These examples could be taken as an argument in favor of early specialization (i.e. at the undergraduate college level or high school level) in terms of developing talent that is highly skewed in one particular direction while deweighting subjects outside of their areas of talent. However, early specialization may not work as well with some other people who may not be ready to decide their path until later.
Of course, many of the “truly best and brightest” may be unable to attend any college (or otherwise go down a path where their talents can be developed and used) because of the circumstances where they grown up (e.g. parent financial circumstances and choices).
None of these people would have been admitted to Harvard under today’s system
ETA: Harvard likes people who hustle. You wouldn’t have time to sit under the tree and wait for the proverbial apple to fall on your head if you have to hustle in order to get into an elite school today.
As is often mentioned in threads involving pre-meds, success rate into medical school depends on the denominator – if the college’s pre-med advising and pre-med committee discourages all but the most-likely-to-be-admitted pre-meds from applying, then it will have a high success rate.
You can not compare UofT to Ivy+. Outside of a few super selective admission programs, most Canadians would not consider an undergraduate degree from UofT to be particularly prestigious, and especially not more so relative to the other research intensive (“R1”) universities. Given the very large size of UofT’s entering class there’s a wide range of admissions averages, and certainly more so than at some the smaller selective admission universities. Also since most universities here admit either by major or at the very least by faculty, admissions selectivity differs significantly by program. Getting an admit to UofT for Engineering or Math is certainly viewed as being more prestigious than being admitted for Social Sciences or Humanities, but it in no way compares to being admitted to MIT, Princeton, or Stanford. Each university has specific programs it is best known for which makes those specific programs more competitive for admission, but even though some universities are on average more selective for admission than others, most outside of high school students don’t view them as being significantly more prestigious overall (and most of us don’t get the esteem in which many Americans hold McGill).
Where reputation comes into play is at the graduate level.
I’m merely illustrating the weakness of the rack and stack philosophy by demonstrating how it would overlook some of the historical giants in several
disciplines including STEM.
Chetty’s earlier study compared portion of kids from top 1% families matriculating to different types of colleges. “Elite” LACs were generally similar or higher than Ivy Plus. Some example numbers are listed below. I expect many wealthy families favor “elite” LACs for similar reasons to choosing Ivy Plus:
Middlebury – 23% of kids from top 1%, 76% from top 5%
Dartmouth – 21% of kids from top 1%, 66% from top 5%
Amherst – 21% of kids from top 1%, 62% from top 5%
Colby – 20% of kids from top 1%, 71% from top 5%
Pitzer – 20% of kids from top 1%, 68% from top 5%
Bowdoin/CMC – 20% of kids from top 1%, 66% from top 5%
Brown – 19% of kids from top 1%, 66% from top 5%
Penn/Yale – 19% of kids from top 1%, 64% from top 5%
Median NESCAC – 20% of kids from top 1%, 67% from top 5%
Median Ivy Plus – 17% of kids from top 1%, 59% from top 5%
However, LACs are not as well known as Ivies, particularly among the general population – fewer mentions in media, little to no recognizable sports teams, does not have the same prestige for kids who are big on T# type lists or need to attend an Ivy, less grad/professional school recognition, less likely to know alumni who attended, etc.
Canadian universities are predominantly stats based for admission and that doesn’t stop each one from having its own unique culture and traditions. Is there a general uniformity across all the universities with regards to academic standards (outside of their flagship programs)? Yes, but culturally they are not all clones of each other.
The best students aren’t necessarily the ones with the best grades (tests and exams are actually much more telling), because they have their own ideas and tend not to want to follow teachers’ recipes. They also tend to focus more highly on the subjects they’re most interested in than others.
Einstein failed the language, botany and zoology sections of the Zurich Polytechnic entrance exam because that exam was given in French, which Einstein hadn’t had much before he took the exam. A professor in physics or math would have surely noticed his talent.
Well, I will put my question again to you, @gwnorth , the one no one wants to answer: Is it permissible in your book for an Admissions Office to choose one candidate over another just because they think that candidate better fits the ethos of the school? --You appear to think that schools do have an ethos, even Canadian ones, if in attenuated form. Is there anything wrong in their attempting to foster this in their admissions policies? Or are these differences best either ignored or eradicated?
No because I don’t think that admissions officers are capable of making a proper determination of something so subjective in an unbiased manner. Certainly not on the basis of a couple of essays.
Students are far better determiners of whether a specific university’s “ethos” suits them and their goals. They are not ignorant of each university’s campus culture. To be honest however most Canadian students choose their university based on whether or not they have geographic constraints and the general academic reputation of each school for the program they’re interested in. Only a small subset really care about campus culture. For those who do however, each university’s individual culture is well known.
The real reason people generally esteem the Ivy+ is because they are perceived, rightly or wrongly, that they represent the pinnacle of academic selectivity and that they confer an outsized advantage post-graduation. That’s what Canadian students mostly value. They aren’t being impressed by these school’s campus cultures and traditions.
My problem with holistic admission is that it is easy to game with enough money and parental involvement. I cringe at the amount of non-profit organizations founded by HS students as well as the amount of research by HS kids done over the summer. How much of this is solely due to the student initiative and curiosity?
I have no problem with favoring the student body president or the captain of the basketball team. It wasn’t their mom who showed up at the games.
I think if you’re arguing for this (subjective fit of student X with the “ethos” of university Y) if you give a specific example of a university and the ethos they’re looking for and how they detect that currently.
In general, though, your description sounds a little close to “Jason Schwarzmann is not a Harvard man because [not said - his nose is a little too big and his hair a little too curly”
As for the general notion that a more standardized system - a take on a points system, say - would homogenize colleges or at least admissions, I don’t buy it. As another has pointed out, students will self-select. But more importantly, just because top universities used a more transparent, more algorithmic approach, doesn’t mean they would need to use the SAME algorithm.
So, gw, if a child really likes the culture of a particular school and really wants to go to it just for that reason and makes a convincing case to that effect in his app, you would say to the Admissions people that they are forbidden to take any of this into account? --And what exactly would be the reason for this - that some element of subjectivity would thereby pollute the pristinity of the admissions process?
At this point, I expect that most admissions officers do too. I feel research is now commonly overdone, the same way that kids going overseas to build home for poor people became overdone around 20 years ago.
Sure, @MWDadOf3 , subjectivity can mask racism or other biases not relevant to the mission of a particular institution. If it does, it should be deplored and put an end to. But it’s a logical fallacy to equate subjective judgments in general with nefarious motivations.
You ask for examples of schools with ethos. I suggest every school in this ivy-plus category has one. We have talked in this thread quite a lot about both Harvard and MIT. Each has a very distinct ethos, and each chooses its students with that ethos in mind. You can question it, you can deplore it, but why would a school not want to perpetuate what it thinks it’s all about in the choice of those who come to it?
That is certainly true of the school I know most about, the University of Chicago. It definitely appeals to a type and itself has a pronounced character that differs substantially from its peer schools. Yet in the age of rankings it gets 30,000 or so applicants, many of whom have applied without knowing much about it except what they read in USNWR. There’s room in the entering class for kids like that, for all kinds of kids in fact, but as an alumnus I want the school to be especially on the alert for the true believers who chose it for its ethos. I would expect no less of any other school. Yes, subjectivity comes in to that determination, but driving subjectivity out of the process is never going to happen in a world I want to live in - one that hasn’t been completely taken over by algorithms administered by robotic functionaries.
I think this is what this new Chetty study concluded, at least with some elements of holistic admissions. They found that those non-academic factors contributed significantly more than academic factors to the overconcentration of the wealthiest among us at most of the elite colleges.
This problem extends beyond elite college admissions. Think about the amount of resources collectively wasted. Some of these students may be burned out when they get to college. Some others may not be equipped, or willing, to go the depth necessary in areas of their interests. They may still end up as investment bankers, but they could have done more…
Not every other school has an ethos that requires some sort of subjective admission determination for general applicants, especially if you get away from assuming that small elite colleges are representative of “any other school”. Non-elite regional public universities may have an ethos emphasizing broad access, so their admission criteria may be limited to that which indicates a reasonable chance of college readiness, unless there are capacity limitations at the campus or majors that require higher standards to avoid overloading the campus or majors.
Also, a school with a particular well known ethos may attract a surplus of applicants who believe that they fit that ethos, but that popular perception of the school’s ethos may be incomplete in that the school may not want a student cohort that is too unbalanced in that particular direction, so that type of applicant may find it more difficult to get admitted.
Should cultural preference be forbidden from being taken into consideration? Yes because the primary mandate of Canadian universities at least, the vast majority of which are taxpayer supported public schools, is not to “craft a class of future citizen-leaders” or maintain a cultural legacy, or ensure maximum alumni donations, it’s to educate the best and the brightest (and to a lesser extent to help overcome barriers to post-secondary studies that students of certain backgrounds have historically faced). They aren’t about social engineering. If a student really wants to attend UofT because generations of their family has historically attended (which is a strange concept to most Canadians), or they think that Queen’s or Western’s party hard/work hard culture is the bees knees, or Waterloo’s “Cali or Bust” mantra speaks to them, or they think that UBC has the most beautiful campus and they prefer the weather on the west coast? Fine, but unless they’ve got the requisite grades they most likely aren’t getting in, because the primary mandate of each university first and foremost is academic. The universities themselves are not invested in crafting their campus culture. The culture of each individual university is formed by the academic strengths of their programs which attract the students who self-select to attend. Each university then develops its own unique culture organically which can change over time (though it’s interesting to see how they tend to endure generation after generation).
But most Canadian students don’t think that way. They want to get into the best academic program that they can. Given a range of choices of equally strong programs and no other constraints, then “fit” may become a consideration. My older son could have gotten admitted into any university in Canada for the program he wanted and he chose the one he attended based first on academics, then location, and lastly campus culture. Being a top performing student with low economic constraints he had that luxury.
Canadians don’t esteem HYPSM because of their campus cultures. They esteem them because they believe them to be elite academic institutions. If they knew how students at the universities that practice holistic admissions were really chosen, they would be less impressed. As someone mentioned upthread the Ivy’s have really perfected their marketed image. The reality of them however is less impressive.
