There’s a way to say things. " Can you clarify?" is sooooo much better than “Based on just skimming your post and not knowing you at all, it’s clear you believe XYZ”
Putting thread on slow mode.
I can’t answer as to what the admissions committee saw, but there will always be those lottery winners. It’s interesting though, because one of my former students is exceptionally bright and has the stats. He didn’t get into Brown. He admitted to me he was a little relieved because then he would have to “live up to Brown.” I think he would have been great, and he will be great no matter where he lands. I do see kids who look really good on paper who will not thrive once the work gets more demanding and the pond gets bigger.
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We have a good family friend being recruited for football at MIT. Coaches told him they can’t even give him a “pre-read” from admissions, like most other highly selective D3 schools. Have to get in on academic merit.
"The range of academic ability at MIT is arguably wider than some would expect.
Yes, the floor is fairly high (virtually no one gets in without at least a 750 Math SAT)."
I don’t think this suggests a wide range at all. 750 Math SAT is in the top 1% of all scores. That seems pretty narrow to me (especially considering the grit it takes to be that strong a student and excel at at sport).
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So it’s not wider in the SAT/ACT sense, because those top out at top 1%.
But the thing is, the difference in skill between the 90th percentile (1 in 10) and 99th percentile (1 in 100), and the effort that goes into it, is really not as great as that between the 99th percentile and 99.999th percentile (1 in 100,000) or higher.
So the median at MIT (35-36 ACT) might not be that much higher than many other top schools (33-35 ACT is typical for those). Again, think high school chess champions. One in a few hundred.
But the top is simply unbelievable. Think international grand masters. Legends. Gods among mortals. Like Luke Robitaille.
I hear you - but there aren’t enough Luke Robitaille’s to fill a class at MIT. His achievements are so notable because they are extremely rare.
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While there are some universities where grade inflation is a documented problem (see recent press concerning Yale, for example), this is a hasty generalization. Where is the evidence that there is widespread grade inflation in college because tenured professors are scared they can’t fill their classes? In fact, tenured professors are NOT the faculty concerned about job security at all.
I could provide anecdotal evidence concerning colleagues at my university (tenured and contingent) that reflects quite the opposite trend, but I would not then use it to make sweeping generalizations about tenured professors in higher education. I understand CC is a place of both knowledge and opinion, but we should at least make that distinction clear and not paint an entire educational system and its professors in such uninformed, broad strokes.
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No, but MIT’s admitted class represents less than 0.05% of the US high school graduates. All HYPSMs combined are then, what? 0.2%?
So I think it is helpful to keep these numbers in mind when thinking about admissions to top universities.
And I think, on some level, each applicant (and perhaps their parents) should be able to honestly answer the “in what ways am I one of the top few hundred kids in the nation to deserve a spot at a place like [insert your top school here]” question.
It shouldn’t be a lottery. And it isn’t exactly a lottery (though it may feel that way). But it can be much less of a lottery.
And in any case, even at a place like MIT, athletic preferences necessarily mean someone more academically deserving is being left out.
But at least they don’t do legacy.
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My impression is that in the UK and to a lesser extent Canada, it is assumed that people are getting a good education in grammar school and high school and thus can enter university with a sense of what they want to major in. I went to a private (as we call it in the US) elementary school in Oxford and returned to the US years ahead of my grade in the US in pretty much every subject. My sense is that in the UK schools, you just focus on your major whereas in Canada, you typically take a few other courses in your first or first two years. My Canadian relatives were a year ahead of a typical strong US applicant in terms of their science education. I know students from
Quebec are enrolled in CEGEP and only attend McGill or three rather and I’m not sure whether these students spent three or four years at McGill. Americans who enroll there do four years.
In the US, our grammar and high schools are so varied in quality that one has very little idea what kids no coming out of high school (which is why standardized tests will probably cease being optional to the elite schools). But, in the US, the first two years are sort of to get people up to university level so they can really do high level work. I think it is US graduate and professional schools where the training really excels. In the fields I knew, at UK universities, grad students do one-on-ones with professors whereas the US schools have intense coursework for two years. You get some great folks from the UK schools but the overall “product” is a better educated from the US school.
More importantly, in the rapidly changing world in which we live, I believe students need a much broader education than is afforded by a system in which high school students choose their majors. I was able to study math, statistics, psychology, economics, game theory, and political science all of which have contributed to my current work (in addition to physics, metaphysics, Western literature, Shakespeare, and symbolic logic, which were mostly hard other than the symbolic logic and have not contributed to my work). I don’t think I could have had that breadth of experiences in the UK. When I speak about career choices, I tell people now that what you need to learn in school is how to think in various ways (e.g., like a social psychologist, an economist, an evolutionary biologist, a historian, etc.). I use to tell my kids that the two jobs I have had for the bulk of my adult career did not exist when I was in college, so there was no way to prepare for them expect by learning different ways of thinking. As a consequence, I am a big propoponent for two years of survey and other coursework and would be even if our high schools were as good as the UK or Singapore.
What does this say about college admissions? You want the angular kids – really good at math, for example – but some kids with broader kinds of intelligences – e.g., synthetic or literary. To me, that does not imply holistic, which seems like a way to do social engineering (whether to keep out Jews in the old days or whether to increase the percentage of BIPOCs today) but not obviously the best way to get an extraordinary class. But, private institutions have a lot of lattitude to decide what constitutes the best class and that is subject to lots of politics within the institutions and among their supporters.
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This is what my parents preach to me and what I believe. I listed undecided on some apps. But I know some schools don’t like that.
You do definitely live/work in an interesting district 
Most around my parts seem to strategize decently well despite the standard lottery ticket application or two.
What you have there is an app that shouldn’t have been filed. But alongside that some other kid in an underperforming school with <25% SAT score may have a decent shot in context, but has no idea (since that contextual evaluation is cryptic) and hence that kid doesn’t apply.
Does it really just come down to a RTFM situation? I think the manual in question explains mostly procedural stuff and is void of any underlying “theory” or guidelines for judging the situation clearly. It’s not just the people…
As someone noted earlier, a definition of “broken” does need to be established to best answer this question, but using a different slant, if we were to ask whether we’d like to improve it, I think we’d have a super majority saying yes. I think it’s okay and not (just?) sour grapes or misguided thinking to want something better than what we have today…
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100% disagree. IMO, the goal of MIT is not to fill 100% of each class with JUST valedictorians and 1600 SAT students. I get that MIT and CalTech are different beasts, but they know that future leaders come in all shapes and forms, and college athletes embody leadership and intangible qualities and contribute in other ways to the campus environment. Success in life is not just about academic achievements! I will take the 3.9+/1500+ athlete who manages to pull off excelling on the field and in the classroom all day long.
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Take them where?
The issue gets more complicated when its the athlete with SAT scores of 1200 getting into Harvard ( yes, that was the score my friend needed to reach as a soccer recruit).
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Hire them, admit them, marry them, you name it. 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs are former college athletes.
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Lots of great points, @shawbridge!
I do agree that in the breadth vs depth divide, American education is firmly in the breadth camp, for better or worse.
Some might be inclined to say something jingoistic at this point, to which I will then gently suggest they look at the proportion of first-generation Americans among America’s very top students.
Perhaps we could learn something from each other.
Perhaps that’s why we are all here. 
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The examples I am giving are the extreme ones that stick in memory. Plenty of kids apply exactly where they should even if they don’t get admitted to all of them.
I don’t think we have the right to tell anyone they can’t apply wherever they want. Because I care about these kids and don’t want them to face needless disappointment (especially when they blast their intentions all over social media), I try to at least show them the odds.
I am also in a situation where my own kids went to a private school with excellent college counseling starting in grade 9. I teach in a large public school that is fairly affluent but not well-resourced for that type of college admissions support. The difference is significant in how savvy the kids are in terms of expectations.
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Pretty sure that 95% number is made up, actually.
But even if it weren’t, that would sound like more of an indictment than an endorsement to me personally. 
Do you have the number for top 500 scientists?
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Ah right, because you can’t be a top scientist and be an athlete who is the top 1% of all students. And if all MIT cares about is producing top scientists, I guess they should just drop all of their non-science majors.
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Of course one can, and those admissions of star scholar athletes are easy. The more relevant question is how far to drop the academic standard to meet the athletic bar, and colleges answer that question differently.
Based only upon those I know, it seems Harvard is willing to drop more than MIT. The 1200 score requirement surprised me, but the student was a very strong athlete. I guess it works for Harvard.
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I think these 9 traits also describe, say, classical violinists.
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