Turning the Tide- Rethinking College Admissions- a new report endorsed by many top Universities

Parents Forum
181

If the Yale professor who couldn’t talk to his plumber had spent a summer flipping burgers, maybe he would have learned something.

Harvard said years ago they get 200 or so kids who are the brightest minds of their cohort academically, and for the rest they are looking for leaders and great kids, but not necessarily just academics. I think they want a mix of kids. They are too timid for the most part to take a chance on the kids who blow off getting A’s in things they aren’t interested in, and certainly some of the professors have been begging for more Chloes. But of course they want bright kids who have challenged themselves in school - that’s a minimum. The question is how much challenge is required. How rigorous is rigorous enough? How do you communicate that more APs, higher SAT scores etc aren’t required, especially when all the data we can see looks like it’s not true.

And BTW, at least when my youngest applied to Georgetown their computer interface was so unfriendly he ended up mailing in that application.

182

“Increase transparency by publishing redacted annotated admission files and returning annotated admission files to the applicants.”

But sometimes there’s no “reason for refusal” – as if “gee, kid, if you had only had an A- instead of a B+ in sophomore year French, you’d have been in.” Or “if only you’d spent 100 hours at the food pantry instead of 90.”

THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH SPOTS. What part of this is so unclear?

Good lord, haven’t any of you ever interviewed, oh, I don’t know, 20 or more people for a spot in your company? And you get together, and you discuss the pros and cons of each, and you decide you want Candidate X more than the other 19. There isn’t any “annotation” to send back to the rejected ones. They weren’t rejected because of something bad they did or something that they failed to do. You just liked another one better.

Likewise, when a bunch of guys flirt with you, and you pick the one you like best to date / marry, do you have specific “reasons” that if the other guys improved on, you’d date them too? “Gee, Bob, if you only were 5’10” instead of 5’9"."

The pedantic, think-everything-is-a-formula people would NOT be mollified by annotated admissions files. They’d focus on the fact that Susie got in with 90 hours of community service and Bobby didn’t get in with 150 hours, or Joey got in with a 2200 and Sarah didn’t with a 2350, and cry foul. There is nothing that will satisfy them, mostly because they don’t have the personality skill to either understand or do well in holistic “judging” of any sort. They can only think in formulas.

183

“PG, you misunderstood. I was not separating the schools into tiers. Besides, Stanford has been tying H for #1 in the rankings the last few years.”

LOL! Thanks for the clarification. (Pssst … it doesn’t really matter if Stanford is tying Harvard for #1 in the rankings, or not. It really, really doesn’t. At all.)

184

Years ago, through some kind of administrative glitch, my oldest received her admission file, with notes, back from the admissions office of a “top 50” LAC. She was applying for a mid-year transfer and there had been conversation about how they wanted her but didn’t have financial aid left so were encouraging application for the fall. It was an interesting read.

But yeah, it wasn’t a formulaic conversation they were having about her.

Pizzagirl is right – when we are looking at single digit admissions rates it’s not personal. There are just not enough spots.

(I think I have one Chloe, one Zoe, and one Doe. Doe went to MIT, the others to great LACs. Everyone slept 8 hours a night with rare exceptions. The Chloe slept 10. She needs a lot of sleep!)

185

There may not be enough dorm rooms. But for many types of classes–not all, such as lab classes most prominently–the number of spots can easily be expanded through the use of online teaching methods.

The supply/demand issue currently applies to the residential college model. It does not apply to the online model. Pros and cons to both models for sure, but ten years from now, this concern may seem quaint

186

One thing @Pizzagirl , but otherwise I agree…we don’t pick employees or spouses based on resumes and an essay/recs. We meet them, and often we determine fit through these meetings. Colleges never really get to do this, so they are literally making these decisions without really knowing a kid. Sad but true. Let’s a lot of Zoes slip through. In this way, a college app is more like a loan app than a job app:)

On the otherhand, there are ppl who pick a spouse off the internet, so…

187

“There may not be enough dorm rooms. But for many types of classes–not all, such as lab classes most prominently–the number of spots can easily be expanded through the use of online teaching methods.”

There are plenty of other great colleges in this country that teach the very same classes and the very same subjects. It’s not as though if you don’t learn physics at Harvard or English literature at Yale, you’re doomed to never learning those things anywhere.

188

Thank you, HRSMom. Are there male equivalent names? Seems I only meet male “Zoes.” They are all junior executives CEO-wannabes at the age of 16, “proving” to (for some reason, colleges, not recruiters) that they are planning on taking over someone else’s illustrious company, or starting a competing one.

So many college resumes that look like job resumes and say nothing about college, with marginal reference to academics. Their applications say nothing about four years in undergraduate school; they just go on and on about what awesome “leaders” they are and how many projects they have initiated with their local government. That application was supposed to be for a school, not a job.

189

“One thing @Pizzagirl , but otherwise I agree…we don’t pick employees or spouses based on resumes and an essay/recs. We meet them, and often we determine fit through these meetings. Colleges never really get to do this, so they are literally making these decisions without really knowing a kid.”

Same difference, though. For me, reading an admission packet gives me a story, a narrative about a person – kind of like how meeting them would give me the story / narrative about who them and what kind of person they are.

Some people don’t have this skill / ability of intuiting anything, so they are completely perplexed when you start talking about criteria other than scores, GPA, and quantifiable things.

190

@epiphany Joey? Lol. I think more likely Trent and Brent!!

191

Who but yourself are you spouting off to?? No one–besides you–has said or suggested anything to the contrary.

Red herring. Generates more heat than light on the discussion

192

I guess for me, a job app can be stellar, and the person a flop. I don’t want to waste $ on hiring a flop. Though I don’t get 30k apps for that job, right?

193

My impression is that they’re drafting the report because of four main issues, in which they are not meeting their goals:

  1. by prioritizing successful achievement, they are encouraging students to create a fake persona of academic achievement rather than finding the “brightest minds” (i.e. getting Zoes instead of the Does who they think are the “brightest minds”).

  2. by the apparent prioritization achievement, they are losing out on caring people in their community who understand that they are not the center of every experience (the person who notices when a classmate is depressed, or who brings home chicken soup to a sick dormmate or drives the friend to the airport when they’ve missed a bus, . . . ). And, more generally, the people who understand, fundamentally, that it’s not all about them – that a class isn’t just to maximize their learning, that a job isn’t just about personal fulfillment, . . . . The second is particularly important, because even non-caring institutions (i.e. law firms), want employees who will do the work, even when it’s not fulfilling or interesting.

  3. that by prioritizing planned achievement, they are losing out on diverse and low income individuals, who might be a “brightest mind” but also might be less self centered.

  4. that by prioritizing achievement, they are encouraging behavior in younger and younger children that is developmentally inappropriate and that they might be breaking childhood (concern for it’s own sake – but also because it doesn’t, ultimately, produce the kind of people they are looking for).

There’s a line in the report that makes me think that the committee was sincere, and not just producing a marketing brochure (at least in part): “Finally, we recognize that we cannot prevent some students from “gaming” community service. But in valuing sustained . . . service, we can increase the likelihood that what students “game” will have . . . more benefit . . . .” The line suggests an understanding of incentive structures and the roles colleges play in setting them and an acceptance that sometimes changing behavior might have value, even if it doesn’t change hearts.

The hype around the report is far too much for what the report is (particularly frustrating that I kept thinking there’d be more “report”, but, really, the longer version is just a repetitive version of the summary, filled with soft focus college brochure pictures.

194

And, in a related question if schools don’t want “overcoached” applications-- why do folks here think that Colleges don’t ask about coaching?

195

It’s a big PR mea culpa sorta…

I do think they would love to address it all, but w/o getting so much more into each applicant, they cannot. And they just don’t have time.

Coaching: They may just assume kids with parents who have $ buy coaching, but so many do not. They don’t have or need tutors, and the kids still pull amazing scores. It is wrong for them to assume and then put a negative connotation to that assumption. We have the means but S1 had no tutors. He took ACT once, SAT once. But I think colleges will presume he took it muliple times and sent the best score, and had whatever tutors and coaches he needed.

(My work provided a service that reviews essays as a benefit, so he had that. But frankly, I could have done that, and would not otherwise have paid for it.)

196

I missed this somehow when it was originally posted (in the context of a “humanity was born to suffer” sort of claim), but it got quoted recently, and so I wanted to counter a demographic myth: Ancient people generally, whether kings or not, didn’t have appreciably shorter lives than we do now—as long as they made it through childhood. (Whether they were happier or unhappier is harder to measure, and I don’t even know how someone would do so.)

If you look at average lifespan, yes, the average lifespan now is much higher—double, by many estimates—what it was centuries to millennia ago. However, that’s largely (though not entirely, of course) due to incredible reductions in infant and child mortality. Think about it—to take a quite simple and somewhat artificial thought experiment, imagine a population with 50% infant mortality, but everyone who survives their first year lives to age 70; the average lifespan of that population would be 35. Given another population with today’s infant mortality rate of 5% (rounded up), if everyone else in that group lives to age 70 the average lifespan would be 66.5.

So no, ancient kings—excluding the rare cases of someone becoming king at or near birth—did not generally lead short lives.

Sorry for the off-topic digression, but as someone who works on issues involving aging, this is a misconception I’m actually rather passionate about.

197

I think that the highly selective colleges ought to ask about all sorts of coaching, summer classes that are not llisted on the transcript, weekend classes . . . Presumably they don’t ask about coaching, because they don’t want to know, because knowing could interfere with their intent to admit a number of their applicants who most likely have been heavily coached.

In connection with dfbdfb’s post, I cannot refrain from quoting “Mithridates, he died old.”

198

I think you have to differentiate coaching an application process from getting help or individual attention to improve.

How about tutoring? Are private music lessons good or bad? What about going to a psychiatrist? Is the message we want to send that if you don’t come by something naturally and you need help, that you are unworthy? I hope not.

199

One of the teachers who wrote S’s college rec. asked if there was anything specific S wanted mentioned. One thing S said was that he wanted it known that what he had accomplished academically was achieved without tutoring, summer advancement classes, test prep, and without feigning illness / getting his parents to lie that he was sick when his homework wasn’t finished.

200

I’m going to repeat this, because someone asked about the names and personas I invented, and also because I don’t see anyone denying my claim that top colleges are not accepting Chloes, and are incentivizing Chloes to turn into Zoes:

Let’s consider Zoe and Chloe, two highly able students at Leafy Suburb High. Zoe and Chloe are equally able. Zoe and Chloe work equally hard in the classes they are in, and get equally high grades.

Zoe is right there in the rat race. She takes every AP her school offers. She is not an exceptionally strong math student, so she got lots tutoring for the BC calc she took as a junior. She does SAT/ACT prep, and maximizes her scores by taking the tests more than once. She also does several extracurriculars. She is under an enormous amount of stress. She sleeps four hours a night.

Chloe has backed off. She takes some APs, and does well in them, but in other subjects, she does not take APs. She is not an exceptionally strong math student, so she did not take BC calc. She did not prep for standardized tests. She does not do as many extracurriculars as Zoe, but she is equally good in the ECs she does participate in. She uses the extra time she saves by not doing as much as Zoe to sleep, read and spend time with her friends.

Zoe has great scores and is one of the top students in her school as to class rank. She has several extracurriculars. Chloe has good scores, maybe 50-80 SAT points lower than Zoe’s superscore. She has excellent grades in the classes she took, but she is not in, or barely in, the top 10% of her class because she didn’t take enough APs. She doesn’t do as many extracurriculars as Zoe.

I claim top colleges are not accepting laid-back Chloe, because under their criteria, overpressured Zoe is strictly better and they will always prefer her.

In the ensuing commentary, someone brought up Doe, the exceptionally bright student who can take all the APs without overpressure. I would have chosen Bowie or Snowy, because Doe doesn’t rhyme with Chloe and Zoe unless you think someone is naming their daughter Doughy, but there it is, we adopted the name Doe for the natural superstar that Harvard and Stanford are looking for.

If you want male names, go with overscheduled Devin and laid-back Evan.