<p>But colleges aren’t looking for the “top” 1000 high school seniors. That hypothetical college is looking to fill 1000 student positions at their institution. If a large corporation announced a hiring initiative – saying that they were expanding and would be hiring 1,000 new employees to start in September – and you wanted to work for them, you wouldn’t just send off a boilerplate resume. You’d check to see whether any of those jobs were related to your work skills, and you’d identify the position you hoped to get, and tailor your application accordingly.</p>
<h1>483 is sort of specific to Department X and your daughter, calmom. I thought that you had a more broadly applicable set of differences in mind.</h1>
<p>I think your advice about how college admissions currently operates is good, calmom. Nevertheless, I am suggesting my own preference for some “top” school to take every student who is very clearly among the top 1000 in his/her age cohort (not just going by test scores, grades, and AP scores, even).</p>
<p>QM, I know you want this as you have suggested it on many threads. But how would it even work? First, everyone would have to agree on some definition of “top” for both schools and students. Then, those schools deemed “top” would have to collaborate to make sure they each got a proportionate share of the top 1000 students. In essence you would have to create a consortium of universities that drew from an agreed pool of candidates. And for what good? Is there any proof that top students or schools are worthy of some grand effort to further distinguish themselves from everyone else? Or that they end up contributing more to the greater good?</p>
<p>Why would one imagine that it is important for someone to go to a “top” school to make a major contribution to the greater good? From my perspective, there is not any real difference in the ability to make contributions to the greater good, based on undergraduate institution.</p>
<p>In my opinion, the quality that distinguishes “top” schools is academic strength. I think it makes sense to match academic strength to academic strength. I realize that many people see it differently.</p>
<p>To add: Fundamentally, I think that Harvard is just a school. It is not a certifier of personal worth, nor is it necessarily the best place for any given person to prepare to contribute to the greater good, if that were the criterion for selecting a college.</p>
<p>^OK. But if you truly want to “match academic strength to academic strength,” wouldn’t you seek out the best students in each subject to match them to the best faculty? In other words, you would look for students showing genius-level aptitude in physics to admit as physics majors. Brilliant writing students to team up with English-department faculty. Promising social scientists to work with esteemed social-science professors (although how you would determine that in a 17-year-old, I have no idea). You wouldn’t need, or necessarily even want, the well-rounded students who excel in every subject. You would want the off-the-charts talented students in each particular area, and you would hand-pick them. Or better yet, let the faculty do it.</p>
<p>That suggestion makes a lot of sense to me (#686), sally305. That’s essentially how Oxford and Cambridge do it. They do take a student’s opportunities into consideration when assessing that student’s current level of achievement, so that there is a boost for students from comprehensive schools whose academic background might be weaker, but whose talent is evidenced. The applicants have serious, academically focused interviews with some of the faculty members who will be teaching them, and in many cases, they have special examinations (aside from A levels). They seem to be able to be reasonably discerning about young people. The Cambridge entrance exams for prospective history students are quite interesting–I think you can find an example on the web.</p>
<p>Well, there’s no way U.S. schools will adopt that system unless they determine the current one to be broken. Which they won’t. The top schools and countless others are educating people who go on to be productive members of society. So why keep wishing for something that will never be?</p>
<p>“Actually, I found it relatively straightforward, but it differs from one college to the next.” -Celebrate the difference! It’s a venus/mars thing, or yin-yang.</p>
But no such college exists, at least not among the elites or larger universities. The only way to run such a college would be to have a purely academic program with generalized, across-the-board requirements for all students. It works in the context of a highly specialized program – for example, an engineering school can reasonably select for the “top” prospective engineers. </p>
<p>You can’t evaluate the prospective philosophy major on the same scale with the prospective studio art major, pre-med student, or engineer. If you only want the “top” students, then you have to figure out what that college will specialize in.</p>
<p>Or perhaps you are suggesting that colleges broaden their admission requirements to mandate that all students can display artistic talent, music proficiency, and mastery of multiple languages when they apply?</p>
<p>I do understand that my suggestion is not going to happen in the US–at any rate, not until the next event that is comparable to the Sputnik scare of my childhood.</p>
<p>With regard to identifying the “top” prospective philosophy major, the top pre-med (or in the British case, medical student, since it’s an undergrad degree), and the top prospective engineer, Oxford and Cambridge assess the applicants individually, by field, on academic grounds. Students are admitted to a particular degree course. I realize that this is also kind of “un-American,” since changing majors is common here and extraordinarily rare there. History of Art exists as a field of study at Oxbridge. I am not sure about Studio Art.</p>
<p>I was not suggesting that a student needs to develop talents across all fields.</p>
<p>I do think that there are some differences in the qualities that Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale look for. For example, among the graduates I know, there are fewer idealists per capita coming from Harvard than from the other colleges. I think this is probably true of the admitted students as well. This is not to say that no idealists graduate from Harvard–I know a few–but that a few more Harvard grads seem adept at working the status quo.</p>
<p>MitchKreyben, you seem to agree with calmom that there are differences among the colleges. I am curious about your take on that.</p>
<p>The sooner you accept that Harvard doesnt exist just to accept the best academic performers in the world, the sooner you can move on with your life.</p>
<p>From the Naviance data for DSs high school, the kids that get accepted into Chicago, UCLA, JHopkins, Michigan, Georgetown Duke have higher GPAs and SATs than the kids that get into Harvard.</p>
<p>The elite publics are doing some of what QM suggests, selecting students with overweight on grades and scores. Just because USNWR does not put them up in top 20 does not mean they are not producing talent on par with those graduating from MIT or Harvard.</p>
<p>I had a friend who worked in the Harvard admissions office as an undergrad. She remarked once that Harvard was not looking for the people who were smartest, but rather for those who would be the most successful. That was quite a few years ago. Do you think it is the same now?</p>
<p>I took your suggestion, sally305, and have started a new thread in the Parents Forum on the topic of differences. (I put it there because I am looking for multi-year views, based on large data sets–no offense to current or recent applicants intended.)</p>
<p>risking prolonging this agonizingly long thread. Just to clarify…i wasn’t perceiving differences in colleges (though there are for sure) I was celebrating the difference…the fact that one person can read this thread and take away that it’s a completely opaque, random crapshoot (me), and another person can read this thread (Calmom)and take away that admissions is a well defined easily navigated procedure which matches up best candidates with best match schools in an efficient and transparent process.</p>
<p>It pretty much is random and comes down to things like ‘‘Are you a URM’’ or ‘Did your parents or relatives go here’. Things you can’t control decide admissions in these Ivies.</p>
<p>Oh . . . just prolonging the thread a little longer, MitchKreyben. :)</p>
<p>I did start a new thread over in the Parents Forum, on the question of differences in the qualities that admissions is seeking. So far, no one has weighed in with any opinions that they are different at HYP + other top schools.</p>
<p>Either people are keeping their closely guarded secrets of how to target admissions (although calmom has been quite forthcoming about how they approached the issue), or else people don’t think there is a difference. (Or people come on CC in the evening and might see the thread then.)</p>
<p>But QM, parents have no idea other than whether their kid did or didn’t get in. They do not have access to closely guarded secrets or large data sets. And again, the colleges do not act as a consortium evaluating the pool of applicants collectively and dividing the spoils of top students. I would love to understand what you and others hope to gain by this information. The subject has been discussed ad nauseum and the word “holistic” alone should pretty much end the conversation. It’s subjective.</p>