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<p>Are you kidding? I mean, you have no CHOICE but to apply to HYPSM! Don’t you know that?! It’s practically forced upon you!</p>
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<p>If it is a public university or a lesser known private and the drop in quality of incoming students is great and/or sudden enough…top faculty will vote with their feet and leave in droves. </p>
<p>That’s precisely what happened to CCNY after they went from being a highly selective public university known as “poor man’s Harvard” to admitting practically anyone with a high school diploma in the mid’60s. By the 1980’s and into the early-mid’90s(my high school years", CCNY was widely seen as a school of absolute last resort for kids who graduated near the bottom of their classes. It also didn’t help that the controversy over Leonard Jeffries’ Afro-centric teachings added to the widespread perception that CCNY has been reduced to an academic dump back then.</p>
<p>As I understand it, in some countries there really are just one or two top universities, and it makes a huge difference to your life if you get into one of them or not. In that scenario, it really might be unfair for considerations other than merit to have an impact on admissions.</p>
<p>But that’s just not how it is in the U.S. Despite what you might think from some of the discussions on CC, the Ivies don’t play that role in U.S. society. Indeed, there are hundreds of colleges and universities that produce students who end up at the highest strata of various fields in the U.S. While I think it is beneficial to go to a selective school, the benefit isn’t really all that huge.</p>
<p>I would like to see a couple more universities eliminate athletics altogether and admit solely on GPA and test scores. Tigerdad’s and others’ kids could go there, and we could stop repetitively debating the “unfairness” of URMs, legacies and athletes.</p>
<p>From reading this thread, one would think that the student bodies of HYPS are composed exclusively of legacies and hooked candidates. It’s just not true. Plenty of kids at these schools have no family connections and are not URMs, recruited athletes, or development cases. Plenty.</p>
<p>Bay, perhaps you’d be interested in investing in my previous brilliant idea:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/509446-modest-proposal-super-stat.html?highlight=superstat[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/509446-modest-proposal-super-stat.html?highlight=superstat</a></p>
<p>Bay - MIT, Caltech and Chicago already take care of athletic admits.</p>
<p>They do still care for URMs. They seem to be ambivalent about legacies at MIT (the app seems to ask about parents attending MIT or working there) and Caltech. Not sure about legacies at Chicago.</p>
<p>Our experience was somewhat different from JHS’s which I think just shows how much variability there is in the system. Our oldest 1570/1600 SAT, 2400 SAT subject tests (one sitting), No. 8 in a class of 650, 5’s on all his APs, got into his legacy school, what were probably considered excellent ECs (the main one was outside school and hard to judge) was rejected or waitlisted at equivalent schools, but got into Carnegie Mellon’s Comp Sci program which had about the same selectivity as the tippy top schools. He applied to Harvard the year they announced plans to create an engineering school and hire 100 new professors in the field, so I think that he was a particularly attractive candidate that year. I didn’t consider him a slam dunk at the legacy, but his stats were obviously fine. Since he didn’t attend H, I hope some non-legacy is grateful for the place!</p>
<p>Younger son had a B+ academic average, but only missed being top 5% in his class by one place. He got into the number 8 ranked college in the country that year. How? By applying EA and writing clever essays, interesting activities outside of the school, and having teachers who I think really went to bat for him. He also applied to the same legacy college as his older brother, but didn’t get in, clever essays will only get you so far. We are thrilled with the school he’s attending which I think is rated somewhere in the 20s on that silly list. It’s provided him opportunities that I am not convinced would have been available to him at the top ranked school in the country.</p>
<p>It’s not HYPSM or bust, it’s HYPSM or top state schools (especially with merit scholarships). I would even prefer the latter over some in those 5. But that has nothing to do with what we are discussing here. We are discussing legacy policy from top school adComm point of view.</p>
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<p>God that would be the world’s most boring university…most of the kids I’ve met that have perfect test scores and GPAs have zero social skills.</p>
<p>^I think this is exactly the kind of negative stereotyping that contributes to the rejection of top scorers from universities. whartongrad08 must live in a different type of community from the one I live in.</p>
<p>Re post 330: Many students with perfect scores and GPAs do not trumpet those accomplishments. I suspect that those who feel the need to announce their perfect scores and GPAs are in the minority, and I’m not surprised that they have weak social skills.</p>
<p>It stands to reason that in Hilbert space the personalities of perfect scorers might be more multi-dimensional.</p>
<p>The bottom line though is that in this country students with perfect scores do not necessarily want to go to a college that only accepts students with perfect scores.</p>
<p>Yes, JHS, and their personalities are also complex. :)</p>
<p>JHS - It is demeaning to attribute a specific type of personality to someone with a perfect score. Based on your kid’s scores, I consider him a perfect scorer by the way.</p>
<p>I wasn’t attributing any specific type of personality to perfect scorers. I was making a joke about QuantMech’s “community” (via his profile), and making what I regard as a factual statement. By and large, more perfect scorers choose Harvard (which pays fairly little attention to perfect scores) over places like Caltech (which pays more attention, even if it does choose to consider other, extraneous information). As someone said before, the perfect scorers want to rub elbows with the moneyed elite and athletes, even if they are slightly less intelligent.</p>
<p>Dragging my son into it illustrates another reason why colleges don’t value perfect scores that much: they aren’t very perfect. At the time he applied to college, my son had near-perfect scores in math, an 800 SAT I, 790 SAT II, and no classroom grade below 91 ever. He was also a couple of months away from hitting a wall in calculus, one that gave him his only sub-80 grade for a marking period in his high school career. He then hit precisely the same wall in college, and went from an A to a C+ in the space of one quarter. The fact is, he isn’t that good at math, doesn’t really like it, etc. You just couldn’t tell that at all from his paper credentials.</p>
<p>^Kind of like my computer guy who looked well rounded on paper - A’s in history and 5’s on the APUSH AP! 800 on CR, twice! But once he got to a college that was happy to accept all his AP scores for distribution requirements he took nothing but math, comp sci and physics. (Which is why BTW he chose Carnegie-Mellon over Harvard.) He fits every stereotype about perfect scorers by the way (well except for being a grind, it all came very easy to him at least in high school). We love him anyway. :)</p>
<p>FYI, JHS – QuantMech is a she, not a he.</p>
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<p>Maybe I’m applying my stereotype a bit too broadly and I apologize if it offended anyone but that has just been my personal experience across h.s., undergrad, and in my career. Like you said maybe I have lived in a different type of community from the one that others have lived in. Obviously I have met people with “perfect” CVs (from a test score and GPA perspective) that did have social skills but I found this to be very rare, particularly in my career. As a former investment banker and current employee at a F500 tech company, I’ve come to see countless cases of analysts or engineers that we’ve interviewed that on paper were perfect (top grades, test scores, etc etc) but once you talked to them you realized that their social skills / EQ were non-existant. One of the most interesting things I’ve come to learn is that the most successful people are those that meet the minimum bar of intelligence but have out of this world drive, social skills, and EQ - all coupled with a deep network of well connected individuals. Honestly, this is part of the reason why, at least on wall street, you see a disproportiate amount of former 2.5-3.0 GPA Ivy athletes in the upper echelons of management as opposed to the extremely intelligence / perfect score people that just don’t have the social / people skills to move up the management chain where your ability to relate to clients, be personable, manage / motivate employees, and sell are much more important than intelligence.</p>
<p>" most successful people are those that meet the minimum bar of intelligence but have out of this world drive, social skills, and EQ - all coupled with a deep network of well connected individuals. "</p>
<p>They drove wall street into a ditch.</p>