Weaker signal, more noise - the dilemma(s) of the highly selective college in the current age

Parents Forum
1

Just a thought balloon here.

There’s a lot of discussion on CC and elsewhere about the relative merits and weighting of different criteria for highly selective colleges.

If the primary goal of admissions for highly selective universities is to distinguish and admit the most academically qualified (with some nudges towards other factors, such as institutional and social issues), then I suggest that the signal clarity of many traditional measures of academic merit among applying high schoolers has weakened.

This makes the job of the admissions officer more difficult.

It also likely makes at least SOME academic and other analysis of past historical cohorts less valid for the modern era. (i.e. how well GPA, test scores, and the like predict success in college and beyond).

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Here are, roughly, the major factors largely within a student’s control that affect highly selective admissions:

GPA and course rigor

SAT/ACT test scores

Extracurriculars

(Perhaps essays, interviews and the like, though I’m a little more skeptical of their weight than many).

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GPA

When grades first started being assigned to students in primary and secondary school (probably centuries ago), I assume that they were primarily to provide both feedback and rewards (or penalties) to students. Secondary goals may have been to satisfy the educators themselves (they likely got satisfaction from rewarding the bright stars) and maybe as a marker to the outside world of the stronger and weaker students (i.e. what’s your GPA). But I suspect that this latter goal was pretty low on the list.

Even into the mid to late 20th century, the primary mark of a successful high school career was not one’s GPA, but rather, the high school diploma itself. Getting a diploma was an accomplishment. If you had many Cs and a few Ds along the way, well, so be it.

But as a HS diploma has become more of a baseline, and a greater and greater portion of the population attends college, those Cs and Ds got added significance, keeping Johnny out of Harvard and maybe even out of State U.

So, with pressure from students and parents, there has been a shift in the purpose of grades, as markers for college admission. This has led to grade inflation, grade compression (i.e. the 70th percentile of the class only a few tenths of GPA away from the 90th or 95th), and difficulty in cross comparisons (as some schools succumb to grade inflation on a large scale and others put up rear guard fights).

The alternative measure to GPA is class rank, but of course we know that many schools don’t disclose this now and make it harder for colleges to get a fine measurement of where a student really stands.

Weighted grades help some in assessing curriculum rigor, but they also add murk and confusion.

And when a college wants to measure a kid who clearly succeeded (in grades, rank, or whatever) at an inferior high school, versus a kid who was ranked somewhere high (exact position murky) at a competitive school, how does the college adjust things properly?

Yes, the above is not new - it’s been going on for decades, but I suspect it has gotten noticeably worse in the last decade or two.

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Test scores
(I’ll try to keep this shorter)

I don’t know exactly how much test prep helps, but it does seem to help SOME.

Add in the SAT recentering truncated the top end of the range for that test in the mid 90s.

Add in the much wider draw for admissions at top universities (i.e. they get more applicants, including international ones)

Now you’ve got many kids applying with 1600 SATs, and 36 ACTs. And we all know a 36 ACT isn’t really that different from a 35, which isn’t that different from a 34. Yes, a 36 ACT kid is likely to do much better at Harvard than a 26 ACT kid, but in the numbers game, Harvard is really weighing the 35s against the 34s and the 33s (with other factors besides test scores weighing in of course.

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Extracurriculars

Even when I was in HS in the 1980s, extracurriculars were not entirely pure. You didn’t join necessarily Key Club because of whatever it does (what exactly does it do?), but rather because it’s a line item on a potential future college application.

But I suspect that the overall competitiveness of highly selective admissions (single digit admission rates across the top schools), and the ease of information sharing (via the internet, including of course, CC), has increased the degree to which extracurriculars are sculpted (by the parents if not the kids, at least for those aspiring to the highest levels).

Does that kid have a passion for the homeless and underprivileged, or did someone nudge them that way to increase the chances of a Harvard sticker on the back of the minivan’s window, a few years hence?

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Anyways, it’s a long post already, but in brief:

Increased focus on college (versus simple HS completion) +
Increased focus on highly selectives (soaring applications) +
Increased information (via the internet)

= More ‘gaming the system’ (often in subtle ways, and not always by the student(s))

which in turn

= Many of the old signals probably are less clear than they once were

2

Well, the assumption is a bit off-base to start with. Many of the elites aren’t looking to fill their entire student body with the most academically qualified (Caltech is arguably a notable exception; they are also tiny), but those who will go on to do great things in different fields.

And yes, many of the numbers-based signals are weaker. Which means essays, recs, ECs matter more. However, the applicant pool is much stronger than generations ago as well, so its actually harder for adcoms of elites to mess up. If they admit a good student rather than a future Nobel winner, big deal; they’re not letting someone in at risk of flunking out.

3

Interesting topic.

So, what would not be easily gamed?

I’ve thought that you could get a good picture of my son from his Wikipedia browsing history. (Just looked at the past week on his PC: Gliese 180b, Four horsemen of the apocalypse, Quaternions and spatial rotation, Euler angles, Feynman sprinkler, Grimoire, Cthulu mythos in popular culture, Great Filter, and Mohs scale of mineral hardness)

That’s pretty easy to game, though.

4

With high stakes admissions, a well informed applicant pool (via the internet), a LARGER applicant pool than in decades past, facing very low admissions rates, I’m not sure there are any viable alternatives, right now, for an ungamable admissions criteria.

I guess one of my main points was that colleges probably shouldn’t, and probably don’t, as a whole, apply the same weight to various measures as they once did. A 4.0 GPA, being valedictorian, getting a 35 or 36 ACT, being president of 2 or 3 high school clubs - these are all nice, but, individually at least, less distinctive and/or less valuable as a signal of the potential for academic excellence at a highly selective.

That said, yeah, I agree that the incoming 2015 Harvard class is probably smarter than the 2005 Harvard class, the 1995 class, and so on. But the admissions departments still need to do their job. They can’t just put a list of applicants on the wall and throw darts at it.

5

The most important thing for parents to know is that applications per student have increased dramatically since the Common App and the ability to copy and paste things on a computer. In the 1980s noone applied to every Ivy League school with the ease of today. Every application was either handwritten or typed and then mailed. Letters of recommendation were a nightmare to get because of this.

This has created a situation where the probability of acceptance to a top school is dispersed rather than lower. This is why so many parents get frustrated when a kid with stats that look perfectly acceptable gets rejected.

It has nothing to do with the size of the pool. Acceptance rates in many cases are artificial.

Another equally important thing is to understand demographics, which many parents rarely look at.

6

In theory, the super-selective colleges could put all academically strong applicants on the wall and throw darts to admit students who have a very high chance of academic success. But they have institutional goals beyond just having students who will be academically successful (whether or not anyone here agrees with any specific institutional goal of any college), so they have additional admission criteria and processes to use to get what they want.

7

Applications per student have increased, yes, and this accounts for a large portion of the drop in acceptance rates at the highly selectives.

But I think the pool of applicants has gotten broader too. i.e. There are a lot of kids applying to the Ivies today (perhaps all 8, perhaps 4 of them, perhaps just 1), who would not have applied 20-40 years ago.

It’s easier to travel and communicate, and easier to research. The highly selectives have pushed outreach harder, with very generous financial aid. I don’t have data to back this up, but I suspect that the #1 kid at a primarily African American HS in Kansas City, or the #1 kid at a primarily Hispanic HS in Texas, are far more likely to apply to an Ivy now than would have been the case 20 years ago. Even the top non-minority kids from affluent backgrounds, but outside of the Northeast, are probably (I speculate), more likely to apply to such schools than they once were.

Add in international applicants, and yeah, the pool is probably significantly bigger.

8

Yes more apply to Ivies, but why? It is very simple, because it is easy nowadays.

Don’t you remember the nightmare of doing a college application? It used to be that only legitimate candidates applied to Ivy League schools, now everyone does with just a click. In 1980, just imagine asking your English teacher for 15 separately typed, addressed and signed letters of recommendation.

9

I always hypothesize on these type of threads that a random selection among applicants who surpass a certain threshold on SAT/ACT and GPA/Rank would not be much different from a class selected with extensive human deliberation.

A secondary hypothesis is that you could make a random selection based solely on GPA/Rank without use of standardized tests, and do just as well. Bates studied 20 years of applicants and compared those who did or did not submit standardized test scores, and found insignificant differences in college performance.

10

While that may be true strictly from the point of view of student academic success, they would be less assured of getting the athletes for their sports teams, enough legacies to keep donating alumni happy, an ethnic mix that is marketable to next year’s potential students and donors, etc…

It is generally the case that SAT/ACT scores are weaker predictors of college performance than high school grades. However, the test optional schools are sort of free riding on the effect of standardized tests being somewhat of a deterrent against too much grade inflation and curricular watering down in the high schools.

11

The world is flat!!

The pool definitely is much bigger than before. The market for admissions at top schools used to be pretty regional; now it is fully national/international. It is much more than just the increased number of applications per applicant (which has definitely happened too with the Common App).

Advances in IT, transportation and other technologies have enabled elite college admissions to become globalized.

12

I am always leery of such studies. One concern is that many features of the application are not included in the studies. Suppose that there are two students with the same HS GPA, one who submitted a competitive SAT score and one who did not submit a score at all. If I were comparing the two, I would first infer that the latter student had a lower SAT score. I would then hold that student to a slightly higher standard in the other dimensions of the application (e.g., the letters of recommendation, the difficulty of the HS curriculum, etc). If the two students performed equally well in college, it would not be because the SAT score contained no information; rather, it would be because the students had been held to slightly different standards in those other dimensions.

College GPA may be the best measure of success we have, but it is not a perfect measure since there are many tactics that raise the GPA but do not reflect increased learning. Some students will choose their courses and instructors carefully in order to maximize grades. Some go above and beyond and hand in problem sets or assignments that are works of art. Some lobby for extra points. Some do extra credit problems. There are all manner of tactics that one can use to get higher grades. The students who avail themselves at the HS level are the ones who will do it at the college level as well. When a college enrolls a group of students of roughly equal ability, it is not surprising that college GPA is correlated with HS GPA.

13

“a greater and greater portion of the population attends college”

I’m just wondering if there are studies to back this up. And if there are, how much do the for-profit colleges and online colleges account for the increase? These institutions don’t really affect the posters here on cc so much, at least as far as I can see.

14

Here is one graph showing the rise of college attendance:

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2010/ted_20100428.htm

(HT NY Times http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/college-enrollment-rate-at-record-high/?_r=0)

It shows an increase in attendance of college by recent HS grads from ~45% in 1959 to ~70% in 2009. And since I assume HS graduation rates are also up noticeably over that timespan, the increase in the overall % of 18 year olds attending college is probably even greater.

Yes, some of these are attending non-selective colleges or colleges that aren’t of much interest to the CC crowd. But I would imagine many DO look at their stronger options, starting perhaps with directionals and State U, and moving up to the more selectives for those at the stronger end of the academic spectrum.

15

Love your thread title!

Very creative.

16

Not all that creative actually…

http://www.amazon.com/The-Signal-Noise-Predictions-Fail-but/dp/0143125087

17

“If the primary goal of admissions for highly selective universities is to distinguish and admit the most academically qualified (with some nudges towards other factors, such as institutional and social issues)”

As other posters have noted, I don’t think this is true.

18

http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/20/college-admissions-the-myth-of-higher-selectivity/

This discusses how acceptance probability has been redistributed.

19

Beyond a certain point, adcoms probably could just throw darts and end up with a class that is roughly academically equivalent to what they get with their selection process.

20

@Hanna - I realize that there are other goals that come into play in admissions beyond assessing academic strength. I even have words to such effect in the bit that you quoted from me.

But I still think that for Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc, the LARGEST part of each admissions decision is an assessment (in varying ways) of academic strength. Yes, if you’re 6’5", 290lb, or your daddy’s name is on the library, that maybe becomes the overriding factor - but those are basically outlier cases relative to the bulk of admissions. And yes, even for mainline admissions, the decision factor on that last yes or no will not be purely based on GPA, rank, or SAT/ACT. But that’s only because those (and other) academic factors have already been applied to the screening process. The kid with the 26 ACT and 3.1 GPA, but a FABULOUS essay, who’s also a legacy (but not a development case), likely won’t get in, because she’s already been screened out at the first or second pass.