I just read through the thread to see if anyone had picked-up on this quote in the OP article. Apparently not, so I guess I am the first.
Noted.
@epiphany, no, not âjust as good options locallyâ but HS populations in the Midwest and Northeast are decreasing and both regions have a surplus of tiny LACs.
Itâs not hard at all now to get merit money from top tier LACs like Oberlin and Kenyon and youâd get even more from a good one like Earlham. Likely enough to make it as expensive as a UC. Even without scholarships, a good public strong in STEM like Purdue would cost only slightly more than a UC to a CA resident.
@damon30 The âever-evolving marketplaceâ is based on the what the U.S. News rankings value. Schools werenât touting all these stats, and especially their selectivity, until U.S. News started ranking colleges. Itâs not that you need to keep up with your competitors SAT median, itâs that the SAT median is part of the rankings.
@PurpleTitan
Indeed. At least some of my students are branching out to Purdue, but the net could/should be cast much wider. Agree about the merit $ and the wisdom of having similar options OOS with which to compare on April 1. Thereâs still enormous denial in CA, and part of that is because the worst of the impaction has been relatively sudden (last 5 years).
A distinction without a difference. The guy said what he said. He was director of admissions. If he says itâs all about test scores and class rank âin practiceâ, then I take him at his word. Having said that, at least 60% of your incoming student body with top 10% class rank doesnât seem too high of a bar for âelite universitiesâ. That still leaves up to 40% for âholisticâ, and other, considerations.
He was on the third rung of admissions level at Wesleyan over a decade ago. He didnât set policy then and certainly doesnât now. I wouldnât take him at his word meaning more than either of our opinions. Heâs is a non factor in admissions who seemingly is now grinding a political ax.
âThatâs your opinion. Try having a 250 year head start. And I actually think if they were there it would have an impact. Crazy to think otherwise. Didnât say shut down.â
What 250 year head start? Tufts was founded 1852, BU was founded 1869, Northeastern 1898, BC 1863
Pomona was founded in 1887, Stanford 1885, Berkeley, 1868, Cal Tech 1891
A 33 year head start for Tufts is not going to impact Stanford, maybe again some of the other schools I mentioned. If your point is Harvard or Yale being found in CA in the 1600-1700s, sure that would be meaningful, but those are the not schools you mentioned.
All these references to the bottom 25% at Harvard. But you have to keep in mind that 88% of the matriculating class (from CDS) had SAT section scores above 700. So that means that half of the bottom 25% are fairly high scoring. There are almost no students with scores below 600, so itâs not like the bottom 25% are a bunch of undeserving slackers.
@theloniusmonk, @privatebanker wrote:
Harvard was founded in 1636.
I was guesstimating, off the cuff, less the founding dates of prestigious schools in those other places. Mid 19th century founding of the other schools is an approx. 200 year head start.
Itâs a chicken and egg thing. The Northeast has strong privates in part because the publics are weak. And the publics are weak in part because throughout itâs history (unlike almost anywhere else in the US), the most powerful people tended to hail more from local privates than local publics, and they had an obvious interest in keeping local privates stronger and local privates weaker.
Hereâs an astounding factoid:
Cornell and UVa are both approximately the same size and get approximately the same amount of money from their state governments, but VA residents get far more benefit (in terms of admissions favoritism and tuition subsidy) from UVa than NYS residents get from Cornell.
^ To add to the above, unlike almost everywhere else in the country, almost all the states in the Northeast gave their land-grant originally to a private.
NYSâs land-grant is Cornell.
When Rutgers became NJâs land-grant, it was still a private (and stayed one for close to another century).
CTâs original land grant was Yale.
RIâs was Brown.
MA gave part of their land grant to MIT.
UNH was originally associated with Dartmouth (and itâs first head was Dartmouthâs president).
When UVM got VTâs land grant, it was a private.
âlocal privates stronger and local publics weakerâ, I meant.
The university of Massachusetts at Amherst is a land grant school as well.
Brown was originally not named brown. It was The College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, then brown
Also after ww2. GI Bill had too many students enrolling at uri. The overflow enrolled at brown. Not kidding. Lol.
Rutgers was asked to be part of the Ivy League and they said no.
@theloniusmonk I was referring to Harvard. And you know it.
If you donât think having 10 of the worldâs top schools plunked down in la county would impact things. We just disagree. Which is fine.
Thereâs a few threads out there that many of us are desperately trying to convince a few students to not spend 160k more to go to an east coast ivy over cal. And for cs of all things. Maybe you can help them understand that no one would care.
Canât find the previous post in all these pages, but my public HS doesnât rank, and itâs not about colleges â they report top 10%/25%/50%, so the measure is still there, but itâs really to end the competition between students (especially because, thanks to grade inflation, many students have very similar GPAs). Iâm glad they donât rank; people would spend years trying to steamroll each other and the valedictorian would end up going to a school with automatic admissions anyway. 
And yes, legacy students are âqualifiedâ to go to Ivies and other top schools, but so are thousands of other students who got rejectedâŠitâs not so much about admitted unqualified students as it is deciding which qualified students to reject and which to admit. The problem is thereâs too many confounding variables, especially income and going to a private high school. Of course kids who go to private schools âearnâ their achievements just like public school students do, but if you switched a NE boarding school student with a smart student at an average public HS at birth, the former would likely be heading off to State U and the latter to an Ivy. Of course it makes people feel good to pretend their success is 100% their own, but in reality itâs probably 50-50. Granted, it also makes sense for colleges to choose someone with concrete achievements over what someone else âcouldâ have done in a different environmentâŠ
And lastly: why is it that the only students who seem to exist in peopleâs minds are: snobby, rich, white New Englanders who go to posh high schools; and low-income minority students from the inner city who somehow all go to magnet schools. At best, thatâs like 25% of the country. (Iâve read interesting arguments that top colleges perpetuate this by skewing their class towards the two extremes of full-pay students and pell-grant students, but I digress.)
Side note: the fact that Ivies even recruit for sports is mind-boggling to me, especially for dumb (sorry) sports like squash and rowing. If Harvardâs going to be good at anything, newflash, sports is not going to be itâŠsurely the few dozen people who care will put up with so-so players.
Yes, because for private college/university admissions, âqualifiedâ means âable to graduate, so weâll look at what else youâve gotâ. âHolistic admissionsâ means the private college/university looking at what else youâve got and deciding if that combination of attributes is worth one of the limited spots they have to offer, on the basis of what they think youâre going to be able to do for them while youâre on campus and after.
Just because some colleges/universities are able to set a high average bar for academic achievement evidenced by rank and scores doesnât mean that anyone who clears that bar is in contention, and that anyone who doesnât clear it isnât. Thereâs no single overall ranking of candidates, many of whom simply arenât directly comparable to each other on many important dimensions, as you note. The schools have buckets to fill, including many specific institutional needs, and they sift through the âqualifiedâ to fill them, using a mix of quantitative measures and judgment, limited only by legal requirements (e.g., not to discriminate based on race).
No admitted applicant is âundeservingâ of their spot unless they committed fraud on their application, because the college/university decided on the basis of all the information available that that person was one of the ones they wanted. Similarly, no applicant whoâs denied is âundeservingâ unless they simply didnât meet the threshold of being able to graduate.
Yes. Too many people have not considered that ^. This same reality, in reverse, was operative and was discussed back in 2004 when I joined CC. And until recently, the opposite dynamic was also true in the West â strong publics, few privates and of less overall caliber and options than in the East.
There was Admissions Shock back then, in those discussions, because of how âdesperateâ Easterners were, given sudden, unexpected national competition for East Coast privates (Echo Boom). The difference now, as I alluded to earlier, is that West Coasters can no longer regard their publics as their fulcrum, let alone as âsafeties.â And Easterners, who began coming West in about 2004-5, are even more interested now in getting on the coastal industry bandwagon. And OOSâers are quite welcomed, both by privates and by publics, and not just for that OOS public tuition UC craves. (A recent admission year â 25% non-Californians at UC Berkeley, I believe, something like 20% for UCLA)
By âmore interested nowâ I mean that even non-tech, non-STEM grads see opportunities in the Silicon Valley and Washington State, so thereâs high interest in âplantingâ oneself in college there. Humanities grads are being hired for many positions in technology because of course itâs not just about technology but writing, marketing, facility with languages, and other tasks/skills generic to all industries.
I think that @DeepBlue86 summarizes it pretty well -
âYes, because for private college/university admissions, âqualifiedâ means âable to graduate, so weâll look at what else youâve gotâ. âHolistic admissionsâ means the private college/university looking at what else youâve got and deciding if that combination of attributes is worth one of the limited spots they have to offer, on the basis of what they think youâre going to be able to do for them while youâre on campus and after.â
That is where both the detractors, who claim that admissions should be based on merit but it isnât, and the cheerleaders, who claim that admissions is based merit, are wrong. It is based on merit, but not the type that the âBest Of The Best Of The Bestâ crowd claims. Admissions are not trying to figure out how objectively âgoodâ a candidate is, they are trying to figure out how good the candidate is for them .
For private colleges, merit = what the applicant is bringing to the college. Sometimes it is high stats, to keep the academic reputation of the college high, other times it is fame, to raise the collegeâs profile, sometimes itâs money. Sometimes itâs a little bit of diversity, and sometimes it is the opposite.
College application is not a competition, in which the âprizeâ goes to the fastest, the strongest, the smartest, the one with the best GPA, the most ECs, etc.
Colleges say that they want smart hard working kids. They do not say that they will accept the kids with the highest scores in this test or this GPA, or any other factor which is supposed to measure these. That is what applicants add on in their mind, or are told by people who do not represent the colleges.
It is admittedly frustrating when a kid with great SAT scores, GPA, great ECs, etc, is rejected by all âeliteâ colleges to which they apply. However, anger at colleges is somewhat misplaced. They never said that any level of these things will assure acceptance, or even that they will increase the chance of acceptance beyond a certain amount. That is what parents and kids assume, based on whatever data they glean from the internet or other sources.
Yes, the kids âdid everything rightâ, but the kids did not âfulfill all the requirements for acceptance to an âeliteâ collegeâ, which is something different.
The prize for hard work in high school is a successful graduation from high school, not admissions to an âeliteâ private college. When somebody else with lower grades is chosen valedictorian because their father is famous, that is not fair. When somebody with lower grades is accepted to Yale because their father is famous, that isnât unfair, since there is no rule, explicit or implicit, that only kids with the highest high school grades will be admitted to Yale.
I believe JHU is d3 so no FH scholarship