@Pizzagirl : Whoops lol. Well, to this person, it seems Ivies (as if they are all the same in their prestige and admissions policies) are a special case even apart from schools that are basically the same level.
@bernie12, I have no experience with non-Ivy schools that are comparable to the Ivies, so no, I cannot speak to how those non-Ivy schools do things. I have no idea about them.
Well, I mean I’m just speaking to the common knowledge that the Ivies are a group of schools in an athletic league and that, while yes, they are all very selective, you still cannot lump them together as some monolithic group (and claim you know how ALL of them work in a specific manner as opposed to other schools that are similar). Whether you know about them personally is irrelevant. Even a person who attended 1 or 2 Ivies throughout their life can’t claim to personally know the Ivies and their behavior as a group (because they don’t really function as a group beyond sports). You can claim some level of understanding in a generic way, which is fine. But if you can do that, then the same things can be claimed for other very selective private schools.
“Just because you and your children couldn’t get into an elite university doesn’t mean that you are entitled to make up your own falsehoods about those who could.”
And exactly who is being divisive???
@bernie12, personal experience with a school by itself isn’t critical, but I think that it’s helpful. I’m a donor, graduate and active alumnus with one of the Ivies. If I had a child applying, I really don’t think that the school would care that s/he would be a legacy, given how little the school cares about me as an alumnus. Plenty of available information about legacy admissions, both at that school and elsewhere, bear that out. If I were John Paulson, things may be different, but I’d expect that his kids are sharp enough to be within range of being admitted regardless of legacy status anyway.
MidwestDad3, the statements that the other poster made as to legacies’ racial composition and abilities were not supported by verifiable facts–and they completely contradict everything that I’ve read (and know from personal experience) about legacy admissions. If you have other views, I’m all ears.
Again, one Ivy, not “the Ivies”…I’m just saying be careful with that language. I see the same thing with younger posters on here lumping them together like that as if they are the “special 8” that behave the same but just so happen to have different incoming stats. The belief has a non-sensical contradiction. As for legacy admissions, the idea is that they at least pretend to give them special consideration. There seems to be a lot of controversy about it: http://thepsychreport.com/essays-discussion/rejected-student-didnt-complain/
Again, I wish more schools were maybe like Brown and broke things down statistically, that way we can at least estimate any advantage (if it actually exists) based on the IQR (or admitted students from the previous year) admit rate overall vs. the legacy admit rate. The reason I say this is because I know many articles are presenting statistics in a strange way to make points. For example, they typically compare overall admit rate to legacy admit rate, so they would be comparing say, Harvard’s 5-6% overall to a legacy’s 15-30% admit rate. This is problematic because it doesn’t take into account that most legacies will fall into the IQR just as most normal admits do.The amount of denials for those falling in the bottom 25% of the applicant pool is much higher than the IQR and certainly the 75%. Not to mention that the stats of the bottom 25% is, at best, at least a little lower (I’ll say 20-30 points on the SAT) than that of an admit from the previous year (meaning that even some of the IQR of the applicant pool will be lower than those in the IQR of admits). Also, one being around, at, or above (but not top quarftile) will help much more than being much below it but not the 25%. Point is, this gets complicated because there is likely somewhere within the IQR where even a non-legacy has over a 10% (perhaps well over) shot at admission to a place with like 5-10% admit rate. One would thus have to compare legacies to a certain threshold within the applicant pool and the applicant pool overall. The part that said being legacy may equate to 100+ points on the SAT, I don’t know. And then, what if it is across 3 parts. If a place has a 2200+ average and that person has a 2100, then they are still qualified (at least at an Ivy or other non-Technological elite. Technological elites…require a different type of academic prowess that goes even beyond SAT scores to perform well in their curricula, especially when you have STEM cores like Caltech or MIT. Even then, such places would naturally more sensitive to scores naturally) and may still be above the bottom quartile.
“My point wasn’t that legacies are above the caliber of the student body; they aren’t. My point was that legacies are above the caliber of the overall applicant pool; they are.”
I agree with that, but shouldn’t you compare admitted legacies with unhooked admits instead? A study at Duke showed what happened (see p 4-5,11-13) :
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/grades_4.0.pdf
Just like pre-meds who try to game the system by taking the easiest courses available, hooked admits at Duke switch out of hard majors into easy majors (at a much higher rate than average) to protect their GPA. I think this strategy is based on the assumption that employers will be so dazzled by the name of the school and their high GPA that they will fail to notice their easy majors.
The weight of the evidence suggests that they are correct. Even graduate schools, who should know better, are still committing the fundamental attribution error. Elite employers such as Google, Mckinsey, and Goldman, on the other hand, are not fooled.
The new math sequence referred to at Berkeley is Math 10A-10B.
Here is a description of the course:
http://mcb.berkeley.edu/undergrad/courses/courses/math10
@Canuckguy : You are referring to the exams or case interviews at those last elite employers right? Yeah, I would say more employers need those based on what I’ve seen. The only thing about the case interviews is that a good career center will help you. However, a student already more adept at thinking on the spot and problem solving will still retain their advantage, so it will come more naturally to such students and the learning curve won’t be as harsh as it is for the “easewhores”.
@ucbalumnus : Yep! As you can see from the article, proposing a new course like that is so political and messy! As I mentioned way earlier here, Emory basically has the same course that emphasizes those concepts (JHU was one of the first places to have it). Interestingly enough, the upcoming is the first that they have eliminated the 1st semester of the life sciences sequence basically reducing it to a 1 semester sequence focusing on the more difficult material. Students who are required to take it must have AP AB credit or take regular calc. 1 first (which is why there are now like 23 sections of it now). However, Emory is weird in that it has may almost as many math majors (even if only joint like econ/math or polisci/math) as life sciences (I know biol has like 500+ and math has been rumored to have 4-500) so it really isn’t a service department. Admittedly, the lower division courses are indeed service courses because no math major (joint or not) I knew had to take single variable calc…and if they do, they would do the accelerated/freshman version of calc. 2. The department could honestly turn introductory series over to other departments and still easily survive because of the amount of majors.
Interestingly enough, we recently began a new quantitative methods dept (statistics I guess) which has an introductory stats. class that ended up shutting down the math dept’s statistics class (I’m sure the math department was actually glad because that was also a service/easy GER course for non-majors). The QTM version is much richer (though also much larger) than the old stats class which was a complete joke with most instructors who probably knew why they were teaching it. At least in the new versions, students learn R and do actual projects and stuff. Also, physics already has its own mathematical methods class that it now requires its majors to take (probably because the person who used to teach a multivariable course specifically for physics majors left). At one point, I think chemistry was considering it and in fact may still do so when the new curriculum comes out (the new foundational physical chemistry course will supposedly use calculus and so will require AP BC or calc. 2 and it is required before students take the advanced pchem course).
Either way, it is always really interesting to see competing interests unfold. It seems that math departments get really defensive when they know that they are basically running off of service courses. I am also very interested to see the future of chemistry departments especially if several medical schools adjust their requirements. Now THAT is a department at most schools that basically survives off of the service courses that may eventually become obsolete in their current structure (like 1/2 of ochem may basically disappear along 1/2 of with gen. chem). Often these courses invite people into the major too, meaning that either more tiering (as in they will have to design one track for pre-meds and one specifically for majors, much like Harvard and Berkeley) or a potential loss of majors as there won’t be as many easier courses to “welcome” new majors (I am partially making fun of those who get BA’s. I saw those students just choose the easy path all throughout, starting with easy gen. chem instructors, then the easiest ochem instructors, the life sciences physical chemistry, easiest electives, and then BOOM! biochem and analytical chem, the only 2 that did not have easy instructors waiting for them. Luckily they saved them for senior year when grades matter less).
My, you’re grumpy and mean-spirited for someone going by the moniker “HappyAlumnus.” LOL. Actually, I did apply to exactly three Ivies and was accepted to and attended two of them. Pretty good acceptance rate, better than legacies at Harvard, and I certainly had no legacy status. Not your “lesser Ivies,” either; the three I applied to were H, Y and P. (Concededly, all the applications and acceptances were for graduate programs, not undergrad; but then, the median HYP undergrad would not have had the qualifications to be admitted to any of the graduate programs I applied to or attended). Oh, and I taught at a fourth Ivy, a pretty good one, better than your average Ivy, I’d say. So there’s that, FWIW, which is only so much as far as I’m concerned but since it seems to matter so much to you, I thought I should set the record straight. My daughters didn’t apply to any Ivies, not because they wouldn’t have been competitive (they would have been), but because they just didn’t like the schools all that much; they both opted for smaller (albeit elite) LACs, and did very well in college admissions and in college, thank you, and based on their experiences they’d do the same in a heartbeat if they had it to do all over again. Also, by the way, my daughters didn’t feel comfortable trading on their legacy status at the Ivies; that just felt “icky” to them, a kind of class privilege they just didn’t want to claim. But that was a side issue. Mostly, they just didn’t care for the Ivy schools, notwithstanding prodding from their father. Too big, too impersonal for them.
I agree with all of this except the last sentence, which to my knowledge has not been demonstrated anywhere in the literature, and in fact a number of academic studies have reached the opposite conclusion. My point is not that less qualified legacies are admitted to the exclusion of more qualified non-legacies, though there may be some of that at the margins. My point is simply that, other things equal, legacies are admitted at a significantly higher rate than similarly-qualified non-legacies. And that is a huge privilege, an advantaging of the already-advantaged. If it was all purely meritocratic, there wouldn’t be much of a reason for a legacy “bump,” would there? I would have absolutely no objection to legacies being admitted at high rates if they weren’t getting that extra bump because of legacy status, but the schools themselves say legacies get special, favorable consideration. The statistics appear to bear that out. At many elite colleges that consider legacy status, legacies comprise 10% to 25% of the student body, while at Caltech which doesn’t consider legacy status less than 2% of the students are legacies. And academics who have studied this have uniformly concluded that legacies do receive a distinct advantage in admissions by virtue of their legacy status, on average a + 45% advantage in admit rates at selective colleges relative to similarly qualified non-legacies, or according to one study (by a Princeton sociologist, no less) the equivalent of a 160-point difference in SAT scores, but much higher at some of the most elite institutions. If you can definitively refute those studies, I’d like to see your evidence.
Again, do you have evidence to back this up? I think your years are a bit off, for one thing. Consider someone who entered college in 1990 and graduated in 1994, immediately married after graduating and had their first child a year later; that child would now be 19 or 20, so perhaps a year or two into college. But not every child is a first child, not every college graduate has a child within a year of marrying, and not every college graduate marries immediately upon graduation—especially among the educational elite, who tend to marry later and have children later than the population at large, So my guess is that most of today’s applicants to elite colleges have parents who graduated college (if they did at all) in the 1980s, not the 1990s, and possibly some even in the 1970s. I don’t know what the racial/ethnic composition of the student bodies at elite colleges was in the 1980s, but then, unlike you, I don’t go off making wild claims about “facts” I can’t back up. The information I do have says URMs comprise about 12.4% of the overall applicant pool at highly selective schools but only about 6.7% of the legacy applicant pool. So the legacy pool is pretty white, I’d imagine. Especially if you factor in Asians, who were not particularly well represented in elite college student bodies in the 1980s compared to today. Again, Caltech is a case in point. Caltech, which does not consider legacy status, is 44% Asian and 28% white. Harvard, which does consider legacy status, is 45% white, and 19% Asian. But perhaps cross-town rival MIT is a fairer comparison to Harvard. Like Caltech, MIT also doesn’t consider legacy status. MIT is 37% white and 24% Asian. Whichever comparison you make, however, Asians seem to fare significantly better at schools that don’t consider legacy status than at those that do. That could change over time, of course, but one of the pernicious effects of legacy preferences is that they tend to lock in and perpetuate the demographics of 20-40 years ago in this year’s admissions decisions.
Bernie, what school are you referring to here?? It is interesting, and would love to hear more.
Happyalum’s experience with the ivys is also at the graduate level, not the undergraduate. For some reason he poo-poo’s his undergrad esperience at Davidson, which is a perfectly fine LAC, and if anyones cares about USnews rankings, is currently tied with Vassar for 11th.
“Some employers seem to fight back by asking for SAT scores”
Canuckguy. I would like you to actually THINK for a moment.
Elite Employer A goes to Elite Schools B, C and D to recruit.
Elite Employer A hates the students they get! They are just a bunch of lame-ass legacies and athletes who can’t add 2+2 and get 4.
So they “fight back” by requiring the students give SAT scores so they can finally separate the wheat from the chaff.
That of course is a nonsensical scenario because if A is so unhappy with the students at B, C and D - they’ll just change their recruiting to schools E, F and G.
“You are referring to the exams or case interviews at those last elite employers right?”
It is even more basic than that. In response to a women’s switch from electrical and computer engineering to psychology because she found the former too hard, Google’s Laszlo Bock said the following: “I think this student was making a mistake,"…. “She was moving out of a major where she would have been differentiated in the labor force” and “out of classes that would have made her better qualified for other jobs because of the training.”
From a different source, a former recruiter for one of the elite consulting firms wrote that they use a minimum of 750 math and a M plus V combine well over 1500 as an initial screen. (For perspective, Harvard’s 25%tile range for M+V was only 1390 a couple of years back). He then said the following:
“Then, your degree should be in something hard: math, physics, electrical engineering, analytical philosophy, computer science, and so on. It’s okay to major in history or literature, but you better have some really tough quantitative or analytical classes on your transcript, and have done very well in them. If your GPA is below about 3.5, you’re out unless there is some really compelling rationale for why. The average successful candidate has a GPA above 3.7. Everyone understands how bad grade inflation is, and that it’s worst in the most elite schools. Any reasonably smart person with good instincts about course selection can figure out how to get a decent GPA at one of these schools”.
“Screeners and interviewers will typically look at the transcript to make judgments about raw candlepower; for example, checking which calculus sequence the candidate completed, and if it was the most difficult track, what grades were achieved”.
When I learned that McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs Group, D.E. Shaw Group etc. asked for SAT scores from job candidates- even those with years of experience, I don’t even need to put two and two together. These firms know.
PG, I think you should stop and think for a while. If a recruiter can screen students by majors and by SAT at B,C, and D, why do they need to go to E, F, and G?
Seems like Emory is spotty on revealing its common data set. The most recent one available seems to be 2010-2011 at http://www.oirpe.emory.edu/institutional_research/Common%20Data%202010%202011.pdf . That one shows that 7.96% of bachelor’s degrees conferred were in biological sciences, versus 1.07% in math and statistics. Social sciences were the biggest group at 23.63% (not including psychology at 7.24%), with business next at 17.46%.
It may be that the service course load on a chemistry department may be too high at some schools.
Prior to 1991, Berkeley’s chemistry department had a traditional frosh-soph chemistry sequence for biology majors – two semesters of general chemistry (1A, 1B) followed by two semesters of organic chemistry (8A, 8B). In 1991, this sequence was changed to remove the prerequisite of 1B for the organic chemistry courses, which were renumbered, so that the sequence became 1A, 3A, 3B, presumably to reduce the service course load on the chemistry department (1B still exists for biochemistry majors who need to take the more rigorous organic chemistry sequence (112A, 112B), and for some non-chemical engineering majors; chemistry and chemical engineering majors take a quantitative general chemistry course (4A, 4B)). Pre-meds taking the 1A, 3A, 3B sequence need a fourth semester of chemistry; they are advised to take an upper division biochemistry course (for non-biochemistry biology majors) for that.
In other words, it looks like the chemistry department pushed a quarter of the pre-med / biology major service course load onto (what is now) the molecular and cell biology department.
https://career.berkeley.edu/Medical/PrepChem
It may not be that unique, though. Notre Dame appears to have a similar chemistry sequence.
@ucbalumnus : My thinking is that they don’t count joint majors which would be the bulk of the math majors. I sort of agree with this idea in principle because the joint majors do not have to take as many math courses as a normal major would. Their primary major is essentially the other subject and math would be more like a concentration IMHO, despite all of them having to take foundations in mathematics. The point is, if joint majors were counted, much more would be “majoring” in majoring in math than about 80 students. The department is known to be stretched to its limits and I kind of buy it because I’ve checked other schools for the amount of sections of intermediated and advanced courses in the department and Emory usually had many more despite the section sizes being roughly the same size.
@Canuckguy : Wow, I think I disagree with the SAT policy. You’re seriously basing the cutoff for jobs that demand or at least encourage creativity on a multiple choice exam…That will basically clearly bias towards only the most selective schools score wise and also not give way to the possibility that someone may improve through a harder concentration or major (it further disincentivizes the pursuit of a challenging curriculum). Your fate is basically sealed once you get to college if you want to work for such a place with that sort of policy. It is only a race among those who were already perfect on a multiple choice exam. That is just poor and would perhaps limit diversity for the wrong reason. I mean, I’m really sorry, but after surfacing science and math classes at schools that are of very high but different selectivity, I see not much evidence that students with a 1400 average are doing much worse than those with 1500 averages. In fact in some cases, the material being taught to the students with the average near or above was lower and they got similar averages. Not to mention the assessments required lower skill levels. They did fine, but not amazing like one would expect. The SAT seems to be able to predict moderate to solid levels of success on easy exams, mostly multiple choice or those that are readily predictable and gamed. I mean riddle me why, even at places like HYPS, UC, C, Vandy, WashU, they still have many STEM (keeping in mind that STEM students traditionally have higher scores-and since scores are high at all selective privates, STEM student scores will be more compressed than normal) classes where the averages are much lower than 80 (and even 70 in some cases) just like elsewhere. Beyond a certain threshold, an ability to think in certain ways cannot remotely be predicted by the SAT. As soon as exams or tasks become cognitively challenging, you have to develop different study skills or thinking skills to get you through. They need to reconsider that policy. I would mainly look at the major, GPA (okay maybe not this as much), and then give some sort of exam or ask for a sample of the work they’ve done for a class or a sample of one of the more difficult assignments they did just so I could see what type of cognitive skills were required to get through a class that they considered “challenging”. I also don’t like the idea of gaming course selection. This is actually why I don’t like the state of highered today. It’s because employers and grad. schools now respond to our behavior to the point where you basically need to use certain strategies that may lead to you getting less out of your experience educationally. We and the consumerism brought it on ourselves. The idea of having to constantly craft a schedule that yields 3.5 is kind of ridiculous especially if I am an engineering major that constantly must take a heavy courseload chock full of STEM to graduate on time. In addition, if many of these classes are training hard enough so that grades have to be curved up to B-/B, I honestly think a person getting a B/B+ is probably getting solid preparation and training. And sometimes getting A/A- (especially A- vs. B+) can be luck on these sorts of curves because one is clueless about where they stand and what cutoffs will be. You simply know “I’m a bit above average”. Either way, that isn’t good and it may end up selecting for some of the wrong people (which is what it is claimed that many med. schools are concerned that they are doing, choosing people who look perfect on paper but aren’t really diverse in terms of academic interests as they once were and also don’t seem to be as creative).
@jym626 : I was talking about Emory of course. The second semester of QTM dept brought the demise of the math dept’s stats. class as many social science departments, biology, and neuroscience started to make the QTM service course a requirement. Note that the dept. is smart enough to require a different intro. course for its majors that is completely unrelated to the service course (and is supposedly much more rigorous mathematically).
@ucbalumnus : As for reporting CDS and stuff, yes it is ever since that SAT reporting scandal, I guess it doesn’t want to make its data as public which is kind of a shame. They should just get over it. It’s not like everyone just wants to go look at the SAT’s…they want to see demographic information and information of the sort you cited. And they have to report real data to the USNews folks anyway. What is so bad about the public seeing it? It is, for example, common sense that our SAT range is lower (and basically always was even before the scandal- our admit student numbers were historically lower than private peers’ enrolled numbers and anyone who looked into it back then could see it, even though somehow USNews got tricked. I don’t see how that is possible since the CDS would have the actually enrolled numbers which were the real ones. Maybe those working for Emory at the time sent a “fake” CDS, because the one on the institutional research website was accurate before the news broke) than private peers, so that point is a bit irrelevant now. I personally think seeing a lower range (though still very selective) may encourage more applicants to give it a shot as opposed to the reaction many will give when they see the admitted range on the admissions website which may be reinterpreted as “if you are unhooked and below 1300, do not bother” which is false because Emory isn’t that stats sensitive both because of who it wants (you have to make sure the people match the academic/intellectual environment. Not just “Admit the highest score range possible!” like some schools I know who are not HYP, and MIT) and also because it has to be careful with yield.
“When I learned that McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs Group, D.E. Shaw Group etc. asked for SAT scores from job candidates- even those with years of experience, I don’t even need to put two and two together. These firms know.”
Do you even know what McKinsey looks for? I know the kind of work because my BFFs are McKinsey people, I work jointly with them on some projects, and right now I am re-doing work for a particular client that McKinsey did a few years ago. There are so many other things like creativity and client presence that are necessary. Raw smarts are just the beginning
Anyway, McK, GS et al are not omniscient gods. They are just companies. That’s all. They hire for what suits them just as other companies hire for what suits them. They do t have some magical potion or insight.
I think the issue is that they could be looking for those things but if some companies are only looking for those things after someone has a 1500 (which may not be substantially different from say, a 1450 in ability)…then no point in ever considering certain positions at said companies even if you are extremely smart and talented but just happened to not earn a 1500 back in HS. Doesn’t really matter if you meet the other qualities once below that sort of threshold. My guess would be that that number was perhaps an exaggeration, or I at least hope so. If it wasn’t, maybe just allow folks to skip college and teach the skills to themselves once they meet that threshold. At that point, going to college while aspiring to such positions is merely a game that seems as if it will usually cost lots of money to play. Another alternative would be to, if below the threshold initially, check for an improvement by looking for a certain level increase via the GRE which also tests stupid math, but at least tests some data analysis and math in context of figures. However, it is overall a sad day when employers cannot trust that college improved the skills of the students. I know companies with actuarial (I have an acquaintance that works at one) positions that make employers test into such raises,signing bonuses, or promotions and those exams are VERY rigorous (though some are multiple choice) and require an understanding of higher level math and intensive calculus based probability and statistics. Needless to say, without a solid foundation, you won’t get through those no matter what your SAT was because SAT does not test that level of math and only rare students have been exposed to it before college.
“is even more basic than that. In response to a women’s switch from electrical and computer engineering to psychology because she found the former too hard, Google’s Laszlo Bock said the following: “I think this student was making a mistake,”…. “She was moving out of a major where she would have been differentiated in the labor force” and “out of classes that would have made her better qualified for other jobs because of the training.”"
If this woman prefers to be in psychology and she’s happy with her choice, why the hell does Laszlo Bock’s opinion matter one iota?