That preference at least doesn’t seem to be universal. Across the pond, the City, similar to Wall Street, tend to hire graduates from elite universities in UK and the Continent, but few of these schools seem to give preferences to athletes.
Oxbridge have one sport they care about, and athletes of that one sport seem to be overrepresented in the City: The Boat Race rowers making a splash in the City - Financial News
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Investment banking is ultimately a glorified sales job with gruesome hours in the first couple of years. Athletes do have good work ethics and do well in networking. Does Oxbridge benefit from winning the Boat Race besides some bragging rights (e.g. in fund raising)? Rowers themselves don’t receive special admission preferences and aren’t overrepresented at Oxbridge, correct?
I’ve yet to see a reliable quote from an employer who avoids 4.0 GPA kids. I expect an alternative translation can be some kids assume that recruiting and hiring primarily is based on having the highest GPA, so if a kid with a 4.0 GPA is not recruited/hired, then he/she may incorrectly assume the employer must not like 4.0 GPA kids.
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The schedule is that of a professional athlete (training 6 days a week for 6 months before the Boat Race) though note that rowers don’t have to be undergrads. They evidently have to meet whatever academic requirements there are for the degree they wish to pursue (and it is the faculty of the individual departments that are in charge of admissions). Sport is suppose to have a neutral effect on admissions though Oxbridge seem to get Olympic rowers. It’s possible that some profs are also impressed by the qualities needed to be among the best in an athletic endeavor. Especially if that is a sport the uni cares about.
We’ve seen them several times from colleges. I’d make a bad AO. I didn’t pick their choice in any of the sessions.
Or possibly a good one. It all depends on what your objective is.
Most rowers in the Boat Race nowadays are graduates and it’s much easier to get in as a graduate (assuming you aren’t looking to be funded), the minimum requirement for many courses is a “high 2:1” which nowadays is up to ~40% of an undergraduate class. Great rowers do definitely get turned down as undergrads, we were very unhappy when the Eton boat club captain was rejected.
That being said there are also rowers who are very academically accomplished, I know one who won a fellowship, others who were medical students. It’s not all land economists. Spending 6-9am and 3-6pm on the river/in the gym every day still leaves enough time for class and terms are only 50% of the training period.
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Thanks for all the posts. Responding to a few comments:
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Like the US, the UK suffers from huge inequalities, previously defined by class and now by wealth (of course, the two overlap). Having said that, there are efforts to open up elite institutions (see London state school secures 41 Oxbridge offers - BBC News) but progress remains slow.
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Educational “excellence” as defined in the UK today probably matches how it is understood in the US although, for college admissions purposes, the scope is narrower in the UK. In a webinar for secondary school students last year, the head of the Chemistry Department at Oxford said (I am paraphrasing) “we’re looking for the most academically qualified students and don’t care about extra-curricular and other activities except if they demonstrate a student’s academic capabilities.”
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Even though the UK educational experience is narrower (even in high school) and sports and other extra-curricular offerings are less extensive compared to US high schools, top US colleges have not shied away from admitting UK-educated students. At my daughter’s school, for example, among the 15-20 that typically head to the US for college each year, it is not uncommon to see 3-4 going to Princeton one year, a similar number to Yale the next, etc.
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I do feel that conventional measures of excellence (GPA and SAT/ACT scores) are less meaningful today because they have been diluted - pervasive grade inflation and easier SAT (remember when a perfect SAT score was so rare that you’d likely be profiled in the local paper?) So, maybe a 3.9 GPA or 780 score in Math will matter less to an MIT if you do well in Olympiad-style competitions (so “perfection” along conventional lines is less significant).
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The top American privates will take the best academic talent they can too. I’ve heard some parrot someone (an adcom?) in saying that only 10% of each class is filled based solely on academic ability, but by my estimation, it’s more like a quarter to half, depending on the uni.
Plus, I’m sure most of the Brits admitted to top American privates also did stuff outside of school.
Anyway, if you look at the number of slots available, I’d say it’s still easier to get in to Oxbridge (and equivalents like LSE/Imperial) than HYPSM (or other Ivies/equivalents in the RD round) purely on academic ability. ED round may be a different story. And these days, IMO, top LACs (and other smaller, more teaching-focused schools who are good in their field) are an undervalued option by many who are Oxbridge-caliber.
At the highly selective privates I am familiar with, hardly anyone is admitted “solely on academic ability.” Instead they consider a large number of non-academic factors for nearly all applicants. For example, in the most recent 5 years of the Harvard lawsuit sample, every applicant who did not receive at least a “general positive” personal qualities rating was rejected, regardless of academic talent. If an applicant does not receive at least a “general positive” rating in personal qualities, it appears that there is little hope of admission. Only 4% of admits received the maximum academic rating and no high 1-2 ratings in the EC, personal, and athletic categories. Far more common were more balanced admits who did well compared to the Harvard applicant pool in several non-academic areas.
If you mean would be still have been admitted if there were no hook preferences, that is more difficult to measure. I’d expect the majority of admits would still have been admitted without hook preferences. However, the overwhelming majority of recruited athlete admits would be rejected without their admission preference. The vast majority of some other strong hook groups would also be rejected.
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Fair. It would depend on how one defines “solely on academic ability”.
BTW, this could explain why these days, MIT hoovers up Olympiad winners (with CMU taking some who may not have gotten in to MIT) while during a period more than a decade ago, it was Harvard doing that. MIT did change their admissions/recruiting philosophy. Harvard might have as well.
I’m not disagreeing with you. There is a deep set fear in the USA of smart people, and has been for a very long time - there is a reason that so many villain in American literature and other popular culture have been “mad scientists” or “evil geniuses”. In no other culture have the “bad guys” been consistently presented as smarter than the “good guys” (which is why so many American movies constantly rely on absolutely moronic plots twists to allow the hero their smarter opponent)
In fact, I think that the difference in the attitude towards smart people in the USA versus the UK goes much deeper. The use of testing for admissions to the “elite” colleges started because of a decades to centuries old attitude of “we don’t want our students to be a bunch of super smart academically focused nerds” (paraphrased, of course). So even American universities were suspicious of people who were “too smart”.
I think that part of the reason that the British lacked the fear of really smart people, so long as the smart people were upper class, was their centuries of relying on their Navy, whose commissioned officers came from the upper class. The level of math skills required by a naval officer ensured that this type of talent was associated with a long list of positive attributes that a British naval officer supposedly had.
Interestingly (at least to me), in the UK, intellectual excellence has long been considered the domain of the upper classes.
One only needs to compare the backgrounds of the famous intellectuals, scientists, and inventors of the UK and the USA, from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Almost all British ones were upper class, while the vast majority of those in the USA came from the middle class or lower. Moreover, many of the earliest one in the USA were from British lower classes whose families in Britain remained working class. For example, Franklin was an intellectual giant, but, had his father stayed in England, we probably never would have heard of him.
So between a system which ensured that the lower class are not competing in the intellectual realm with upper classes, and a need for smart people (or at least people talented in math and other STEM fields) among the upper classes, Britain has not developed a general fear of academic excellence, and does not see intelligence as being incompatible with other traits that are considered important for the ruling class.
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I think that the reliance on civil service exams, tracing back to the 1870s (Testing times: a history of civil service exams) and a widespread respect for civil servants (despite comedies such as Yes Minister) is perhaps more directly relevant than the Navy in instilling respect for “really smart people” amongst the British public over the last 100 years. And before that, the very direct effects of the scientific revolution in creating Britain’s place in the world (some good history here: BBC - History - British History in depth: Britain and the Rise of Science). The book Longitude (about Harrison’s sea clocks) is a good example of how even today, there’s huge enthusiasm in the UK for this sort of scientific achievement (sufficiently so that it featured in “Only Fools and Horses”, the most popular British sitcom of the 1990s).
But the reasons why so many upper class people devoted their time to intellectual pursuits in the 18th and 19th centuries is probably due to primogeniture inheritance, which meant second and subsequent sons would be financially comfortable but needed to find something else to do, because the first son would be inheriting the family estate and title. Its also surprising how many of the prominent scientists were clergymen as well (because the vicars of many Church of England parishes were assigned by Oxford and Cambridge colleges or by the lord of that region, which gave you a free place to live and a modest income, without much to do except on Sundays - a good option for natural scientists in particular). But there are still exceptions in the UK (Faraday being an obvious one).
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Well, the Northeastern WASP elites were, but that “suspicion” was undergirded by fear/disdain of the Other. In politics, that would have been the Irish Catholics and white ethnics from southern and eastern Europe. In college admissions, it would have been Jews. Hence the institution of the Jewish quota at Ivies.
The British elites didn’t feel threatened by other racial/sectarian groups.
I am not aware of any highly selective Ivy Plus type college that has a lower admit rate for perfect stat applicants than near perfect stat applicants, so nothing to suggest that they penalize perfect score applicants in any way. If your HS has Naviance and a good sample size, you can confirm a similar effect at specific colleges.
However, this also doesn’t mean that the applicant will get a big boost in chance of admission for increasing their 1590 to 1600 or whatever. It’s usually just one relatively minor factor among many that are considered in the application process.
In short I’d generally agree with the counselors recommendation to focus on other parts of the application, rather than focusing on increasing a near perfect score to a perfect score. However, I consider the wording in the subject line quote misleading.
They did, especially by Catholics (or “Papists” as they were also known in Britain). However, the did not feel nearly as threatened as the American elites of the period. The British elites were more entrenched, hereditary, and their power was enshrined in the law. Moreover, there were far fewer minorities in Britain (and still are).
Aside from having a much larger immigration wave, more possibilities for immigrants to succeed, and no laws to protect their place in society, American elites saw a couple of major upheavals, one of them occurring in the early 20th century when the old traders and landowners were being supplanted by the industrialists and merchants.
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Hi all,
This thread seems somewhat related to my question so I’d be interested in your thoughts. Rising senior has a 1590 SAT and 35 ACT (rounded up from 34.75). Based on concordances the SAT is clearly better. Senior is unsure whether to nonetheless submit both scores or just submit SAT. Of possible relevance, ACT breakdown was 36/36/35/32 with 32 in math - didn’t take a practice test, no watch, and ran out of time on that section. Meanwhile 800 on math SAT, A in BC Calc.
Because of the 32 math subscore, I would just send the SAT score. If the ACT had been more balanced I would have said to send both.
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Just send in the 1590. No bonus points for sending in 2 scores. The ACT score will just dilute the SAT score.
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