I did not convey the point that I intended, blossom. I did not mean to say anything about the academic quality of Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice, etc. What I meant was this: It is sort of cold comfort coming from a parent whose children went to top schools to have that person say that Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice, etc. are perfectly good schools.
The same opinion would be a lot better coming from a person whose children actually went to Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice, etc.
In my view, it’s a little like a person who drives a BMW saying that a Ford Escape is a perfectly fine car. In fact, it is. But you really ought to have the comment coming from someone who drives an Escape.
Re blossom’s post 806: I disagree with you about what would happen to research grants, if MIT took merely good undergraduates as opposed to excellent undergraduates. That would have essentially no impact. The research grants to MIT depend on the faculty, foremost; secondly on post-docs; and then on grad students. The undergrads do not really matter with regard to research grants, except to the extent that funding agencies like to see an undergrad or two supported on a research grant, because it allows for continuity of the pipeline and encourages the undergrads.
One of my colleagues at Harvard remarked to me that he lost ground with every grad student he took, and he broke even on the post-docs. I don’t think he had any undergrads in his research group.
How about the reasons listed in post #0 at the beginning of this thread (before it wandered around about admissions to super-selective colleges which was not the intent)?
C’mon lookingforward, I quote exactly a part of what you have said, without destroying its meaning in any significant way, and you object in #807.
Then immediately in the same post, you create a straw man of what you imagine I think. It is not what I think at all. I find the opinion you are attempting to attribute to me objectionable. I have never said anything like that.
I did once comment that there were some students who could not participate in ECs because they had to take care of siblings. This was not a “poor them” comment; it was an objective statement about a specific friend of mine. She had to take care of her younger sister when most of the ECs were meeting, and then she needed to fit in homework later in the evening. Her mother worked outside the home. Substantial responsibility fell on my friend. It happened more than once that she missed the bus while she was helping her younger sister. Then her mother drove my friend to school. And if it became apparent that they would not get to school in time, and my friend would wind up having detention, then they turned around and went home. The mother had to have my friend at home right after school to take care of the younger sister.
This was the first comment that I made (in a briefer form–there is even more to the story than I have posted now), and it elicited a complaint from you that it was a “poor them” comment from someone (me) who was unaware of how amazing students from lower SES groups, etc. could be. That is not the case at all. My friend was amazing, actually, just not amazing in the way that usually gets a lot of credit from admissions committees at highly ranked colleges.
Yes, I know Harvard is not interested in capturing the long tail. In fact, I somewhat suspect that they are more interested in obscuring the long tail at the high end–hence the lack of objection to re-centering the SATs in the mid 1990s, and the reliance on the SATs at all, instead of a more difficult test. If you take a look at the essay and problem-solving tests that Oxford and Cambridge entrants take, you can see the distinct difference in level of difficulty.
I know that American universities are not going to change their admissions practices, no matter how many outsiders think it would be a good idea. I understand that Harvard is looking for people who will be “important,” and not necessarily for future academics, except with their slight nod to 10% or so of the class. I get it.
But I also know that MIT and Harvard are not actually that hard. MIT has information on many of its courses online. The great majority of the students who believe that they are being forced to drink from a fire hose there would be adequately challenged at my university instead.
An important part of Twoin18’s comment in #808 is that the math test used by his UK company had questions that were more complex than the SAT-2 (presumably Level 2), and not simply given in shorter time.
I would guess that most professors at Harvard or MIT would tell you that there is a wide range of student effectiveness in their classes. I won’t call it ability, because it is more like developed ability. But differences in developed ability cannot be entirely compensated by self-advocacy, resilience, grit, etc. within a semester. I doubt that all of them can be compensated entirely within a four-year period. I don’t believe that developed ability correlates especially strongly with any demographic characteristics.
For that matter, Richard Feynman observed significant differences in developed ability among Caltech students, who don’t tend to be selected holistically, and who are relatively few in number.
So back to the original thread topic. I have given a few reasons earlier on. My recent comments speak to the point that applicants may not be over-reaching at all, in terms of the challenge of the colleges, but that the college admissions outcomes may not be correlated with the level of reach involved.
@QuantMech, I think you’re using a very unusual and idiosyncratic definition of “overreach” that really has nothing to do with the subject of this thread. If the admissions officers of many highly selective colleges are to be believed (and why not?), 70 to 80% of their applicants are capable of doing the work. But that’s not what they’re looking for, except as a minimum threshold. The problem comes in when some students, including many who are perfectly capable of doing the work, apply to only a narrow band of super-selective colleges thinking that of course the colleges will recognize their individual brilliance and admit them, and then face a rude awakening when they’re rejected across the board. That’s overreach. It has nothing to do with whether they’re actually capable of doing the work.
100% of their applicants would be capable of doing the work, if the bar were low enough. It doesn’t mean anything. Frankly, AOs, generally speaking, are not particularly qualified to be the judges of applicants’ academic capabilities. Faculty should be involved in applicant selection process, but very few colleges are still doing that because of the large and ever increasing number of applications.
Note that this is not limited to those applying to super-selective schools. Some students apply to a less selective range of schools, but still aim too high relative to their college admission credentials, so that their intended “safeties” are really reaches.