@jzducol Besides athletes, only about 20 students per year attend UT for free. It’s a very desireable school for in-state students of high earners. And because of the top 6-7% rule, there are lots of top students fighting to make the cut in very competitive schools. Many just aren’t applying EA/ED to elite schools out of state. I’m sure Texas isn’t the only state like this. And therein lies the problem with your generalizations.
Seriously, @Data10? Reed College has ONE student and Swarthmore has TWO in the top 184, and you are going to quibble with my characterization that extremely strong math kids are not looking at LACs, at least as a first choice. Lol.
People should look through that list and consider just how concentrated the talent really is in undergraduate mathematics. LACs are basically nonentities in the list of top 500 college mathematicians.
Since I have not lived in Tx I am not aware things are so different there—that many “top high school students” do NOT apply to elite schools out of state. Its good that the top kids from the rest of country don’t have to worry about extra competition from a big state like Tx.
@jzducol Where’s the data to support your assumption that most top students who have the money to afford a $70k+ school are gunning for elite admissions? Folks need to step outside of the CC bubble.
“If some of these colleges are so desirable for the very top applicants, why do they need to lock in the applicants with ED and/or offer merit aid as incentive?”
If Harvard is the top desired school by every top student why have SCEA? Why not allow applicants to apply to other schools as well?
Prestige aside, do you honestly think that HYPS - and only HYPS and that ilk - provide the very best undergraduate education and learning environment in the country, let alone for every student in every academic area?
If your answer is of course not, do you honestly think everyone is a prestige whore?
Who said Harvard is the top desired school for every top student? It’s not. It’s primarily competing with the other SCEA/REA schools for general talents, and with MIT/Caltech in some STEM fields. These schools should remove the single choice restriction as MIT/Caltech does.
Putnam is a weird test. You could be a great mathematician but too slow on exam day. Also, some of the kids are just not mathematically mature enough as an undergrad if they haven’t been to math camps where they learn proofs and abstract problem solving like the Williams math camp.
In freshman year my math major (4.0 GPA) kid got a zero. This year he got 1 problem correct. He is taking real analysis now and that should firm up his proof writing. Some colleges run entire classes on the Putnam, others have Putnam clubs. His has neither.
He prefers applied math and stats anyway, but likes the challenge of the exam. I can’t imagine spending an entire Saturday to get crushed by a math test.
The kids at the top of the Putnam are brilliant, but I dont think you can use the results to judge a school.
Yet all the HYP group do SCEA, not just EA. Is that an indication they can’t compete without forcing top students with general talent to make a choice?
I’ll answer - of course not! Every single school on the planet has at least one rational person involved in admissions decisions that realizes out of the thousands of top students there will be multiple preferences. Every school out there - no matter how wonderful - knows that top students will have many choices. SCEA and ED serve to give schools an indication that the school really is the top choice of the applicant, which allows schools to avoid wasting time and resources on students who interested in another school and to help sort out the ones that will be happy to be there.
Do many students want to go to H, Y, P? Yes. Does every student have H, Y or P as their top choice? No. If you can’t even picture that out of the millions of graduating seniors there might not even be a few thousand with different goals, dreams, desires, dislikes… not sure what else I can say.
I’m not a fan of SCEA/REA either, but SCEA/REA is not equivalent to ED. SCEA/REA doesn’t restrict an applicant to apply to other colleges in the RD round, so a top applicant can still comparison shop, except without the boost that early application may offer. Stanford and/or Harvard should offer unrestrictive EA, IMO. If either one of them did, the other SCEA/REA schools would have to follow, or be grouped in a different (and lower) tier.
“be grouped in a different (and lower) tier.”
I actually sprayed water on my monitor at that one.
They’ll be grouped in a lower tier… by God? By the Top Student Secret Ranking System? By the New Englander Snooty Scale? Who exactly is doing this grouping? :))
The top schools are all in a similar tier. Of fantastic schools. Some will appeal more to certain students. It’s funny to think that there is a single rating system by which all top students evaluate and choose schools. Harvard could change it’s admissions system to require applicants post a picture of their naked patootie and it would still be the top choice of many students.
It’s a big country. Millions of graduating seniors and thousands of top students. Many schools will attract some of those top students no matter what admission system they use.
Didn’t Harvard (and Princeton) remove the restriction for a few years and then went back to restrictive?
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-michele-hernandez/what-harvard-and-princeto_b_828527.html
Re: Putnam and math brains - Not every personality wishes to enter into competitions to prove something.
We’ve really lost the plot on this question of ED, SCEA, RD, etc. The original contention was that despite the differences in accepted percentages (with early decision pools uniformly being admitted at higher rates than the respective regular decision pools for all schools), there was actually no advantage to applying early because the early decision pools represented the “very best” students in the country. It was also alleged that the extraordinarily high relative acceptance rate of legacies in the SCEA pool at Princeton specifically was an illusory “advantage,” an artifact of the alleged extraordinary quality of the Princeton SCEA pool versus its RD pool.
I can see some argument for the SCEA pools along those lines, although I could be equally convinced of the opposite. For instance, some weaker students might choose a particular SCEA program on the grounds that their “demonstrated interest” will count for something. Also, there are of course going to be some preference issues (not all of the “very best” students are looking at the same places), and the very few SCEA choices might not be first choices or compelling enough to forego the chance to apply ED somewhere else.
For ED pools, though, I don’t think the contention holds water. The fact that such a small percentage of students can comfortably afford to be full price implies that many of the “very best” students are not going to be able to go early decision at all (or, if they do, will be restricted to the SCEA schools alone). Although strength of students (however defined) is going to be positively correlated with wealth and income, it remains that talent is more democratically distributed than wealth or income.
Since the ratio of FP to non-FP (either due to lack of resources or willingness to pay full price) is going to be small, the lion’s share of the most talented students in the country is not going to be in the FP group (and, by extension, will not be in the ED group either). It’s hard to see how it could be otherwise.
I imagine in certain parts of the country, big ten is a bigger draw then top ten. A high stat student might still want that Greek life, school spirit, experience.
Colleges seem to know their pecking order better than you do, by the choice of the admission system they select.
Of course that’s true. But it is equally true that the overwhelming majority of talented undergraduate math students will be drawn in. It’s been going on since 1938.
This is a bit dated (2005), but remains the best short description of its significance I have seen:
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm
Results in the Putnam are a good gauge of the mathematical talent present at any particular college.
Pecking order implies there is one system, that everybody agrees and buys into it. You can participate if you want to. But not everybody does.
What’s really funny about this continual early action argument is that this idea that universities should make admissions as favorable for the applicant as possible, and they should bend over backwards for students (many of which aren’t going to attend there institutions, even at Harvard ~ 1 in 5 turn down their acceptance). Admissions offices are doing what’s best for the university or they’re not doing what they are suppose to be doing,
Curtis McMullen went to Willaims. I doubt he ever took the Putnam.
@SatchelSF You should read the following. Lots of math brains would disagree with you
It is completely true that not everyone wants to go to Harvard. With my daughter there were very important considerations: Size, location, weather, and in relation to the HYP’s something not quite verbalized that i would call snobbishness. She did not apply to Harvard.