Maybe I am jumping to conclusions, but I am guessing that colleges, if they are searching for math talent, do not need to “dip” into the USAMO qualifying pool when they have the pick of high achieving international students who are clamoring to come to US schools. </p>
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No question they are doing a good job; however, I am asking how many of these high performers are international and is it intentional on MIT’s part to pick these kids to enhance their Putnam outcome? While in the meantime, denying high performing US students who may not necessarily be Putnam material.</p>
<p>Judging by your CC handle Shravas, I do believe you deserve a hearty congratulations! You did an amazing job on Putnam!</p>
<p>This is an interesting point about whether colleges admit to win the Putnam while neglecting other talented students. However, let me address the specific point about the composition of the Putnam winners.</p>
<p>First of all, I believe both Harvard and MIT have a quota limiting the amount of internationals they take. (Harvard and MIT both dominate the Putnam top 50-60, so their policies are relevant to this discussion.) For MIT, it is like 8% or so. Not every international they take is a math team star. Qualitatively, my impression is that a majority of the people in the top 50-60 of Putnam are US students. It may be a slim majority. It’s important to remember that the U.S. is basically only second to China in producing math team talent. And also, many of these internationals may stay in their home country for undergrad.</p>
<p>Let me address the larger point about whether colleges admit to win the Putnam while neglecting other talented students. I do believe that preference for intellectual talent is higher in Harvard’s math majors than in say, chemistry, or biology. I think this is because it is immediately apparent to the outside world whether they admitted the cream of the crop. That is, if they got killed in the Putnam by another school, it would be obvious they didn’t have the smartest people. </p>
<p>The question about admitting people who are great at math but not making the IMO or MOSP is a slightly different issue, though related. There was a kid who got A’s in Math 55 at Harvard (their hardest class, and possibly THE hardest math class in the country) but didn’t get into Harvard. I think these people still do have a better chance over the general pool (especially if they at least get USAMO,) but admission is much more dicey. For MIT, which has a lot of majors for which being great at math is helpful (e.g., electrical engineering,) making USAMO or even just showing a lot of ability in advanced math coursework (beyond multi-variable or differential calc) helps admission. I think MIT is less conscious of winning these contests than Harvard is, from my impression of their blogs.</p>
<p>That particular poster started only one of the eight threads I linked to. And If you think those other seven are atypical exceptions, I’ll be happy to post up plenty more for you. </p>
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<p>It is when one of the main tools for combating Ivy obsession is posting that they really aren’t very good schools and/or that kids who aspire to them or wore yet actually choose to actually attend them are primarily shallow, short-sighted, prestige-hounds.</p>
<p>Please direct your angst towards the posters who claim that the Ivies aren’t very good schools and/or kids who aspire to them are shallow, short-sighted prestige-hounds. I hope you don’t classify me with the above crowd, coureur – as I have never said, nor do I believe, any of the above!</p>
<p>Yeah, I’d say it’s probably true that if you take away all the smart kids and all the school’s money and other resources what you are left with won’t be nearly so impressive. Its’ like saying that if you “adjust” for all the really talented players and big payrolls that say the Super Bowl or NBA champions have that they’d be just another couple of so-so teams who would be somewhere well down in their league standings. Yup, probably true. </p>
<p>But that’s how you build winners. You have a long-term vision of success. You spend your resources wisely. You attract the best talent. You build the wealth and keep reinvesting it in the organization. It works for almost any type of organization.</p>
<p>No, he was a high school student when he took Math 55. I believe he took it at Harvard during his junior year of high school. I guess he was local and they let him in the class.</p>
<p>“If you adjust Harvard’s student outcomes not only for the credentials of its incoming students but on how much it spends (and how much it is subsidized by tax breaks for donations and untaxed gains on a $30 billion endowment), you might conclude that it is an underperforming institution.”</p>
<p>And if you conclude that it is an underperforming institution, presumably you can also conclude what other institutions are overperforming according to those same metrics, and send your kids there (or have them apply there). After all, if you don’t think that Harvard is All That, the only thing to do is – not have your kid apply, that’s pretty much the end of the story. </p>
<p>According to the metrics you have laid out, Beliavsky, what schools would be classified as high performing?</p>
<p>^Re 925: More often than any other CC poster I can think of, PG, you allude to an alleged subgroup of those aspiring to the Ivies as people who are obsessed or hung-up over a handful of elite schools. Further, to those students you most certainly assign a few rather unpleasant labels. Do I need to repeat them again? Provincial, unsophisticated, lacking smarts… No one knows how large you believe that subgroup to be, but judging by how frequently you criticize them, I’d assume you think it’s of substantial size. Therefore, in that sense, you appear to malign quite a few Ivy aspirants.</p>
<p>My broader points are that there is not enough information to say which universities are doing a good job, and that even with more information such a ranking would depend on what one chooses to value.</p>
<p>Looking at the Payscale salary numbers by school, especially the mid-career numbers, I was impressed by Princeton doing much better than other Ivies, by the strong showings of Annapolis and West Point, and by NYU-Poly and Lehigh, schools that were hardly on my radar screen. </p>
<p>The military academies may benefit from having a more male student body, since there is a sex differential in average earnings. Even controlling for sex, their students are probably more masculine, which may also help :).</p>
<p>You raise an interesting question, beliavsky, and I wondered if this sports scenario relates to it. On my middle school D’s track team, there are children who come out the first day of practice never having run fast more than a few steps in their lives. Some are overweight and some appear completely un-athletic. There are other kids who are fit and already in aerobic shape from playing soccer and other sports.</p>
<p>The coach keeps track of their race times and then rewards the students who show the most progress. Guess what? The previously out-of-shape kids always win those prizes. When you’re a 10-minute middle school miler, dropping 10 or 20 seconds from one race to the next is commonplace. But when you’re a 5 minute miler, knocking off a second is much harder to do. In fact, a second drop is a pretty big deal once you’re that fast.</p>
<p>The average Ivy student comes to college better-educated than the average lower-ranked school student. S/He will have taken more advanced courses and done better in them. No doubt s/he will continue to learn quite a bit at school, but advancing farther when you’re already quite advanced might be more difficult and time-consuming than going from a basic to intermediate level is. Any collegiate progress measurement would have to account for this difference.</p>
<p>Don’t these schools require a letter of recommendation from a US Senator to be accepted? Seems to me that would imply very high connections and those with such connections would generally be expected to be offered superior pay opportunities.</p>
not really, according to the data, starting with 1991, average rank was 4 for US, 3 for Russia, and 1 for China. Prior to 1991, US rank was much worse.</p>
<p>TheGFG,
you make a logical argument, but in real life it doesn’t work this way. There is a lot of data in education that shows that kids who come to Kindergarten better prepared progress at a greater speed through school. In other words, mathematically speaking, not just the intercept is higher, their learning curve has a greater slope. At the same time, kids from disadvantaged backgrounds lag further and further behind. The achievement gap is only growing. I see no reason why this unfortunate phenomenon would not hold in college.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, my younger son took a pass on our most elite public high school because he found the staff to be too rigid and full of themselves – accepting only the kids with the highest stats in our city and then bragging about how high their average ACT scores were. I would say this was a clear example of a school underperforming relative to its potential: these kids, as a group, could have played video games in school all day and still outperformed other schools on standardized tests because they were preselected on this basis.</p>
<p>Instead, my son chose to attend a different top-10 rated high school that we knew would work with him to provide flexibility should he need it (they had admitted his older brother to the school at age 9, so this wasn’t just hope and speculation on our parts).</p>
<p>In one of his college essays, my son wrote that he didn’t care about prestige, he cared about flexibility and opportunity. Averages are meaningless, he said, and pointed out that, on average, the Vatican has two Popes per square mile (make that four Popes per square mile at present ).</p>
<p>In retrospect, that’s a rather ballsy thing to write in an essay to elite colleges and may well have been a factor in why MIT and Yale rejected him and why Brown, with its flexible open curriculum, accepted him. Regardless, he ended up at the place which suited his needs and personality best.</p>
<p>So I can see your point in general. But college is very different than high school, where you largely move along in lock-step tracks with your intellectual peers. Why should averages matter from a lone individual’s perspective? Surely there are a lot of students who start to coast once they are accepted to an elite school, believing the hype that they already have it made due to the school’s reputation. Wouldn’t these students pull down the average while still leaving grand opportunities for those who continue to strive and work to the best of their abilities?</p>
<p>I don’t think the type of students who get into Harvard may coast once they are in. I think of them as planning their next move (in my mind they are plotting to take over Yale during those 4 years because Yale students are having a bit too much fun).</p>
<p>A cursory glance at the results over the past 10 years shows China has the best results and that Russia and the U.S. are very close to each other in second place. I don’t know who would edge out who. There is one year where the U.S. had a bad performance, but other than that year it looks like the U.S. would edge out Russia.</p>
<p>Not only senators, but also House Representatives, Vice-President, and President. Also, an applicant isn’t necessarily restricted to using the Representative/Senator from his/her own district/state. </p>
<p>Each nominating source has a limited quota on how many may be attending an academy at one time. While having connections may have been an issue in the past, this hasn’t been as much of a case recently…especially after the Vietnam War. </p>
<p>Had a cousin and several neighbors who went through the academy admissions process. One in particular was an older childhood neighbor who if still in service, has exceeded 20 years in the Navy after turning down MIT to attend Annapolis. </p>
<p>Moreover, children of Medal of Honor earners are exempt from this requirement.</p>
<p>"not really, according to the data, starting with 1991, average rank was 4 for US, 3 for Russia, and 1 for China. Prior to 1991, US rank was "</p>
<p>If you dig slightly deeper, it is not hard to see that there have been a significant presence of ethnic Chinese and other Asian Americans on US IMO teams during the rise of US rank.</p>
).</p>