I always maintained that what I most esteemed for s19 was one of the academically selective LACs that exist in the US. We don’t really have that here in Canada. We do have some small LAC like schools on the east coast which also attract a certain percentage of American students, but they aren’t particularly academically selective. Living in the Toronto area with UofT on our doorstep, there isn’t much particular appeal to us (or most Ontario students) for McGill. Students here tend to attend school much more closer to home. S19 will be applying to McGill for grad school but it won’t be his first choice because it is not the highest ranked program in his field.
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However, it is unlikely that such things will change merely because a school decided to change how it handles admissions – increasing or decreasing the weight of certain criteria, or holistic versus non-holistic.
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But how does a school get to have such an orientation if not because kids know it has that orientation, apply to it for that reason, and the admissions office gives some level of preference to that sort of kid? Whether you call it an ethos or a culture or some other word, it’s recognized by all and doesn’t come out of nowhere. Why all this pussyfooting about whether it’s an actual thing?
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Yes, but that does not prevent employers from choosing between numerous “good enough” applicants based on other criteria. Some may want better than “good enough” “just in case” what they thought was “good enough” is not good enough (although they may have to offer higher pay and/or take a higher risk that such an employee will leave). Others may want to choose based on not-specifically-job-related criteria, such as the college prestige of the college they graduated from.
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Of course, your idea of “quality academics” and “great city” may be different from what others see those as. For example, is Los Angeles a “great city”, and does CSULA have “quality academics”? Is Phoenix a “great city”, and does Arizona State University of “quality academics”?
Note that McGill has about 27,000 undergraduates, in a province of about 8.8 million in a country of about 40 million. I.e., relative to national population, it is about 35 times larger than an Ivy League school, so it is less likely to have the need to figure out ways to choose elite applicants from a surplus of applicants at the ceiling of the usual academic measures. In addition, greater standardization of high school courses and grading at the provincial level means that McGill can trust domestic high school records much more than US universities can trust US high school records, and not need external standardized tests for their domestic applicants.
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Though McGill being an English language university means that a certain proportion of the province being French only speakers would not be attending.
The small size of Ivy League institutions is one of their greatest appeals as it is for SLACs. The opportunity for highly academically capable students to get more one on one attention and opportunities to shine as well as to potentially forge more meaningful connections with their peers and with faculty.
S19 attends a large university and even though he’s in a relatively small program, that kind of a culture just doesn’t exist at his school and the opportunities are harder to come by.
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In countries that rely on objective admissions criteria, schools do not become all the same. Some schools have a tech focus, others a humanities focus. Some are intense, some relaxed. The AOs in these countries don’t rely on essays where kids try to package themselves as sporty enough, or outdoorsy enough, or cosmopolitan enough, or conservative enough, or liberal enough, or career oriented enough, or artsy enough or whatever enough for that school. It may be hard for Americans to imagine that school cultures can exist without “curation” of the student body, and yet they do.
It’s a bit like when my cousin moved back from the Bay Area. He couldn’t believe that you could buy a house without submitting a letter where you packaged yourself as a nice young family deserving of having your offer chosen over the others (pretty please!!!) No, we explained, around here you make a bid, and then the bid that is objectively best is the one that gets the house. Somehow it all works out.
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Colleges choose what majors, courses, and curricula to offer (and market to potential students). For example, a college that builds its curricula around co-op jobs (e.g. Northeastern, Cincinnati, Drexel) will tend to attract pre-professionally-focused students who want to go to work immediately after BA/BS graduation, regardless of whether the admissions office makes that an admission preference. A college that offers only liberal arts majors and has a large set of liberal arts general education requirements (or even a liberal arts core curriculum that is the entire curriculum like St. John’s College) will attract mostly a very different type of student.
Similarly, a college with pre-existing favorable perception in a specific field will attract applicants interested in that field (e.g. CS at CMU and SJSU, BME at JHU), although in this case, there may be an anti-preference in admissions to avoid overloading the relevant departments.
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Perhaps a relevant factor is whether the bidder’s letter is convincing enough that the nice young family is not a front for a Wall Street hedge fund wanting to turn the house into a rental to extract rent from nice young families who have difficulty buying in competition against Wall Street hedge funds.
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Kind of like how the student’s essay needs to be convincing enough that the nice young student really is passionate about Classical Studies and does NOT just plan to turn around and work for a Wall Street hedge fund…
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the Ivy League is mainly a finishing school for the rich
Again 55% of Harvard students have financial aid, 22%+ pay nothing (recently expanded to families with incomes under $85k), the average family contribution is $13k, and 100% graduate without debt. Similar for several other top schools.
It’s fine to discuss legacies, donor kids, athletes, whatever. But I do want to hear how such generous financial aid is going to be funded.
I have not read most of the thread. I will just say that objective admission criteria (grades, scores) sure would make for a boring campus. Holistic admissions means assembling a mix of interests and talents in a class.
And not everyone goes to top schools so they can make money. I wish that were true of fewer kids, but still, the experience itself has value. I do know some Harvard grads making a lot but I also know quite a few who don’t.
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Of course, that means that 45% are paying list price of $79k per year…
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The schools say this but in my experience students still tend to self-segregate on campus whether that be with other students in their major, or in the clubs they join, or ethnic and/or socioeconomic background. Athletes hang out with their teammates. Orchestra students hang out together. International students from the same country in particular I find tend to congregate together. How much real mingling is going on? I do hear anecdotally that it happens but I do wonder to what degree.
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MIT somehow manages (they do have some athletic preferences, but much weaker than Ivies, and no legacies).
Their income to attendance chart controlled for scores is basically flat.
As an aside, Chicago’s drop-off at 99.9% after the 99% spike is curious. Marlowe1?
Oakland and Eastern are in the Detroit area. Detroit is the largest city in Michigan (the only state I looked at), and the Detroit Metro is actually right around the same size as the Montreal Metro.
Western Michigan is in a smaller town, Kalamazoo, although I quite like Kalamazoo.
preparing local kids for careers such as K-12 teacher, nurse etc.
Here is the latest summary for what Eastern Michigan college graduates were doing next:
By far the largest category was Business/Professional, 38%. Healthcare and education added up to 4%.
In terms of location, 74% were still in Michigan, but 22% were in other states (California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Wisconsin).
Western Michigan is a bit higher ranked by US News (although both are considered “National Universities”), and it sends a good number of its college graduates to grad school. In terms of employment, they have a complicated interactive dashboard, but it looks like maybe 5% total were becoming nurses or teachers.
Anyway, there is a wide range of colleges between community colleges and Ivy+, and these sorts of national universities are in that range. But I understand your view is they are not good enough for you, and therefore you are discontent with what the state of Michigan in particular has to offer in terms of colleges with your preferred admissions approach.
This is not necessarily the case. A college can evaluate applicants holistically, but it may not be trying “build a class” in the sense that some of the most selective colleges are said to be doing.
If a college sends all applications to be read by two or three admissions readers, each of whom gives a single score for the entire application (more holistic in this sense than the Harvard process with different scoring categories for academic, athletic, other extracurricular, personal) but then just rank orders the applicants by their holistic reading scores to determine who gets admitted, would posters here consider that “holistic”?
I saw that too, @TheVulcan . It was historically the case that the kids of the very rich did not want to attend Chicago (too little glamour, too much work). The chart seems to bear this out in more recent times. The drop-off in that demographic is really remarkable as between Chicago and every other peer school. Even MIT rises slightly and manages to nose it out.
I have nothing against the very rich, but, as Fitzgerald famously remarked to Hemingway, “they are different from you and me.” Hem is supposed to have got the last laugh when he replied, “Yeah, they have more money.” No, Ernest, it’s apparently that they all end up at Dartmouth!
The distribution of income is more relevant than portion receiving FA. According to Harvard’s NPC, it is possible for students to receive FA with up to ~$350k parents’ income. The exact threshold may be lower, depending on specific financial and family circumstances, but the point is upper income families can receive FA, so % FA is not synonymous with % lower income.
According to IPEDS, tuition is a relatively minor source of Harvard’s revenue, such that I’d expect Harvard to be far less sensitive to % full pay than the vast majority of colleges. Some specific numbers are below. With such a small fraction of revenue coming from tuition, Harvard is not going to be in dire financial circumstances if there are fewer full pay kids. However, if Harvard wants to earn more tuition revenue, they can raise sticker price for families without FA. I expect there will be no shortage of families who have too high income to qualify for FA that are willing to pay a higher tuition.
Harvard Revenue per FTE Student in 2021 (most Recent IPEDS year)
Investment Returns – $557k (81% of revenue)
Private Gifts – $54k (8% of revenue)
Tuition + Fees – $30k (4% of revenue)
Government Grants – $24k (3% of revenue)
Other – $20k (3% of revenue)
.
Other Ivy+ colleges are also financially supported by high endowments per student. For example, at Princeton, tuition accounted for less than 1% of revenue, in the sample year.
Princeton Revenue per FTE Student in 2021 (most Recent IPEDS year)
Investment Returns – $1.51M (95% of revenue)
Private Gifts – $49k (3% of revenue)
Government Grants – $16k (1% of revenue)
Tuition + Fees – $13k (1% of revenue)
Other – $6k (~0% of revenue)
And as Leonard Cohen would say-
"The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows "
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So, basically, Harvard is a messed up, prestige-driven, simulacrum of the worst traits of a bygone, Brahmin/British landed gentry because it chooses to be, not because it’s forced to by some imaginary financial strait-jacket.
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