"I also agree with many others who have urged highly selective colleges to expand.
…
We think eliminating legacy preferences, balancing recruited athletes on income, and ending the non-academic ratings boost for high-income students would collectively get most of the way there. Each of those changes on its own would be a huge lift. Doing them all together would be a huge challenge for any leader of a selective college to undertake.
Another option is to expand the class by 10 percent. If I were an Ivy-Plus college president, I would strongly consider announcing a phased-in 10 percent expansion of class size, and I would pledge to allocate the newly created spots to low- and middle-income students. I personally would prefer that outcome to the first option. I would allow privilege to persist as it has, if in exchange I get to enroll more worthy students from the rest of the income distribution."
Putting aside admissions criteria, it’s surprising these schools haven’t increased enrollment given the demand. As to allocating new spots to lower income students (a worthy goal), good luck with that — I’m pretty sure there’d be a lawsuit immediately.
I don’t see most schools going back to requiring test scores anytime soon, especially in light of the recent SCOTUS decision…not requiring test scores allows the highly rejectives to attract, consider, accept, and enroll more URM applicants. So, making test scores part of one’s answer to highly rejective college admissions doesn’t make much sense.
Ask UCB and UCLA (the most applied to school) if they would like to expand their class…well yes they would, but they have been thwarted in those attempts because of housing and other expansion issues. Other schools with limited room for expansion would also have that issue too.
These highly rejective schools could offer 4 year online only degrees as an alternative, but the administrations and Boards aren’t sold on that yet…I wonder why?
It also doesn’t fit into these school’s marketing strategies…scarcity/limited spots=elite/prestigious in the minds of way too many.
Again, these schools could all offer fully online degrees, taught by the same profs/TAs at the same tuition level as in-person…yet they don’t (and won’t) because that would tarnish the brand if more people could access it.
They could consult/partner with the leaders of online education like ASU, SNHU, Western Governor’s so they could best implement this. There’s no coincidence that ASU Online’s first (modified) brick and mortar OOS offering is in Los Angeles.
I’ll admit that for Ivies in expensive urban settings, like Harvard, it is a little trickier. Real estate is expensive (and not always available adjacent to/near the college) in the Boston/Cambridge metro area. That being said, they could find a way if it was an important priority - Harvard certainly isn’t lacking for cash. As to on-line, I’m not holding my breath. It isn’t perceived as “elite” enough for Harvard and its brethren.
Not only it would tarnish the brand, but students who would attend the college remotely also wouldn’t have the connections and the networking effect to be useful to themselves, and to the college.
I think you are correct, but in my view that is indeed wrongly. Not that Harvard can’t be great for the right kids, but it isn’t the best school for all high-achieving kids. Such that many who potentially could get admitted could reasonably decide not to apply, if there are a sufficient number of other, better-fitting, colleges.
I realize that is a tough sell in certain social circles, but hopefully discussions like this can help families be a little more informed about the various pros and cons of these colleges.
They make decisions that are beneficial to the institution and its priorities. This is what we know, and these schools have been transparent that their institutional priorities are the driving force in admissions and elsewhere. We just don’t know what these priorities are from year to year.
There certainly is a draw for some, and, I too, have seen a cross-admit prefer it. It wasn’t a surprise in her case. These two institutions have very different cultures. Nobody should be confused about which one is a better fit for them.
"Stereotyped as convention-going, pocket-protector-wearing, chess-playing, infrequently-showering types, nerds are one of our society’s most ridiculed groups. And, for a university with an international reputation as a bastion of intellectualism, Hаrvard is startlingly devoid of them.
Indeed, Hаrvard has pulled off the astonishing feat of branding itself as the world’s greatest university but not the world’s nerdiest. While MIТ and the University of Chicаgo dukе it out for the title of nerdiest school, James Franco and Renee Zellweger show up at Hаrvard to party. Somehow, miracle of miracles, Harvаrd is “cool.”"
Of course, it’s an exaggeration. Harvаrd still has the 2nd best Putnam team. But the culture difference is real and palpable.
Our older didn’t apply there, and I really, really hope our younger won’t have to either.
Of course to do that and maintain Yale’s standards for the Yale College experience, including the residential college system, was (and will continue to be in terms of operating costs) very expensive.
But I note again that overall college enrollment in the United States is actually going down from a peak circa 2010. I do think there is also a relative demand shift from more “local” schools to more “regional”/“national” schools. But still, I think it is important to understand the increase in total applicants is much less than the increase in total applications.
Finally, I’d personally suggest that the mindset that the US college system would be significantly better if the Ivy League moved from enrolling about 0.4% of the US college population to 0.44% is thinking pretty small ball (approximately double that for Ivy+ and I would give the same answer). I would instead suggest that the most potential for positive change is among the other 99.6%–including the parents who are arguably undervaluing the “top” of the other 99.6%.
Yes, and many colleges are doing a much better job than the highly rejectives at elevating significant numbers of students out of poverty/making class jumps. This is one area where the highly rejectives don’t rank highly.
Not to be uncharitable, but I have heard this described as the “just one more” problem.
Parents, say, who value these colleges precisely because they are so selective/elite/prestigious/etc. don’t really want them to become materially bigger/less-selective, because they will then become less elite/prestigious.
What they really want is for them to let in just one more person, namely their kid.
In fact, there are actually information sources available if you want to find “colleges that change lives” (hint hint). There are lots of different ways of thinking of the “best” colleges, if you are open-minded.
The CTCL schools, while great for some students, are too small to make a significant impact on economic and/or social mobility.
Here are USNWR rankings (there are other places that also ‘rank’ based on various economic and/or social mobility factors). These lists are generally populated with relatively larger state schools.
You are probably right. Scarcity makes a thing more valuable. That isn’t to denigrate the Ivies and like schools (S24 is looking at a few) - they offer a lot that is wonderful outside of just the name. At the same time, there are a lot of wonderful schools outside this cohort which offer a great collegiate experience, including a rigorous education.
Like many others, our older spent his freshman fall semester taking online classes from his childhood bedroom during the 2020 pandemic shutdown. He did fine, but his true MIT experience didn’t start until he came to campus.
The classes themselves are only a small part of the package. In fact, most of them are available online at OCW, but people still want to come to MIT.
The most important part of the experience is arguably peer interaction, and it just isn’t the same on Zoom screen.
Further, over 90% of MIT undergraduates are involved in research, and that doesn’t scale up all that well if you suddenly expand the student body ten-fold. There are only so many high-quality projects that the faculty is able to offer to undergrads while staying involved with mentoring them.
There will always be a trade-off between maintaining the character and quality of the program and expanding access.
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone could study at MIT and enjoy the same outcomes? But you can’t have MIT adopt the ASU model without it becoming more like ASU and less like MIT.
My two cents is the unstylish nerds versus preppy jocks thing is not a constant of human societies, it was more just a passing period in US culture. More typically in human history, socioeconomic elites have deemed themselves as the smart people. Of course the concept of a person who is so wrapped up in intellectual pursuits as to be poor company is very old, but that was more of an individual critique.
The idea of smart people being “nerds” as a group seems to have primarily arisen in the 1970s or so, and peaked in the 1980s (which I believe is the last decade in which a lot of the high social status kids were dressing like they were about to go golfing with their parents). In the 1990s, there was more and more pushback in youth culture, including the rejection of the idea that being stylistically like your parents was cool.
Today, I sense like zero general belief that the smart kids in HS are somehow more likely to be unathletic, unpopular, or so on. Kids styles will always come and go and come again, but Gen Z appears to have no particular affection for very strict preppy norms. And being into computers, say, isn’t special, it is just their lives.
So I am not sure that student article from 2009 really means anything today. I think we are more back to the old way of thinking, where individuals might be seen as anti-social, but that is not something associated with smart people as a group.
*Ewan Chen is a math PhD student at MIT and one of the United States math olympiad coaches. As a high school student, Evan was an IMO gold medalist and a winner of the 2014 USA math olympiad
I agree, and to clarify, that was more intended as an example of how parents could think more freely about this issue.
I suppose the main answer is just that we have a huge, robust, varied public college system in the United States, and that is a logical place to look first for meaningful upward socioeconomic mobility. And to me, the fact that some families in some places have a really good range of reasonably affordable public options, and some families in some places do not, is a WAAAAAY bigger societal issue than exactly how Ivy+ colleges are going about their admissions.
Both in sheer scale, but also because those colleges really are supposed to be our main societal response at the college level to the deeper issues of privilege from birth that we have been discussing. So if they are not doing that job adequately for certain groups of kids, that is a very serious problem to me.
Yes, if nothing else they are often very important research universities which also put a lot resources into their colleges. So there are many reasons why a given kid might see some, or indeed many, of them as desirable that don’t depend on generic “rankings” that are essentially just selectivity measures.
But as you point out, that way of thinking leads to more seeing them as part of an attractive group of colleges, not the full extent of it.
I mean, far be it from me to criticize someone’s self-identification as a “nerd” if that works for them.
Still, the long answer:
. . . basically seems to be about not liking the House system, and also not liking parties with a lot of alcohol. Interestingly, the cited source for that:
. . . actually says he misses the Harvard social environment, and that critique is in a footnote. But immediately after that footnote, he says:
But even if most of the students weren’t my kind of people, Harvard still gave me an unparallelled group of interesting, talented, smart, and ambitious classmates. I probably learned more from them than from my professors for the last two years.
Kinda sounds like what Harvard was trying to do . . . .
Anyway, my point is I think if someone doesn’t like the House system and the sorts of parties being held at Harvard, it is obviously fine not to want to be at Harvard. But calling that being a “nerd” still strikes me as a throwback to an old dichotomy that has little relevance to the HS kids I know today.
Well, maybe we can influence such believers away from that notion. Admit rate has become a function of popularity and ease of applying.
Not to harp on TO, but going TO increases the denominator. Now – if it did that for all schools, there would be no advantage gained. But this stands to increase apps at the highly rejective schools that some kids would not have applied to with their 1300 SAT or 29 ACT. So the admit rates at Ivies+ will continue to drop, while Average State U will probably remain around 50% or higher – the 29/1300 kids were already applying there. And probably getting a great education.
Edit: None of that would matter if kids didn’t link admit rate with quality, but some do.
