Should we really look at Ivy League Admissions as a Lottery?

Parents Forum
161

@epiphany, OK here is your complete post, which you accuse me of selectively editing to give a false impression. You say the most basic level of requirement for admission is to be a contributor to the community and that a student who has never done an ounce of community service does not meet the most basic level of requirement. I’m still baffled as to where you said that community service is not an absolute requirement, though you keep accusing me of having left this part out. If you’re going to accuse me of deliberately misrepresenting what you said, please do quote it because I cannot for the life of me find what you are talking about. Sorry the quote is so long. Most of it is in fact irrelevant which is why I left it out before. Have a nice day.

"But that still doesn’t translate into every one of, say, 43,000 applicant or even most applicants- or even, say, a third- is/are necessarily the sort these schools look for.

Yes, that’s one of the facts I’ve been trying to communicate. Also, Yale has said that they could fill the freshman class over 3x, but the way they phrased it was, “All of those applicants can do the work required at Yale.” LOL, I’m hoping their LOR’s were more enthusiastic than that.

So, again, there are shades of differences among
Excellent, reliable, capable, consistent student and contributor to the community.
That ^ and more.
Extraordinary capable & multi-talented.

However, line 1 or 2 may be sufficient any particular round to get you considered if you have a special talent or fill an institutional need when no student from Line 3 happens to.

Lots of students do not meet Line 1, but their parents, peers, etc. announce that they do. For example, a high-performer in grades and scores who has never done an ounce of community service does not meet Line 1. You would be surprised at how many families assume that Ivies will overlook a disinterest in the wider world. "

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Yes. Lots of people don’t understand that fact, either. I completely understand why it happens and I have no problem with it. No private university is required to penalize its local students just because it is also a national university.

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Regarding post 150, I guess it depends on one’s perspective (half empty/half full kind of thing). You said luck “plays a part.” So does much in life, and that would include the luck of one’s parents and family dynamics, one’s neighborhood schools, one’s economic class, one’s region, one’s innate capabilities, and a whole host of variables.

But:
(1) the part is not the whole
(2) luck is no more a determining factor, necessarily, than many other “campaigns” or efforts, such as job hunting among a sea of qualified candidates within a high-demand/low supply industry, or artistic or academic competitions based on age groupings where those groupings differ markedly in talent (a situation I’m familiar with).

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(Something I have said repeatedly, so I agree)

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Correlation does not mean causation. Even if HYPSM did not consider test scores as part of their evaluation, the median score would be extremely high since test scores are correlated with criteria HYPS values. MIT’s website explains this better than I could saying:

Also note that HYPS’s test scores are not “higher than everyone else.” For example, the sum of the 25th and 75th percentile CR+M and ACT, at selected colleges are below. Stanford falls behind Vanderbilt, WUSTL, and various others.

Caltech – 1500/1600
Vanderbilt – 1430/1580
WUSTL – 1420/1560
Stanford – 1380/1570

166

The yield rate makes a big difference. Vandy’s test scores are higher than those of Stanford and some Ivies. But it’s yield rate is about 40%, while Stanford’s is almost 80%. An 80% yield rate means that the school can practically handpick whom they want to be on campus. The admissions office will know exactly whom they want. There are tens of thousands of applicants to HYPS, but the number of students whom they are looking for are very limited. The admission rate makes the whole process look extremely competitive and hence random, but it is not.

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“The so-called highly selective schools cannot afford to get the news out that they screen by academic performance and exceptional talent in a non-sports area. Then they won’t get the 40k+ applicants, as those without would simply not apply. That would lower the admission rate and make the school look less selective. Hence the fig leaf of holistic admissions.”

The admission rate counts for less than 1.5% of the USNWR rating. So contrary to the popular belief often expressed on CC, arbitrarily inflating the admissions rate doesn’t make a school jump in ratings.

Rather, these schools really do want to find the “diamond in the rough.” They are aware – though the supposed “sophisticates” on CC aren’t – that in most parts of the country outside their immediate area, the average person isn’t necessarily aware of these schools.

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“Well high school GCs, teachers, many on CC, parents, and peers are telling the kids: if you do X, Y, and Z, you’re in. So the kids feel like they’ve failed when they don’t get in. Is not getting in not being good enough? Or is it being unlucky? or…? If kids better understood their admissions odds, they might not bother stressing about as much as they do.”

The admission rate to every single college of the kind we are talking about is easily accessible with a few clicks on the internet. The problem isn’t that it’s not available. The problem is that people are just unwilling to come to terms with it. I truly think that what happens is that a kid / family looks at a school with an admissions rate of, say, 10%, and concludes - well, I’ve always been in the top 10% (if not higher) of everything I’ve done at my school, so there’s no reason to conclude I won’t make the cut – and completely forgetting that the applicant pool doesn’t resemble the school at large, but rather represents all the top students all over the country.

169

The major difference between a lottery and the college acceptance process are the factors involved. With a lottery it is merely chance and either no one or everyone could potentially win. I look at it as more like recruiting for a sports team. There is a large but limited number of elite athletes. Say you only need 10 but you have 200 potential to choose from. Some are obvious enough that they will get multiple offers from the top teams, the rest are chosen from the information the teams have and who the team feels will best benefit them as a whole and the positions that need to be filled. People seem to understand this better with sports than with academics. It’s not a perfect parallel, however, I think it’s a better explanation than comparing it to a lottery.

170

Not a lottery, but not entirely rational either. Harvard admitted around 2000 students out of 34000 applicants for the class of 2018. Leaving out that some subset were recruited athletes, big ticket legacies and other direct admits, that would mean that using the 3x over figure about 6,000 students could have been admitted. That translates to about 17% of the applicants being truly viable and 83% having no shot. Only that top 17% (minus the special admits) would have a ticket to the lottery.

There is clearly some element of luck involved as others have said. Kids get into one tiptop school and rejected from others all the time. Clearly, there was some element of randomness that gets them into Princeton but rejected from UPen.

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"Not a lottery, but not entirely rational either. Harvard admitted around 2000 students out of 34000 applicants for the class of 2018. "

The process by which you picked your spouse wasn’t rational either. Nor is the process by which you got a job (unless you have a civil service type of job which is wholly dependent on the scores from some test).

Harvard et al obviously like the classes they get from their process. If they felt they were getting the “wrong” students, nothing prevents them from racking and stacking SAT scores and cutting from the very top, or administering their own college entrance exam. If one thinks that these methods don’t produce a “worthy class,” or that worthier individuals are being left behind, it’s odd that one would want so badly to be a part of that class.

172

Having just watched my son go through this process as a recruited athlete, and gearing up to go through it with a more “normal” kid over the next year, I have to say I find this thread fascinating. My son was fortunate in that his athletic ability and his academic stats afforded him the opportunity to choose from a number of different schools. Early on in the process, he limited the schools he was looking at to the Ivy and a few NESCAC schools because while he enjoys his sport, he did not want to risk his sport consuming his college experience. We visited several Ivy schools, some multiple times. At most places, he was fortunate to have the opportunity to spend several hours with other students, some administrators and of course his prospective coaches. Maybe it was the experience of looking at the schools through the lens of the athletic program, maybe it was just that he was afforded the opportunity to spend a lot more quality time on each campus than what I assume a normal applicant can get, but I came out of that process amazed that anyone would apply to several Ivys. It seemed to me that while there were overlaps, many of the schools were very different from each other. I can not imagine a kid who would be happy at Dartmouth enjoying Columbia, as the most obvious example. But it is not just geographical. Columbia and Penn were as different as different could be in the “vibe” of the place. What the students talked about, what they chose to highlight when they were recruiting my kid, that type of thing. Harvard, Yale and Princeton were maybe a bit more alike than different, but even in the case of the “Big Three” there was a distinct flavor to the type of kid who attended each school. Obviously there were things my son picked up on, even if he couldn’t quantify it, because he quite quickly lost interest in one of the three after a long visit last spring.

Another data point. In his HS class this year, there are kids headed to Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, UChicago and MIT. Four of the six are good friends, and all are in overlapping social groups. I know five of the six fairly well. They are all very different. All of this is a long winded way of saying that I do not believe the fact that some kids get into certain schools but rejected by others is proof of a randomness in the process. All the kids I know are exceptionally bright, successful students, and I have no problem believing that academic merit is the first, cruelest cut in the admissions process. But once past that hurdle, it seems obvious that the schools are looking carefully at different things. It is not hard to imagine that the kid headed to Brown would not have been as valued by Cornell, and consequently may not have been admitted had he applied, because while he is as smart in a quantifiable sense, he is nothing like the kids we met at Cornell. The kid headed to Cornell is.

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That’s why the lottery analogy is so poor. Lottery implies blind randomness. Admissions committees are not operating blindly, nor are they considering all candidates evenly. Under-qualified, unhooked students will have their chances reduced to zero after the first look, and they always had a zero chance, whereas extraordinarily talented students have close to a 100%chance of being considered in the final round.

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Princeton and Penn have different needs, structures, environments, etc. One reason some of us advocate knowing the schools.

In the sports example, just because you’re a top player in your hs doesn’t mean you are necessarily a top contender for that dream sports team.

BoxChecker, you aren’t the first to claim it’s “high academic performance…and excellent skills in a non-sports field.” But it’s not hierarchical where the 2400 has a better shot. And I don’t believe you can define “excellence in a non sports field.” You don’t have that frame of reference. Most hs kids make assumptions about excellence, leadership, etc, what it really takes…and the fierce competition. Plus the weight of the written portions.

Rubin was looking to quantify. The process is holistic. Academic performance matters for 2 main reasons. The academic bar/expectations is generally higher in courses at elites and the level of peer readiness is higher. That’s it. With such a vast pool of high performing kids, the wild card is “the rest of the picture.” I.e., don’t show the personal attributes they want and your chances drop. Eg, come across as so all fired sure you know it all and they may question your judgment, maturity, perspective, etc. AFAIK, you have not been through this process yet.

Again, look at the Brown tables.

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"Put another way, if 43,000 high school dropouts tmrw decide to apply to Harvard thus swelling the rank of the applicants to 86,000, the average odd may seemingly drop to 5% (from 10%) but in reality the odds for this new group will be 0%, and the odds for the old group will remain unchanged. However, Harvard will look even more selective, and people will think of a Harvard admission even more as a lottery. It will add to the myth of Harvard, "

43,000 hs dropouts applying to Harvard next year won’t impact the “myth of Harvard” one iota. Get real. 99% of people in this country couldn’t tell you what the Harvard admit rate is to save their lives other than “you’ve got to be really smart to go there.”

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Around and around and around we go. The term lottery doesn’t apply as a general description of what happens. The adcom isn’t picking powerballs or intending to randomly select from all applicants, or from even a subset of “qualified” applicants.

But from the perspective of individual applicants, especially ones with superb credentials, the process may appear to be a game of chance because even though there are so many other applicants with superb credentials, why weren’t they one of the chosen ones? But that doesn’t make it a lottery. There were a whole lot of talented and accomplished applicants, and chances were that the adcom could find other very similar applicants who they regarded as having better credentials (not just referring to gpa and test scores).

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Or if Harvard thought that somehow they were being forced to choose a diluted class due the supposed “randomness” of the college applicant population (some geniuses applying, some clueless self-deluders applying), then wringing one’s hands over the effects of “randomness” would have some value. But Harvard is hardly suffering from all this. They merely weed out the randomness at the first pass and continue to choose from what Harvard, not the general population, believes is the cream of their crop.

It is only “random” if:.

One believes that all students are about equally capable and have about equal chances of admission
That a so-called “mysterious” process must be also random. (Being not understood = randomness)
The Ivies are poor judges of quality, so they’re actually just getting a random mix of mediocrity & quality together. (This is a way to discredit outcomes, of course.)

Another subtext I haven’d mentioned that is that I always think that on these threads there’s an effort to undercut the Ivies, simply because not at all students do have a random chance of being considered and even accepted. I think lots of people think it’s mighty unfair that it doesn’t resemble MegaMillions and one just can’t keep buying daily lottery tickets to “force” an Ivy to consider {their) students equally with others. Then the outcomes would be “fair.” In other words, what they really resent is that the Ivies are in control. They think they should be in control instead.

After all, an Ivy League college does not deserve to call the shots for their classes. Rather, “random” people should be able to “decide” (fix, sway, influence by sheer numbers, not by credentials) who gets considered for the final round.

178

Exactly. it’s been said from the get-go that it’s not that the process is a lottery from the school’s standpoint, but that the student is best served thinking of it as a lottery once he’s done all he can do. But, no surprise, this is CC, so people will run with the word lottery and think we’re saying “elite schools admit using a process that’s no different from a lottery.”

179

Thank you @Pizzagirl ! I kind of felt my question was getting lost…but not sure whether or not it was worth trying to keep the comments on point!

Yes, that is what I was asking. Wouldn’t it be healthier for the high achieving students to accept that part of the process is out of their control (like a lottery)? Knowing this, and actually internalizing it, would I think free those kids and their parents.

But it seems I touched a bit of a nerve. Sorry!

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Yes. They **are **looking for different things. And they are also looking for the kind of mix of students which at that campus has worked well for that U. Leaving the Ivies out for a second, a student that would thrive at Northwestern may not thrive nearly as well at UChicago, and vice-versa, despite their geographical proximity and a very high level of selectivity.