Undone by social media: Harvard rescinds admissions

Parents Forum
201

@LadyMeowMeow - I would submit that you, I and the staff of the Harvard admissions office can tell an awful lot about someone from their activities outside the classroom (including any leadership roles or special achievements), personal statements, recommendations and interview, coupled with their academic/testing record. You or I (and, no doubt, many others on this forum) might even feel that we’d be good enough at it that we could hold our own with the finely calibrated BS detectors that long-serving Harvard adcoms and their peers have developed over many years on the job. In other words, I think we’d all feel like reading someone’s admissions file would give us a reasonable sense of their “character”.

I think there are three difficulties, though:

First, not everything is revealed in those files, and inevitably a few not-so-nice people will slip through the net when an admissions office has to review a consistent set of information from close to 50,000 applicants every year, no matter how experienced the adcoms are. It’s not practical for Harvard to commission a full background investigation on everyone they choose to admit - and, even if they did, they still would get some wrong. I’m not sure what you think Harvard should be doing differently.

Second, many Harvard students have one or more prodigious talents, or are highly accomplished in some way. That’s a large part of why Harvard wants them. Sometimes the price of great accomplishment and the effort it requires is some other kind of personality distortion that may not be revealed in the admissions file but may eventually manifest itself in ugly ways.

Finally, and most importantly, I’m unclear as to what you think constitutes good character, and why you think Harvard is incapable of reliably identifying it. Somehow many Harvard graduates - more than at most places - go on to accomplish great things in many spheres. That, I would suggest, takes more character than most of us possess - but some of those people are also not-so-nice. Some Harvard graduates never become rich or famous, but do wonderful things in comparative obscurity - which also takes a lot of character. Harvard looks for those kind of people too. Some are fine spouses and parents - same thing. Some don’t fulfill their promise, or are wealthy wastrels. Maybe Harvard got those wrong - but they get lots of people spectacularly right.

It sounds like your issue is that Harvard “cannot guarantee the slightest thing about morality”. Of course they can’t, because no one can. They couldn’t do it even if they tapped the phones of every kid they admitted and had them followed by private detectives. They never claimed that they could, though.

For a close-to-home, real-life example of why I think your arguments are inapplicable to the world as it actually exists, I invite you to consider the case of Ken Griffin, Harvard '89, CEO of Citadel, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, which he founded a year after graduating from Harvard. He has been enormously successful, and is a billionaire, but is not warm and fuzzy, not at all, as this article will make plain: http://pagesix.com/2015/01/20/richest-man-in-illinois-accused-of-bully-tactics-in-ugly-divorce/. What do you think of his character? What do you believe Harvard thinks, or should think, of it? Is it great, because of what he accomplished, or not-so-great, because of how he seems to have behaved in this instance?

Now, consider that in 2014 he gave $150m to Harvard, the largest gift in Harvard College’s history at the time, to be used for financial aid that would impact 800 undergraduates a year, and Harvard named their financial aid office after him. What do you think of his character now?

202

I am assuming that a Harvard administrator is the source of the comments quoted by DeepBlue86:

“students’ intellectual imagination, strength of character, and their ability to exercise good judgment — these are critical factors in the admissions process, and they are revealed not by test scores but by students’ activities outside the classroom, the testimony of teachers and guidance counselors, and by alumni/ae and staff interview reports” and “personal qualities and character provide the foundation upon which each admission rests” and “the admissions committee…takes great care to attempt to identify students who will be outstanding “educators,” students who will inspire fellow classmates and professors”

There is nothing there about “ranking” by character, specifically.

However, consider the hypothetical applicant with a 4.0 UW GPA, 1600 SAT I, 2400 SAT II, many AP exams, all with scores of 5, and reasonably good ECs. The common wisdom on CC is that these applicants are “a dime a dozen.” So surely there are some students with those paper qualifications who were not admitted to Harvard.

I’d guess that they are scratching their heads and saying to themselves, “So, apparently I came out worse on the measures of strength of character and ability to exercise good judgment than those 10 people whose admissions were rescinded?!”

I agree with LadyMeowMeow that the pretense of evaluating strength of character and quality of judgment should be dropped, since it is apparently unworkable in practice.

203

“I agree with LadyMeowMeow that the pretense of evaluating strength of character and quality of judgment should be dropped, since it is apparently unworkable in practice.”

Third it. I think there is very little in most college applications that addresses character. The majority of college essays, given topic required and brevity, are very poor tools for evaluating such things, IMO. Most bright college applicants aren’t going to out themselves on their character flaws in an application. I think the stupidity on doing so on social media comes from a boneheaded idea that it is “private”.

204

@DeepBlue86 You’re making my point for me quite admirably: Harvard “cannot guarantee the slightest thing about morality”. Of course they can’t, because no one can."

Bingo. So they need to stop claiming that they can decide who has strength of character and “good judgment.” In the real world you accept and predict the reality of Griffins and stop pretending to make “character” the “foundation” of “every admissions decision” (!) when you can’t even define character, measure it, predict it, or evaluate it.

205

Maybe “character” means sports prowess or family members with deep pockets. :wink:

206

Or those with connections/friends in high places, parents/they themselves are celebrities, children of domestic politicians, scions of foreign politician/royal/aristocratic families, etc.

207

But @LadyMeowMeow, Harvard never said they could guarantee anything about morality - it’s just you claiming they did, or that they should have.

If we worked in admissions, we would of course attempt to make character judgments based on admissions files - just as Harvard does. While our judgments might generally be accurate - and the available evidence would suggest Harvard’s generally are - they’d necessarily be based on incomplete information and would occasionally be wrong. So what? No one - including Harvard - has claimed otherwise, as far as I’m aware. Should Harvard, not try to make character judgments of its applicants? Should Harvard pretend it doesn’t try to make them, when it obviously does, since it would be self-defeating and stupid for Harvard knowingly to admit bad people?

All Harvard has said is that character and judgment (which mean lots of things, from grit to good conduct) are major factors in admissions, which I’m confident is true, since I don’t believe they knowingly admit people with bad character or judgment. In the same way they evaluate academic achievement/potential, they evaluate, based on the application, whether or not someone has the baseline character and judgment required. If they do, Harvard looks at everything else and makes a decision. If you have evidence to the contrary, I’m sure we’d all be glad to hear it.

208

I think it shouldn’t try. How do you establish appropriate criteria that will stand the test of time in an ever-changing culture?

When I was a teenager, getting pregnant while unmarried was considered to reflect a serious flaw in your character, but getting arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol was not. Today, it’s the other way around. A few decades from now, both actions (or neither) might be considered unacceptable.

“Character” is a moving target, and I think Harvard would be better off not addressing it.

209

“All Harvard has said is that character and judgment (which mean lots of things, from grit to good conduct) are major factors in admissions, which I’m confident is true”

Right. Suppose the activities, recommendations, discipline record, etc. screen out 80% of the kids with an unusual propensity to misbehavior. I don’t think schools should disregard that information because it is imperfect. Heck, if I were running an admissions office, I’d keep that filter even if it only screened out 50%.

GPA and test scores are flawed predictors of academic performance, too. I’m sure I could find 10 Harvard freshmen who got Ds or Fs in chemistry this year. Do those 10 kids prove that Harvard’s academic screening process is fatally flawed and should be abandoned? Should it stop claiming that outstanding academic ability is a core selection factor? Isn’t that a moving target? In the 1950s, when out-of-wedlock pregnancy was scandalous, an SAT score of 1200 was more than enough for Harvard. Not any more.

210

Lol, I feel like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. I read one argument and think, “Hmm, he is right.” Then I read another post and think, “Hmm, she is also right.” The little voice in my head says “They can’t both be right!” And I think, “Well, you are also right!”

Very interesting discussion.

211

To be fair, in the 1950’s Harvard like the other Ivies and some peer elite private colleges had undergrad admission policies which were far less meritorious academically and highly discriminatory on the basis of one’s racial/ethnic and SES background.

An intellectually dim scion from a wealthy WASP family*…especially a legacy of that particular elite college is likely to be a shoo-in. Conversely, someone from the lower SES and/or those from “undesirable” racial/ethnic groups had to contend with strict quotas against them even if they were high academic achievers who ended up doing great things.

And with the exception of Cornell, women were shut out of all other Ivies until recent decades…with the last being as recently as 1983.

  • My engineer uncle had the dubious pleasure of being stuck with one as his incompetent secretary for 10 years because he was the idiot nephew of an influential partner in the engineering/tech firm. Said nephew was a Harvard engineering graduate from sometime in the mid-late '50s. Ironically around the same time my uncle graduated from Columbia SEAS.
212

I don’t get it. Yes, there will be many examples of people with less than perfect morals who are admitted to Harvard or any other college. Does that mean that when H or any other college has reason to know that a particular student has a less than stellar character it should simply ignore that fact and admit him/her?

Remember the Glenn Ridge (NJ) case many years ago when students were convicted of sexually assaulting a young woman who was of very low intelligence? There was no actual sex. IIRC, a baseball bat was used. While the convictions were on appeal, some of the students enrolled in colleges–not H–despite the fact that the colleges knew of the conviction. They were allowed to enroll under assumed names, and went to college parties and social events. I was appalled when this came out. Do some of you think this is fine?

Should Owen Labrie be allowed to enroll in H?

Should Brock Turner, the convicted Stanford rapist, be permitted to transfer to another college if he had good grades at Stanford?

Is a conviction the only exception?

What if a teacher knows a girl is the leader of a “mean girls clique?” The girl’s parents are substantial donors to the private school she attends and as a practical matter the girl is untouchable. I have a friend who was a teacher in a private school and had a student who made horrible comments out loud about other kids’ clothing and accessories. Most of her “victims” were kids at the school on scholarships. When my friend tried to talk to her about it, the girl essentially said she had no respect for anyone who would take a low paying job like teaching and certainly wasn’t going to pay any attention to advice from a “loser.” Would it be unethical for my friend to mention this in a college recommendation? Would it be wrong for H or another college to consider such things in deciding whom to admit? I don’t think so.

The fact that H or any other college can’t screen out EVERY mean, nasty, immoral person doesn’t mean it shouldn’t screen out ANY of them, IMO.

213

jonri, of course I think that Harvard and other colleges should screen out applicants of poor character or poor judgment.

That is somewhat different from claiming to assess applicants on “strength of character” and “good judgment,” though.

Some evidence of poor character or poor judgment might be apparent from known actions of the applicant.
I understand that Harvard doesn’t want to advertise that the admissions staff members are assessing applicants on “absence of clear-cut disqualifications in terms of character or judgment.”

But I think they are just pretending if they imagine that they can actually assess strength of character.

214

Depending on what you’re screening for, is your filter anywhere near 80%? To use an example from another thread, the OP’s son got caught smoking pot at prep school and she thought that significantly harmed his college admissions. What percent of HS pot smokers end up getting caught and having that on their disciplinary record? My wild guess is 1-2%.

215

I guy I know committed a felony (involving fraud) and spent a couple of years in prison. After he was released, he was hired by a small company run by a certain woman. She was heavily criticized for hiring him because of his criminal record even though he was well qualified for the job.

You may agree with the criticisms. But think about it a little more. Would it benefit society for this man to be unable to find employment? Wouldn’t it make it more likely that he would commit additional crimes because he would have no other way to support himself?

What, exactly, do we want ex-convicts to do? I think we want them to get jobs. So why criticize the people who hire them?

Now let’s expand the discussion to students. In today’s society, if you prevent a young person from getting a college education, you are greatly impairing that person’s ability to earn a living. Does this serve society’s needs?

Unless they have been convicted of crimes that carry a penalty of death or life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, everyone needs to be able to earn a living. Even mean girls. Even convicted rapists. Does it serve society’s needs to prevent them from obtaining the credentials needed to get a decent job? That’s what we’re doing if we prevent them from going to college.

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These kids will have no trouble getting college degrees. People can be productive members of society without going to an elite college. There are cases in which I think a punishment (legal or disciplinary) is excessive in the extent to which it will impact a person’s future life and career prospects, but this isn’t one of them.

I don’t have a problem with elite schools screening out students who have shown demonstrably poor character (not that I agree that smoking pot should constitute poor character), or favoring students who have demonstrated particularly good character But I tend to agree that colleges should at least tone down their rhetoric about selecting for these kinds of mostly intangible personal qualities, as it perpetuates the destructive idea that there is something magical about the elite school screening process.There isn’t.

217

As long as these students’ identities remain unknown, they will not be prevented from going to college. They just won’t be going to Harvard, which is quite survivable.

218

However, if that filter also screens out a similarly high percentage of those without an unusual propensity to misbehavior, it may not be effective at its intended purpose. An example of a way to screen out 50% of those prone to misbehavior is flipping a coin and screening out if it shows heads. But that also screens out 50% of those not prone to misbehavior.

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" What percent of HS pot smokers end up getting caught and having that on their disciplinary record? My wild guess is 1-2%."

I agree that most are not caught, but I don’t consider smoking pot a character issue. It is certainly a risk-taking behavior. Reasonable minds disagree about this.

220

Yes, of course the kids who prompted this thread should be able to go to college somewhere. But the discussion has expanded to include mean girls, people who use marijuana, and people convicted of sex offenses, among others. Will all of them be able to get into college somewhere? And if the answer is no, is that consequence appropriate either for the young people themselves or for the society they live in?