| ▲ | mrangle 2 days ago |
| The problem is that private elite colleges never used just SAT scores for admissions criteria, and no amount of assertion that they did or should will change that fact. Focusing on SAT scores advances a false narrative, and serves to try to exert outside influence on adjusting admissions criteria to be more robotic. While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom. What that means is that these students are more often found in elite prep schools. But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools. Though I agree that there is definitely a common difference of opinion as to what such a candidate's profile looks like. If one doesn't have much experience in the Ivy competition pool, for example, it's hard to understand your specific competitiveness. |
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| ▲ | cool_dude85 a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| >While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom. The paper says that the three main causes for Ivy-plus admission rates among the 1% are: "The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families" But are these oh-so-important factors what make for successful students? Let's ask the authors. "Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success." Hm. I guess you'll need a new excuse. |
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| ▲ | mrangle 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >Hm. I guess you'll need a new excuse. I don't, because it doesn't matter what the authors of that paper assert / wishcast in regard to decades old admissions standards. The only people that take virtually any social science paper seriously are people without science training. Or people with an agenda who are willing to overlook the fact that the so-called science is garbage. There's no way that these authors were able to meaningfully statistically parse that elite school non-academic credentials / athletics are negatively correlated to outcomes in comparison to low income SAT only students. How you know is that they aren't even parsing the "three key factors" to arrive at their conclusion. The other part of this that you are missing is that public school academic credentials and private school credentials are in no way 1:1. As someone from a poor background I went to an elite prep school when the academic standards were still as high as ever, but attended a public college that was known for its academics. Prep school was much harder than college, and college was no cakewalk. Good students, most of whom went Ivy and who were about 15-20% of my graduating class, had estimated IQs in the 140s and all were athletes. As the school had a sports participation requirement. Two sports per year until high school, at which point it dropped to at least one sport per year. I played three sports per year. The top students had estimated 150+ IQs, though it gets hard to estimate at that level. Also athletes. You aren't dealing with dumb jocks in the Ivy league. You're dealing with hyper-smart, well-rounded leaders who deserve to be there. Because everything that they've done since kindergarten has made them impressive people by high school. And not just in the classroom. | |
| ▲ | doctorpangloss a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s even simpler than how you’re putting it. Gini coefficient has risen since 1980 and freshman class quality by objective measures like incoming grades and test scores is declining since 1993. It is really improbable that being rich helps you in college - in fact you don’t need to have a study at all to know that the opposite is very probably true. But people like the guy you’re replying to are so hung up on first principles thinking like “increasing selectivity means greater quality.” He thinks that’s axiomatic, when you need to conduct a pretty serious study to measure quality. This study was good because it shows how being rich improves your admissions chances. Probably, increasing numbers of richer students have been causing class quality to DECLINE, not improve, and if it weren’t for donations funding research, the universities are actually WORSE off with the children of the merely richest Americans. This aligns with my experience at such universities, over many years, both as a student and an educator. | | |
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| ▲ | SilverElfin 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom. But the SATs still matter. They are a generalized measure of the student’s quality and are a good measure of how they’ll succeed in general. They should be given more weight than subjective measures. And focusing on them also avoids favoring those “extra” activities that are more accessible to students from wealthy families, who can afford it (money and time). For example, a family that needs the big kid to help watch the little kid can’t afford to have the big kid stay for after school sports. By the way, plenty of public school students also have good test scores AND the extra things you mention. The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic. That’s legacy admissions but also race or gender based quota based discrimination. |
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| ▲ | mrangle 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | What you're missing is that elite prep school admissions to Ivies (for example) virtually all smoke the SAT and are well rounded. The SAT is weighted. If you are going to complain until it completely overwhelms anything else, then you're going to be in for a disappointment. And if the goal is to get it to overwhelm everything else until mostly lesser advantaged kids are admitted, you're going to be more disappointed still because elite kids can be elite and hard to beat even just in terms of SAT scores. Which is where the well rounded aspects of their profile come in. When that's the case for public school admissions, they also get in. But admissions usually well knows what the competitiveness of their classes was in whatever public school they attended. All are not equal, as it goes. Complaining after having taken non-competitive academics isn't honest in the national discussion. Less competitive but still competent wealthy students generally end up at a private liberal arts college. > The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic. You have no way of knowing that this happens often, and the PR and DEI incentives seem to be against it. Last, a factor in all of this is college-by-college capacity for tuition assistance. At a certain point in admitting any class, tuition must be paid by a proportion of students. Endowment capacity differs from college to college, but it isn't helpful to act as if these colleges exist solely to educate every promising lower SES student who can't pay. "Promising" being a relative measurement. |
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| ▲ | fn-mote 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I agree with a lot of this comment. For example, focusing on SAT scores is definitely not the way to go. > But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools. The only way you could make this assertion would be if you knew "high level candidates" who were being refused admission "to elite colleges". And do you mean one? Or talking collectively? So a counterexample would be an high-level candidate who was admitted to NO elite colleges. I do know examples. It happens all of the time. It doesn't even bother me. Colleges only have so many space. Unqualified rich kids getting in: undesirable and irritating. Qualified kids not getting in: a necessary consequence of the math. The easiest way to find examples is to look in poor communities, where kids don't even know that Harvard would be free for them instead of $87k/year. Can't find any exceptional candidates there? Look harder. The idea that there is some fictional "high-level" to begin with is crazy. Reducing all of a young person's humanity to a single metric ("level")? |
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| ▲ | lolwow1234 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is naive. The job of admissions is to make money for the institution. Academics, being "well rounded", being a "leader" is all kayfabe. |
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| ▲ | aabhay 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Colleges are a “marketplace” as much as any other marketplace. Just how Stanford disrupted the traditional Ivy League monopoly, other schools can disrupt the status quo by consistent churning out leaders, great thinkers, entrepreneurs, and the like. What sells the colleges the most is the sense that successful people tend to be there. So while admissions profit can be a very short term goal, any admit counselor knows that the long term goal is to create admirable leaders and change makers. This is not impossible for publicly funded schools. Berkeley has put out consistently top AI researchers and engineers, more so than Stanford in my opinion. | | |
| ▲ | mistrial9 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Stanford builds companies; Berkeley builds entire industries | | |
| ▲ | SilverElfin 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Interesting take. But Wikipedia has lists of scientific achievements and also companies associated with both. Is it really the case that each university has such a strong “personality” or is it just their reputation. | | |
| ▲ | mistrial9 2 days ago | parent [-] | | years ago I had no interest in this old football rivalry stuff.. very, very smart people work&play hard individually at both places. However once things get more organized, the differences are indeed profound for example, the rise and concentration of capital on the one hand, and the Nobel prizes and social contracts on the other. Agree that both places are large enough, active enough, stable enough such that simple comparisons are certainly refutable. However the raw number of graduates is not at all comparable between the two. The inward and enduring commitment to certain (polarized) politics, in both cases, is evident to me. Both institutions can claim societal-level accomplishments in the pure sciences.. | | |
| ▲ | musicale a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Berkeley has more Nobel prizes (and actual elements in the periodic table); Stanford has more Turing awards (with MIT at #2 between Stanford and Berkeley). > However the raw number of graduates is not at all comparable between the two This is true. Stanford isn't too far removed from Berkeley by grad student enrollment (10K vs. 12K) but the undergraduate enrollment is tiny by comparison (7.5K vs. 33K). | |
| ▲ | SilverElfin 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Interesting. Would love to learn more. Of the things you mention the capital thing does seem real. I don’t have enough visibility into these places to know about the rest. Did you attend one of these? |
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| ▲ | kjkjadksj 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If things were really so machiavellian they wouldn’t take broke students at all. |
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| ▲ | jvanderbot 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools This really strains credulity. Decision criteria may not be purely based on academic merit (e.g., SAT), or even significantly based on it. It may also be true that they seek candidates likely to succeed b/c why not? Successful alumni are a self-perpetuating advertisement for your school. But to say they have never refused admission to a candidate that will "truly" go on to succeed is trivially falsified, if only by having limited admissions slots. It's an imperfect game, and I think you're giving them too much benefit of doubt, and playing a "no true scottsman" game here. |
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| ▲ | darth_avocado 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| How are you judging “students who excel in leadership positions” at 18 year old while dismissing SAT scores as an admission criteria? Most of the “captains” in my high school have grown up to have mediocre careers (including me) and at some point were in leadership positions mostly because they “looked cute”. |
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| ▲ | aabhay 2 days ago | parent [-] | | SAT scores are taken into account by many schools for that very reason that it can change how you read the application of a candidate. SAT is almost always read in terms of the deviation from the school or community average. So its not the case that having a decent score from a shit school is worse than a slight-better-than-decent score from an elite school |
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