wrong @tdy123 the people who want to rig already know how, assuming you can’t change your ethnicity, or donate 7 figures, play an affluent sport that not many participate in: field hockey, lacrosse, crew, fencing. 83% of kids who fence in high school fence in college. It’s not about learning the game, it’s about making sure kids understand that averages stats and 25/75%tile numbers are very misleading.
We have to stay real world.
So for those of you wanting complete transparency do you:
A) Want the government to provide that regulation? And should they also do so for every other industry?
B) Do you really think that granularity will help? So, they peel out the data for legacies, athletes, URMs or whatever separate groups you feel are keeping you from getting the clear picture you want on the college admissions landscape? What’s next - the kid that is that competes in debate at an international level? The student who excels in theater, painting, music? The teen who championed an environmental program on their high school campus? Where does it end?
As far as those spots that go to special groups like athletes, legacies, URMs, etc. - those spots never were available to your child if he/she didn’t fit into those groups.
End result is you will still have data that doesn’t apply to or give clear information on your child’s application and chances.
It’s not the schools’ duties to do your homework for you. They are clear that admissions is holistic. Many focus too heavily on data they can see and quantify when the selection process is focused on many more data points which can’t be quantified and laid out before you.
Given the time (4 years) and the large amount of $$ involved, I’m surprised that more people don’t research the process more thoroughly. There is plenty of info out there on the process. No need to hire expensive test prep or college counselors to build a balanced application list.
@anon145
I’m going to speak about rights first, because behind your complaint is a belief that private colleges should be required to divulge how they choose their students. If that were to be required, it would be actually or potentially a matter of law.
People have a right to an education. Any judge would uphold that right. However, that is a qualified right. Thus, the right to an education is commonly understood as K-12 public education within jurisdictional requirements.
People also have a right to pursue opportunity. (Declaration of Independence; U.S. Constitution) Private education (both K-12 and Higher education) is one such opportunity all have a right to seek. That is not an infinite right, nor does it imply a guarantee of admission to particular schools.
Ditto for employment, which is a legally guaranteed opportunity to seek, not to attain. As with college admissions, for many, many positions, the supply of qualified workers far exceeds the ability of the company to employ that vast pool. Yet the law does not insist, other than the general job posting “requirements,” that companies reveal their methodology for hiring workers. It’s literally a secret, why one person was hired and another, equally qualified person, was not. Outside of discrimination on the basis of a constitutionally protected category, companies will not be required to divulge their reasons for their choices.
That fact in itself shows that the law understands a few basic facts, which are paralleled in college admissions:
Businesses have a right to engage in non-discriminatory hiring practices which they judge to ensure their own profitability.
To disclose hiring methodology to the public would violate confidentiality, especially of the job seekers, because files would have to be opened.
To disclose hiring methodology to the public would invite manipulation by job seekers, thus jeopardizing the integrity of the process, disadvantaging honest people, and threatening the operation of the business itself.
Private colleges are also businesses.
“Requiring” colleges to “become transparent” is not going to occur by legal mandate.
@epiphany nice summary but you won’t convince some of this crowd. Maybe @roycroftmom has some altruistic principles but there are the vast majority that don’t and will use information to there own benefit. Therein lies the legal reasons things are kept behind the curtain.
@epiphany at no point did I say they should divulge how they come about with the slots they want filled by law. I have never said transparency can be enforced on colleges.
Simply that students could apply to fewer places and with better accuracy if they knew the data. And that colleges should share the data they already have at their fingertips or even use (URMs, recruited athletes) internally. Even MIT admissions knows in its final pool who the recruited athletes are. In fact MIT could easily release how many recruited athletes apply/accepted. (the coaches rank their kids by number for each sport for MIT). I’m making a moral argument, not a legal one. It seems we are going the other direction since Stanford will no longer release anything about EA applicants. (my cynical take is that EA at Stanford is so low, if kids saw that EA acceptance rate, EA applications to Stanford would drop.)
I suppose if Congress got mad enough they might be able to say any institution that takes federal funding (e.g. NIH, NSF, Pell grants) must divulge any holistic qualities they use in slotting their class and how many applicants filled that slotted institutional need, but I’m not anticipating that happening.
Services such as Naviance and Scoir could provide a pretty good profile, if they wanted to. While they don’t necessarily know everything, they have much of the data and could relatively easily consolidate the high schools by college to provide more information about applicants and whether they were admitted (anonymously, of course.)
^^yes, but naviance doesn’t have recruited athlete or URM status necessarily. right now it’s word of mouth among the high school kids
You certainly imply that divulgence is a moral mandate. But the public does not determine the mandates of private companies and agencies, nor (directly) of institutions. Mandates become institutionalized by law, and until they reach the legal level, “demanding” or pressuring institutions to “become transparent” will have at best uneven results: some institutions may, out of concern for their public profiles, yield or appear to yield to public preferences; many (probably most) will refuse, for all the reasons I have stated. And --importantly-- I suspect that the institutions others wish most to become transparent are precisely those institutions that never will do so.
We can pretty much guess what the numbers are so it’s not really a total secret to those on CC. The general public will be misinformed though with a lot of misdirected resentments. It’s no accident Harvard/Yale have had <20% asian before the lawsuit pretty much forever.
Opacity leads to lots of employment for people that really shouldn’t even be involved in college applications.
Who are those “people,” and what qualifications do you have to determine that?
I was waiting for this rather transparent statement to appear.
^^^ I"m glad you are good at using copy/paste but do you have a single moral argument for keeping admissions slots for institutional needs a secret? How does secrecy benefit high school students applying to college? Bueller,Bueller?
@ephiphany those people include several identified by the FBI in the latest college admissions scandal, including the go between, the stand in test takers, etc.
Not a moral argument. More about what serves one.
Thing is, if folks can’t read the info out there now, why pretend it’s not enough? How hard is it to figure the tippy tops are long stretches. Do you really need the numbers?
How does that improve your app, your chances?
Don’t tell me confirming to you there are only 150 spots or 250 or 550 is going to make your own app better, make you H quality.
Unlike the grocery store, you don’t get it just because it’s available.
This insistence you have to be told isn’t the sort of energy thinking they want, anyway. Lean in. Not wait to be told.
We’re debating this too much. I see what happens when kids don’t understand the college they’re applying to, when they fail to do their own due diligence, when they come off as a mismatch. That’s by their own hand. Absolutely, even among top stats kids, president of this, award in that, able to juggle hatchets.
Not for not knowing how their demographic fares.
Focus on the right stuff.
It seems many of the adults don’t have a clear understanding of the legal role of colleges. The colleges at issue here are nonprofit institutions, so although they may seem to be businesses to you, they are legally obligated to run according to their charter which is for a social mission, namely, education. What those few for profit schools do isn’t relevant here. In exchange for nonprofit status, those colleges (the vast majority discussed on CC) receive tens of millions of dollars in federal and state tax benefits each year from the government, both directly and in the form of financial aid to their students. They also agree to various public filings and regular government audits designed to ensure they are operating pursuant to their charter. Admissions policies should be included in those audits.pretty basic stuff. Many public universities do provide this level of data already m. Not hard to do at all.
You do all realize that the colleges already have this data? It is reviewed regularly by the college’s administration, and sometimes, select others, almost always including the general counsel. The office of research statistics, or the equivalent at each school, keeps it updated. So the exact information is known to some, the only question is whether to share it with the rest.
@gallentjill I have a lab type student B (actually even more impressive that you described, and this wasn’t his only qualification). We were very much aware this wouldn’t get him into Harvard and most likely other top schools without him also being a student B of the first type, or an athlete, or a URM. Top colleges want more than one box checked.
@roycroftmom I know of no colleges that explicitly explain why (public or private) they chose student A over student B. Could you give an example?
The rest of us in this thread aren’t talking about the specific reason Harry was chosen over Sally, @CU123, but about the public release of existing aggregate data regarding admission statistics by demographic cohort. Feel free to start a new thread on your own topic of Harry vs Sally and maybe I will come visit it.
OK I’ll settle for that.