I think this is more of a two way street. If I was a militant president of UF and wanted to change this, I’d change the mascot to the “Quivering Mole Rats” and downgrade the athletics to D3. Or drop football due to fears of injury. If it is a test of will, it can be done. UF’s academics are good enough to stand on its own. (I have extended family in FL and they are not Gator fans… even though one spent time as one… so it goes both ways)
The concept of the brightest and the best being at a school spans from UCB to UF to UT, from Harvard to Duke to Stanford. They all give that speech to their first years. They don’t have to. And the constant plant improvements…. Stanford was constantly putting up new construction for decades and I’m not sure it was as needed as they claimed. Yale, Princeton, Claremont colleges just to name a few all had either major construction going on or work crews beautifying buildings over the summer. (Some of these were useful to promote a larger student body but others were more niceties). It never ends but would if they just had the strength of will to stop.
I’ll grant you sports but really I was merely using it as an example since your example was UF. But it is a school that could stand on its academic merits alone. Just not as popular. UCB is headed this way and is trying very hard to right their athletic ship. But it still attracts very well.
If we restrict the conversation to Ivy+ (minus Duke) for a second, sports fall to a second tier albeit still important.
I think the problem is the “couple tiers down” belief. Applying to schools with sub 30% chances and thinking those are matches, as opposed to the sub 10% schools, is the problem. Often times, the schools looked at as “a couple tiers down” aren’t actually a couple tiers down. Those are all reaches, the difference is between being a low reach and a high reach.
Hardest part of many of those “low reaches” is demonstrated interest being a big part of admissions. And many times, those are the schools many of these applicants are least interested in, so want to spend the least amount of time demonstrating interest.
There are plenty of schools with admissions rates between 40-60% that would work well for many donut hole families looking for merit except the schools don’t have the name brand…er, “best academic fit possible” for their kids.
Purely anecdotal, but using my own kids and their friends and my students as a sample set, I am not really seeing kids get into schools that are really beyond their stats. I am often surprised, and a little saddened, by kids who didn’t get into schools that are considered a match. It really comes down to there not being enough spots.
Purely anecdotal here as well, but the biggest issue I’ve seen is students looking at the admission process more straightforwardly than is helpful.
As an example, I see average excellent students basically saying, “I am interested in X subject…let me look for schools well known for being excellent in X subject”. What they don’t seem to think of is that almost every other average excellent student is looking at the same criteria. And then you have a enormous group of substantially similar [excellent] students all vying for the same spots…with the same strengths.
To give a more specific example, if I knew an average excellent student who was very good/interested in Foreign Languages - I wouldn’t suggest they apply to Middlebury - there are going to be many, many students applying for the same reason. I would suggest other schools where the Foreign Language department isn’t one of the main calling cards of the school, or even if it is a calling card - there are more spaces available. Perhaps I would suggest Indiana University - the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International studies has fantastic resources for FL studies and is a much easier admit. If the student wanted a LAC experience, there are plenty of LACs with good FL departments and the ability to study abroad that have much higher acceptance rates.
Curious why you’d suggest the others in lieu of Midd instead of in addition to? Might they not fall into the 60-70% of applicants who academically qualify for the school? (I don’t know the actual number but I’ve heard similar numbers talked about).
The thing I don’t get is why wouldn’t a student apply to the level of academics they “qualify” for just because of the admit rate? I’d think most would apply, but apply to more…
Are you saying students should only apply to schools that are a sure thing, and not to schools that are a fit and they’re qualified for even if admission is uncertain?
If not, then we’re saying the same thing, no? That (for certain types of students) admissions are unpredictable at a wide range of schools, which causes frustration and leads them to apply to more schools than they would have wanted to.
I disagree that students and their parents who are seeking “best academic fit” are merely chasing name brands. But this topic has been beaten to death so I’ll not discuss that further.
I agree, for most of the sought after schools there are already way more qualified kids than there are slots. Most kids I know these days are relieved to get into their target schools, rarely see reach admits (w/o an athletic angle), and often see kids only getting into their safeties.
There is absolutely nothing that says the admissions process that advocated by many who have experience with the systems often advocated (stack ranking) are better. My experience in a long career in tech leads me to confidently say that they aren’t any better than the US system and that they fail many. The systems fail many who were ‘late bloomers’ or those who are overweight on soft skills rather than deep math and science skills at a particular point in time.
Both systems have positives and negatives but the US system is well aligned to the US educational system and what is valued by the small group of Colleges/Universities that are really part of that discussion.
I believe that your children attended school outside of the states. It was likely the best system for them and I am glad that you had that option. I am quite thankful for the US system which has the ability to flex and accommodate a much wider definition of ‘excellence’ than the narrow minded systems which some believe to be superior.
This is something I wonder about. I believe schools when they say they don’t admit by major. However, they must be somewhat cognizant of the resources for all the different majors and interests. Maybe STEM kids have amazing math scores and awards, but the school would not have enough resources to have a lopsided student body where the majority of students might want those math/science/comp sci/engineering classes. That’s where the holistic admissions might not seem to make sense from the outside. A LAC needs to have academic diversity.
If that student wanted to apply to Middlebury, go for it. As long as they also understood that if they are applying because of Foreign Language - Middlebury probably becomes a high reach; they are going to be competing against lots of other students with that same strength. That having a 5 in an AP language class is going to be average (maybe even below average) in that group which most likely has students who’ve studied more than one language at a high level, taking advantage of programs like NSLI-Y, etc.
@DadOfJerseyGirl what I am saying is that I think lots of kids are picking schools they believe are matches which are actually reaches. Because of how they choose their college lists. They think they’ve gone down a couple notches with their list…and they are still in reach territory.
The FL student wanting Middlebury often doesn’t have a school like Indiana on their list because they aren’t always the most flexible with their thinking. And when it is then couched in terms like “best academic fit” - that reduces options rather than expanding them.
I think there is uncertainty in both tiers, but of a different kind, and with different narratives surrounding it.
On the one hand, there is a narrative that it’s all but impossible to tell apart the top 15K kids from the top 150, so it is only natural that HYPSM admissions will, and in fact should, feel like a lottery for everyone. The truth is that not every unhooked HYPSM applicant has a 5% admissions chance, so the system is not entirely random.
Here, for example, is the matriculation data for the US part of the RSI '22 cohort gathered from their public LinkedIn profiles:
Similar picture emerges for some other groups of academically elite high-schoolers.
But the fact remains that there are no guarantees for the “top 150”-level kids even at the lower-tier institutions.
And part of it stems from the fact that @DadOfJerseyGirl is describing, that the uncertainty with admissions at the top breeds additional uncertainty with matriculations at the next levels, and then that paradoxically leads to the fact that the uncertainty with admissions also flows downhill.
My desire would be that, at least for some of our most selective schools, they are pure meritocracies. Just test based - whatever test(s) are determined to be fair (or as close to fair as we can get). And, no, this won’t generate a class of ‘robots.’ Plenty of kids that test well have skills in athletics and the arts.
I can only comment on my classmates. But I would certainly bet on some to be very successful. High EQ is a big part of it. Or brilliant, but inconsistent. Some are just impressive in an abstract way that goes way beyond GPA and course acceleration. Who knows.
We keep coming around to this ‘desire’ which consistently ignores the single most salient point in the counterargument. The schools in question do not want such a system because it doesn’t fit their mission, needs, ethos, pick a term.
Any or all of them could easily adopt such a system and the fact that they do not even discuss or entertain such a system.
And, any system predicated on a single test would be riddled with error and guaranteed to not get it ‘right’. You would need to test many times to get to anything like a reasonable confidence interval that you had the correct pool. Name a system that does that? There isn’t one that I am aware of.
“A full ride” would have been based on financial need; not academic achievements. UVA doesn’t really do merit. (Sometimes they call the need based awards “scholarships” which leads to the confusion.)
This leans into the idea that the 60-70% qualified stat is actually not very useful. The applicant needs to show something more to be actually competitive (a stat indicating the amount of competitive apps would be interesting. The lack of that info is part of the reason why the admit rates are deceiving)
What that “something more” is is yet another cryptic part of the admissions process. Adjusting for context makes it even harder to understand.
Based on this I think it’s hard to provide guidelines on when an applicant should self-select away from Midd. I think that’s why so many apply. Are colleges willing to provide more guidance here to self select wisely?
