<p>This discussion I think highlights something that comes up all the time, that the admissions process is not scientific, there isn’t some magical numerical formula involved, it involves a lot of criteria that quite frankly probably differs from school to school and even among people weighing admissions. It revolves around the question of what makes a great student, who will bring the most to a school? The problem is, you can have someone with top SAT scores, GPA and so forth, who otherwise seems like someone who spends all their time doing what it takesa to get their stats, and if it has nothing to do with that, they don’t do it…is that person going to add much to a university? In many ways, colleges already do this, when for example, even the ivy league might admit athletes who are ‘worse’ compared to the 2300+/4.0 GPA/etc, etc academic type (I have to laugh about that, at Columbia in my time, it was guys on the football team were admitted with an 3.8 versus a 4.0…).</p>
<p>It also raises the question, how did the kid achieve those stats? Did they do it because they really are tremendous students with a bright, probing mind, or are someone whose every waking moment was centered around getting the stats as they see it to get into HYP? Did they ever read a book for pleasure to learn something, or was reading only the things that would get them a good score on the AP lit exam? </p>
<p>The irony is one of the reasons foreign students often want to come to US universities is because the education isn’t as oriented to stats as it is at home, there is a wider focus then on GPA or getting great grades on standardized testing. One of the reasons foreign students, especially grad students, come to US research universities is because the environment at home is so rigid, so less open then it is here, and they want that (and many of the foreign students who go back home get frustrated when they see the barriers the dominant culture often puts up). </p>
<p>Another question is the kids background. What is more impressive, the kid from legacy parents who grew up going to the best prep schools, had tutoring, had an environment where the world was literally at their fingertips, where their parents were very well educated, everyone around them is, where they didn’t read about the paintings in the louvre but saw them as regularly as other kids see a movie? How much did that kid really have to do to achieve the kind of input stats an HYP required, and is that impressive, or is the kid with slightly less impressive stats who came from a manufacturing town in the midwest and is the first person in their family going to college, where they achieved despite a modest background? One of the problems with systems like China and India is that being predicated on stats, it gives a lot more weight towards those who already are up there, it tends to favor those who have already made it, since it is likely that they would have the means to ensure those goals (not to mention money to bribe people, but that is another story in itself)…</p>
<p>College admissions are supposed to look at the whole student, and make evaluations on what the kid brings to the university and also stops it from being monolithic in any one thing. What if they took only kids with a 2400 SAT, as a hypothetical example, and those kids were all math/science geeks going into a very few fields…would that make for a broad university? If they admitted kids with those kinds of grades only and the kids had few things they did other then study and get good grades on tests, what kind of campus would that create? </p>
<p>It is funny, there is a direct parallel in music, many of what I am writing about happens in that world. The level of music students these days is staggeringly high, kids come to apply to conservatories with incredible technical skills, at a level that many kids graduating from college didn’t have a generation ago. There are issues with that, though, and they are sort of the same thing.</p>
<p>In music right now, the dominant group going into it tend to be Asians, either from various Asian countries or Asian-American. Like academics, the students are generally known for the incredible work ethic, it is not unknown to see Asian kids who have literally devoted almost their entire time to practicing music and lessons from the time they are very small, I mean multiple hours, including stories of 5 year olds practicing more then 8 hours a day…the problem has been that the training they get in Asia has tended to be focused strictly on solo playing, on achieving high level technical skills, kids coming from those programs often have next to zero ensemble experience, and the training itself focuses on the technical and leaves the kids in terms of musicality parroting back what their teacher told them to do…the analogy to this is the kid whose whole academic life has been focused on the kind of stats that would get him/her into a top school, and has no interests or passions outside that. A lot of kids with incredible technical music skills don’t get admitted to the top music schools, while kids who are less technically adept get admitted because they have strong musicality or playing ability other then the technical, they multidimensional versus the single dimensional ‘whiz kid’…Learning like music is a lot more then simply getting great stats, great hashmarks, and in both attempts to make it singly dimensional can fail to achieve what they are supposed to be about, someone who not only can do well in the classroom but add something, or in a musician, someone who can truly play music, not just play an instrument technically incredibly. </p>
<p>I find it kind of ironic that Shelby Steele is bemoaning how the Ivy League has become ‘less about Merit’ and ‘the level has fallen’ when the admissions standards for most of the people who get in there are staggering, very few kids get in there with ‘lesser’ stats by any means. The irony of his position is that in one way especially the Ivy league is more about merit, and it is in the declining influence of ‘legacy’ admits. In his day and before, the Ivy League was notorious for those who got in simply because they came from the right family, had the right connections, went to the right prep school and so forth,and it was a significant part of the population (these days, though evidence is that legacy admits often are not in the top of the heap, they are still competitive…no C students getting into HYP because granddad went there, dad went there and the library is named after some relative). The Ivy league always had their bright students, but in prior generations that Steele complains were more about Merit, there were a lot more admits who if compared to today, would pale in comparison.</p>