<p>"Regardless of personal socioeconomic status, private schooled students are the beneficiaries of advantages in the college admissions process that most public school students could only dream of."</p>
<p>Thank You!!!</p>
<p>trackstar...
I think you are missing several huge and important points which, hopefully, you well learn in college. The playing field is not level in this country for all students to achieve at the same levels - it never has been and probably never will be in any of our lifetimes (sadly). </p>
<p>NEVERTHELESS, your continued insistence that admissions officers do not know what they are doing is insulting. At most highly selective schools, there are people working in the admissions offices who advanced degrees in education, psychology, counseling, teaching, sociology, social work, law, and other areas which all, believe it or not, do give them some authority with respect to "social engineering," although, quite frankly, we aren't doing that so much as we are building a community of learners - people who can learn from their work, their professors, and each other. Your comments are quite ignorant in many ways - I hope wherever you end up will teach you about the realities of American society. Vast inequalities exist in our society and culture - ones that attitudes like the ones you have presented here help perpetuate.</p>
<p>"NEVERTHELESS, your continued insistence that admissions officers do not know what they are doing is insulting."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7pok0TKDU8%5B/url%5D">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7pok0TKDU8</a></p>
<p>QED.</p>
<p>Interesting link, somewhat amusing, collegealum. And your point is? (relative to the topic & to the replies)</p>
<p>collegealum314, that video has nothing to do with the topic at hand.</p>
<p>"collegealum314, that video has nothing to do with the topic at hand."</p>
<p>it's an example of an Admissions Committee at an elite college making a terrible, terrible mistake. Clearly they fell for his long line of fake achievements: being CEO of a company that actually had no customers, being a karate master and chopping through pre-cut bricks, being a great tennis player that can take a game off of pete sampras... (The Pete Sampras thing is not in the video but is well-documented.) Also, I'm sure his flamboyant and braggadocious personality was interpreted as having "passion."</p>
<p>AdOfficer specifically cites that sometimes excellent candidates don't convey WHY they do what they do and lose out to less-accomplished people that convey their "passion" better.</p>
<p>Example #2: Harvard</p>
<p>When I was a teenager and visiting Boston in the early 90's, some other high school students and I got to meet with an admissions officer at Harvard. She told this story about how one year someone sent a shoe with their application and a note saying, "Now that I've got my foot in the door, let in the rest of me." They thought it was funny, and admitted him. That was his "hook." Then word got around, and they got more shoes next year with applications. They admitted those people too. </p>
<p>Eventually, as they began to be flooded with shoes, Harvard decided to stop making it an advantage to send a shoe in with a "funny" note. </p>
<p>If you ever visited Harvard in the late 80's and you saw a bunch of students walking through Harvard yard with one shoe on, now you know why.</p>
<p>collegealum,
I would not be one to argue that committees never make mistakes, including being misled by an applicant (I do not necessarily know that the applicant featured in YouTube was such a mistake: Is he doing poorly in college? If, when the U discovered that he misrepresented himself, did they choose to admit him anyway, deciding that the other aspects of his accomplishments were not misrepresented, & were more critical to his admission?). However, the points are two:</p>
<p>(1) Relative to the video, how many such (similar) applicants are there from particularly "bad" public schools? (Probably not many in the position to engage in some of those featured sports.)</p>
<p>(2) Since the numbers of genuine applicants with genuine accomplishments are staggering, the likelihood of there being a significant number of "mistakes" becomes smaller.</p>
<p>blump blump blump...</p>
<h2>(1) Relative to the video, how many such (similar) applicants are there from particularly "bad" public schools? (Probably not many in the position to engage in some of those featured sports.)</h2>
<p>I really wasn't responding to the issue of people getting in from public vs. private schools or URMs. </p>
<p>In general, I just don't think the decisions that adcoms make at the top 5-10 schools are particularly rational.</p>
<p>You're saying that in general the top 5-10 school adcoms make irrational choices. Where does that come from? C'mon. Add something constructive. That's ludicrous.</p>
<p>Become more informed. Get to know the admissions process -- heck, even read the posts by adcoms on this site. Don't just throw a grenade into the room like that...</p>
<p>I have been reading these posts with a mixture of interest and sometimes, annoyance. Thank you, Adcom for shedding light on a subject that in this discussion seemed sometimes to detriorate into sniping and sour grapes. And I can understand how that can happen. It's only human nature when rejected to assume that someone else is to blame, especially when you have worked so hard and had so much to offer. At my Ds public school, there is a fair amount of sniping too, and some of it is along the lines of, looks like only prep school kids get in. But the important thing is to move on, to continue learning and to take advantage of the opportunties that lie ahead of you.</p>
<p>RE the subject of kids from truly 'bad' schools gettting into very good colleges I read a very illuminating book titled A Hope in the Unseen, by Ron Suskind It chronicles the journey of a hard working intelligent young man from a ghetto school to Brown. It's interesting not only in revealing the obstacles he faced in high school, but also in revealing the significant obstacles he faced at Brown. </p>
<p>In my opinion learning to 'walk in other people's shoes' is just as important, if not more important than scoring 2400 on the SAT. By admitting students from many backgrounds who have faced many different challenges, colleges not only take a step towards fairness, but also provide their students with the opportunity to expand their horizons. A top school made up only of the best that private schools have to offer would provide a much narrower and I would argue less educational experience.</p>
<p>Trackstar makes me the slightest bit sick.</p>
<p>Why do you want to go to college?</p>
<p>Just_Browsing: thank you for your supportive words and adding to this discussion. </p>
<p>Adofficer I never said that the playing field was fair. Nothing in life is fair. That still does not mean that it is o.k. for you to penalize those that have had success. </p>
<p>Like I said with the name calling, no need to keep using the word ignorant when referring to my comments. I don't want you to feel insulted, but keep in mind that you insult every hard working middle/upper middle class student (and their parents who have worked hard to give them opportunties) who you reject in favor of a lesser qualified economic diversity admit. You said that people need to learn from each other but I think you are placing too big an emphasis on how much a student will be impacted because they have another poor person in their class. Adofficer, I don't envy your job but you could make it a lot easier on yourself by using merit as the determining factor in admissions. but thats just my humble opinion.</p>
<p>"keep in mind that you insult every hard working middle/upper middle class student (and their parents who have worked hard to give them opportunties) who you reject in favor of a lesser qualified economic diversity admit."</p>
<p>trackstar, do you assume that all, most, or just some economic diversity admits are less qualified? Or, to put it another way, what method have you found to determine just how qualified all the economic diversity admits are?</p>
<p>"you could make it a lot easier on yourself by using merit as the determining factor in admissions."</p>
<p>What makes you think that merit is not the determining factor now?</p>
<p>You're saying that in general the top 5-10 school adcoms make irrational choices. Where does that come from? C'mon. Add something constructive. That's ludicrous.</p>
<h2>Become more informed. Get to know the admissions process -- heck, even read the posts by adcoms on this site. Don't just throw a grenade into the room like that...</h2>
<p>Well, I think the Harvard story speaks for itself. I was responding to the general tone of Adofficer's post that they don't make mistakes and that the process is completely rational. </p>
<p>I came from a high school where the avg. SAT score was 1400/1600, so it's pretty easy to identify trends in who gets in and who doesn't since everyone has the baseline numbers to qualify. However, any anecdotes people offer for irrationality of the process can be dismissed because they are just anecdotes. I will add that I am equally critical of my own alma mater, MIT, so it's not sour grapes.</p>
<p>I just wonder why it isn't equally possible for adcomms to be irrational as it is regular people. </p>
<p>Anyway, I will repeat that my posts have nothing to do with URMs or taking people with subpar grades from bad high schools.</p>
<p>To the person who suggested that taking a person who has "walked a mile in other's shoes" is more important than the 2400 SAT score, let me ask you this question: if you looked at high school students in 1950 and 2000 that spent their summers doing community service in Peru, do you think the two groups would have the same level of compassion? I would argue that because it benefits one's application and everyone knows this, that a significant number of the year 2000 group are doing it solely to help their application. I also doubt that doing such community service as a high schooler is a good indicator of performing such service after admittance to college/medical school. It seems like the sociological version of the Heisenberg principle is at work here: once you start trying to measure a quality, it changes solely because someone is observing it. If colleges are trying to cause more high schoolers to do community service, then they have succeeded in this regard. I know that hospitals do need people to do community service, and I'm sure the fact med schools require it of applicants helps the hospitals to function. </p>
<p>Intelligence can be much more reliably measured, however. And also, I will venture to say that being a great student may be a better vehicle to effect societal change. It's not just whether you are smart or not smart...you can develop intellectual ability. What is needed in this society are people that are intellectually talented enough to grasp the nuances of issues that are driving societal wrongs. I don't think Ralph Nader was an activist as a high school student or even during college; he was a hard-core intellectual. </p>
<p>And, as a general point, why is it that people understand the qualities it takes to throw a football in a certain spot every time, but don't understand that the same discipline and character is required to get a certain SAT score or to win a math contest?</p>
<p>epiphany: no i don't think that all diversity admits are less qualified. I think that most of them happen to be. I'm sure Adofficer would be glad to share with us the approximate admission rates for various groups of individuals applying to the institution he/she works for. Merit is currently just one piece of the admissions puzzle. I think it should be nearly the whole thing -and most Americans would agree.</p>
<p>"Merit" as you describe it correlates too closely with income. </p>
<p>"I think it should be nearly the whole thing -and most Americans would agree."</p>
<p>Hahaha I love statements like this!^^Long live the Homogeneous States of America! Guess I must be a dirty, red, commie.</p>
<p>davnasca</p>
<p>"Income" as you describe it correlates too closely with hard work. </p>
<p>.</p>
<p>collegealum,
I don't think that most people "don't understand" the points you made. But I think you need to review kenny's post. It's about the spots available. </p>
<p>Prior to the echo boom, and prior to the greater perceived accessibility of Elites to all segments of society (which was actually many yrs. ago), it was much more likely that all or virtually all of the "99's" would be admitted, AS WELL AS the "90's." With the increasing disproportion of numbers of applicants versus numbers of freshmen spaces at every Elite, choices have to be made, or -- as another poster just said -- the private colleges will start looking as homogenous as they were in about 1960.</p>
<p>So now, in addition to <em>mostly</em> people who can throw a football in the right location every time, there will also be a few admits who can usually throw a football there, but often while the turf has traps in it, 2 or 3 teams are tackling him, his cleats need replacement but his family can't afford that, his helmet is not of the highest grade of protection, and absolutely no one is cheering him from the bleachers.</p>