@MWolf I wish your comment could be pinned somewhere, it is so valuable!! Or autoposted to all the “chance me” threads, or the “are my ECs ok” threads.
The best advice I have for all those people is “think outside of the box”! There are thousands of kids that have your grades and scores, thousands that have done Model UN, or debate or whatever. You can do those things, but put them into a context that makes you unique, or one of 3 kids that has that profile, instead of one of 20,000.
30, 40 , 50 years and beyond ago elite college admissions was as simple as what prep school you came from, who your parents were-- legacy and or money. Even sports wasnt as much of factor–if anyone remembers Harvard used to have JV lacrosse and hockey for the marginally qualified non elite athletes. Many factors (both good and questionable) have fueled the current admissions frenzy). Affirmative Action and Title IX are two laws with noble intent that morphed into dysfunctional and toxic outcomes across the board. The unchecked availability of college loans have caused an education bubble much like the housing bubble.
This is unbelievably true and I wrote a short story (dystopia) about this. Suffice to say it came from a lot of emotion…
THIS:
It seems that a minority of people understand that.
@goddess00: “30, 40 , 50 years and beyond ago elite college admissions was as simple as what prep school you came from, who your parents were-- legacy and or money”
You seem to think that was a good thing.
@jackson5123, JHU is DivI in lacrosse and offers scholarships in lacrosse, but whoever mentioned JHU or lacrosse scholarships before you did on this thread?
Johnny523 said someone got a field hockey scholarship. JHU is d3 in FH
"I believe JHU is d3 so no FH scholarship "
They gave her an “academic” scholarship so she could attend and play field hockey. It was a de facto athletic scholarship. Most schools that can’t give athletic scholarshis give indirect ones.
“The prize for hard work in high school is a successful graduation from high school, not admissions to an “elite” private college.”
I disagree. To graduate from high school you don’t need top course rigor (8-10 APs/IB’s), highest GPA, highest standardized test scores, awesome ECs, a great essay, etc. Most HS kids are not doing the above just to graduate from high school, they are studying their butts off and doing amazing ECs in an attempt to get into a very good college. It might not be enough, but if they don’t do at least the above “minimum” they will be immediately put in the elite college “reject” pile.
In addition, college success (just like high school success) gives you the opportunity to be placed in a good graduate program or find a good job after college.
It all matters my friends, stepping stones in the search for a very good education and great career. Success in high school is correlated with receiving admission to an “elite” college.
“Most HS kids are not doing the above just to graduate from high school, they are studying their butts off and doing amazing ECs in an attempt to get into a very good college.”
Misguided goal, IMO. They should have some greater, more praiseworthy goals, such as work to better themselves and the world. If they manage to get in to a “good college”, that’s just extra.
“In addition, college success (just like high school success) gives you the opportunity to be placed in a good graduate program or find a good job after college.”
Having brains, guts, drive, people/social skills gives you those opportunities.
@PurpleTitan not at all. observation that it used to be one way and many regulations and incentives were put in place to change higher education. Law of Unintended Consequences=it has all gone too far.
Plenty of people do good work, get involved in lots of ECs and take on leadership roles in high school…because they’re the sort of people with the smarts, discipline, ambition and social skills to be successful at that, and they assume that if you’re doing something, you should do it well.
They may also see all those things as steppingstones to an elite college, but what some of us are saying here is that you may be a really good natural athlete with a great work ethic and the leadership skills that get you elected captain of your high school teams, but that doesn’t make you recruitable to any school in particular. Your skills need to be a match for what your target colleges want, and you have to know how to play the game and navigate the process.
I’m not sure that wanting to get into a good college is “just extra” for a lot of people, but I’m with @PurpleTitan on his second assertion: essentially, if you’ve got the right attributes, you’re not a lot more likely to be successful if you went to Harvard than if you went to your state flagship.
This is, I believe, one thing you can conclude from the well-known study by Dale and Krueger that showed that people who turned down elite college admissions ultimately did as well financially as people who accepted them: if you’re the sort of person who has the skills, drive and sophistication about the process to get into elite schools, you’re probably going to be successful in many aspects of life. The skills and drive without the sophistication may not be enough, though.
“I’m not sure that wanting to get into a good college is “just extra” for a lot of people, but I’m with @PurpleTitan on his second assertion: essentially, if you’ve got the right attributes, you’re not a lot more likely to be successful if you went to Harvard than if you went to your state flagship.”
This is where things get murky. Harvard students have certain advantages like having the attributes needed to get into Harvard. Many also have the advantage of having families of influence and the benefits that affords both in admission and in their future endeavors. I’ve often wondered if “legacy” was much of a factor or if it’s legacy with influence that really factors into elite school admission. I don’t doubt that a Harvard education is an excellent thing to have, however, there may be the argument that many of Harvard most successful students came from success and influence. I wonder if the average (excellent) student from a more modest family benefits as much from that specific degree or will they get overshadowed by those who have a track much more laid out for them. Would they be better off at a University where they could stand out due to their own merits? Not sure.
@goddess00 the US has added 100 million people to its population since 1980. Yale added a couple hundred seats since then. The other top 20 ??? I mentioned artificial scarcity - not as an economic term - but clearly each of those T20 schools have the endowment to add another 500 kids, without losing any quality if they wanted to. So really the part that has changed is the uptick in merit based unhooked applicants for nearly capped seat numbers, not really increases in legacies or hedge fund donors.
There are loads of Harvard kids who make a smooth transition after graduation to a high-paying job in investment banking or consulting. Many of them have wealthy/influential parents who call in favors from their friends to make introductions and help get the right internships for Junior after sophomore and junior year, building his/her resume and clearing the path to an offer following graduation. Many other kids from comfy backgrounds have the connections and social capital to get other kinds of prestigious jobs in media, advertising, entertainment, tech (yes, even tech), etc.
That doesn’t mean, though, that kids with other skills who don’t enjoy those advantages won’t do well; after all, a disproportionate number of these opportunities are offered to students at Harvard and its peer schools. Goldman Sachs and its ilk recruit a lot of kids from Harvard and similar schools, and they don’t all belong to the same country clubs. Many came to Harvard without prior connections, distinguished themselves on campus, did a lot of legwork and forged their own path to Wall Street. So there are more kids with a leg up at Harvard, but there are also more opportunities specifically available to Harvard students - and if someone is the sort of kid who gets into Harvard without certain advantages that others enjoy, they may be well-placed to exploit those opportunities.
Legacy by itself gets you two things: (i) a second look, which is a guarantee that you won’t fall through the cracks and be denied after some junior adcom spends five minutes skimming your app (and in the context of >40k apps, this is meaningful); and (ii) something that functions as a modest tiebreaker, in a game where many applicants are fundamentally interchangeable and there are consequently a lot of ties.
That said, there are legacies and there are LEGACIES. An example of the former is someone with a parent who went to Harvard and is now a mid-level professional in a small city, who never donated significant amounts of time or money and isn’t in a position to be useful to Harvard and its affiliates in any meaningful way. In that scenario, the fact that the parent went to Harvard is modestly interesting, nothing more. The admissions decision is really almost all about what the kid themself brings to Harvard; the legacy status just ensures that the kid’s app will be appropriately considered.
An example of a LEGACY is a kid with two parents who went to Harvard, at least one of whom is now prominent in business, government, Hollywood or some community/group that’s highly relevant to Harvard, who is in a position to be useful to Harvard and its affiliates and likely has given substantial and growing amounts of time and/or money to Harvard, with indications of capacity for a lot more in the future. That family matters a lot to Harvard and, as you might reasonably assume, the bar for the kid is much lower, with zero chance that that application doesn’t get significant focus at the admissions office, possibly bolstered by a call from the development office.
[Not that there’s anything wrong with that - Harvard is a private university that can admit who it likes, on the basis of who it feels are most useful to it - but that’s a topic for another discussion.]
The number of legacies admitted is naturally limited by the need to meet other institutional priorities; it’s good for Harvard if they can kill multiple birds with one stone and find, for example, a star quarterback who’s also a wealthy legacy, an URM and from Wyoming, but this is unlikely. I’ve often thought that Harvard and places like it need to admit enough legacies for the alumni to believe that legacy status provides a real boost, so that they’ll play hard for the Harvard team in the hope that it helps Junior’s admissions prospects, but not so many that Harvard has to skimp on quality and turn down too many kids that it really wants or needs for other reasons.
“Misguided goal, IMO. They should have some greater, more praiseworthy goals, such as work to better themselves and the world. If they manage to get in to a “good college”, that’s just extra.”
These are kids, 14-18 years old, they’re not going to have that kind of perspective for greater goals yet. It will be at least a few years, according to the latest research on the teenage and adult brains. It’s all about comparing to peers and if the peers are focused on elite colleges, they will be too, even if adults say do something to make the world better. It’s why a lot of the anti-drug, anti-alcohol programs did not work in the 80’s and 90s, in fact it made things worse. The people who designed the programs were well meaning but had no idea how an adoloscent’s mind worked.
@theloniusmonk One of the best posts I’ve read on CC. Many of the things the top schools say they look for are more “brain age” appropriate for 22 year-olds, not 17 year-olds. Which is why admissions consultants, with their developed brains focused on one thing, can be so valuable in “steering” the kids. Which is another in a long line of reasons why the system is broken.
This isn’t right. Their research showed anyone who applied to an elite did as well as those who went. Whether they were admitted or rejected was irrelevant.
the biggest beneficiaries of HYPMS education are low income folks, particularly non-white non-males. Women who go to elite colleges are making more money 10 years later, but only because they are more likely to delay having children. decently off kids who’s parents went to college have the least difference in going to elite vs public flagship for making money
You’re correct, but the paper’s conclusions still support the point I was making: that your success in life is much more about you than where you went to school. Here’s a paragraph from the NBER’s summary of the paper (emphasis added):
As I said: