Yes, because of NCAA minimum requirements. But we aren’t talking about the Mississippi State type colleges on this thread, and I was clear in my post I was talking about highly rejectives.
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Who is “we”?
Like, I for one would welcome an end to the hyperlocalization of curriculum control in the United States.
And if “we” put that to a vote, “we” would get outvoted by some enormous margin by the rest of the voting “we”.
So “we” have some choices about things “we” can do. Consistent with American values, we can actually vote with our dollars.
Like, there are some quite good colleges in the U.S. where a person with sufficiently good numbers is going to be all but guaranteed admission, unless they are like a convicted serial killer or something. Meaning the “generally positive” personal 3 profile that might have been not good enough for Harvard will be fine for them.
And for that matter, you might find an “honors college” within that bigger college that will also be happy to admit a Harvard personal 3 with great academic qualifications.
Now, if you start demanding those colleges do not also recruit any athletes, that is going to narrow things down a lot. But–who cares? Like if you are an Honors Math major, I would not particularly worry about encountering the sorts of recruited athletes that some people seem to be worrying about.
So that is the sort of thing “we” can actually do about it. Don’t like how Harvard runs its college? Fine, you don’t need to leave the U.S., you may not even need to leave your state, to find a situation more to your liking.
So what’s the problem? The problem is if you feel like that honors college or whatever is not good enough for you, if you feel entitled to something better, and you see Harvard as something better.
I personally think the right answer is Harvard is not necessarily better, so if you don’t like how they run their college, don’t apply to Harvard.
But if you very specifically want what Harvard offers but you are complaining about how Harvard goes about offering that–I mean, come on. It is a free country, which means people are free to assert entitlement to whatever they feel like, but to me people are not in fact entitled to get what Harvard offers, except completely changed to better suit them personally.
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Right, we need to distinguish between recruited athletes at colleges like Harvard, and non-recruited student-athletes at colleges like Harvard.
Recruited athletes got Harvard 1s for athletics, and it was basically a hook because that meant completely different academic standards applied to them.
Non-recruited athletes are basically the kind of people Harvard thinks might do intramural or club sports at Harvard (possibly they could walk on to varsity, but probably not). And there was no evidence that operated like a hook in the same way as being a recruited athlete. Instead, it was one way you could get a Harvard 2 on the activities/athletics leg of the stool, but you still needed to get 2s on the academic and personal legs.
Although being something like a team captain could potentially help on the personal part, which is true generally for activities–they can serve many purposes, including evidencing personal traits.
But anyway, being an athletic 2 at Harvard would typically still take a lot of time during HS.
So the question posed by the academics uber alles proponents is whether we want Harvard admissions to basically say:
Either be a recruited athlete, or don’t do athletics at all. Because if you waste all that time on athletics in HS, even near-perfect grades and test scores still won’t be enough. You’ll have blown your chance because you foolishly used your time outside of class on playing the sports that you love, being physically fit, and making friends, when you could have been doing a bunch of academic-adjacent competitions. And people like you who make such obviously bad life choices like that don’t deserve to go to Harvard.
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I am an avid sports fan. My dad was a college athlete and S24 is a varsity athlete (in a niche sport that he would never be recruited for but will continue to pursue recreationally). I think sports can be an awesome EC for many reasons and they should be viewed favorably. But non-recruited athletes meet the same academic bar as everyone else - athletics enhances their application but doesn’t replace the need to have outstanding grades/scores etc. A few years ago our valedictorian was also the captain of the football team (but not recruitable) - I’m sure it enhanced his already stellar application (he’s at Yale).
Exactly. That kid sounds awesome to me, Yale is lucky to have him.
But others in this conversation want to say if the comparison is:
Applicant A: Has a 4.0 UW, 35 ACT, captain of the football team, also on varsity basketball and lacrosse, but not recruited for any
Applicant B: Has a 4.0 UW, 35 ACT, has done well in a lot of STEM competitions
Then B should beat A every time when it comes to Yale admissions.
And if A actually had “only” a 34 ACT, and got admitted when B did not?
Burn the college to the ground and start over . . . .
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That’s not how I feel. When it comes to ECs I think variety is the spice of life. In addition to athletics S24 is also on the science team - it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive (btw, he isn’t looking at Harvard so this isn’t personal in any way).
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I don’t think @NiceUnparticularMan was referring to you 
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This is very funny 
. It applies to all activities. For every kid that did well on the Math Olympiad, there are a thousand kids that did not even make the AIME. The journey should be more important than the destination as there is no guaranteed path
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For now, maybe. But if some of the posters here get their way, nothing else will matter but childhood math performance.
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We. Us. You and me. Together.
That was my way of agreeing with your assessment of the (un)likelihood of the systemic change that would be necessary to alter the existing state of affairs in any meaningful fashion.
I think I made it fairly clear already that I do not specifically want what Harvard offers.
What I specifically want it a lot more like what MIT and Caltech offer (though I could do with even less holistics).
I definitely do not specifically want what my state flagship offers (honors or no honors), even though my younger has amassed not one, not two, but three full tuition merit scholarships from them before he entered high school.
And I see no logical contradiction in being prepared to settle for second, third, or fourth choice in this less than ideal world of ours, without agreeing to love the entire package, just the way it is.
This ain’t marriage, y’know… 
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There has been a lot of discussion on this thread about exactly how many 2s, or a combination of 1s and 3s, a student needs for a likely admission to Harvard. But a key underlying assumption is that the scoring is objective and consistent between different reviewers, so that all applicants are evaluated on a level playing field.
I think it’s worth questioning if that’s actually the case. As a brief summary, there are four categories (Athletic, Academic, Personal, and Extracurricular), and each is evaluated from 1-4. But there are also + and - ratings, so the actual rating goes goes from {1, 1-, 2+, 2, 2-, 3+, 3, 3-, 4+, 4}. This means the actual difference between a 1 and a 4 is actually 9 steps, not 3 steps. As far as I know, there is no 1+ or 4-.
My son has seen his admission file and shared it with me. He had an alumni interview and 2 admission readers, one of which was “WRF” (who I believe is the admissions director William R Fitzsimmons). All of them scored each category, but with the important exception that the alumni interviewer combines athletic and extracurricular into one category. But as my son is not an athlete, it’s pretty clear that that alumni score in this category was purely for extracurricular and not athletic.
I will not be sharing the specifics of my son’s file, but I wanted to point out the disparity between these three evaluators, all of which are supposed to be using the same rubric. Important to note, all of these evaluations were done before he received a few awards in spring of his senior year (there are separate notes for those), so everyone was looking at basically the same information for their evaluation.
In one of the categories, there was a 5 step difference between the highest and lowest score between these three reviewers. In another category, there was a 4 step difference, and in the final category, there was a 3 step difference. To me, these are pretty massive differences in what should be similar evaluations. If his ratings are representative, admission can be hugely affected by the random chance of which reader you got.
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This was definitely not an assumption by Harvard as revealed in the litigation. The basic process, at least in that period, was an application was supposed to go to two initial reviewers, and then a third more experienced reviewer could adjust the ratings. This is how we know there was cases of, say, initial reviewers giving 1s that got adjusted down to 2+s by the third reviewer. The reviewed applications would then go to committee for debate and voting.
That sort of process implies Harvard expected that different reviewers will have different impressions, that more experienced reviewers would better understand Harvard’s standards than less experienced reviewers, and that ultimately the committee members could disagree on the proper evaluation of any given applicant.
It is indeed possible despite their multi-layered efforts to deal with that issue, it was path dependent. Meaning maybe if you got lucky/unlucky with the initial two reviewers, it could impact the final committee decision. It is very hard to test for that sort of thing, though.
I think Kristoff can be forgiven his pre-SCOTUS support of legacy admissions since the existence of white privilege was always the core consideration for Harvard and other elite colleges’ support of affirmative action. Without one, the other was bound to fall. Just wait.
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He claims his opposition is actually principled, based on a belief that privileged legacy students should not be further advantaged, even compared to other white students.
He may have seen it more as a tit-for-tat, you lose URM status and I will lose legacy hook, but that means he was happy to have his family improperly advantaged so long as others were also hooked. Interesting.
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Yeah. It’s not if. It’s when. It really is not morally defensible.
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Character is important. Don’t we all wish we can tell someone’s character in 10 months, let alone in 10 days, or 10 hours, or 10 minutes? From what? A casual alumni interview, an essay or two, and a list of self-described activities?
And if each of us is asked to list three of our least favorite politicians, the chance is pretty good that all three graduated from some of these elite colleges.
These colleges are really looking for influences. Euphemisms like “citizen-leaders” just sound much nicer.
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Just another resource from Harvard to consider in light of some of the above discussions. Nothing really new, but we were basically inferring what Harvard would say about how to spend HS time based on what they look for in admissions, and in this page Harvard actually connects those dots itself:
A few notes.
One thing that is clear is Harvard does not want to rule out exploration, and therefore is de facto arguing against the non-US model:
A well-rounded education
A good high school education should do more than prepare you for the next level of education or for later employment—it should prepare you to take advantage of future learning opportunities of all kinds. You should gain particular skills and information, as well as a broad perspective on the world and its possibilities.
As previously mentioned there are pros and cons to both the US and non-US ways of doing things, but I again think that wanting Harvard to stop being committed to this ideal of a broad, exploratory liberal arts education is such a fundamental change you are basically asking Harvard not to be Harvard.
It then has a What Harvard Looks For section, and it is interesting to me the degree to which it is basically answering the sort of people looking for a formula approach, and explaining why it doesn’t do that:
This overview is not intended to provide a formula that will ensure admission to Harvard. Our admissions policies are based on many criteria. Some are academic; others are not.
Our Admissions Office chooses carefully from a broad range of applicants who seem to us to offer the most promise for future contributions to society. Not all of the students who are best prepared for college will be among those with the most future promise, nor are all of the most promising well prepared academically.
While the heart of the matter will always lie in academic promise, we prize candidates with special talents and with outstanding personal qualities; we are interested in students who excel in one or more extracurricular activities; and we seek a distinctive and diverse national and international student body.
Most of all we look for students who make the most of their opportunities and the resources available to them, and who are likely to continue to do so throughout their lives.
That line, “Not all of the students who are best prepared for college will be among those with the most future promise,” bluntly summarizes why Harvard does not accept that a pure academic ranking of applicants would best serve its mission.
A little less bluntly, but perhaps no less significantly, Harvard treats “special talents” and “outstanding personal qualities” as distinct from “academic promise,” and it lists “extracurricular activities” in this context. I don’t think this is quite going so far as to say it entirely rejects the value of academic-related extracurriculars, but I do think it is suggests that Harvard typically sees the most value in extracurriculars that are not redundant with demonstrating academic promise, that instead show other sorts of talents, other sorts of personal qualities, and a willingness to make use of more than just academic opportunities.
Anyway, there we go–that is explicitly what Harvard says to kids in advance of applying. And if parents want Harvard for their kids, I think those parents should understand what Harvard wants out of their kids. And if they read this and do not particularly like what Harvard wants out of their kids, if indeed it does not fit naturally with what that kid really wants to be, I really hope they are open to changing their mind about wanting Harvard for their kid.
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I think what drives interest in Harvard goes beyond academics - yes, it is an excellent school with lots of famous academics on the faculty, but what pulls people in is the name. It’s part of the reason it wins almost all cross admit battles. I was flummoxed when the valedictorian of S22’s class (a true academic superstar who was planning on CS) chose it over their acceptance to MIT. There is a reason it is the “Hail Mary” pick for so many HS students. Rightly or wrongly, kids (and many of their parents) perceive that it is some kind of golden ticket.
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And the winner is…
"As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we find that academic qualifications predict later life success much better than extracurriculars and other non-academic factors.
Still, I would not advocate for an admissions process that just picks people with the highest test scores and grades. Instead, I’d establish a highly rigorous academic cutoff that applicants are required to meet to be admitted. It could be based only on SAT/ACT scores, or it could be a combination of test scores and GPA (like the Academic Indices used by many schools). It could even be weighted by course difficulty. The cutoff would be high enough that most applicants don’t meet it, but still low enough that there are many more eligible applicants than spots.
Above that cutoff, I’d offer admissions spots randomly. If you meet the bar, you get a lottery ticket. You could meet diversity goals either with formal quotas (definitely illegal), or with probabilistic quotas achieved by giving low-income or first-generation students, students of color, students with disabilities, and other worthy groups extra tickets (probably illegal, but I’m not a lawyer).
I see three big advantages to this. First, it would limit the college admissions arms race. You still need to work really hard to achieve a high enough SAT score or GPA, but once you meet the standard, there is nothing more you can do. Smart and talented kids would be able to enjoy their childhoods a little."
You heard it here first.
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This gave me a chuckle.
We were disсussing these very same points literally hours ago: both the high ACT/SAT scores decidedly NOT being the be-all, end-all qualifications of academic excellence due to their low ceiling, and some smart and talented kids deriving as much enjoyment from pushing themselves to the limit intellectually as others might from breaking their personal speed limit.
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