Seems like you (presumably as a Canadian with money) had the option to try the “high-stakes choices and gambles” in the US while having low cost safety options of the more desirable universities at home.
But is that better on a societal scale if many American students must play that game with some losing in various ways, often due to affordability issues (even for in state publics in some states)? Or that the sometimes required (by parental and peer pressure) “emotionalism and drama” may contribute to mental health issues and family discord?
Of course a number of very good private colleges have merit aid programs for more or less precisely this purpose (to woo very desirable applicants away from colleges with only need-based aid or instate tuition breaks to offer). Notable names include Case Western, Rochester, Syracuse, Tulane, Northeastern, WUSTL, USC, Duke, Hopkins, Rice, Chicago, Emory, and Vanderbilt. That’s just some of the more prominent private “national universities”, there are also LACs and publics that do this. Of course the number of scholarships and total amount funded varies.
It is interesting no Ivy League schools offer merit scholarships. Maybe they are all unilaterally coming to the same decision that it is not an efficient use of resources. Maybe it is basically an illegal antitrust conspiracy. Or something in between.
Life IS a high stakes gamble, @ucbalumnus , at least when the battle is fought with relish and flair. Sure, there’s an argument for placidity, in education as in one’s professional and romantic choices, but something is lost. Call it adventure if you like.
I suppose I should set the record straight, since you seem to think only privileged folk could long for these things and that I am speaking out of such a background. No, it was resolutely working class - a father with an 8th grade education and a working life divided between time in the army as an enlisted man and the postal service as a letter carrier. You don’t have to be a fancy dan to yearn for the fruits of a good education. Those who don’t start with them are the best yearners.
I think the eastern colleges believe they have a market edge in high-score, mother lodes like New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and even California as well as a kind of Puritanical belief that scholarship money should be based on need.
I actually admire the bravery of American students who on average range further from home for their educations and take up studies abroad in much greater numbers. I also appreciate the rich traditions of the campuses and the excitement of sending them off to College.
When we were researching universities when s19 was still in high school, we took advantage when on vacation to tour some schools on the East Coast. One in particular I really liked for him at the time. It ascribed to the US LAC model that I really admire. In retrospect given where his path has taken him it wouldn’t have been the best choice (and then there was a huge sexual assault scandal and cover up), but even if it had been, he wasn’t willing to stretch himself by attending school that far from home. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that most Canadian students don’t attend university that far away. That’s why McGill (or UBC) doesn’t hold much appeal to Ontario students. For me going 200km/2.5 hrs away from home to attend university was a huge step. Dh attended the same university and while it was further for him, 360 km/4 hrs in the grand scheme of things it still wasn’t that far. I was hoping for something similar for my kids. Instead s19 ended up at a great school but it’s only a 45 min drive from home. At least while he could commute he has chosen to live away. S21 on the other hand refused to consider applying to any school he couldn’t commute to or at the furthest, easily come home to on the weekend (we are fortunate to have many very good options meeting that criteria) and while he did live on campus his first year, since then has lived at home commuting back and forth.
I think being further away but with a safety net of home and parents if needed, really helps to foster independence and self-reliance. It builds poise and confidence and that’s something that I really admire in US students. I was amazed to find that even high school students do study abroad, and US college students certainly do so much more frequently than Canadian students. I would have liked for s19 to have done a study abroad semester or year, or a summer internship abroad (or even out of the province), but it didn’t happen. Many of his friends have though. My next hope was that he would be applying to grad school out of the country but it does not appear that that is likely to happen either, at least not yet. Maybe if he decides to continue to a PhD. At the most he will be out of province (either at McGill or UBC) but unfortunately his best options are actually close to home (UofT and Waterloo).
Having said that, I’m glad we don’t have the same degree of hoop jumping for admission to post-secondary. S19 as bright and talented as he is just doesn’t have the drive to invest the kind of effort needed to make himself a competitive candidate for holistic admissions. It’s tough enough to getting him to invest the kind of effort I think he will need for his grad apps (and not wanting to write the GRE is one reason he’s not applying to the US for his next steps). He has friends from high school who applied for highly competitive admit programs for undergrad in both Canada and the US as well as to med school in both countries so I know the amount of effort it takes to market oneself as a truly competitive applicant beyond academic metrics. He just is not that person. His refusal to undergo standardized testing and craft compelling essays means that had he attended undergrad in the US (which we briefly entertained until we saw how competitive it was and how much it was going to cost), he would not have ended up in as academically selective a university as he was able to in Canada where the extent of his effort involved submitting his program choices through a common app online portal and admission decisions were based strictly on junior and senior year grades. The two more selective programs he applied to did have supplemental applications, but they had very minimal requirements and he didn’t put much effort into them. It’s not that he is a one dimensional student and couldn’t be a competitive applicant, he participated in various ECs during high school and is an accomplished musician, though at the time he didn’t have any leadership experience. He just wouldn’t have stood out on paper compared to many other very bright but driven students. He’s just not wired to compete that way and I don’t think his outcome in a holistic selective admissions landscape would have been as successful (and it’s become clear in retrospect that neither Harvard nor Yale would have been a good cultural fits for him, and I’m not sure MIT or Stanford would have either. Maybe Princeton.).
In any case I admire the US students (and students in other countries) who are brave enough to venture far. I just wish s19 could be recognized for his many talents and abilities without having to aggressively market himself to be able to access the kinds of opportunities that would support his interests and goals. This opinion article in the Washington Post kind of sums up my concerns for him.
Jonathan Meer, an economics professor at Texas A&M, recently told me an enraging story about watching an outstanding student with great board scores, a prestigious internship and sterling undergraduate research credentials get rejected from every PhD program the person applied to. When Meer made some quiet inquiries, he was told that the problem was not the student but the school: “We don’t know what a 4.0 means in your program.”
I’ll leave it up to Canadians like yourself and @gwnorth for more definitive answers on the number and frequency of standardized exams in Canadian primary and secondary schools, but my understanding is that there’re still many more of them in Canada than in the US, even though their numbers have been dwindling in recent years.
Food for thought: are kids in certain income ranges more likely to have a fire-in-the-belly seeking the adventure, stretch, and hope for success that may be harder to develop in a top x% family, or is the fire-in-the-belly a personality trait just as obvious at any income level?
Do current admissions practices even seek this, or merely only occasionally stumble across such applicants by accident?
(Maybe I’m conflating two different characteristics here, fire vs yearn for adventure)
Schools like Harvard do maintain a bucket for some of the nation’s best students because they also want to have influences in academia and other more merit-based sectors, on which their reputations rest. However, their desires for influences in other areas preclude them from enlarging this bucket.
Colleges at a tier or two below Harvard would need to work harder (by offering merit-based scholarships) to attract some of these middle- and upper-middle class kids.
We’re in Ontario. My kids had to write standardized tests in grades 3, 6, and 9, but they are more to assess how the schools and teachers are doing, not the students, and they have no impact on their grades. Students also have to pass a grade 10 literacy test to graduate. Certainly students wanting to attend magnet programs and private schools have to write admissions tests and s19 did so to be admitted to his specialty high school program, but Ontario at least doesn’t have exit high school exit exams any longer (I think only Alberta and maybe BC still do) and we don’t have the equivalence of the PSATs, SATs or ACTs for admission to university.
It’s an interesting question @evergreen5 and I do think there is a correlation between fire and yearn for adventure and I do think in part of it is a personality characteristic. For the self made 1%+ it’s what propelled them to the top and they are characteristics likely to be inherited by their kids. I also think though that growing up with the kinds of experiences like frequent travel that many from upper income backgrounds do, instills a kind of self-reliance that gives these kids the confidence to strive for opportunities further a field (to dare to dream) and the polish to make them attractive candidates.
But would you prefer an environment where everyone is forced to make high stakes gambles (with greater penalties for losing)? If so, why did you return to Canada where you sent your kid to university? Is it because you wanted a safer backup plan in case your kid did not want to play the higher stakes gamble or did so and lost?
But, as an international student without a lot of money, you would be the exception to the rule in terms of being able to afford undergraduate education at a US university.
I believe that can describe the majority of high school students. Except for athletics or other rare natural talent, the drive comes often from their parents or other counselors. Left on their own devices, kids would mostly want to be kids - socialize, contemplate, pursue random not high-power hobbies, and try to find out who they are. This is why I believe there are so many depressed and/or medicated kids in the US. I have nephews in Canada and I could compare their admission process with that of my kids who live in a affluent, highly competitive, and nationally-ranked school district.
As to going abroad, cannot agree more. My daughter went to study in UK and had to navigate a different culture (both educational and societal), bureaucratic hurdles as well as basic life challenges as running her own household after graduating at age 21. In three short years, she transformed into a completely independent, supremely confident young lady, and I can only sit back in awe and applaud from afar.
Sorry, @ucbalumnus , I should have clarified the autobiographical tidbit in my prior message: I grew up American and came to Canada only as an adult. That was an adventure in its own right - but one of no interest to any but me and my near and dear.
However, I’ve raised my children here so have the benefit of seeing the experience of going off to college from both the US and the Canadian perspective. There’s something to be said for both. However, I think the peculiar drama of it in American life does have some appeal, and I wanted to clarify that the appeal to me was not as a scion of privilege insulated from the downsides of American life. But that’s enough about me.
Interesting that you would put it this way, since “end[ing] up as an investment banker” is a pretty good proxy for most of those outcomes deemed “successful” by this study.
Most (all? too lazy to double check) Ivy+ state that they do not consider demonstrated interest. That’s separate of course from whether they actually do.
I’ll go even further. Once you lay it out you get the USNWR rankings effect i.e. once something is measured it becomes a goal. E.g. % of classes with <20 students. Sounds great until schools start artificially limiting enrollment in classes without hiring more qualified faculty. IOW right back to box checking. Just different boxes.
I mean, it’s in the mission statement. Not to mention all over their “what we look for” type info. Not sure how much more clear they could be about it.
Yet sadly, and problematically IMO, the study chose this as one of the primary measures of success.
That’s not how endowments work. At all. As has been dissected here upthread and elsewhere on CC.
Your post brought up an angle I hadn’t considered, that it may be a personality trait inherited and/or refined by experiences. Initially, I had in mind some some sort of un-advantaged early life experience developing the trait which then propelled a person to the top.
Of course, it is not surprising that the higher stakes higher drama game is more likely to appeal to someone who won the game, even if most people end up worse off than if the game were not as high stakes and drama.
Again, the statement you quoted involves a review that controls for test scores. If you look at only students who get 1500+ test scores, why are kids from the top 1% income who score 1500+ more 1.4x more likely to attend Harvard than not top 1% income kids who score 1500+? The author concludes 30% of this 1.4x higher rate of attendance relates to kids who score 1500+ from top 1% income having better average non-academic ratings than kids who score 1500+ and are not from top 1% .
While that is a statistically significant difference, the far more influential factor for SES distribution is instead that kids from the top 1% are 100x more likely to score 1500+ than the kids in lower income, as noted in my earlier post. Changing admission policy to increase emphasis on a criteria in which wealthy kids are 100x more represented is not expected to improve SES distribution.
Certainly those are the truly impressive people. Those who had the drive to overcome adversity in life or to start from a disadvantaged position and propel themselves to the top.
The reason for the 1500 SAT scores is because of expensive tutoring. Let’s face it…at least 60% of these credentials and ECs are bought. Elite private universities love to tell people how smart the kids are, but it really targets rich people. The “real” acceptance letter is the tuition bill. Those that can pay can attend. Those that can’t, go somewhere else and their spot is given to someone richer.
Arriving at the next generation, that person’s kids may have a personality trait which could be honed by other experiences, but not by disadvantaged life experiences. I’m just musing about how this sort of trait comes across in apps sincerely, i.e., looking past, or perhaps through, a cynical, hazy view of ECs/essays.