Two people I went to high school in the 90s with went to Harvard, and I went to a high school in small Nova Scotia town. We only had 700 students in the whole school.
One of them was a decent but unremarkable student who was good enough at hockey to eventually play in the NHL. The hockey got him into Harvard. The other guy was a very good student and a decent enough rower to make the reserve team at Harvard. These student athlete types probably account for a fair number of accepted applications.
As a father of a daughter who’s entering the second half of her high school career, from what I can tell, it’s a lot harder to get into good schools than it was when I was a kid. I’d love my kids to go to top-20-type schools, but I’ll be satisfied at this point if they go to UGA (plus the tuition would be a lot lower).
Part of the problem is grade inflation. It’s much easier to have a straight A average now than 20 years ago, so it’s hard to stand out from the crowd. And then you have people hiring people to write their entrance exams, and there are also “publication” mills for rich kids to get bogus publications to add to their resume.
This is true. Even in the 90’s, getting a C in a class was basically like failing. Things are also WAY more competitive now. I was near the top of my class, did some varsity sports, was a mathlete, was in the some clubs, did well on my SAT/ACT, etc., nothing overly special. Got into some really good schools, got rejected by some others, but never felt like I had to do anything crazy to stand out.
Now it feels like if you’re not all-state everything or invent a new way to desalinate water, good luck, you’re going to a commuter school.
At my kids’ high school (oy, dlk9s jr is in high school in the fall), I also find it interesting that there is no grade point differentiation between minuses and plusses. An A and A- are the same, B+, B, and B- are the same, etc. Also, finals only count 10% of their grade. The upside of all that is that there is less stress because a 90 (well, 89.5) is the same as a 96 and the final only really matters if you are on the border of two grades.
My son took a high school-level Spanish class this year in 8th grade, so it was graded like a high school class. It was the class he had the most trouble with, but he had like an 86 or something going into the final, so he could have gotten like a 20 and still pulled a B, but it was impossible for him to get an A.
Massive increase in applicants for a fixed number of seats. It’s a prestige badge with fixed supply and rising demand, especially from the ballooning pool of international applicants. The cheaters, scammers, and Aunt Beckys are over-represented in these groups since people aren’t paying $10,000 bribes to get into North Dakota State.
April 4, 1996
Acceptance letters were mailed at 12:01 a.m. yesterday to 1,985 secondary students across America. The class was chosen among a pool of 18,190 applicants, making Harvard’s admission rate a paltry 10.9 percent–the lowest in College history.
…
March 31, 2023
The College’s Admissions Office notified 1,220 students of their acceptances in the regular decision cycle at 7 p.m. Thursday. The admitted students join 722 applicants accepted through the College’s early action program in December, totaling 1,942 admitted students from a pool of 56,937 applications.
The only Yale and Princeton admits from my year at so cal public school were athletes. They were in advanced classes but weren’t the best at the school academically. The top academic student went to cal tech.
I’m glad someone posted this. I haven’t read the study, only the comments about it, but it emphasizes something that I’ve felt pretty strongly about–the move away from standardized test scores is bad, and harmful to underserved communities. Yes, of course kids in rich families can get SAT prep, etc. to jack up their scores. But the question is, what’s the alternative that’s more fair? It’s certainly not things like extracurricular activities, which are substantially more biased towards high-income families. I think this is the most informative summary in that dimension:
The alternative is to just build more schools. We waste god knows how much time measuring and sorting out the 0.1% most deserving students so only the absolute cream of the crop get to go to Harvard and it’s like this country cold just build a dozen new Harvards if we really wanted to. It’s all bullshit artificial scarcity.
There’s no point in tinkering with how the triage is done, rich families will buy SAT prep if standardized testing is how you rank students, they will buy coaches for extracurriculars if that’s the standard.
My daughter is entering her junior year in high school. She gets very good grades (over 4.0 weighted, 3.8+ unweighted), but from what I’ve been hearing from parents who have gone through the college admissions process, I’m just hoping she can get into Georgia at this point. Just go there, have a good 4 years, save us money, and enjoy your life.
(Not to denigrate UGA, it’s a good school. It’s just that in my day, the big state school would have been firmly in the “backup school” category for someone with close to a 4.0, varsity sports, volunteer work, etc. Now I’ve been told it’s tough to get into.)
If the goal is to eliminate the extent to which rich kids are overrepresented at top universities relative to their test scores, the study points to the existence of some fairly straightforward ways to do so. Legacy and athlete preferences can be zapped immediately. Non-academic factors like recommendations and extracurriculars could be hugely down-weighted or eliminated entirely. Other targeted encouragement could increase the application and matriculation rates of the non-rich.
But this is really not the goal of top universities. These schools already have vastly more qualified applicants than they have seats. If they wanted to create classes that were more socioeconomically balanced, they could already do so from their current applicant pool. They choose not to because their goal is, in part, to run the nation’s elite families through their institutions in order to increase their endowments and power in society.
Insofar as a hugely outsized share of the ruling class of the country matriculates through these institutions, it makes sense that they are objects of intense scrutiny. Anything that has to do with the creation and reproduction of the ruling class should be of interest to the public because it has an impact on everyone.
However, many people seem to be interested in these institutions because they think that they are important pieces of our higher education system when that just is not the case. According to the study, the 12 Ivy-Plus schools have an average admissions class of 1,650 and admit around 157 more rich kid than they ought to based on test scores alone. This means that, between these schools, there are around 1,884 seats being misallocated to the rich every year. By comparison, around 4 million kids are admitted at undergraduate institutions in a given year.
The kids who are elbowed out by the 1,884 non-deserving rich kids still attend college, just at a 98th percentile institution, not a 99th percentile institution. The quality of the educational services they receive does not differ, though the prestige, status, and career opportunities made available by their institution does.
Egalitarian reforms to the higher education system should focus on reducing selectivity and making top universities less distinct from the rest of the system. Swapping a few thousand people around the top few percentiles of the university system just isn’t going to do much to create an equal or fair society, if it does anything at all.
There’s a whole lot of quality public unis called “Public Ivies”. At least in Pennsylvania, a shitload of people were targeting Penn State as their only option not a backup option.
I think it extends beyond the Ivies. I’m at a non-Ivy, but for doctoral admissions we’ve faced the issue of whether or not to require standardized test scores. I’ve received many emails from potential applicants asking for waivers and talking about how those tests are biased or otherwise bad. But I’ve always come down on the side of requiring them, knowing that even if they are biased or noisy, they’re still a lot better than the other even more biased or noisy signals.
But at least some other schools that we compete with have made them optional, so it continues to be a question of whether we should, too.
I’m not involved in undergraduate admissions, but I think the same is likely to be true there, as well.
Fundamentally, I don’t think anyone has actually thought about what the goal ought to be. Taking the legacies out of the Ivy League would be madness; the entire point of going there is meeting legacy kids and networking with them! It’s like buying designer jeans and tearing the label off.
If you actually want “Harvard, but without the legacies and child prostitution rings,” we could just build another Harvard. The only actually special thing about Harvard is the elite social network that people say they don’t want. Abe Lincoln was in the middle of a goddamn Civil War and he managed to build a bunch of universities because there was a huge demand for it, we could just build more schools if there’s an unmet demand for education. If what we really want is the prestige and social cachet, that’s not really fixable, only the rich kids and the weird freaks who ace the SAT are ever going to have that by definition.
When I went back to school for a doctoral program, admission was almost entirely because of essays and petition by the presumptive advisor. However, funding was largely determined by test scores. Thanks to ASD I had the highest GRE scores in my cohort and thus was given a free ride that I didn’t even apply for, despite easily being the least intelligent student in the program (no false modesty, there was only 1-2 others where it was even a close call). The whole thing was pretty uncomfortable, but I took the money ldo.
I think there’s a lot of confusion about what the Ivys are, how they relate to the educational system as a whole, and by extension what their goals should be.
Taking legacies out of the Ivys would be madness if you’re goal is to create and propagate a ruling class. If you were purely interesting in meritocratic education then taking out legacies is a great idea. Brunieg points out though that this isn’t a systemic US education problem. There’s no elite out there buying up the top 10-20% of slots and depriving Americans of a good education. It’s the top .1% buying up a thousand slots in colleges that, education wise, give them the same education as a top tier state flagship school.
