Not using holistic admission may be because they are not overloaded with applicants at the stat ceilings, because they have a larger number of seats as a proportion of total matriculants.
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Or because they limit applications, like UCAS.
But the UK has a much smaller population than the US, while its most selective universities have significantly larger entering classes than the most selective universities in the US.
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But they also deliberately dampen competition by not allowing undergraduate applications to both Oxford and Cambridge in the same year, as well as by limiting the overall number of applications. Vs the system here that encourages extra applications so that colleges can use selectivity as a marketing tool.
Again, different discussion.
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Right, there are few similarities between US and UK college admissions. The US common app does limit apps though (and now a number of UK unis are on the common app, marketing I guess.)
When you have too many college seats, marketing and differentiation naturally occur, because colleges are businesses here. And that’s why we see some schools closing or merging as well.
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Hard to do if those advanced classes don’t exist. You should not get rid of accelerated math because some people don’t excel (or haven’t yet) at math.
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Thanks for this.
This feels off-track. I don’t believe that the award-winning writer and Editor of the school newspaper who wants to double major or in journalism and music’s candidacy at say, Northwestern or Columbia (or any other applicable selective school) is somehow diminished by not taking Calculus. The applicant pool is pretty large. Not everyone wants to be an engineer, finance bro or scientist.
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Back to the title - the parents who are pushing for accelerated math in middle school were already pushing their kids in elementary school by enrolling them in after school math enrichment courses like Kumon, Mathnasium and Russian school for math. And/or hiring private tutors (who, in this instance, should really be called academic coaches) to get their kids ahead before they enter middle school. This is very common in parts of the Bay Area.
Regarding the comments about highly selective colleges giving preference to applicants who took the highest math offered at their high school or outside of their school - I find it disingenuous that representatives from these school tell kids at admissions events to just “Take the most rigorous schedule that you can handle” and then mark them down for not taking the most advance math class when admissions decisions are made. I attended many info sessions with D25 where college reps were specifically asked about the importance of calculus on a transcript and if it confers any advantages in the admissions process, only one rep said yes. Yet another reason elite colleges are viewed negatively by the general population - there is no transparency offered by these schools.
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People should stop kissing the ring and set their students up for success.
We read so many - I got a B, am I screwed ? Math is foundational - the grade matters less than the comprehension of the material.
College is a commodity. There are so many great ones. Kids should be in the appropriate class for them. If a great college is the goal, they’ll likely find one.
There’s way too much - it must be selective or high ranked. No wonder everyone seems stressed.
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And in preschool…
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My daughter is finishing her 2nd year at Berkeley. Got into all schools she applied to–direct admit to Architecture (or environmental design/similar major, depending on school)–except UCLA. Had 4 years of math, Geo through Calculus AB. Had a B in one semester of Pre-Calculus.
For reference, Accepted: Tulane, UW (Seattle), Tennesse, CU Boulder, UCSC, UCSB, U of Arizona, U of Oregon, U of Utah, Drexel, Cal Poly SLO & Pomona.
Yep! I posted above, but my daughter got into nearly every program she applied to, with TWO Bs (1 semester each of 9th grade English & Pre-Calculus). She had 4 years of math. She got a C in Calculus, but ended up passing the AP test. You just NEVER know. There’s no indication to me that 5 years of math is going to be the THING that pushes one applicant ahead of another. What helped her more–probably 2 dual enrollment architecture courses, volunteering teaching drawing at her elementary school as her senior project, countless hours teaching dance…
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It’s a great story. You should share it every post that starts with - I got a B. Am I cooked ? Not always but often it’s math related.
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My youngest daughter is a dancer and NO ONE cared about her transcript–at all. 3.7 weighted GPA was perfectly fine for every academic admission.
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It depends entirely on WHO gets the B! That person might be cooked, but I don’t think most will. That B my kid (the one at Berkeley) got her freshman year was the BEST thing that happened to her. In our district students who have all As get to wear a gold robe at graduation. (It’s not about having a 4.0. It’s literally just about the A.) As you can imagine, a lot of kids opt out of taking APs their junior and senior year (Physics, Bio, and Calculus) because they don’t want to jeopardize their gold robes. That B in English (which is one of her best subjects) freed her up to take AP Physics and Calculus when she was temped to take easier versions of those classes. It really pushed her, which I am thankful for.
Just need to respond to this.
Folks on CC live in a rarified world (which is great, and why I learn so much from others on here). But in the real world, parents are pushing for enhanced security and safety and metal detectors, a school library with internet access for kids who do not have a computer at home, teachers who are actually qualified to teach the subjects they are assigned to (i.e. not having the gym teacher become the Spanish teacher when the actual Spanish teacher goes out on maternity leave and hey, the gym teacher is from Puerto Rico, how hard could it be to teach Cervantes anyway?), etc. The list of BIG ISSUES in a lot of places is very, very long, and pushing for AP and IB math (which I personally think is very important) falls down to the bottom of the list.
There is a general dumbing down/anti-intellectual strain happening in America right now, and sadly, our HS kids seem to be on the front lines. The “college is a waste of time, you’ll make more as a Tik-Tok influencer” stories seem to be all over the place. Cutting access to loan programs for various professions, cutting the meat out of history/civics/social studies curricula, spending class time on subjects best taught in houses of worship vs. in a public school classroom- it’s easy to ignore the pattern that is emerging because each individual outrage or story seems like an anomaly. The “Moms for Liberty” campaigns to focus on removing books they find offensive (Anne Frank? Anything by Elie Wiesel?) or attacking individual teachers for “promoting” a non-Christian lifestyle– it all fits with an overall denigration of the importance of academic standards and intellectualism, cloaked in verbiage about Parents Rights and “if we removed DEI from the classroom we’d have more time to teach ABC’s”.
All of which is my longwinded way of stating- good luck with this. I personally agree with you but I see high quality math education as a very low priority in a lot of school systems. Once you’re taking up half of every school board meeting trying to make sure that someone you suspect might be “trans” (they don’t even know what that means) can’t go to the bathroom during the school day, there isn’t a lot of time to discuss expanding the math instruction budget to include innovative ways to teach the average math kids, the advanced math kids, let alone the “I eat and breathe math “ kids.
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I think part of the context for them is they know in the end that they will be rejecting like 95%+ of their future applicants. They also know that most of the very well qualified kids they reject will go to other great colleges, even if they are not quite that selective.
I think from their perspective, this puts them in a difficult position when talking with kids, and maybe even more so parents, who are targeting them. They know the vast majority of those efforts will fail. And they know there is nothing they can tell kids and parents to change that fact, because it is dictated by math: they only have so many slots to fill, and there are far too many kids/parents who want one.
So I think they are more concerned about maximizing the number of kids who have happy, healthy childhoods, and who are then well-prepared to thrive in whatever colleges they do end up attending. There is no similar mathematical logic that makes that impossible as a goal.
So yes, I think they are reluctant to encourage kids/parents to do things that will potentially be bad for the kids when they know it won’t change how many of those kids they have to reject.
And to be fair, what you said, “Take the most rigorous schedule that you can handle,” is not technically bad advice. If you take a rigorous schedule you CAN’T handle, and get a bunch of not-A grades, possibly trigger a serious health episode, and so on, that is ALSO not good for admissions.
But again, the math dictates that the vast majority of kids/parents targeting their school will fail no matter what choices they make. So technically good advice that is also substantively consistent with good outcomes for all the kids they reject is going to tend to be their approach.
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this is empirically incorrect.
Name a college which does not have freshman calculus, designed for students who have never taken calculus before. Who are these phantom students signing up for a class that they don’t need because they’ve already taken it?
CC fetishizes calculus, STEM, engineering, premed to a degree that the rest of the college-going population doesn’t seem to share. But there are plenty of HS’s that don’t teach calculus, and their students go to college and either take calculus (because they want to or have to) or don’t take it.
Parents engage in the “what went wrong” exercise when their kid doesn’t get into the mega reach, and claiming that the kid got “marked down” is the easy explanation. The actual explanation is that even the kids with the perfect everything- dual enrollment Differential Equations because the HS “only” offered one year post Calc BC– often don’t get into their mega reaches. A 6% acceptance rate means that 94% are getting rejected. And many of those rejected had the perfect everything. Grades, scores, rigor.
It’s not disingenuous- it’s reality. Sometimes the kid who took the “college prep” but not advanced math track really and truly is bringing something distinctive to the classroom, and gets accepted over the kid with the “several years beyond grade level” transcript. It might seem unfair (since nobody can read the teacher’s recommendations so we don’t really know what goes on) but it’s hardly disingenuous– no “elite” college claims that they “rack and stack” and admit from the top and go down until the class is full.
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Caltech, but that is an outlier compared to other highly selective universities, most of which offer a precalculus (Princeton MAT 100) or calculus-with-review-of-precalculus (Harvard Math MA and MB) course as well.
Probably (a) hooked students, and (b) students following the common grade-grubbing recommendation to repeat their AP credit. Doing the latter seems quite counterproductive after having put in the effort for math acceleration in high school.
I’d add students coming from high schools which don’t offer Calculus and perhaps some prized creative/perfoming arts students, although with these colleges such students are sometimes sort of getting close to being “hooked”.
This is another thing admissions officers might talk about in general terms but are often reluctant to discuss in very specific terms, the sorts of context they consider when forming expectations for competitive transcripts.
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