This is the exact situation that the UC system is in CA where FP has been used to cover budget. The pushback has reached the point where international admits are being cut to make more room for CA residents.
Thatâs for med schools to sort out. 
Thankfully, they havenât all gone test-optional yet, and anecdotally, House, M.D. is not an entirely made-up archetype.
Although the direction is frightening. Topic for another thread, of course.
But yes, there are some professions where being nice, nice as that is, can never substitute for raw technical competency.
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And one unintended consequence of the current system is the positive feedback loop it creates: the uncertainty forces students to apply to more and more places, which in turn reduces admission rates across the board, creating more uncertainty, thus forcing ever more applications to flood the system.
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The academic bar per se is the point at which these schools are comfortable with the idea that an admit can complete a program and graduate. None of the schools which are the focus of this discussion are going below that for anybody, it isnât in their best interests to have athletes (we know where you were going) fail out at high rates because it would hit the public view. The high graduation rates of these schools is confirmatory here.
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There is some logic to this. Crazy but logical. Personally, I feel it is the top 5% trying desperately to avoid downward mobility.
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More undercaffeinated thoughts (I keep coming back to edit this because my thoughts are not fully formed, sorry everyone). To return to @marlowe1 's discussion, it makes sense to me that holistic factors would ultimately determine admission decisions for a school like UChicago that has a more distinct ethos than other Ivy+ schools and the uncommon essay gets at that. Most of the other schools, meh. Each of them may have a different vibe, but Iâm not sure I can ascertain a significantly different ethos (at least among the other Ivies and T20-ish generally, excluding MIT), at least not to an extent that provides additional certainty in crafting the list.
Maybe Iâm just annoyed that acceptance rates are so low.
The issue here isnât so much that domestic applicants are being displaced by international students, they arenât because provincial governments dictate the number of seats they are willing to fund for domestic students. International enrolment is on top. Apart from resulting in more crowded campuses and larger class sizes, the biggest issue to universities are the potential liability that depending on foreign tuition dollars to fund university operations presents (a case in point was when a spat between the Canadian and Saudi Arabian governments resulted in them withdrawing all their med students), the pressure to lower the academic bar for international applicants, the falsification of credentials, and rampant academic cheating. From a societal standpoint many of these students are being exploited. They arenât all rich 1%. Some of them come from very poor families in developing countries who have leveraged their entire life savings to send their children with the hopes for a better future and they are getting conned into poor quality programs. Beyond that thereâs also the increased strain itâs placing on an already strained housing situation. Some students are being mercilessly exploited by local landlords.
Completely agree.
In my earlier post, I showed how these subjective admission evaluations can vary a great deal among readers. Couple that with very low admission rates, and you are going to get a set of students that end up with numerous rejections while equivalent students get more than one acceptance. The horror stories of talented kids being nearly shut out will amp up applications the next year.
A while back @gwnorth wondered why McGill was held in such high esteem among US applicants. I think a large part is because it is a high quality institution with objective admission criteria. It acts as a âsafetyâ for highly qualified applicants, thereby minimizing downside risk. If my kids had not gotten into Michigan EA or better, they were definitely going to be applying to McGill.
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For those still listening to the Amherst presidentâs views, I wonder if the abolishment of the legacy hook is felt by the alumni network in job placement. Most do well, of course, but the single largest employer of Amherst class of 22 was⊠Amherst College. Not ideal.
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IRL this is almost never the case except for possibly a few research roles. Most every role in life has a âgood enoughâ bar.
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I agree about the appeal of McGill â quality academics + objective admissions criteria. Add to this its location in a great city and low cost (for Canadians), and you have a very appealing combination.
Really, this is all I ask. If the United States could have even one university like this, I might be content enough to stop caring that the Ivy League is mainly a finishing school for the rich.
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Go back about 10 years, and Vanderbilt used to be this. There was a very clear delineation in the scattergrams between nearly guaranteed admission, a band of uncertainty, and almost all rejections except for hooked students. I havenât looked at Vanderbilt scattergrams in a while, but they are probably more holistic now.
So pretty much all the highly selective holistic review colleges largely impose a type of âacademic barâ for unhooked applicants, in that unless you pass their basic academic screen (in Harvard speak, get at least a 2 on academics), it is extremely unlikely you will get admitted.
The âproblemâ is if other non-academic factors are considered, then if Applicants A and B both pass the academic screen, Applicant A may get admitted and Applicant B may not, even if B appears to have âbetterâ academic qualifications than A. The only way to avoid this is if there is no consideration of nonacademic factors at all.
Character/personal qualities is a line item under Nonacademic factors on the Common Data Set. So you could look for colleges that marked that Not Considered. Evergreen, discussed above, is one such college.
A close relative went to Western Michigan, so I looked that upâthey also marked it Not Considered. Staying in that state, public four-years only: Michigan Tech: Considered; Michigan State: Important; University of Michigan: Important; Central Michigan: Considered; Wayne State: Considered; Eastern Michigan: Not considered; Oakland University: Not Considered.
In fact, Eastern Michigan and Oakland marked all nonacademic factors Not Considered, Western Michigan only Considered ECs.
So, it looks like in Michigan, at least among public schools, you could focus on Western Michigan, Eastern Michigan, and Oakland University if this was important enough to you. You could also consider compromising on the Considered schools, but that would be up to you to weigh.
Thatâs one state, and it is easy enough to do this in any state, or for any other school that might interest you.
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Minus the low cost partâŠ
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CC is replete with Chance Me threads where the OP would rather spend two years at community college (and then apply to their state flagship) than take out a small loan to attend any private four-year college but Harvard. And, itâs not because they want to become a Supreme Court justice, a U.S. senator, or reporter for the NYT, as the podcast suggests. They just want to major in a fairly common STEM field. They would be the first to admit theyâre not attending college to make friends or to explore new interests; their only contribution to the greater community would be the addition of their near perfect SAT scores to the Class Profile. My entirely rhetorical question would be, âWhy should Harvard build even more ugly buildings in a crowded part of Boston in order to enroll more students like them?â
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The study implies the opposite. Elite colleges would be LESS socioeconomically diverse if they based their admission criteria on academic factors alone.
I donât want to repeat yesterdayâs posts, so Iâll phrase things in a different way. The study effectively divides the top 1% family overrepresentation in to 2 parts â things well correlated with test scores and things not well correlated with test scores. The vast majority of the overrpresentation falls in to the former category with being correlated with test scores. Academics also falls well in to this category, being well correlated with test scores. However, thatâs not what the study focuses on. The study instead focuses on the smaller influence that is not correlated with scores. The study finds this smaller not well correlated with score component is primarily driven by non-academic factors, rather than academic factors.
In an earlier post, you mentioned 1500 SAT as a criteria associated with âthe countryâs very top students.â The study found that 0.05% of lower income kids (I am defining as bottom 40% income) received a 1500 SAT score. The relative chance of higher income kids meeting this threshold, as listed in the study is below:
top 0.1% income â 140x more likely to get 1500+ score than lower income students
top 1% income â 100x more likely to get 1500+ score than lower income students
top 5% income â 70x more likely to get 1500+ score than lower income students
90-95th percentile â 35x more likely to get 1500+ score than lower income students
80-90th percentile â 15x more likely to get 1500+ score than lower income students
This suggests some implications about how changing different admission criteria is likely to influence SES distribution, as summarized below:
- Replacing legacy preference with increased preference to non-legacy â improves SES diversity
- Replacing athletic preference with increased preference to non-athlete â improves SES diversity
- Replacing non-academic ratings with increased increased emphasis on scores â worsens SES diversity
- Replacing non-academic ratings with increased increased emphasis on academic criteria that is well correlated with scores â worsens SES diversity
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So in the state of Michigan alone, it looks like Eastern Michigan, Western Michigan, and Oakland University have similar admissions policies.
I assume the complaint, then, is that they are not as high-ranked as the University of Michigan and Michigan State.
But it is probably worth being clear about this. The complaint is that although such colleges exist in the United States, people wish some of the better-ranked ones followed suit. At a minimum, though, I would suggest thinking carefully about why that correlation might exist.
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Just pointing out that the academic bar for the three low-ranked schools may not be comparable to highly-ranked schools.
Thinking out loud about the correlation between higher academic stats and having âbetterâ holistic factors, the demonstration of the holistic factors in the app and apparent subjectivity via the app reader still leave the process opaque to applicants.
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The difference is how the academic bar is set. Here in Canada the minimum academic bar is set at the level necessary for being able to complete the program and graduate too, but itâs not fixed. If there are more qualified applicants than spots, then the minimum bar rises. The actual average needed to get in is set by supply and demand. The more the demand the higher the bar. As a result the grades needed to get admitted to specific programs can fluctuate from year to year. Case in point is the much greater selectivity in admissions for CS programs the past few years due to increased demand. For programs where demand is so great that the number of qualified applicants still exceeds capacity, then holistic admissions come into play, but these programs are few and far between and to be honest this has only become necessary it recent years due to high school grade inflation. Also the characteristics being selected for in the supplemental applications are not being chosen on the basis of wanting to âcraft a classâ. Certain characteristics are established as being valuable and thatâs whatâs selected for. They arenât searching for an oboe player or a starting quarterback.
If we were to extend this model to Harvard, based on the quality and quantity of the applications they get, applicants would probably need a perfect 4.0 & SAT/ACT score to be even considered to move on to the next round of having their supplemental application assessed. If Harvard actually set their minimum academic bar there, the number of applications they received would drop significantly and their acceptance rate would be a much more accurate reflection of the true chances for admission once all the non academically qualified applications were weeded out. Then they could select from the remaining students for all those other qualities and characteristics they wanted while maintaining the highest academic standards.
Of course this only works well if all applicants are coming from a relatively level playing field to begin with (which we know they arenât). We also know that educating the brightest isnât actually Harvardâs mission anyway even though most people think it is. Harvard would have far fewer issues with lawsuits over their admissions preferences if they just made that more clear. Then the number of those clamoring for admission because they believe it to represent the pinnacle of academic quality would drop. It just wouldnât address those who believe that the perceived prestige of a Harvard education confers an outsized advantage to gaining success in certain spheres.
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The complaint is that of the 4 factors that I listed that make McGill appealing, the Michigan directionals you listed only have one: the objective admissions criteria. Despite a few good majors, they lack rigorous academics in many departments. They are not located in great cities. They are not even low cost!
Schools such as Western Mich, Eastern Mich and Oakland U are fine for their missions: preparing local kids for careers such as K-12 teacher, nurse etc. But we donât have to pretend they are appealing much beyond this; if they were more appealing they wouldnât be hurting so much for students (big drops in enrollment over the last decade.)
ETA: And why do the Michigan directions have the admissions policies they have (they admit essentially anyone who took the requisite classes in high school)? Because almost open admissions to residents of their state is part of their mission. This is very different than McGill.
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