The mess that is elite college admissions, explained by a former dean

Applying to College
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https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/1/18311548/college-admissions-secrets-myths

Highlights

  1. Recent headlines notwithstanding, the ways the wealthy game the system are remarkably mundane
  2. When it comes to elite college admissions, private high schools reign supreme
  3. Standardized testing is just as problematic as the vague concept of “preparedness” and as contingent on wealth
  4. Men — especially white male athletes — have an unfair admissions advantage over women
  5. Rankings are arbitrary, misleading, and poisonous
  6. Deserve’s got nothing to do with it
  7. Where you go to college doesn’t define you — or guarantee your future
  8. The job isn’t easy, and admissions officers do a lot of thankless work
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Here’s another interesting quote from the article:

Many here still deny these facts.

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my favorite

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“3) Standardized testing is just as problematic as the vague concept of “preparedness” and as contingent on wealth”

The tests themselves are probably an OK tool to confirm that a student really is the student their grades and transcripts say they are if taken once. However, over the past decades I think standardized test have become gamed. It doesn’t involve out an out cheating, such as in the recent scandal, but it does involve specific preparation for the tests. Such programs will always benefit those with the resources to pay for them. Between PSAT and PLAN test students who are aware of such tests can get a pretty good idea of how the actual SAT and ACT will work. If that’s not enough then their are books, tutoring, and even courses to raise one’s test scores. I think that’s why we have seen such a bifurcation in test scores recently and we have seen the number of high scores skyrocket. I truly believe many of the over 30 test scores would have been mid twenty test scores 20 or 30 years ago. Not because students are more intelligent but because they have spent hours, days and weeks preparing for these tests that past students didn’t. The student who takes the test once and scores in the 30s probably is offering a more realistic indication of their academic ability than the one who scores the same but took the test 3 times. As for it being predictive that’s a whole new subject.

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Some of the claims may be influenced by the political views of the author. Here is another quote from the article

And while it might be nice to hear the author in person we have missed the chance to hear him “read reading from his work dealing with class and race at the final event in our Marx@200 series” according to a post at CMU Facebook page

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“4) Men — especially white male athletes — have an unfair admissions advantage over women”

No argument that being a recruited athlete is a huge advantage, but not just for white males. As for men having an advantage over women getting in, depends on the school. At Vassar - yes. At MIT - not so much. And definitely not at Mr. England’s former school CMU, where women are admitted at twice the rate as male applicants.

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@TheBigChef, Prof England evidently is a professor at CMU now but was dean of admissions at a LAC (or “liberal arts university” as he called it) before.

At pretty much all LACs these days, it is either neutral or advantageous (pretty much never disadvantageous) to be a guy as there tends to be a bit more to far more women applying to a LAC (depending on the LAC) nowadays. IMO, gals should be looking at all-female colleges if they want LACs with comparatively easier admissions at the same brand level.

As for the white male athlete comment, I think that’s in reference to white athletes being disproportionately represented in most sports (really, pretty much all outside of basketball and maybe football) at the DivIII level.

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“As for the white male athlete comment, I think that’s in reference to white athletes being disproportionately represented in most sports (really, pretty much all outside of basketball and maybe football) at the DivIII level.”

He raises an interesting argument regarding giving a boost to kids applying to D3 schools as athletes. I’m inclined to agree with him that being a great lacrosse player shouldn’t be an admission ticket to Williams or Wesleyan. However, he undercuts his argument by singling out males. Every been to a field hockey or girls lacrosse game? Those are white girl sports.

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@TheBigChef, his complaint there seems to be that while the female athletic admits (to his former LAC) at least met the numeric academic benchmarks of the student body as a whole, many of the male athletic admits (to his former LAC) were academically substandard.

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This article is also being discussed in the “Feds uncover” thread in this same subforum.

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BTW, England evidently is a Wesleyan grad (with high honors) and was dean of admissions there.

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Wesleyan is a school that especially values legacies in admission, as a policy. Their policy and practice are not identical with the policies and practices at all elite colleges and universities.

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I don’t think that’s true. Wesleyan’s legacy admissions are at the low end of the pack, if by “elite colleges and universities”, you mean the Ivy League":

Penn - 25%
Cornell - 22%
Princeton - 17%
Dartmouth - 16%
WESLEYAN - 11%

(Sources: https://www.thedp.com/article/2017/12/early-decision-ivy-league-philadelphia-upenn-admissions-legacy
https://www.wesleyan.edu/admission/apply/classprofile.html)

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No, @circuitrider I mean elites in general, but thank you for pointing out Wesleyan is behind 4 Ivies in that regard. It may, however, be ahead of some other LAC’s. I haven’t compared numbers with regard to the latter.

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He was an Assistant Dean (essentially the lowest level of admissions staff) from 2003, the year he graduated, until 2006, during which time he earned his MFA from the University of Iowa.

The staffing for Wesleyan admissions, with the number currently in each position is:
Assistant Deans (5)->Senior Assistant Deans (2)->Associate Deans (5)->Director of Admission (1)-> Dean of Admission and Financial Aid (1)

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Huh? Did you make the assertion with any comparison?

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@1NJParent Well because we had a different experience, my DD applied ED, went to a public high school, needed FA, and compared favorably to the average admit…so there ya go.

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I’m going by “some other LAC’s.” For example, Williams two years ago had a 7% legacy admit rate. Amherst also has a 7% admissions rate for legacies, I think. Generally, I go by history of my students admitted. I’m not obsessive about stats.

Have a nice day.

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Re: private high schools. The number of kids from Illinois’s nationally highest ranked public schools (Like Walter Payton or IMSA) who apply, and then attend, Ivies are a fraction of kids from fancy private HSs in the East Coast which have fewer student achievements, lower student SATs, etc. According to Niche, the top 3 schools in which the kids at Exeter are interested are Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, in that order. For the kids at IMSA, with slightly higher stats, the top three colleges are UIUC, NU, and UChicago, in that order. Among the Exeter kid’s top 10, are all the Ivies but Dartmouth, Stanford, NYU, and Georgetown, with nary a public school. For the IMSA kids, the top 10 did not include a single Ivy, and three were public. The only overlap between the two top 10 lists was Stanford. These are two sets of kids with the same stats and the same achievements.

The differences are that the private school is populated by rich kids, most who are legacies to one Ivy or another, and these fancy private highs schools are a pipeline to Ivies, meaning that more kids will be accepted from them, and at lower stats, than is true for kids from the best public high schools.

It is not by chance that these fancy private schools generally do not rank, which means that they do not mess up the claims of colleges like Harvard, that “of the schools that rank, 68% are in the top 2%”. When you have 25% of your class in the Ivy pipeline, and your best are likely going to places like MIT where legacy doesn’t kick in, you are going to mess up claims about the percentage who come from the top 2% of their class, if your kids are actually reporting their class rank.

It also becomes much more difficult to claim “merit”, when you are only accepting kids from the top 2% of Walter Payton, but are accepting kids ranked as 20th percentile from a fancy private HS which has lower SATs and fewer national awards than Payton does.

Pipeline high schools are, essentially, as much part of the Ivy League admissions system as the college admissions offices themselves.

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I think the prior posters were confused and meant to say that Amherst and Williams classes were composed of 7 percent legacy students, not that there was a 7 percent legacy admit rate. It seems highly unlikely that legacies were tremendously under admitted compared to the general admit rate of close to 15% for Williams, for example