That article is shocking. I honestly am a bit skeptical that it accurately reflects reality. That said, the Atlantic is a reputable source. But, how is it that kids who have done all of the hard academic work required to get into Harvard for years, all of the sudden don’t care about academics at all? Simply because As are easy to get (yet still more frought if you don’t get one)? So, all that work was solely about the grade/not learning at all really? By all of these kids who were top performers for years before they got there? If true, I am stunned. I further refuse to extrapolate as the author suggests, that this same attitude applies to all or most of the “elite” colleges. So, a huge swath of our top high school students only work hard if As are hard to get? If that is true, we have taught our highest achieving kids the absolute wrong lessons about education. I need more data before I believe this framing of the state of the top end of higher education is true.
Also, the description of the extracurricular scene at Harvard sounds like a nightmare. As doesn’t reasons students are pushing to get into those clubs. The place described in that article (again, I’m not convinced it is an accurate portrayal of Harvard) is one I would want absolutely nothing to do with.
Regarding the topic of folks not understanding selectivity….I’ve been taking regular walks with a neighbor and naturally end up talking about this process. My D26 is EDing Cornell and today my friend said, “well she should get in.” I said it kind of a crapshoot given the low acceptance rate and competitive applicants…. She said “well it isn’t a top 5 school, though, right? So it just seems like she should get it.”
I can tell you that at D26’s school, the mentality that the grade matters more than the learning does exist. I’ve heard it from my own kid, which then results in a very long lecture about the importance of learning.
While I am slightly skeptical about the article and its generalizability, from what I’ve seen in the last 4 years at D26s school and the amount of parental pressure on teachers to dole out As, I’m not surprised. 25% of D26s HS class has a UW 4.0.
I think people just have no idea what the numbers look like. I posted this a couple weeks ago, but when my D22 was applying, she was waitlisted at Northwestern, and she got a very nice letter from them saying her application was outstanding, but they got 60,000 applications for 2,000 spots, so it was nothing personal.
That was RD, but still. It does involve a good bit of luck no matter how good the stats.
If you haven’t visited RIT, I’d recommend trying to schedule a visit/tour via the NTID admissions office (which is where you will apply) but also scheduling the regular RIT tour through RIT admissions. The NTID tour goes over a lot of the supports and services they provide, but tends to show less of the actual campus ….if you’re looking to cross register and not just take one of the NTID programs, you’ll want to take the RIT tour to learn about RITs programs. Also (of course this is always a crapshoot!) our NTID tour guide wasn’t nearly as personable as the one who did the regular RIT tour — THAT kid remains my favorite college tour guide ever, over 2 kids and like 25 schools! If there’s a specific major she’s interested in, you can also reach out to the department and schedule time to talk to someone there – my son wasn’t sure if he wanted comp sci, software engineering, or cybersecurity and after his tour he got to meet with professors from those departments to help him make up his mind.
Thank you so much again. I hope you don’t mind- but I stared a thread on the RIT page and tagged you. If you do mind- please let me know and I will remove it ASAP!!!
This way any future people looking of info can have an easier time finding this information.
To be clear, I don’t question the premise in the article that grade inflation is rampant at top colleges (and in high schools, 25% 4.0 unweighted is wild to my mind). I’ve seen that that is the case for some time. I think I struggle to accept that because of grade inflation, most of the tippy-top high school students (which almost all of the kids who attend these sub 10 or 5% admit colleges are), just don’t actually care about learning at all.
Granted, I may be out of touch on this because my D26s high school does not have this type of grade inflation - the vast majority (if not all) students get at least some Bs, and kids get into the sub 5% schools with some Bs.
I am on board with the notion that rampant grade inflation has some negative unintended consequences. But my mind is really struggling to accept the notion that it has actually completely ruined the interest in learning of our top performing high school students. Maybe my understanding just needs to catch up with the times. But, if what the article says is true, then we really need to rethink what we are doing with education of our most talented and capable kids from even the high school level. If true, then parents then need to understand the long term damage they are actually doing to their kids by lobbying for higher grades their kid does not deserve. And, teachers and administrators need to understand the harm they are doing to their best students by allowing grade inflation. All of that said, I still don’t yet accept that the article is accurately reflecting reality. And even if it is, I’m not convinced at this point that grade inflation is the cause of our most talented students not caring at all about learning as opposed to being correlated with it.
Regardless, the article made me think about this, and it is an issue I now want to learn more about.
At our high school I would say that the teachers engage in a fair amount of extra credit, retakes, and accepting late work up to the end of a grading period. A kid can not only skate by with lousy test scores but even work their way back to an A or B pretty easily. My S26’s Econ teacher offers extra credit points every class for kids who answer his trivia questions correctly. His trivia questions are not always about economics. S26 is a walking encyclopedia of random facts (because he actually does love to learn) and he walked into his test this week with 30 extra points. I don’t even know why he had to bother with the test. It’s too bad because Econ is an interesting topic and easily relatable to real life for these kids.
If the grades have gotten easy to come by, the high achievers look to extracurriculars to stand out. Seems to me that’s why Harvard is full of kids who compete on the EC track and not in the classroom. Their ECs are what got them into Harvard. Their grades were a given.
Setting aside that the description of extracurriculars at Harvard in the article sounded like a dystopian, exclusionary social and professional scene nightmare to me, is your premise that the students are still interested in learning itself, they just focus that learning in what the clubs are doing rather than classroom work? That would be a more hopeful interpretation than I had of the article which would actually be nice.
My D26 is also in Econ this year and loving it. Last night we had a riviting discussion about the impacts and unintended consequences of minimum wage increases and policies intended to tax the rich (I don’t know Econ well, so all the terminology she was using escapes me). Agree though, totally relatable concepts and topics and super intellectually interesting stuff.
Yes, that’s what I’m thinking. It’s also a reflection of the “preprofessional” direction of college generally. The proliferation of computer science, engineering and business degrees over Econ, history, philosophy, etc. More and more college is seen as a bridge between student and professional life, and the more you demonstrate that you can operate professionally and contribute to an organization (a club, a company, a nonprofit) the more reassured you might feel that you will have your pick of professional opportunities post grad. Learning for the sake of being a well-educated, critical thinker almost becomes a luxury for those who don’t need to be concerned with their salary and benefits and loan repayments. It’s not that the brilliant Harvard kids don’t care about learning, I think it’s that they feel enormous pressure and responsibility for setting up their professional lives as best they can. And since they are the go-getters who are going to strive toward success, what they strive for is the job at Google or Goldman, not the brass rings of academia.
Ha! Yeah, to me, the article is myopic and even asking the wrong questions. The grading situation is a byproduct or a symptom of something much larger. And that something is the deep insecurity this generation feels about their future. Perfectionism, doing absolutely everything outside of the classroom, being unwilling to fail or take risks, striving toward the most complete LinkedIn resume… it seems to me that this group of go-getters represents one reflection of our culture in a multi-faceted mirror.
My D26’s school does not grade inflate (which makes it more difficult for kids to compete with those schools that do). Just increases the stress on our seniors who have their hearts set on attending a highly rejective school.
For sure. You have the kids at the schools where the 4.0 is a foregone conclusion chasing their tales trying to pad their ECs to standout, and you have the kids at the schools where there isn’t rampant grade inflation just trying to not get discouraged feeling like they’re competing with kids who are on track to be Nobel laureates or cure cancer.
I guess this is where the school profile comes in handy.
This saddens me as someone who has spent over a decade in academia and married to an academician. My naive self wants to believe that the world is a place where both can exist and flourish.
My understanding is that the school report is supposed to control for this. They can include things like median GPA and other information to give context to the fact that a student with a 3.8 for example is actually at or near the top of the class. My understanding is that most of the highly rejective schools are looking at transcripts in the context of the school.
D26’s school is a well resourced private school, so take this with that in mind, but a lot of kids from her school get into the most rejective schools with under 4.0 gpas because the context of the grades matters.
I always thought my D22 would stay in academia. She’s getting a double major in linguistics and classics just because she loves those subjects and enjoys nerding out about them.
There is no obvious career path with a 4-year degree in either of these areas, but she has been advised – and done a good bit of research – that getting a PhD in either linguistics or classics isn’t likely to guarantee a job in higher education. And although she loves to learn, she’s too practical to want to spend another six years in school without at least some promising return afterward for her efforts. (Not to mention current lack of funding…)
So she’s planning to apply for a much more practical master’s degree that will take three years, but afterward she’ll be employable.
We have some grade inflation at school (which I judge by now vs D19’s day) but seems less than elsewhere. I think the school profile puts this in context by (1) average GPA (2) highest weighted GPA - we have no 9th grade honors and no honors in certain other subjects so absolute max wtd is around 4.5, vs some other stats I see posted here (3) test scores (4) breakdown of AP scores into 1/2/3.
Agree with you 100%! It is so nice coming here to “chat” with knowledgeable parents who get all these nuances.
I also feel confident that the AOs know about our high school. And I am very proud of my D26. She is doing very well in the context of her school report. Her class rigor is there and her test scores are excellent. Now, if she can only get those pesky essays finished
She means well but what on earth?!!!
Thank you for talking me off the ledge.