As something of an aside, and something of an anecdotal correction:
As many people here know, both of my children went to the University of Chicago, and I am a big fan of that institution. (Partially because my kids went there, and partially they would not have wound up going there if my wife and I had not been fans already.) Neither one gave any serious consideration to applying to Northwestern, because they (and I) agreed with what epiphany wrote.
When my older child graduated and was starting her first job, her co-trainee might have been her twin – from a similar communities about five miles apart, the same highly selective summer arts program when in high school, dozens of people they knew in common, same major and very similar interests within the major, full of appreciation for each other’s taste, similar social styles and pretty much as distinguishable intellectually/socially as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. He was a Northwestern grad who had not even considered applying to the University of Chicago, and he had loved Northwestern and felt perfectly at home there.
I am not saying that some portion of the student body at Chicago really would not have belonged at Northwestern, or that there were not a bunch of kids at Northwestern who would really have hated Chicago. Chicago and Northwestern are about as different as two elite private universities less than 20 miles apart could be. And, still, I believe there is very substantial overlap in the institutions, and that the majority of the students at each college would be perfectly happy at the other.
Since you’ve mentioned UChicago, members of the adcom there have said that about half of all applicants are eliminated based on academic credentials – on the adcom’s judgment that the applicant would not thrive at UofC. That has to be based primarily on test scores and grades, and perhaps also on high school curriculum, language, or other “objective” criteria.
Back in the old days (when my son attended UofC), an article was published about the process of preliminary stratification of the applications into 5 groups (not of equal size). Applicants rated 5 by an initial reader were disqualified from further consideration (this could well be the “half of all applicants” that I referred to above). Applicants rated 1 were virtual sure admits. The committee as a whole would then review in detail the applicants rated 2 and 3, from which the bulk of the admittees would come.
With the surge of applications now to over 30,000, I suspect they have to be fairly decisive about that first cut. The committee as a whole can’t talk about every case. Back when my son applied, I figured he would be a 1 (he was offered a Merit Scholarship) and, thus a “sure admit,” based on his raw credentials, fortified by the fact that he could write very well. But the pool was much smaller then than it is now. He did apply to one Ivy, but we figured that from his perspective this was a “lottery” in part because he was never willing to put in the extra effort to fashion his credentials. So he wasn’t disappointed in the result, and has also become someone Chicago admissions cites as an example of recent graduates who have done well in their careers.
First cut isn’t just about stats, though. There’s a lot of gibberish in many apps.
OP, I’m still grappling with your lottery concept, probably partly, yes, the word. And partly because, to me, the process up to hitting “submit” is so critical. The app is the primary vehicle to communicate with adcoms. (Adult strangers, not the hs folks who know you.) It conveys your absolute record (grades, rigor, scores, activities,) but also your sense of self, understanding (and thus, savvy/smarts,) judgment, and potential to contribute.
So many are lacking in the above and in general self-awareness. That lack of self-awareness is actually one reason why they often apply to schools for which they have very little chance of final consideration but will be eliminated early. That has nothing to do, necessarily, with grades and “hard work.”
Well, feel free to add me to the group that either misunderstands what you are repeating or simply find the term “lottery” misplaced for both the process by the schools AND the perception by students. Simply stated, it is an incredibly poor choice of words, and no amount of explanations or clarifications will change that part. There ought to be better terms to define the type of odds for applicants without relying on one that carries images of a random process balanced by luck. The same applies to similar terms such as crapshoot and related terms related to gambling.
The fact that 5 or whatever percentage of students are chosen from a pool of applicants does NOT make it a lottery, and it is NOT appropriate for the students to think it is one. This would simply intimate that students buy a ticket that carries the same odds, when NOTHING could be farther from the truth.
There are plenty of similar scenarios with equally poor odds: actors at auditions, job seekers interviewing for a nice job, etc. Their odds my be worse than Ivy League admissions, but there is no lottery involved. Employers and casting directors will hire someone who fits the profile for the role or the job. How many jobseekers send a resume to a “computer” and never receive a reply? Could be 99 percent … but it is still not a lottery because the resumes should not be identical.
And, despite what some seem to intimate here, neither are the applications viewed as identical by the people tasked to measure them.
All of this lottery non-sense stems from a simple position: the non-acceptance that people with seemingly equal (or perhaps worse) credentials were valued MORE than you did. The reaction is to blame an imperfect system that does NOT measure correctly instead of accepting that the system did actually work as intended. None of the rejected applicants know what was in the successful candidates files; they can only speculate about it! Hence, the knee-jerk conclusion of a … lottery one did not win.
PS The nerve finds itself irritated, not by the concept, but by the need to have to dismiss it repeatedly and in various forms … only to see it resurfacing with the same original argumentation. Over and over!
I disagree. I think there is nothing inconsistent about saying “the schools have a deliberate process, I may or may not make the cut, but they absolutely have certain criteria in mind” and “from MY (student) perspective, it LOOKS like a lottery because some decisions will be made that I might not understand - which doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a rationale for them, only that I can only see my own application and not the totality of the applicant pool that the adcom was assessing.”
In that regard, while it is NOT a lottery ticket, it surely is more helpful emotionally to THINK of it as a lottery ticket that you polished to the best of your efforts and now it’s out of your hands, than the other attitudes which are rampant on CC - that it’s the “just reward” for your hard work, that it’s something that you’re entitled to, that it’s something that, if you don’t get, means you’re a loser as a human being and condemned to flip burgers, and that you need find the nearest URM / legacy / athlete / etc. and blame them from taking “your” spot.
Indeed, the whole concept that someone HAD a spot (that the URM, legacy, athlete, etc. ‘stole away’) is precisely why there is merit in TREATING it like a lottery - because no one entering a lottery is guaranteed to win anything.
But I don’t think that’s what most people mean when they use the term, Pizzagirl. You can tell from the context of their posts about the term. They don’t mean that it’s pragmatic to maintain a philosophical distance and understand that there are multiple variables involved. You mean that. Most people, i.m.o., don’t.
Case in point, @Pizzagirl – following up on my post 191:
One of my students just this year — unqualified for the Ivy League (doesn’t have the essential “stuff”) – when I asked him about an application he did on his own, replied, “my luck was not so good.” And he meant that literally. (I know him well enough to state that.) Luck, yes. I assure you, luck had nothing to do with his rejections, plural.
Not to disagree with either Pizzagirl or epiphany but I think there’s another sense in which the application can be seen as a lottery. Namely, if you don’t apply you can’t “win.” But if you do apply, your chances of acceptance are uncertain, and possibly quite long, even if you have a strong academic record and great “numbers.”
Further, if you don’t have a lot invested in the process (you haven’t been gunning for a particular college for years) and don’t care a lot whether you win because you have a life beyond high school and some good options in the “very certain” admit category, then you can avoid getting too emotionally involved or disappointed in the outcome. If the outcome is “no,” you toss your lottery tickets and move on with your life.
Of course, everyone is entitled to his or her own erroneous opinion. Facts are, however, something else.
The fact that it makes a rejected student feel better about qualifying the process as a lottery does not make it one.
Fwiw, anyone who feels better by considering the application a lottery ticket should also accept that they stand no better chances than all the other ticket holders, and thus NOT consider their application more worthy. My perspective remains that the complaining voices are mostly from people who assume that a lottery is inherently unfair.
I think most would agree that there are more qualified kids than there are spots at the most elite schools. I also agree with JHS that the same kid that thrives at U Chicago would probably also thrive at Northwestern (with few exceptions). While the Cornell-bound kid may be better off there, he or she may well have gone to Brown if accepts (or vice versa) and been successful. No elite college has a monotype of students.
For the small subset of students that are qualified in every way, it is somewhat like a lottery. I could forsee that the same student that gets accepted for the class of 2019 at a top 10 might have gotten rejected for the class of 2018 or 2020. And vice versa for the kid that was rejected.
But even among the qualified, there is a subset of kids that are almost a sure bet at getting into an elite school, And others with a shot, but not a very good one.
Certainly, if the kids that are very unlikely to be accepted would just not apply, the acceptance rate would be more realistic. As stated above, for the kid that makes it through the first cut, the odds are much higher than <10% of getting admitted. But the majority (2/3 perhaps) will be rejected, even if qualified.
Not your opinion! The opinion of the students who think the process IS a lottery is baseless. Hence, based on erroneous facts.
Aren’t we going in circles and to great lengths to debate what has been obvious? The students claim that it is a lottery. It makes them feel better. We understand that but do all of us have to accept that their perception is correct because it makes them feel better?
Coming in late to the “party,” but I wanted to add a somewhat contrarian point of view: In my opinion, if the selection process at one of the highly selective universities could be re-run with the same applicant pool (and some variety of “memory wipe” for the admissions staff, so they forget the original decisions), then the class that was selected the second time around would not be identical to the class that was selected the first time–particularly if the applications were read and discussed in a different order, and at different times of day, different days of the week, and perhaps even different months. I don’t doubt that there would be some overlap in the admitted group. Also, I think that there are some applicants who stand no chance, either time. However, I think that there are some applicants for whom the decision would change.
The National Science Foundation ran a replication study of this type about 25 years ago, for the award of NSF grants. Admittedly, they had different referees evaluating the grant proposals in the actual application round and in the experimental round, to see whether the outcomes were replicable. About 1/3 of the grant proposals that were actually funded would have moved out of that category. They would have been replaced by grants in support of proposals that were originally declined.
In the college admissions case, in my hypothetical, the admissions personnel would remain the same, which would increase the consistency of the outcomes. However, the National Science Foundation runs a pretty objective process, mostly involving people with lengthy track records and proposals that are much longer than a college application. So there is an argument that decisions on grant awards should be even more replicable than college admissions decisions.
If you think that admissions are non-random (in any sense), what fraction of the admitted class do you think would be identical in my hypothetical scenario?
I don’t say that Ivy League (or comparable) admissions are a lottery. My preferred term is that there is an “element of randomness” in the process.
There are many possible pre-existing preferences of the admissions committee members: Too many oboists gaming the process already. I prefer sculpture as an artistic form, not painting in oils. 17th USAMO participant today–ho hum. Sheeesh, another applicant who wants to study Akkadian! Why doesn’t this applicant ski? Why doesn’t this applicant compete in dare-devil snow-boarding? I don’t like applicants who overlook needs in their own communities, and instead take expensive short-term service trips to other countries. I don’t like applicants who are narrowly focused on their own neighborhoods . . . Sheeesh, another champion rutabaga curler! I like rodeo clowns–they are risking their own necks to keep others safe. I don’t like rodeo clowns–rodeo is cruel to the animals and should be abolished.
The applicant can’t know which way the admissions staffers think. From the applicant’s standpoint, this introduces an element that looks random. Of course, it’s not really random, unless (for example) the pro-rodeo-clown reader is replaced with the anti-rodeo-clown reader on a random basis.
Yet, for a specific admissions staffer with fixed preferences, there must still be times and conditions that affect the reading of an application, beneficially or not. The order in which applications are read is likely to have some influence. An applicant can’t be the 17th USAMO participant in a single day, unless 16 others happened to be read first. As a class begins to “gel,” the “holes” also take shape, based on the students who have been identified for admission already. Being discussed right before lunch is likely to be good for no one. These influences have causes, so they are not truly random either, but it seems to me that they roughly fit the “element of randomness” characterization.
QuantMech said, much more clearly and more elegantly, and with really interesting backup, what I (and I think some others) have been trying to say: The process is not a lottery, exactly, but it does have elements of randomness for a significant portion of the pool. Including some randomness that results from changing the identity of admissions staff (who, after all, turn over at a pretty high rate at most colleges). If you need to have the same personnel to achieve consistency applying common criteria . . . colleges don’t do that year-to-year. (They can’t, as a practical matter, and it’s not all that important that they should.)
QM, I think your analysis is completely spot-on, and just part and parcel of any situation in which humans evaluate “stuff” on criteria that isn’t strictly objective / quantitative. (After all, we might not have given our future spouses or BFF’s the time of day if we’d met them under different circumstances, we were more tired at the time, whatever).
Without any data to back this up, I’d surmise that 75% of the admitted pool would look similar if you ran your experiment (same application pool, “memory wipe”).
And I totally agree that there is the human element of the adcom who likes rodeo clowns vs the one who doesn’t, the one who has a soft spot for Eagle Scouts or the bassoon or has a subconscious dislike for prep schools or contact-sport players or whoever. As long as it’s not systematic, though, I believe it all comes out in the wash.