They certainly don’t fly under the radar of the elite, however you define elite.
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I was thinking more in the opposite direction. Someone taking rigorous STEM courses for the first time in their life. Which, some might say, is, you know… harder to do;)
…I will go one further and say that it’s even obvious to TA’s.
My point harkens to the apocryphal (offensive) story of having now established “what kind of a woman do you take me for?” i.e. “we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.” Ultimately my issue is that the rank/stack purists love to claim that it’s fair(er) because it’s objective. When it’s simply subjective about other criteria. Criteria that they’ve decided is ok, or superior. When it’s not. it’s simply different. As these schools agree by and large 
By the way points systems like you outline seem appealing, but are also tricky. Not all alumni are equal right? Some do nothing at all or ever again after receiving their sheepskin. Some interview. Some interview 3 kids each year, others 10, or 20. Other still coordinate and assign hundreds or thousands of interviews. Some lead local alumni chapters. Some give money annually at the $500-1000 level, others at $5000-10000 (and yes of course at some point you cross the threshold from L → D). Tough to just determine them all to be equal-ish despite there being so many shades of gray.
And others might find that supposition, you know…offensive. Subjectivity cuts both ways
This might be a fun thread for you to peruse:
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LACs are flying under the radar in this conversation because LACs aren’t discussed in the study that is the focus of this thread. Instead the study focuses on Ivy Plus colleges.
One can compare the percentages pursuing different career paths to get a rough guess on how LACs compare. For example, a comparison between Swarthmore and Yale is below. I selected these particular colleges arbitrarily. They have a similar split between working and continuing education. However, Swarthmore has more pursuing a career in academia and fewer pursuing a career in finance. I suspect this is a common pattern among LACs, with more pursuing careers in academia. I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar type of waitlist accept/reject analysis for LACs found that being accepted from waitlist to an “elite” LAC increases chance of a career in academia. In contrast Yale has a larger portion pursuing several career paths associated with top 1% income (finance, MD, JD, …) than Swarthmore.
Swarthmore First Destination
- 68% Working, 18% Continuing Education, 13% Seeking Education/Employment
- Among working: 21% Research, 17% Consulting, 16% CS/Engineering, 10% Finance
- Among education: 38% PhD, 10% JD, 7% MD
- Most common employers were: Analysis Group, Google, and JP Morgan
Yale First Destination
- 64% Working, 18% Continuing Education, 5% Seeking Education/Employment
- Among working: 17% Finance, 12% Consulting, 12% CS/Engineering, 8% Research
- Among education: 17% MD, 15% JD, 15% PhD
- Most common employers were: Yale, McKinsey, and Facebook
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Underlying the points being made by many posters is an ideal model in which the elite schools will all be clones of one another, admitting strictly on the basis of standardized tests or tests coupled with a lottery. The assumption is that excellence is an objective and universal measure, both in students and schools.
Maybe we’re coming to that, but, if so, it will make for a dreary and depleted world. We will hear no more of the unique cultural traditions of schools; they will have been discredited as being nothing more than a fig leaf for discrimination. There will be no ethical basis to justify a kid’s selection of a school based on its special qualities or a school’s selection of a kid based on the kid’s special qualities.
If this world actually arrives, it will take all the romance out of the big step of going to school. Thankfully, it hasn’t come as yet. Think of the kids describing their dream schools on cc. Most of us can remember it in our own lives. That will all be gone. We will have in its place transparency, but we will also have the complete absence of human judgment and emotion. And schools themselves, with their homogenious student bodies, will no longer exert emotional pulls or have distinct cultures. You might as well be at Dartmouth as at MIT, at Brown as at the University of Chicago. All that has very much the feel of a dystopian novel.
As for me, little as I would have wished to find myself at either Harvard or MIT, I’m quite happy to let each do the things they want to do. I care very little about the gentlemanly and sporting ethos of the former or the rebarbative abstract one of the latter. Knowing they exist helps me to know what I myself value.
I say, love your school for what it is, not for what it’s not. And, yes, dislike the schools you dislike for what they are. There’s not much chance in this big baggy monster of a country that you’ll get very far in imposing a single model on them all.
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The idea that colleges with stats-based admissions are “dreary and depleted worlds” that are devoid of “unique cultural traditions” and fit only for “a dystopian novel” is a rather dim view of colleges in general that most college students actually attend, and seems to feed the “elite or bust” drive that is so common on these forums.
Of course, in reality, having (mostly) stats-based admissions does not make Arizona State University, University of Texas, etc. into “dreary and depleted worlds” that are devoid of “unique cultural traditions” and fit only for “a dystopian novel”.
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We are talking about distinctions among the elites here, @ucbalumnus . There’s room in my world for every other sort of school, including the University of Texas and Arizona State. If you want to shift the discussion to a question of whether the concept of “the elite” is valid, that’s fine with me. It wasn’t, however, germaine to the point I was making.
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My point is that stats-only admission does not homogenize the various colleges into “dreary and depleted worlds” that are devoid of “unique cultural traditions” like you claim. If it does not do that for the much larger and more common non-elite colleges, why would it do that for elite colleges if they chose to do so? (Note: not advocating that they go to stats-only admission given their small size and lack of stats criteria that can make the distinctions between applicants that they need, but that is a separate issue.)
Indeed, no matter how elite colleges do their admissions, they will still differentiate themselves in other ways, including their cultural traditions, which will result in some level of self-selection among applicants and matriculants.
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I’m okay with some some schools doing this. But you sound like you’re advocating admissions on stats-based objective measures for all schools. Do you not think that would induce a certain level of uniformity as between school and school? Of course, we can disagree on whether this is good or bad. For me it sounds like dystopian hell, for you it may be paradise.
You obviously did not read my last message:
Going back to your question / assumption:
No, as proven by numerous colleges that have significant variation despite stats-only or stats-mostly admissions.
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I think the faculty and university leadership as well as the individual missions of the colleges (and geographic location, departments taught, research) might still make different colleges quite different from each other. But yes, I think the student bodies would become at least somewhat more homogeneous. But you are never going to convince someone who strongly prefers to reside in a rural area to consider Columbia or Northeastern their ideal school and life in Manhattan is just different than Pablo Alto life culture.
Still I feel like so much of this demand for stats driven admission seems to come from STEM oriented students and families. That might just be a coincidence, but it might also reflect a numbers-driven approach that is most appealing to folks who are interested in those fields.
I am genuinely curious if the conversation here would be any different if there were more participation by students who love and want to pursue the humanities , arts, and social sciences. Also for that matter, if there were more participation by families who are actually low and moderate income. Or for that matter by more Latino and African American families. It is possible that the homogeneity that marlowe1 fears is more of a reflection of the homogeneity of the loudest anti-holistic voices on this forum not of what would actually happen with more stats driven admission.
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Let me ask this question of all the anti-holistic advocates, whether loud or soft: Would it be admissible in your ideal model for a school to choose one applicant over another just because that applicant in the subjective judgment of the Admissions Officer fitted the ethos of the school on other than objective measurements?
Thanks for putting this together, great insight which aligns with my general impression of the LACs; I think that they do a great job of “exploration then commit” by holding major declaration until after sophomore year while providing excellent outcomes.
Looking at the data one can see that when normalized for size they punch well above their weight with Williams and Amherst consistently higher than half of the Ivy’s in the professional categories and many LACs are well known for overrepresentation in Phd programs.
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I know that they don’t, that was the gist of my ‘by the people that matter’ comment. But if you were to bring them up in discussions with some of the most Ivy focused groups in the Silicon Valley you would be shocked at how many people are unaware of this group of schools which has members who consistently outperform half of the Ivys in admissions into grad programs, professional schools or consulting and finance careers.
It highlights the power of brand for the Ivys.
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LACs’ small size likely enables this by default. A department must have some minimum size to offer a worthwhile major, so individual departments at a college with only about 500 students per year are likely overprovisioned in instructional capacity relative to the number of students who may want to choose that major (although some LACs like Pomona and Swarthmore are encountering capacity limitations in computer science). So they are less likely to need to have frosh apply to specific majors or otherwise regulate entry into specific majors.
Of course, some majors with more sequential prerequisites still need to have the prerequisites started early to ensure being able to complete the major in 8 semesters.
I’m not an advocate of stats based admissions, but let’s not fool ourselves. Elite schools are peopled mainly by the children of the upper middle class and wealthy with a soupçon of lower income students to give the impression of inclusion.
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I don’t think I got an answer to my question, @Thorsmom66 . Would you therefore deny subjective judgments as to cultural fit in the admisssions process because they tend to privilege certain demographics? And, if that’s the reason you would do that, are you so certain that stats-based objective measurements would not privilege similar demographics? Wouldn’t it be better to accept that privilege is baked in the cake in any case and to stop obsessing about it?
There are a lot of people in SV who are immigrants like myself, and we’ve never heard of the LACs before. They are just not that well known internationally
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Standardized tests and class rank are very appealing because they offer better objectivity, transparency, and less inter-observer variability. In comparison, the rest of the holistic evaluation suffers greatly in those areas.
However, those 2 measurements are very crude instruments for evaluating aptitude and future potential.
Examples:
The modern military profession is often considered one of the most meritocratic professions. Here are some of the most illustrious graduates and their class rank.
Napoleon 42 out of 58
Grant 21 out of 39
Pershing 30 out of 77
Eisenhower 64 out of 164
Schwarzkopf 43 out of 480
Albert Einstein did not possess superlative grades. Although he achieved the highest grades in history, algebra, geometry, and physics. The rest of his grades in german, french, italian, geometry, chemistry, natural history, art drawing, and technical drawing were less stellar. At the age of 16, he failed the entrance exam for the Federal Polytechnic School, but he did very well in the mathematics and physics section.
Sir Isaac Newton was also a poor student and was thought by his professors to have no potential when he started his college career at Cambridge.
Srinavasa Ramanujan lost his college scholarship because he failed all of his non-mathematics classes. He also failed the first arts exam which was the entrance requirement to attend another university.
In literature, F Scott Fitzgerald,
John Steinbeck, and Arthur Miller were all considered very poor students. Miller actually failed his high school algebra class several times. Applying current admission standards, it’s extremely doubtful that any of them would have been accepted by their alma maters: Princeton, Stanford, and Michigan as well as most selective US universities.
Obviously, many (maybe most) of our “best and brightest” perform extremely well in our traditional academic evaluations. However, these examples illustrate that universities will miss out on some incredibly talented applicants (and future Nobel Prize winners) if they rely on those criteria alone.
There is a lot more to an applicant than just his GPA and SAT score. On the other hand, how good are the other parts of the holistic evaluation at identifying those extremely talented outliers or diamonds in the rough? How many of the “truly best and brightest” are they potentially missing?
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I was talking about the wider public conversation. I think that most of this group and frequent participants on CC are familiar with LACs in general.
I am in the SF Bay area and as you might imagine within the top schools there is an intense focus on Ivy+ admissions yet most families have little knowledge or understanding of this group of schools. People are generally unaware or have a “I’ve heard of them but what about Brown” type of reaction completely unaware that Midd has a 93% success rate into Med school, Williams sends 37% to Wall Street/Consulting, and size normalized many of them outperform for Professional and Phd programs.
And its not just the Northeastern LACs, they are blissfully unaware of the Claremont colleges as well.
They operate out of the public eye in many ways and I am sure that they like it like that right now.
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