Agreeing with LadyMeowMeow. Not to be excessively partisan here, but Yale has Lux et veritas on offer. I realize that Yale has had its scandals, too.
@LadyMeowMeow : You are still looking at everything as though the most important people in the system are applicants, when in fact they are a relatively small percentage of the audience for these statements. The point of the statements is not to give applicants precise instructions as to what will entitle them to a favorable admission decision, or a way to assess their chances of admission accurately. If anything, what Harvard is trying to tell applicants, just like Yale, is “Watch out! It’s not all stats! Don’t assume because you have great stats you are a shoo-in. At the very least, you need to convince us that you are also a great person. Good luck with that!” They are also telling donors, alumni and faculty that they are maintaining some kind of social as well as intellectual screen, and they are trying to convince employers, graduate schools, and the surrounding community that Harvard’s students are not just smart, they are special.
Of course, they are not doing anything more than Yale does with its “hunchy guess.” So what? The rest is PR, and perfectly good PR.
At the very least, Harvard needs to say something like what it says so that when an incident like this arises, and Harvard finds that it has just admitted someone whose level of public asininity is about to embarrass the university, it can un-admit him. Just like it did here, and with Owen Labrie, and the girl who killed her mother. At that point, it is well beyond a mere “hunchy guess” about character.
An article on this written by a Yale student: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/harvards-ugly-offshoot-of-campus-meme-culture
It’s an interesting read.
It’s rather difficult to address 23 pages of discussion in on succinct post, even assuming for a moment one wanted or needed to. deepest My apologies, as one who has apparently “turned up” (I lurk often, and don’t live on CC), for not posting to expectations.
I don’t personally think Harvard- or Yale, or UWyoming, or anyone else- has a special Lasso of Character with which to see into potential students’ souls. (Just as well for me, since my kid is ginger and hasn’t one, anyway.) They pick who they want to pick, for whatever reasons: test scores, mad essay skills, the ability to fund a new building, or dirty pictures of the admissions committee. That’s from whence the general CC idea of “it’s a crapshoot” sprung, yeah?
“Perhaps they were defensive, or indignant, belligerent – or otherwise doubling-down in ways that revealed their character further…”
I’m speaking solely as someone who has seen many first drafts of explanation essays in cases where the facts of the underlying matter are not in dispute. This theory isn’t plausible to me across 10 Harvard admits. I see many first drafts that are inartful or self-defeating for various reasons, particularly if the student is a weak writer to begin with. But practically everybody caught with their hand in the cookie jar is remorseful. I’ve only seen a few exceptions in my career, and there tend to be psychiatric diagnoses involved.
Society and it’s institutions have to draw lines or bad behavior becomes normalized. I believe people who are genuinely and authentically not racists don’t post memes that are. The students involved are young, but they are old enough to know better. From what I understand, when they received their offer of admission from Harvard, they were told — and had to acknowledge — that the offer was conditional and could be withdrawn for, among other things, “behavior that brings into question their honesty, maturity or moral character.” I read in the Washington Post that that statement was also posted on the Harvard College Class of 2021 Facebook group page. Maybe the meme posters felt they were protected by the privacy of the chat group or their right to free speech, but they weren’t. I support the decision to resend the offers of admission because the university needed to make a statement about who they are as an institution. Maybe it’s a farce that Harvard is able to determine character in an admissions packet, but when admitted students behave in a way that demonstrates a lacking in moral character, Harvard is right to deny them the privilege of joining their academic community.
@OHMomof2
Thanks for sharing that article. Good to get student POV
Hi petrichor11–You are certainly welcome to lurk! I think I lurked on the CC forum for more than a year before I started posting.
I was not really meaning to complain about people not reading the entire thread before posting–I have certainly done that often enough myself. And at 23 pages and counting, this is a long discussion. (Sorry if you thought my post was personal.)
I was specifically responding to Tperry1982’s post, asking why people expected Harvard to be clairvoyant about applicants’ characters. My point was that LadyMeowMeow and others (including me) on this thread have been challenging Harvard’s claim that their admissions staff could assess character.
Also, the “you” I was jokingly hoping to persuade was DeepBlue86. Not much chance of that, I think!
When it comes to the "crapshoot’ description of top college admissions, there are many who agree with you, petrichor11, and many who are incensed at the suggestion that it is a “crapshoot.” My favorite description is that admission to top colleges has “elements of randomness.” Even this more moderate view has its opponents.
@LadyMeowMeow, I think there’s very little difference in practice between how Harvard and Yale assess applicants. They do a first read of the application and throw out a bunch of people who clearly don’t have the brains or the character. Then they have further reads and committee meetings that look at everything else and arrive at a decision based on “hunchy judgment”. They admit some potential Einsteins and Mother Theresas and (because they have other attributes) a whole lot of other people who aren’t Einstein-level intellects or Mother Theresa-level souls. They deny plenty of super-high stats kids and very good people because of the perceived lack of those other attributes, or because someone they’re admitting is seen to be a possibly better version of someone they’re denying.
The degree of brains and character are considered at every stage but not explicitly ranked overall, for the same reason that I’m guessing the National Gallery doesn’t do an overall ranking of the paintings in its collection: because they’ve got a finite amount of wall space, different time periods, styles and artists to represent and you can’t really compare this Rembrandt to that Rothko anyway. The curators are re-evaluating things all the time, what they’ve got on the walls represents the best collection they think they should be exhibiting at that moment, and their priorities may (and do) change over time, just like the admissions priorities of universities.
Regarding the following:
I would respond: (i) echoing @JHS’ comments (he says most things better than I do) Harvard doesn’t care if what they say is useful to applicants, because Harvard’s not purporting to give applicants a roadmap; and (ii) in fact, whether or not you think they’re any good at it, Harvard accumulates a great deal of measurable data on those it admits and uses it to improve their process (see here: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/4/5/byerlys-eye-on-the-yard-span/).
@QuantMech The UChicago rep for our area pretty much publicly endorsed the “elements of randomness” theory last year. While that’s not Harvard, I can’t imagine there’s too much difference between adcoms at the top of the Shining Ladder of Eliteness. When you have tens of thousands of applicants, maybe a quarter of which are good prospects, and that’s still three times as many spots as you can fill…I don’t know what else it would be.
In which case we’re back to ten or so kids on Harvard’s wait list who have probably been breathing some (culturally appropriate) variation of “thank you, baby Jesus!” for the last little while.
Unfortunately, I think Harvard was overenrolled and the rescinded spots did not lead to WL movement.