I miss the live tigers too, but time marches on.
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I think Carleton illustrates the difference between Ivy+ schools and LACs very well. I went to Carleton and the education was high quality. I have friends from high school and from grad school who went to Brown, Stanford, Dartmouth, Harvard, U Chicago, Berkeley etc and I think my education was as rigorous and often more rigorous than theirs. And yet when it comes time to list famous Carleton alums, who can we list? Thorstein Veblen, a grad from 150 years ago? Chris Kratt, the kidsâ nature show host? Peter Tork from the Monkees (a Carleton dropout)?
Take home: If you want to be very well prepared for med school, law school, a career in regional politics etc, Carleton is a great place. Ambitions beyond that?-- not so much.
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Iâm not totally opposed to having a supplemental application that weighs other factors like ECs, volunteering, or work experience, I just think that it should be secondary to academics. You need to pass the academic bar first. What I really donât like are subjective evaluations of character, or basing admission on a subjective evaluation of whether or not a student fits the âethosâ of the school, or whether your parents or grandparents attended.
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Since the career choices for all the kids attending Ivy plus schools are pretty much the same regardless of which school they attend, I am dubious as to whether any supposed difference in ethos matters. They all have roughly 10-15% going in to each of finance, consulting and tech. Another roughly 15-20% in grad school upon graduating.
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I thought the âwhy [this school]â was a staple of holistic admissions along with demonstrated interest.
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So they say. But I think almost all âwhyâ essays could work equally well at, for example, Columbia or Dartmouth.
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The kinds of jobs taken by grads doesnât tell the whole story of what being at school was like for them. There are only so many jobs out there, and the real homogenizing is going to set in after graduation. The precious thing about the undergrad years is their freedom, relatively, from those constraints. There are far more choices of courses and activities, not to mention schools themselves, than there are professions waiting at the end. Only a few of us can become rodeo cowboys.
In that regard, some schools famously are far more pre-professional than others - a distinction among schools frequently remarked on in cc - and the kids know this. Thatâs the ethos of the school, you could say.
I would put this question, especially to those who have recently been touring around the campuses of the group of schools weâre discussing here: Do you notice differences among them and their students? There can be many similarities, but a few significant differences matter a lot. Humans and baboons share something like 98 percent of their DNA. But that doesnât make the two species so similar you canât tell them apart.
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Biddy Martin ended legacy preferences at Amherst College in 2021. On a recent Brookings Institution panel with Raj Chetty, she does offer some gentle pushback to the study authorsâ recommendations (at 1:00:00 and 1:30:00). Namely, she talks about the challenges of funding financial aid for middle class kids if they take fewer 1 percenters. She also ponders about the potential loss of âgeneral communityâ if the equity measures recommended by the Chetty study are implemented. A good discussion of the study and the tradeoffs inherent to its implications:
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This is a worthy goal. And I think admissions officers and such often try to pursue exactly that goal, and then many families seem to ignore that information and go with what they hear from friends, family, friends of family, and so on anyway.
Possibly even more transparency would help, but I wonder. If people want to believe admissions works a certain way, including because they have potentially allocated many years of effort on the basis of those beliefs, I am not sure it will be easy to get them to believe something different. Particularly if that would require accepting that maybe they have not been doing things in an optimal way for those many years.
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I chuckled at the ârecovering Europeanâ remark.
Certainly strikes home with me 
Yes, personally, I think my college remains a reasonably desirable place to go to college for certain students, and I do think some of what it does with holistic admissions contributes to that. I donât think it is the only type of reasonably desirable college, it may specifically not be a good fit for other students, and I am not at all interested in âdefendingâ everything it does.
If that sounds like tepid support overallâfair enough!
Perhaps. But absent greater transparency their proclamations are naturally harder to take at face value.
Thatâs a valid concern. Canadian universities have been getting around this issue by increasing the number of international students they accept since they pay much higher tuition fees. Itâs gotten to such a high level though that thereâs starting to be more push back since it comes with its own attendant issues.
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You just described the current system.
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My experience in this regard is differentâI know some exceptionally successful people, and many of them are like you describeâŠand others are total jerks.
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A similar phenomenon exists in the US where top-tier publics attract funding through OOS admissions, and 2nd-tier privates through international ones.
E.g. the few institutions that are full-need and need-blind for international students, such as Harvard and MIT, have ~10% international undergrads, whereas at Boston U that number is ~25%, every single one of them paying full sticker price.
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âŠso, howâs ElĐŸn in person? 
Itâs not if thereâs a different academic bar for some applicants based on non-academic criteria.
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It has taken me days to get through this thread.
We are having practical issues with a system of passing the academic bar and then moving onto holistic factors: the level of uncertainty, particularly in making the list. Iâve been reading in this forum for years, have older kids who have been through the process, and still have no idea where my high-stats senior best fits and will actually end up (likely these are two different things).
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Which matters more for a doctor than an engineer.