It’s a lot more than cc;s. We have AAU members with ~80% admission rates.
He does, but with zero facts. Does he (or anyone) have a survey of the top 100 selective schools (maybe 150?) of AO’s which all say SAT/ACT adds nearly nothing to them?
Correct. I agree that most 4 year colleges accept most applicants.
The “juice is not worth the squeeze”! I understand you to mean that requiring a test puts too much pressure or burden on certain students from certain backgrounds. Frankly if they can’t handle signing up for a test and then taking it they shouldn’t be going to the super selective schools in the first place.
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Maybe not in this thread, but such posters can be found in abundance in every passionate “is elite school worth it” debate, saying their kids from Average State U working alongside all these kids from Elite U and getting paid the same.
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We will have to agree to disagree.
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Huh, it’s definitely around the time of WW1, so a swing and a miss on Mickey Mouse. Sorry about that.
Thanks for fact-checking me! The premise was they asked pop culture questions as a test of intelligence.
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Colleges are not interested in reducing stress on applicants. If they were, they would be far more predictable and transparent in admissions. Test optional is for the convenience of AOs, not students-it allows them to build a class they choose with little accountability. The Harvard case might not have succeeded without those test scores showing Asian American students being systematically discriminated against.
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It depends on the industry. My example is from the tech industry some time back but I’m pretty sure is true today: if you know how to negotiate, you can get as much as anyone is for a given role. (Eg UCinncinati > USC/Berkeley for certain chip design roles. Yeah, it was common enough as long as one is good enough). Doctors seem to earn relatively evenly across undergrad institutions and even med school for a given specialty. Business/consulting seem to hire differently than the other two though so people from those industries tend to promote attending name brand schools
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A better question is, ‘what exactly does Jon mean by that statement’? And not worth it to whom?
For example, CalTech has decided that tests are not worth it to them, which kinda makes sense when their floor is an 780/800. In other words, the SAT/ACT is just too low of a ceiling for their differentiation purposes.
Moreover, teh University of California, which has decades of data and millions of students, and IMO, is the gold standard of data studies, particularly since it did not yield the answer that they desired), did not make teh conclusion that the ‘juice is not worth the squeeze.’
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As the article I linked to above says: “The purposes of the SAT and ASVAB are slightly different; however, they are both reliable measures of aptitude, ability and academic achievement.” That’s written by a EdD candidate, not the military. But the military is happy to include aptitude in the name of its test, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (probably they are also the only institution that still refers to a series of tests as a “battery”).
Just because the words “aptitude” and “ability” are apparently no longer politically correct, does not make them uncorrelated with SAT test scores. After all, administering the SAT to middle school kids was the primary way to identify participants in Duke TIP. But that’s now been cancelled, and apparently seeking academic talent on this basis is also no longer politically correct because Duke now puts a mea culpa on the TIP website that “Equally important, Duke is eager to expand our definition of “talented” to maximize access to our signature academic rigor and to strengthen our growing community.”
https://tip.duke.edu/
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I think it depends upon the Ivy League college and the goals of the student. I will speak about STEM since I know that best.
In some years, about half of the national STEM winners have chosen Harvard or MIT. It makes for an extraordinary peer group and, in Harvard’s case, allows them to offer legendary classes like Math 55 and Physics 16. Some students choose Harvard for that peer group and those classes.
Yale, which is less known for STEM, has a huge recruiting effort to get a lot of the top STEM students through an invite-only Yale Engineering and Science Weekend (YES-W). They send out roughly 100 likely letters to what they consider the top STEM applicants, invite them all to YES-W, and invite a subset of them to become Hahn Scholars, which provide additional opportunities. I hear that Yale traditionally enrolls about half of the students that attend YES-W. Again, it’s about building that peer group.
There is a talent distribution across all colleges, and many at Average State U are every bit as capable as those from Elite U, so it’s natural they end up in the same jobs and get similar pay.
But what people don’t see are the Elite U students taking high-paying jobs not even visible to Average State U grads. Granted this was before the internet, but when I attended Average State U for undergrad, I had no idea what investment banking even was (wouldn’t have been a fit for me, but that’s a separate discussion). And there still exist high-paying jobs that relatively few people have heard of outside of elite universities.
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Was your dad an admissions officer? I was wondering how he knew individual test scores of grad and undergrad students? Thanks.
I’ll also add: the companies I’ve worked at, and the ones in familiar with, have the same starting comp package for interns and new grads. Once a candidate is selected for a role, they’re not going to be offered different pay based on which school they’re coming from. Not only would that be unfair (after all, they passed the same rigorous screening), it would also be a discriminatory practice.
Edited: due to time constraints I missed mentioning earlier where I was going with this. That graduates from different schools ending up at the same jobs with the same pay doesn’t mean that the differences in their undergraduate experience is immaterial or irrelevant.
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Broadly speaking, I agree with @DadOfJerseyGirl There are lots of people here that push “Bama has more NMSF than anywhere! You shouldn’t want to go to Princeton, that;s being prestige focused! It makes no difference”
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I see some of that, but the reality is that many schools can lead to a good outcome. That’s important because not everyone can (or wants to) spend $90k per year on their child’s undergraduate degree (if their child can be admitted in the first place - which for most unhooked kids is unlikely). I’ll be happy if S24 has the opportunity to attend one of the elite schools on his list, and will happily pay for it, but realizing the odds are not in his favor it’s important for him to know that he can have great outcomes from many schools.
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From Bruni to Loren Pope to Dale & Kreuger, the “it doesn’t matter where you go” message makes its presence felt. In meetings with college counselors to here on CC, it’s definitely there.
My take is that working with advanced peers is the main benefit of “prestige” schools (access to certain jobs too but that is a small part of the population). But there’s a good chunk of people that can do as well working closely with profs or in a lab/internship.
But the problem really is that people aim for these schools thinking it’s some validation of the work they put into the HS years. Some choose schools for the ranking even though their area of study might be better elsewhere. An extreme example is picking CMU over Kenyon when you want to be a writer.
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Absolutely. College, for the most part, is what you make of it. But equally positive outcome does not mean the experiences are interchangeable. I know lots of people who had great outcomes not because they were thriving, but because they didn’t really find their place, so put their head down and got to work.
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I don’t like the emphasis on Ivy+, but I also don’t think all colleges are the same. Peer effects are a big part of the college learning experience. Is your child surrounded by smart, motivated, talented, and intellectually curious peers? If so, they are more likely to push themselves to keep up with and learn from those peers. Those talented peers can also create a formidable alumni network after graduation.
Such peer groups exist outside the Ivies and are available at most highly selective colleges. HOWEVER, they can also be found in excellent honors programs at large public universities.
These programs are a head-scratcher to me. I know many “Ivy+” kids that were not accepted into said programs. Its far from “if you can’t go to Harvard, just go to Public Honors College”
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And now back to the SAT…please. There are countless other threads that address if Ivies + are “worth it”, peer groups, honors college, etc…
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