<p>hmom: I understand from your posts that your first two kids had disappointing college results, and that your third kid benefited from the services of a private counselor. I absolutely agree that a good counselor can help a student build an appropriate college list and present the best possible application. But s/he cannot ensure admission at any college – and any consultant who promises specific results or access to the admissions office is a charlatan. Moreover, there is no real game. Yes, there are admissions boosts – big ones – for developmental prospects and recruited athletes and “facbrats” and URMs, and I’ll even grant you there may be little boosts for the much vilified legacies. But plenty – plenty – of kids get into HYP and its brethren without “playing games” and without relying on supposedly “unfair” advantages. These are smart, interesting students who demonstrate through their applications that they will contribute to life on campus.</p>
<p>No counselor promised us a thing. They just educated us. The fact is the game had become a dramatically different one than it was in the dark ages when I spent 2 years in admissions. </p>
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<p>Plenty? The admit rate at HYPS for the unhooked is under 4% and for the rest of the ivies (few Cornell exceptions) under 6%. Some get lucky but as Golden says, the vast majority remain outside the gates.</p>
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<p>Really? We’ll have to agree to disagree.</p>
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<p>Xiggi, I agree with the great logic in most of your posts. This statement I disagree with. Mostly the serve them well part. Lots of kids are not getting great returns on their college investments.</p>
<p>And thanks in large part to social activism. Affirmative action was not just left-wing social engineering, it was a social contract signed 40 years ago by the elite, as cities were burning and administration buildings were being occupied, to safeguard their own entitlements. URMs get 15 percent, legacies + development admits etc get 25.</p>
<p>You can argue that the rich own the club and pay the bills; they should get to make the rules and allow their own children a place at the head of the line. Whether or not this is just, does it really lead to the best outcomes for everyone, compared to a more transparent, consistently merit-based system?</p>
<p>How are you defining “unhooked?” If you are saying that under 4% at HYPS are non-minorities, non-athletes, non-development cases, you are wrong. Many, many are straight-ahead academic admits. Kids with great stats and (apologies to Dr. Suess) interests that are interesting.</p>
<p>^ I thought 4% or 6% referred to the net admit rate for students admitted strictly on merit (students competing for the 60% of places that are “untagged”), not to the percentage of unhooked kids among all matriculated students. Those are 2 different things.</p>
<p>I find it more than a little ironic that the man who basically says that money and privilege buy a seat into the most elite colleges in this country is currently making his living in an elite private school in Southern California. I guess he knows, best. </p>
<p>A $20,000+ price tag/per year for these students is not affordable for most students on the economic spectrum.</p>
<p>I am guessing those students get the inside track of what they need to do to get into the elite schools. Good for the students, I suppose.</p>
<p>Hmom5, please remember that I did add the following caveat “Of course, my own conclusions are based on rather narrow base of experience and much less than a decade of observations. I completely expect for many to see a system that pleases only a few and disappoints many.” </p>
<p>I based the statement with which you disagree on a combination of the statistics presented by NACAC on students making it to their first of second choices and my personal experience. Albeit this is by no means true for everyone, I believe that my peers at the school I attended would overwhelmingly consider that the school did fit and did serve them well. </p>
<p>As far as getting a great return on the college investments, it is also very feasible that the parents who sent all those tuition checks and attended their children graduation in one of the worst economic downturns might have a more reserved opinion. </p>
<p>I still believe, and especially when compared to our K-12 education, that the tertiary system does work better than most other elements of our economic and social system. Very expensive and inefficient in many areas, but still better than the rest! :)</p>
<p>Xiggi, that whole subject is for another thread. Many are now of the opinion too many kids are going to college–an unthinkable thought a decade ago. Then there’s the question of what good fit means. Somewhere you enjoyed for four years? A place that you learned more than you would have at others? A college that got you where you wanted to go down the road?</p>
<p>I am not so sure that the rich still own the club but they do still pay the bills. But you assume that because they are rich and can pay their bills, they have no merit to be there? Talk about intellectual elitism and a leap? Are we really trying to say that you got in because youre rich is any less insulting than saying you got in because youre a minority? Depends on your point of view I guess.</p>
<p>Activism did lead to commitment for Affirmative Action. But without the money to back it up, that commitment would be merely rhetorical. Look at how Summers’s FA initiative changed the landscape, not just at Harvard but at other universities that tried to compete for the same pool of qualified low income students! </p>
<p>Consider this scenario. A donor makes a gift to H of $5 million dollars. The yearly income generated by this is used for scholarships. In return for this gift, the donor expects his child to be admitted (provided that said child meets requirements). The yearly income on the gift is able to fund 50 full scholarships. Is that a good trade-off? Or would it be better to admit one more 51 more full pay students: one to replace the donor’s kid and 50 to replace the low income kids who are fully qualified but do not have the financial means to attend college? My personal calculus leads me to conclude that it is better to admit one donor’s kid and 50 low income students.
Without money, it’s just words, words, words.</p>
<p>Where did you get the figure of 4-6% unhooked admits?</p>
<p>Michelle Hernandez claims that 40% of students at Ivies have some hook. Even if we accepted these stats, that would leave 60% unhooked.
William Fitzsimmons claims that every year Harvard admits about 300 academic superstars. Since H makes about 2,000 offers, this would amount to 1 out of 7 students admitted clearly on academic merit alone (of course, some of these may also be legacies) or a little over 10%. In fact, one would expect the proportion of unhooked admits to be much higher since by their very nature superstars of any kind are outliers.</p>
<p>Marite, you may need more than 5,000,000 to fund 50 scholarships. </p>
<p>Assuming a 50,000 COA and perhaps 10,000 of federal aid, it would cost 40,000 per scholar. For 10 scholars, you’d need $400,000. For 50, you’d need $2,000,000.</p>
<p>Assuming an income of 5% per annum to cover a distribution of 5%, you would need $40,000,000 to generate the $2,000,000 per annum for 50 scholarships. To make things worse, this will only carry your scholars for one year. In year 2, you will need to fund 100 scholars, and in year 4 … 200 scholars. Of course, you might decide that the fifty would really mean 12 new scholars per year.</p>
<p>However, this is only simple math. The idea to balance donors and recipients remains the same. Unfortunately, it does show that a 1 million donation might cover fewer than 8 scholars at our toniest schools. Big money is indeed needed for education!</p>
<p>Seems we’re getting confused about the facts and the arithmetic. One of the outcomes of having a complicated, mysterious process.</p>
<p>I think the claim is not that 4-6% of admits are unhooked, it’s that there is a net admit rate of 4-6% for unhooked applicants. Different.</p>
<p>You start at ~10% for the entire pool. But you’re aiming for an outcome in which ~40% of the places are for hooked applicants. So after eliminating 4 of 10 places from open competition, the net admit rate for unhooked applicants drops to something like 6%.</p>
<p>No, I don’t. If anything, I tend to assume that the average legacy is at least a little more qualified than the average applicant. For development cases, I do assume the opposite (why else would the donor be timing a gift to coincide with a child’s application?) This assumption tends to be confirmed by the anecdotal evidence. As for the merits of the average unhooked full-pay vs. the average unhooked FA applicant, I really don’t know.</p>
<p>I don’t see a grave injustice in giving a small tip to a legacy. Part of the problem though is the mysterious lack of transparency. So we really don’t know the full extent of the tips and hooks.</p>
<p>As far as money is concerned, this is a rich country. Depending on private donors is a choice we make; other rich countries make a different choice. Even if we make the choice for private funding (and there are good arguments for that), there must be ways to incentivize it without outright sale of places to underqualified applicants.</p>
<p>The practice of “crafting a class” is a related but separable issue, one that perhaps distorts the process even more than money does. Once you depart from objective indicators of academic merit to say that, in order to foster a rich community life, we need 1 more male hockey goalie (who cannot be from Northern New Jersey) or precisely two bassoonists from anywhere we can get them, then you’ve turned the whole system into a huge crap shoot, based on dubious assumptions as well as a lack of faith in the ability of smart kids to entertain and motivate each other. And, you are probably rejecting some kids who are among the most interesting, where it really counts for educational purposes (at the meal table, in a seminar discussion, or on a research team.) </p>
<p>If the outcome is objectively better, maybe the game is worth the candle. Does class-crafting really result in a community that is significantly more vibrant, where it counts - and leads to better post-graduate outcomes - than simply focusing on grades, scores, and perhaps essays or an interview? To address that question, compare the Ivy environment to the Oxbridge environment. Or compare the Ivy/NESCAC schools to places like Chicago and Reed. Presumably, there’s a trade off. The Ivy/NESCAC approach probably does result in a more stimulating environment for certain kinds of personalities. Many others would be better off applying to schools where the process is more straightforward, the admissions outcomes a little more predictable, and the classroom environments at least as rigorous and stimulating.</p>
<p>Got it, thanks.The fact remains that only 10% of applicants, hooked or unhooked, are admitted. So by that logic, a lot of “hooked” kids don’t get in, especially legacies. When my kid applied, 10 other students from his school got into H. One who did not, though my S said he was very smart, was a URM-- a bigger hook than a legacy. And H is known to give a hook to local students. He did get into another non-HYPSM but also extremely selective school.
The year before, two Hispanic twins applied and got into the college of their choice. One at H, the other at Brown. I can’t remember which of them got a national award for a design she produced.</p>
<p>I don’t know if one could possibly quantify hooks and tips. Colleges are fairly open about giving an advantage to certain groups of students, and about their efforts at recruitment.
As for crafting a class, colleges do not want just economics and pre-med majors. If they went by pure merit alone, they would probably end up with classes that would be academically lop-sided. But I truly think that diversity–of many kinds, not just skin color is enriching. The American classroom experience is different from that of the UK–and the UK is a smaller country, where geographic diversity, for instance, is not quite such an issue.
Still, I am not convinced that Oxbridge are pure meritocracies. It’s hard for me to believe that all the actors who cut their teeth in the Cambridge Footlights were academically superior than other applicants. And looking at the stats posted by Oxford, they don’t think any different from the average HYPSM stats. </p>
<p>xiggi: yes, it was late when I posted. Math is not my forte. I still think that 5 students on full scholarship for every donor kid is a good deal for all concerned.</p>
<p>This is a good discussion … the honest answer is that we don’t know for sure what the class-composition outcome would be in a “pure merit” admissions market.</p>
<p>Personally, I doubt you’d wind up with just econ and pre-med majors. Of course, pre-med isn’t really a “major”, but I get the point. In my entering class, as I recall, there was indeed a huge number of pre-meds. Many of them switch after crashing on the rocks of organic chemistry.</p>
<p>In any case, my impression is that class-crafting practices are not targeted primarily at major distributions. It’s a rather weird process of holistic interest-engineering focused more on extracurricular activities. As Jerome Karabel puts it,</p>
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<p>(Marite, you grew up in France, right? But I guess you’re 100% peculiar by now :))</p>
<p>Yes, I’m 100% peculiar. I would not want to attend university in France as my siblings and nieces and nephews have done. Too many horror stories. </p>
<p>As for crafting a class on academic grounds, you are absolutely right that most students change their minds, or crash out of orgo. From what I know, however, many liberal arts colleges try to have 1/3 humanities, 1/3 social sciences and 1/3 math/science. Even in the absence of declared majors, I assume adcoms can guess, however, imperfectly, at which category the applicants are likely to fall into. Years ago, I overheard some profs at an Ivy fuming that the adcoms had not admitted some students interested in the classics. They surmised that the adcom had wanted more econ majors because these were more likely than classics majors to become major donors eventually. Whether true or untrue, pressures to “craft a class” seem to come from different directions!</p>
<p>I still don’t see why it’s good to give a boost to admit a URM based on race, but it’s not acceptable to do the same for a URM based on donations (those who are willing to dish out double comma amounts surely are URM). At least one area of impact the latter group makes is surely lauded by all concerned - ie., subsidizing the education for the rest.</p>