<p>^^I don't think that they discuss these stats in a lot of numerical detail, but my D does know that she is the lone sal in her blocking group of six friends. The other five girls were all vals at their respective high schools.</p>
<p>Maybe it's my S who is totally oblivious to information like this and has never thought to measure himself acording to conventional criteria.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
Do students already in college discuss their SATs, GPAs and class rank?
[/QUOTE]
Sadly, some do. </p>
<p>The classmates in the cases I've read so far are high school classmates.</p>
<p>Ah, but my S did not know the SAT scores, GPA or class ranks of his best friends with whom he had lunch every day. He hardly even knew which colleges they were applying to! And I'll bet his friends did not know his SAT scores or GPA.</p>
<p>More importantly as far as ethical behavior is that someone must have leaked information about the rating given to the Frist kid. I agree that is an invasion of privacy.</p>
<p>"Ah, but my S did not know the SAT scores, GPA or class ranks of his best friends with whom he had lunch every day."</p>
<p>Boys! When I was in high school I knew the SAT scores of all my friends. We obsessed about them from Dec through April.</p>
<p>When I once asked S why he did not know to which colleges his friends were applying, he said they had more interesting things to talk about. :)</p>
<p>I have a daughter and a son, and I will confirm that they are very different about this sort of thing. S either knows nothing about his friends' various "numbers" or doesn't care to share the information. The only exception was a couple of years ago when some idiotic counselor told all of the kids what their IQ scores were!!! and they all compared because they thought it was hysterically funny. I'm happy to see the guys focus on more important things than SAT scores and GPA.</p>
<p>I agree with mathmom and marite...my son and his friends never discussed (and didn't care) what scores their friends got or what colleges they were applying to. I was told they had better things to discuss, too.</p>
<p>My son and his friends (male and female) absolutely compare scores and GPAs.</p>
<p>My daughter never discussed such things in public, although a few weeks ago (i.e., two years after the fact) she told me in passing that one of her friends had had a 150-point difference between her verbal and math SAT I scores, and that no one else had more than 100 points difference. So clearly she knew what a number of peoples' scores were.</p>
<p>Just read the whole thread, and agree that this is something I was aware of as a general idea. However, I have only recently realized that several classmates of my children, who had a big fuss made over them at graduation for their large scholarships and prestigious admits, actually fit this scenerio. I didn't know at the time about the parents' positions. I am ashamed of my naivete. In the cases I'm thinking about, the kids were bright and deserving, and the colleges have nothing to be ashamed of in snapping them up. And I suspect the parents are somewhat frustrated at having their kids' successes questioned.</p>
<p>But I noted then that the "haves" seem to keep on getting, and dumbly didn't figure out why. The kids who could well afford college were the ones getting full scholarships, and I couldn't figure out why poorer but equally bright, less-connected students were continually ignored.</p>
<p>Saturday's WSJ has an extended excerpt from Golden's book and...sigh...one of the two schools featured is my alma mater, Duke. I am dismayed that Duke has over the years periodically embarrassed itself in the public eye with some of its institutional activities. A few years ago there was a faculty member who was silenced for being insufficiently gender sensitive. The Black Studies department has been good for a few eye-rolling moments over the years (see this quarter's Alumni Journal that profiles a member of that department who is characterized as "the professor of hip-hop culture". "Strip clubs are the new churches.") And then there is all the institutional groveling that is going on over the Duke lacrosse team's rape/non-rape case. But now preferential treatment of development candidates is being profiled and it isn't pretty. Some of the general points made are ones already discussed here but some of what is being said about Duke specifically is more disturbing.</p>
<p>"This success, however, carries a cost. As the number of applicants has soared in recent years, premier schools admit as few as one in 10 students, a far more selective rate compared to a generation ago. To make room for an academically borderline development case, a top college typically rejects nine other applicants, many of whom have greater intellectual potential.</p>
<p>Some colleges have been known to accept all applicants from a given high school to conceal the development admit, and thereby avert criticism from rejected students. Known in the trade as "considering context," the practice shortchanges worthy candidates from other high schools who might otherwise have made the grade."</p>
<p>One could have guessed that stuff was going on. Later it talks about Joel Fleishman who handled development cases for the Duke admissions office.</p>
<p>"Mr. Fleishman wrote a wine column for eight years for Vanity Fair magazine and cultivated Duke donors with vintage selections. "Joel used to give very expensive bottles of wine and put them on his university expense account," recalls former president Keith Brodie, who succeeded Mr. Sanford in 1986 and sought to restrict the practice of development admits. "Because they were millionaires you had to buy an expensive bottle.""</p>
<p>Later in the article the relationship between the family of Ralph Lauren (two of their children were admitted to Duke during this period) and Fleishman is discussed:</p>
<p>"Mr. Fleishman and Ralph Lauren were certainly familiar with each other: According to Dr. Brodie, the designer was regular guest at dinners Mr. Fleishman hosted for parents of students he had helped.</p>
<p>Mr. Lauren had pledged a six-figure gift to Duke. In 1999, Mr. Fleishman became a director of Polo Lauren Inc. As of the company's most-recent filing he was earning $35,000 a year as a director plus $7,500 as chairman of its compensation committee and $2,000 per meeting. He also owned or held options for 37,500 shares of Ralph Lauren stock, worth at least half a million dollars, public filings show."</p>
<p>So Duke got a six-figure donation and whatever benefit there was to having Ralph Lauren flitting about campus to visit his offspring. But it appears that Mr. Fleishman personally did at least as well. Fleishman, now on the Duke Law School faculty, also sits on the boards of a number of other companies (more boards than many university presidents, the article points out) whose presidents/chairmen/founders have sent kids to Duke. All parties either won't comment or deny any of this is repayment for services rendered, but it sure doesn't look good.</p>
<p>Some graphics that accompany the article 2dsdad references, subscription not needed to view:</p>
<p>2dsdad:</p>
<p>What disturbs me about the Duke info is not that Fleishman courted potential donors, nor that he charged expensive bottles of win to his university account. That is the way expenses are handled. What is disturbing is that he leveraged the connections to gain seats of boards of companies. But, can we say revolving doors and K-street lobbyists?
To put things in perspective, Duke is not the only university with hip hop experts. Harvard lost two Afro-Am faculty when Summers refused tenure promotion to a sociologist who specialized in hip hop culture. The pair moved to Stanford. I'm sure there are other profs of pop culture in many other universities.
Despite Duke's ardent courtship of development admits, there is absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that Duke's academic performance has risen.
Regarding the graphics posted by SV2 (thank you). If the ranking is from 1 to 5, one must assume that there are more than one person--the Frist kid-- who gets rated 5 in an admission cycle. Who are the others? And 5 does not mean that the person is not capable of handling the work; just that s/he is not ranked as high as others. So perhaps the 5 admit will graduate at the bottom of the class. As Mini has pointed time and again, there must be to 50% and bottom 50% in a class. I would go further and say that there must be a bottom 10% and even a person who is dead last. So what? $25 million is a lot of scholarship money.
As for the Harvard admits, is there any info that would suggest the 300+ kids of parents on the COUR are inadmissible? Golden argues that the kids of donors are taking places away from better qualified kids. A case can be made that without these kids, the better qualified ones would not stand a chance financially. I speak as someone who went to college on full scholarship.</p>
<p>A case can be made that without these kids, the better qualified ones would not stand a chance financially. </p>
<p>It is so true for the kids who have very top academic records nad national level achievements but need lot lots lots lots of aid. Without aid these kids will not be in any of these colleges</p>
<p>I could not agree with you more, stockmarket. Our family is one such recipient. And we do our best to thank these donors, whose names are often made available by the financial aid office.</p>
<p>And people should keep in mind that there really are some wealthy students who happen to be also brilliant and gifted.</p>
<p>Sorry that was Marite whose words I borrowed. I should have put those comments in </p>
<p>" A case can be made that without these kids, the better qualified ones would not stand a chance financially. "</p>
<p>"As for the Harvard admits, is there any info that would suggest the 300+ kids of parents on the COUR are inadmissible?"</p>
<p>Marite, the same thing could be asked/said about many of the rejects. They just did not get in.</p>
<p>We're not talking about who is qualified, as the elites tell us frequently that many more are qualified than get in. </p>
<p>None of this is a surprise to me, but the stats on sports confirm what I've seen for a long time, that preferences for various groups can be given in many ways, some of them quite subtle:</p>
<ul>
<li> want more prep school kids? Weight prep school sports more heavily.</li>
<li> want fewer asians? discount common asian ECs like music.</li>
<li> want more middle and lower income kids? Start giving weight to part time jobs that help support the family (Yea, like this will ever happen...)</li>
</ul>
<p>You get the idea. Much of the social engineering of a class happens in quite subtle ways.</p>
<p>Another interesting example: In the late 1990s, there was a large drop in Jewish kids at Pton. It seems the biggest reason was that Hargadon stopped visits to, and outreach to, urban high schools with a lot of jewish kids. Instead, he stepped up recruiting among the 'burbs. Google and find the series in the Daily Princetonian if you want a good read regarding this.</p>
<p>NMD:</p>
<p>I am not disputing your claim in any way. But I look at it this way. I benefitted from a full scholarship for 4 years. The scholarship program has benefitted 800 students since its inception. I have no idea whether the donor had children who were admitted into the college as a quid pro quo. But if he had, and he had 10 children--most unlikely-- that's only 10 students who were displaced vs. 790 students who got funded, including yours truly.</p>
<p>NMD,
Like marite, I do not deny that admissions in many colleges (including upper-level Ivies) have been manipulated in the past. But that would cover a multitude of sins -- including, pun intended, Catholic U's & colleges often favoring Catholic students for scholarships, for example. And keep in mind how much demographics have changed. My d's Jewish classmates so far have tended to be mostly suburban, not urban. So there is a limit as to how far cleverness & so called classifications will go.</p>
<p>I do not call it social engineering. I call it, truly, diversity. I don't think the U's are generally picking & choosing in the indirect ways you mention, at least in the last few years. I think they're just being direct, even while admitting large blocks of students from certain categories. (And speaking of categories, I categorically deny that Asians are supposedly underrepresented at Ivies. They still appear to be heavily represented at places like Princeton, Harvard, MIT, & Stanford -- in the sciences -- whether or not they do or do not present with "common" music e.c.'s. They are being admitted for achievements & scores & apparent potential in the sciences, not because of ethnicity or e.c.'s.)</p>
<p>What I see is national & international diversity: a plentiful mix of nationalities & ethnicities & types of interests & geographies. I don't think there's any "wink/wink" about it, either. That is in contrast to many public U's in diverse states such as CA and Michigan, where the diversity is largely <em>local</em> or regional, as opposed to national/international. So in CA one will find huge numbers of Latinos & Asians at the U.C.'s, because of the state populations. That is called "diversity," locally. In actuality I find the Ivies far more diverse.</p>
<p>epiph,</p>
<p>I think the situation with asians at the elites is that colleges "adjust" the criteria so that the asians are not represented more than they already are. </p>
<p>And, it is unfortunate that the elite's efforts at diversity that you value tend to pick kids that are diverse in color only. For example, there has been quite a bit published regarding several elites and how they classify carribean upper class admits as "black" implying a higher percentage of "african american" than actually exists. And, even of the african american admits, they come mostly from upper class backgrounds. </p>
<p>Latinos? Have you ever looked around these campuses? You won't find anyone who looks like a resident of Chicago's west side.</p>
<p>I will not disagree that an elite college offers a different kind of diversity than does a State U. Much more international. But economically? </p>
<p>This has been debated extensively before, with such data as Pell grant recipients. I see no reason to repeat that debate here. </p>
<p>So, you may call it what you want. But the fact is that elite colleges, especially the ivies, give huge advantages to certain groups, from outreach (the head of Harvard admissions himself talks to local prep school parents. That sure doesn't happen at the local public schools, even in Boston. Many prep school kids get private meetings with adcoms. The rest get student meetings if any...) to sports alignment, as the graphics showed. </p>
<p>I will call it social engineering. These practices have nothing to do with increasing diversity.</p>