Duke only admits 29% of the HS valedictorians who apply.
Over half of Duke’s applicants are scored as having the highest possible rating in terms of the HS transcript.
Academics are necessary, but not sufficient, for admission at the max selective schools today.
After reaching a certain threshold of high school academic “stats” that are predictive of academic success at the a selective college, adcoms are looking at: 1) Is the student going to “add to our college”, either demographically (they are the only student from Idaho applying) and / or once they get on campus by being involved in activities that publicize the college in a positive light 2) After they graduate are they likely to keep furthering the college through success, testimony, & monetary contribution.
It is less regional/more national than it once was, but it is still much more regional than many people on CC seem to think. The Ivies, for example, still draw half or more of their entering class from the Northeast, a region that comprises just 18% of the nation’s population. Top Southern schools draw disproportionately from the South, Midwestern schools from the Midwest, and Western schools from the West, even leaving aside the top publics.
I mostly agree with this, but “those who will go on to do great things” doesn’t quite hit it, either. Applicant pools at elite schools are larger and stronger than ever, so at those schools, finding applicants who are academically qualified is now the least of their worries. Many people on CC seem to think it is, or should be, a purely meritocratic judgment, with the schools choosing the “most qualified,” i.e., my Johnnie. But that’s not what they’re doing, and if you stop and listen to them, they’ll tell you so. They’re not sitting around trying to decide whether Applicant A with a 35 ACT and a 3.93 unweighted GPA is “more qualified” than Applicant B with a 34 ACT and a 3.97. Both easily make the cut on that score, as do thousands of other applicants, far more than they can accept. So it’s the “other institutional and social issues” that dominate. They need to let in enough athletes to fill up the varsity athletic teams, and at most schools they’ll give some weight to the coaches’ preferences as to which athletes, provided they meet minimum academic standards. They’ll want to maintain some semblance of gender balance, which at some schools means cutting male applicants some extra slack, but not at engineering schools where it’s the reverse. Whether or not the admissions officers themselves care about racial/ethnic diversity, their institutional masters care, so they’ll consider that. They need to admit enough legacies to keep the alumni from ripping their heads off, along with a few “development cases” to keep the development office and the president happy. They may pay some attention to geographic representation. Many schools now treat first-gen status as a tip factor, if only to convince themselves that despite enrolling very small numbers of Pell grant-eligible students, they’re still an engine of upward social mobility and are therefore entitled to keep the tax-exempt, tax-deductible status that keeps the money machine running. Most elite schools don’t do admissions by intended major (unless they admit to separate undergraduate schools or colleges, as at Cornell), but they’ve got to pay some attention to ensuring that there are enough musicians, enough math/science jocks, enough literary types, and so on, both to give their various academic departments a reason for being and to support a broad range of extracurriculars. They all say they want a diverse and “interesting” class, by which they mean at least avoiding a cookie-cutter sameness. I’ll bet Harvard could fill up its entire class with highly qualified suburban white kids from the tri-state New York City metro area; that’s what they want to avoid. At the end of the day they do need to be attentive to their SAT/ACT medians, not because that determines who’s most qualified, but because many people look to those medians as a proxy for the academic strength of the students and the “selectivity” of the school, and because it matters in their US News rankings which they all care about no matter how silly they think those rankings are in substance. And yes, they do want people “who will go on to do great things” in a wide variety of fields, in part because in the long term it will help maintain the school’s image and prestige, and in the short term because it will make the campus a livelier and more dynamic place and enhance the undergraduate experience for all who attend.
In short, contrary to MWDadOf3, I think the “institutional and social issues” aren’t merely side issues, they really are the main event in elite college admissions, at least for those schools that have reached the point where they could fill their entering class many times over with academically highly qualified applicants. I’d be willing to bet that at these schools, a strong majority of those admitted have one or more “hooks” or “tip factors” working in their favor. You’ve got to be highly qualified academically, but that just gets you in the game.
I think MOST of the “institutional and social issues” boil down to the equivalent of adjusting the (academically driven) admissions threshold for different groups or folks with certain attributes.
Male applicant at 65% female school? Threshold lower
URM? Threshold lower
Legacy? Threshold lower
Athletes? - Yes, even for these - threshold lower (though there’s some dynamism to this - the coach may push harder and for a lower standard for the future star quarterback than for the future punter).
Now, I readily admit that at the upper reaches of the non-tipped applicants, the ability to distinguish fine-grained academic differences is small (and a noisy, weak signal) - that’s part of my original point. GPA-like characteristics are especially noisy because schools want to project to colleges that all of their graduates are brilliant, and thus are more likely to grade inflate (which raises the average GPA for their kids, but also may decrease the range) and also less likely to make clear rankings available.
“It is less regional/more national than it once was, but it is still much more regional than many people on CC seem to think.”
Today Harvard gets 40% of its class from New England (17%) and the mid-atlantic (23%). While that is disproportionate by population, it also means that the majority of Harvard students come from outside its region.
17% comes from the south, 21% comes from the western U.S., 10% comes from the midwest. 20% are from outside the U.S.
That’s a huge change.
@bclintonk, the percentage of the student body at Columbia, Emory, Harvard, MIT, Rice, Cornell, UPenn, Northwestern, and Stanford who get Pell grants is over 15%.
Is that low?
At UMich, that percentage was 12.8% in 2009.
Re post #13, thanks for providing that data. I never would have guessed that 70% of HS grads were enrolled in college the following year, since it is frequently said that roughly 35% to 40% of the US adult population has a college degree. The notes to the NYT chart indicate that 60% of the students are in 4-year programs.
Valedictorians are not necessarily most academically qualified/capable. As a matter of fact, if you ask AOs of these elites what is most important in an application, the answer would most likley be - instead of GAP - “transcript”. It means that in addition to grades or GPA, the rigor of one’s curriculum matters and the rigor of one’s HS matters. So a student in top 10% of their class with a challenging curriculum and/or from a reputably rigorous HS would easily win, when compared with a valedictorian with a “regular” HS transcript.
Selective schools are looking to assemble an interesting class. It is about the mix, not the individual. Noone has mentioned music, theater, art or writing but those talents matter too. And the Ivies tend to emphasize “character” and “ability to overcome obstacles.” I think the academic stats have to meet a certain benchmark and after that it is about a lot of other things.
@compmom, each Ivy is different. Heck, each college in Cornell emphasizes different things.
My comments were not specific to any particular school, though this is the Harvard forum.
@compmom, when did the Parents Forum become Harvard’s?
Sorry, I was distracted and made a mistake 
Pan – you are missing the point. Duke itself says that more than 50% of the apps it gets receive the highest possible score based on Duke’s own admissions process for scoring a HS transcript. They don’t admit gobs of kids who meet Duke’s academic standards at the highest possible level. That’s completely consistent with turning down two thirds of the valedictorians who apply.
Also, with the advent of weighted grading, the days of the valedictorian who aced all their home ec classes is long gone.
Except that isn’t what admissions officers at elite schools using “holistic” admissions processes, i.e., just about all elite privates and some elite publics, say they do. I’m not sure what reason they would have to lie about it. And frankly I’ve never heard any description of the process by anyone who’s been involved in it that sounded anything like what you describe. It’s not nearly so mechanical, it’s much more subjective. The University of Michigan is obviously a public institution, but it uses a holistic process not unlike the top privates (except that Michigan is now prohibited by state law from considering race). Here’s a link to their actual rating sheet:
http://admissions.umich.edu/assets/docs/template-rating-sheet.pdf
“Secondary school academic performance” including GPA, test scores, class rank, and strength of curriculum is just one of seven broad evaluative categories. The other six are quite subjective. Three readers (“evaluators”), or two readers plus a “validator,” read the entire application file and give it a grade, Outstanding, Excellent, Good, Average/Fair, or Below Average/Poor, with plus or minus gradations within each of those. Then it’s forwarded to the entire committee which reviews those grades, probably has a brief discussion, and gives it a final grade on the same scale, coupled with an up or down vote on admission. Michigan is now selective enough (27% admit rate this year, 22% for OOS applicants) that probably only the “outstanding” and “excellent” applicants make the cut for serious consideration, and not all of those are offered admission. No doubt most of the applicants rated outstanding or excellent have very strong academic stats, but on this type of rating system it’s very possible that some applicants with less stellar academic stats are nonetheless rated outstanding or excellent, and it’s equally possible that some applicants with stellar academic stats come up so pedestrian or even negative on other parts of the rating system that their overall applications are graded “good” or worse, and they’re not offered admission. And indeed, every year you see a few OOS applicants crying on the University of Michigan section on CC, “What happened? There must be some kind of mistake; I have a 4.0 unweighted GPA and a 1570 SAT CR + M, Michigan was my safety, and I was rejected.” It’s no mistake; not everyone with stellar stats gets admitted, because in the big picture, with all factors considered, some other applicants with lower academic stats simply graded out better, or because there were so many outstanding or excellent applicants that they simply couldn’t all be admitted. And Michigan is now selective enough that it’s a mistake for anyone to think it’s their safety. It’s not as if there’s some clear threshold of academic stats that automatically get you admitted, with downward adjustments made from there for first-gen, economically disadvantaged region, legacy, etc. All that information–academic stats plus 41 other enumerated factors–are evaluated, weighed, and factored into the applicant’s rating by 3 independent sets of eyes, then by the committee, before a decision to admit, deny, or waitlist is made.
It is the teen version of Kiwanis club. In our community kind of important as Kiwanis puts on our 4th of July fireworks, carnival, a big deal parade, summer concerts etc…and Kiwanis a ton of service work beyond that, offers scholarships and so on.
D joined Key Club, probably, because most of her friends did too. It’s just something a certain kind of kid in our area does (my S did not, he’s not that kind of kid). Also, we have service hour requirements to graduate and Key offers them.
In her HS Key puts on a battle of the bands to benefit bone marrow donations/awareness, runs “market day” to raise money for various charities, and helps out at a lot of community events.
Concur with posters discussing the fact that elite schools can easily fill their classes many times with kids having top scores and grades, even with discrepancies in HS quality and grading systems. The increased competitiveness fueled partially by greater numbers of HS grads going to college and the common app have forced elite schools (and others) to take a “holistic” approach where they select AMONG the top academic performers to find other qualities that stand out and make an applicant a strong candidate for that school’s campus.
As an alumni interviewer for an elite school, they ask us to try and ferret out the following attributes: Creativity, Responsibility, Leadership, Initiative, Impact, Engagement, Talent and Maturity. I have to believe these criteria are also what the AOs at this particular U are using in committee as well to separate the offers of admission from the highly-qualified chum. I’m sure that every elite U has its own set of similar, but different, characteristics/values to separate applicants beyond the scores.
Compmom and cameron121 made important contributions to this discussion. Admission decisions are not based on rank ordering students from the most to the least qualified applicants and drawing a line under the least qualified of the most qualified and sending admissions letters to those above the line. Instead, elite colleges have many extremely qualified applicants among whom to choose.
So, whom does the school admit? Well, I am sure the very qualified legacies who are still young enough to attend college are admitted. After that, admissions decisions are designed to build a class. So, if the school needs a good student who excels at basketball and plays the same position as the star player who just graduated, then I would expect admission. If a program has more tenured professors than majors, then well qualified applicants seeking that major are likely admitted. If a well-qualified student is the first person from a rural area of North Dakota applies and has something to add to the class, then that student is apt to be admitted. In contrast, the many qualified applicants who want to major in an area with scads of existing majors are less likely to be admitted. Each year a class that meets university needs is admitted. Those not admitted are not judged to be unqualified or deficient, but just not what the university needs and is looking for this time.
Admissions folks, then, are looking for those well-qualified applicants whom the university needs to fulfill its needs and admits excellent candidates who have something special as Cameron 121 pointed out. It’s all about selecting a class from a embarrassment of riches in terms of excellent applicants. It’s not personal when qualified applicants are not admitted, but is wildly disappointing when you are denied. Please watch Legally Blond 1 to see how a member of the new class at Harvard Law was selected.
So, the impression I have, based on casual conversations with friends who are professors at one of those “elite” departments of a high-ranked university, the general university admissions prescreens applications based on the usual metrics, e.g. grades, test scores, etc. and then passes on those meeting that criteria on to the admissions committees of the departments, who study the applicants more in detail and do the selecting at the individual level. One professor in the school of engineering told me that by the time the filtered applications got to him, he could basically disregard the GPA and test scores because they were all the same. In all my conversations, I never got the feeling that there was any complex “formula” at play. It sounded all very subjective and, in fact, the professors do have personal opinions about the kind of students they want to see in their classrooms, and it’s not always the ones with the best grades/test scores.
Obviously, this is all anecdotal but what it says to me is that applicants should be cognizant of the minimum bar to be seriously considered but once they’ve reached it, forget it and go do the things that interest them. The admissions committees are made up of people just like us.
@ScreenName48105, how admissions is done differs a lot by school. Some do hand it off to a school/college/department to decide. At other places, it is done by the admissions committee.
At Oxbridge, the final decision is definitely made by faculty members of a department. At Cornell, by the different colleges. At most elites, the admissions committee (which may include faculty) make the call. At Northwestern, Admissions decides on applicants to Engineering and Arts&Sciences, but Music chooses its students, Journalism chooses its students, etc.