This system would not allow for much racial diversity, and likely little socioeconomic diversity, for many reasons.
Many students (URMs, limited income, otherwise disadvantaged) don’t have the access to educational opportunities, have no one in their lives telling them to challenge themselves academically, nor do many participate activities that you defined, feeding their ‘passions or career objectives’ (many must work to help the family). How would you make sure you include those students in your class?
I’ll leave racial diversity to the other thread. For socioeconomic diversity, our current system has clearly failed. According to this new Chetty study, these elite colleges would be more socioeconomically diverse if they had based their admission criteria on academic factors alone. I’d also consider every applicant’s entire personal history in the context of the applicant’s background and surroundings. If they had to work, or spend hours, to help support their families, they obviously can’t spend those hours on academic pursuits or other activities. If their schools don’t offer challenging courses, they obviously can’t take them.
Yes, and the issue in your system (and in our current system, even with pervasive test optional/test blind policies) is that many of these students tend to not apply because they see the ‘requirements’ and believe they don’t meet them.
I agree It is unfortunate we can’t address the race issue here, because it’s an important part of college admissions, which in turn shines a light on the many issues facing k-12 education in the US.
By the way, just to add a little nuance, that may or may not be interesting–I do think one potential issue with the CDS weighting answers is I personally feel like sometimes there is a little strategic counterbranding going on.
Like, take MIT. MIT marks only one factor as Very Important (many as Important). And that factor is . . . Character/personal qualities. I am pretty sure most people would NOT have guessed MIT of all colleges would do that. Which makes me wonder if they are doing that in part to try to communicate to such people they have the wrong idea about MIT.
Here is another fun one. 6 out of the 7 Ivy League schools list rigor of secondary school record and academic GPA as Very Important. One only lists them as Considered. Do you know which one? Harvard. Harvard in fact ranks nothing higher than Considered, and then a lot of things as Considered, but this still feels to me like some counterbranding by Harvard (Harvard’s intended message seems to be something like: not only are we holistic, we are the most holisticky holistic you will ever see!).
My point is just I personally feel like often these schools are at least somewhat trying to fight back against the stereotypes of these schools that are passed around in certain social circles. Obviously how well that works is a different question.
It’s been interesting to me that there have been hardly any commenters - though I may have missed one or two earlier in this elephantine thread - who have been willing to stand up and give a full-throated defence of one of the non-MIT elite schools, or at least of the educational ethos of, say, a generic ivy league school. Why is that?
Well, let’s put it in less highfalutin terms, roycroft. Harvard seems to have in mind a kind of student it especially likes. That’s clear from the data. Why aren’t there defenders of what Harvard intends to perpetuate in an admissions policy designed to snag or at least privilege that kind of student?
Maybe because what Harvard ideally wants is pretty much the same as what every other college wants ( and those admitted to Harvard are likely to be admitted to many others schools as well ).
We can argue about whether all these schools have the same culture or at least the degree of the overlap in that culture, but the real purport of my question is, why no defenders? Are there no ivy alumni who are proud of their schools? We have no dearth of MIT alumni who are willing to say so - and indeed would like every other school to imitate their one great good place.
With the possible exception of MIT, all of these schools largely practice the same admission policies, and enroll kids who succeed there ( and would have succeeded at any of the Ivy plus schools. Their admission policies reflect their common institutional priorities at this point in time. They seem to think it works for them, and with the exception of minor tinkering around the edges, is unlikely to change. They also are very likely to act as a group on any potential changes.
I don’t agree in the case of the one school I know something about, but set that aside. Why are there no defenders of this policy you say is common to them all?
But as you yourself just noted further downthread, the “importance” section of CDS seem to be more of a PR gimmick that is hardly actionable.
There are many good arguments made on both sides in this long thread (the strongest one, in my opinion, being an impossibility of building an objective system in a country with no educational standards), but I though I’d still ask this:
Would it really be so terrible, if the level of opacity of the system was reduced dramatically? If there was, indeed, if not a recipe for admission, then a set of prescriptions for what colleges truly value, and if emphasis on academics was one such prominent prescription?
Yes, there would still be tons of kids that, despite their best efforts, would fall short of getting into their top choice colleges, but if the prescriptions themselves were good and wholesome ones - wouldn’t that still be a net benefit to society, eliminating all the non-productive box-checking and focusing instead on something of inherent value?
Which is all to ask: do very many people here on CC honestly believe that American kids overall are already studying too much?
Or are we, as a country, more proud of our NBA picks than of our top scientists?
Legacy has become indefensible, so we can just move to a model where the highly rejective schools accept each others’ legacies (which already happens obviously).
I personally don’t much care what institutional priorities private colleges have, or how they fill their classes. I will amplify that Harvard (and many of its peers) does not see itself as a college for only the ‘best and brightest’, academically speaking. I see MIT and a few schools like them as outliers among US colleges.
All of these threads where posters purport to know how to do admissions ‘better’ than enrollment management professionals, high level college admin, and boards of trustees are curious to me (noting there can be sometimes non-insignificant tension between these people wrt institutional priorities).
Sure it can be fun to bat around some ideas, but many of the suggestions for ‘improvement’ coming from those who want to preference academics above all would result in classes that are less racially diverse than they are now, classes that are relatively more affluent than they are now, and classes with greater gender imbalance (at least at the schools that try to balance gender since they wouldn’t be giving males extra consideration on their relatively low HS GPAs (as compared to females)). And achieving greater racial and income diversity, as well as gender balance, are among the most important institutional priorities of most highly rejective schools.
Perhaps they have a nuanced view of their alma mater’s admission practices, stated ethos, actual ethos, and related things, so that they do not agree with all aspects of such.
Possibly because, with respect to LD hooks that are of significant relevance to this thread, they are less about the student and more about the parents. Some may see them as necessary for alumni and donor engagement, but not particularly desirable for (what they see should be) an elite academic institution. Others may hesitate to defend them when it looks too much like pure self interest.
I will jump in and defend Princeton’s legacy admission for a minute. I realize it will not last long once others abandon it, but it will be among the last to fall, due in large part to the 25k loyal alumni who return each year for the giant 3 day festival of reunions. It may be singular in hosting such an event and one has to experience it to believe it ( though live tigers are no longer permitted). I did like the family events where young alumni bring their tots, and the generational sense of loyalty. It will be missed. Times change.
BTW I have noticed the same sense of generational loyalty at many schools other than Ivy plus. Parents from The Ohio State University, U of Texas, etc seem to have rabid alumni bases as well.
Of course not. But once parents are less sure their progency will attend their own school (completely regardless of whether that is UT or Princeton), I have noticed they distance themselves much more from their school. The world won’t end when families stop attending reunions or going to UT football games. It is just different.
Pardon me for pushing your very pungent description of the Princeton alum get-together further than you probably intend, but to me your candid regret over its likely passing suggests a broader theme hovering over this discussion - the loss of joy in higher education generally. I say this as someone never remotely attracted to the particular ethos (pardon my french) of Princeton. Still, as I’ve gotten older I find I value all institutions that have managed to maintain their distinct identities in defiance of the homogenizing pressures of our world. As the motto of my own old school would have it (in my own stab at translating the latin): “Let knowledge be more abundant and life thereby enriched.” Fight!