What stands out to me from graduating high school in the late 80s in comparison to today is the difference in ECs we had. I went to a public high school in a small-ish town outside of Boston. It was basically the school version of average excellent. We didn’t have APs though we did have some advanced classes. I had high stats across the board (rank, scores/NMSF, etc.), but I think my ECs were playing on the high school sports teams (not anywhere near recruitable) and participating in some clubs. I held a class officer position that was not such a big deal, really, and one or two leadership activities related to the surrounding community. I had part time jobs throughout my high school years which was very common. If only watching “General Hospital” could be considered an EC! My classmates were similar, and of those that I can recall from our top 10 in the rankings, we went to Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth (2), MIT, Williams, Tulane, Bowdoin, Pomona…
My entire list of schools to apply to was Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, MIT (only because my father would get a great tuition benefit there…the tour was a turnoff for highschool-me), and Tufts. Tufts-syndrome was born of my era, I think! I didn’t apply to all of them as I went ED, but nobody saw a problem with that application list!
Wow! I graduated from CMU in 1993 and we were already to 30% female at that point. 10% would have been so different! I was impressed a few years ago when they announced they had made it to a 50/50 ratio.
Here is the CMU Factbook from my graduation year. It’s interesting in so many ways. It was ranked among the top 25 colleges in the country then (similar to now in terms of arbitrary prestige) but its admission rate was well over 50%, which isn’t crazy relative to other top schools at that time. There must have been a lot more self-selection in terms of where people applied.
It’s also fun to look at average SAT scores of a top school at that time. Also, even in 1993, there was no $800/semester tuition at Carnegie Mellon! It was orders of magnitude more expensive than what many of you are reporting:
I remember my stats only because I found my old records cleaning out the attic a few months ago. Along with my old student ID cards featuring the 80s perm.
Dark Shadows and the prime time soaps like Dallas and Dynasty! I guess the modern day equivalents with much higher production values could be Succession, Billions, Yellowstone and the like.
Because true “matches” are hard to find these days for high stats, highly accomplished unhooked kids. So they need to apply to a larger number of schools.
And while “prestige” by itself may not buy you much (unless you’re aiming for a prestige conscious career path), schools deemed prestigious typically provide many other benefits to their students.
Probably region dependent. Definitely not the case where I live.
I graduated HS in 1986, #39 out of approximately 280 (you were ranked first to last back then), 1270 SAT, AP History and English, some advanced classes Soph and Junior years with run of the mill activities. Got into Hamilton, Lafayette, and Lehigh, WL at Colgate. Of the kids who were ranked higher than me, two got into Yale, one into MIT, one into Penn, three into Georgetown, one into Brown, two into Emory, one into Tufts, one into Williams, one into Georgia Tech, and one into Northwestern. There were probably some others that got into impressive schools, but that’s all I can remember. This was a public HS on Long Island. Needless to say, you don’t see results like that at my old HS anymore.
Graduated HS in mid '80s. I went to a public high school in an affluent NYC suburb which had already gotten rid of class rank to combat rampant competition. I was probably top 15%–can’t remember my average. Took the SATs once 690 V/600 M. I had higher scores on the SAT Subject tests and 5s on AP English and US History. I got into Columbia, Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Haverford, and Wesleyan; waitlisted at UPenn; denied from Harvard and Brown. IIRC from our class of 450, 12 classmates went to Yale, almost as many went to Harvard and Brown (the hot school that year) but only a couple went to Princeton and MIT. Tons of students went to Cornell, with many others going to Michigan, Duke (some were January admits), and 6 to Williams. I recently looked at the results for the class of 2023 in the local paper and there were far fewer Ivy League and top tier admits. Times have changed!
I went to a speech about this arms race of admissins by Frank Bruni…. Things are harder than they were. and it would seem that we are encouraging more accomplished and thoughtful applicants. But he made a strong argument that we are not. But rather that the process is encouraging stress, damaging mental health and really just making people better at applying to stuff.
I’m sure most of our kids are wonderful and kind thoughtful people, but I don’t think the process helps that, possibly the opposite.
“Where you go is not who you’ll be” by bruni. Nice stats and anecdotes and everything
I had it easy because today I probably could not go to any college or only a small number I couldn’t have afforded because a numbers based learning disability kept me from taking any math above a very low level, plus my SAT scores of 490 math 710 verbal didn’t seem to phase anyone. Instead in my day the colleges weren’t so hung up on that and I went to my big state school which was fairly competitive , got straight A’s and went to law school where I was in the top 5/percent of my class . Never took a real math class. (A how to teach math K to 2 class filled my math requirement and it was very easy focusing on the pedagogical their use of math instruction. I did a paper on my learning disability for my main grade in the class ). Through a friend of mine who has a kid with a LD similar to mine I saw how much harder it is in kids today. How this kids LD hampered and defined her. She was told her SAT math was a big problem. I feel lucky to have escaped all that.
I don’t think we have more accomplished and thoughtful kids/applicants because of the college application process. My kids are more accomplished and thoughtful than I was for a ton of reasons, none of them relating to college admissions.
Both things can be true and probably are: As a whole, kids can be more involved and generally stronger AND they can be stressed out and have emotional challenges. The college process may contribute, especially to the second truth, but it isn’t the only cause today of either.
