“One other note, most universities in Canada are public institutions and thus receive significant government funding. Their mandate is to provide education for it’s students.”
This is important. Probably related to this, the top schools in Canada have enough spots available for the top students. If you have straight A’s in a Canadian high school, you can pretty much attend any university in Canada (except for universities that teach in the other language if you aren’t fluently bilingual – and replacing “high school” with “CEGEP” for Quebec students). I think that this significantly reduces the stress for high school students.
When we toured BU about 4 years ago they mentioned that they had recently reduced the number of students that they were accepting. This seems strange to me at the time. However, a month or two later I happened to notice a university ranking that had BU only a few places ahead of UMass Amherst. Suddenly it made sense, they had to restrict their admissions enough to be seen as selective enough to stay ahead of UMass in the rankings. Otherwise, why would any Massachusetts resident pay $65,000 per year for BU when they could attend UMass for less than half the price? The top Canadian schools are not constrained to prove that they are so selective that they are worth $65,000 per year, because they don’t cost that much. They probably are constrained to accept all straight A students, because otherwise the taxpayers who have been funding the schools and who have kids with straight A’s would complain. To me “if you are a top student then you will get into a top university” is a good thing.
“Holistic” may sound like a lovely word. However, one result of the holistic admissions approach used by top US schools is that nothing that a high school student does can be reliably felt as being good enough. If you are taking 4 APs then you could have been taking 5. It is not enough to have a couple of ECs that you find interesting, you need to best ECs (whatever they are – no one can tell for sure). This contributes to an insane amount of stress that is causing very real physical and mental damage to many US high school students.
@DadTwoGirls In the past 5 years BU has cut the September freshman class from 4100 to 3400. But, they admit 300 CGS students who applied for fall admission in January. BU has also increased transfer admissions from about 400 to 750. So the total number of undergraduates is about the same as it was but suddenly they are more “selective”.
This and other similar practices are common at many schools in the 15 to 50 range of rankings, even Ivy League Cornell!
Unfortunately, many US public universities have practices that seem to go against their theoretical mission to offer an affordable college education to all of their academically qualified state residents. Examples include poor financial aid for those from low income families, and use of legacy preference in admissions (for example, Pennsylvania State University does both of these).
HYPMS, and to a lesser extent UPenn and Cornell, have arguably been quite successful in selecting wealthy or influential graduates. However, below that very top echelon, success gets dispersed widely among a range of schools attended for undergrads. Fortune 500 CEOs attended 220 schools for undergrad. I suspect schools not in the top ten could admit by lottery students who met some minimum academic threshold, and get nearly the same number of “best graduates.”
Another issue with "best graduates’ is people at the pinnacle of their careers(CEOs, Senators, Congressmen) have an average age in their late 50s. Their success or lack thereof reflects the admissions policies in place 40 years ago, which might barely resemble the admissions policies of today.
I have a few data points on Canadian admissions from my wife’s family who live in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal and probably some other places as well and hear about admissions – for the most part no fuss, no muss. A couple of my US nieces/nephews went to school in Canada because of the very low cost for dual citizens. Other than McGill, all of our other nieces/nephews/cousins went to school in the city they lived in. They often live at home. So, the competition is not national.
The minimum averages for getting in may be higher than they seem. A few years ago, daughter’s experience started university in Canada, though she transferred back to the states. We visited 7 schools in Canada over the summer prior to her senior year. Given her junior year GPA and ACT score, they told her that she would get in at each one – the only one that was slightly uncertain was Queens, which had a little bit of a holistic spin to a largely numerical admissions algorithm. But, my recollection is that Canadian folks told us that US HS grades were inflated so that they had to adjust the GPAs by deflating them a fair bit. Her grades were letter grades. They assigned a numerical score between 0 and 100 to a numerical grade. I have forgotten the algorithm (it wasn’t complicated) but it turned a good US GPA into an OK but not great Canadian average. Interestingly, my daughter attended a fairly elite private HS in the US that had a fairly difficult grading approach – indeed, she had one teacher who hadn’t given an A in more than a decade. When I asked about how they would handle grading from her school, the admissions officer at McGill (or maybe Queens) said, “We know the school and we know about Mr. X”.
Actually, athletes can get slight “help” in admissions at some Canadian schools, similar to what an American would get at a high academic D3 school. No athletic scholarships, of course, except Simon Fraser, maybe?
It depends on the school, the athlete, and the sport.
This style of grading is simply a continuation of how students are graded in high schools here. Considering that Canada produces the finest high schools grads in the English speaking world,
those who are fortunately (or unfortunately) enough to be accepted into elite programs such as commerce or computer engineering are in for a meatgrinder of an experience.
@JHS I say all the time that “I wish Harvard were more like Oxford and Cambridge.” The true merit approach is not recent, there used to be (and perhaps still are) a few places for the royal family/other VIPs, but at the level of less than a handful of people out of 5000+ admitted each year between the two universities. And many of those VIPs are worthy in their own right (e.g. the current PM of Singapore got the top first in his year at Cambridge, he didn’t just get in because his father was PM at the time).
But the biggest reason why I favor their approach is that they interview every shortlisted candidate. And not with a friendly “get to know you” alumni interview, but a really tough academic interview by the people who’ll be teaching you (and where they cut two out of three candidates). I still vividly remember that experience from over 30 years ago (including one of the memorable questions I was asked). There’s no reason Harvard couldn’t do that.
To me that is far better than the sheer randomness of US admissions. Why should a tuba-playing URM from Wyoming have a huge advantage over a middle class white kid from California? Why should it matter for a politics course that the middle class white kid has spent 1000 hours learning to row, play tennis, or whatever? Shouldn’t you instead choose the kid who will do best academically in that college environment?
Best graduate in terms of influence and wealth, not in terms of academic research. Of course it works better for the schools. Just one problem though. They claim to be mostly “research universities” rather than mostly “business schools.”
As I read this thread, I am in the car (back seat) on our way back from Montreal, where we brought U.S. Thanksgiving to our son who is a U0 (first year) at McGill. My thoughts:
I personally like the McGill admissions approach. If you don't hit last year's minima then it doesn't make sense to apply and that filters out a lot of kids. If you have a lower GPA then there are schools for you. There are just less games. My youngest now has McGill at the top of his list and it has given him a clear set of goals.
That said, McGill's admissions process can be frustrating for a U.S. student. It literally is based on your unweighted GPA and ACT/SAT scores only. My son's public HS in suburban Boston is extremely rigorous and an A in a class there is much harder to earn than at some neighboring high schools. That said, his high school experience has prepared him well for McGill and its work hard/play hard experience.
McGill has a reputation for a TON of work and being really hard academically. (The whole US grade college grade inflation is not part of McGill's DNA.) This has proven to be true. So many kids will fail an exam or two there that the ice cream shop in the engineering building gives students a free ice cream for any failing exam they bring in.
McGill is probably one of the most diverse universities I have ever seen and it is a point of pride for the University. We did a campus tour on this trip for my youngest son (HS junior) and our tour guide was from Lebanon. There were 10 students on the tour and they were from 7 different countries across five continents. My son's friend group is a similar mix...in his small group it is Canada, U.S., Malaysia, Paris, Nigeria, and some small countries in Eastern Europe and Africa.
My son and I went out for a drink last night (18 year old drinking age in Quebec). He told me McGill is the “best decision” he’s ever made in his life…and then followed it by saying that most of his closest friends from HS would not have liked it. McGill is a great school but definitely not for everyone.
Some schools in the UK do not offer Latin and certainly ancient Greek, and Latin and ancient Greek are more likely to be offered in independent schools. However, you can take Classics at Oxford without studying Latin or Greek before. You take course II and start one, or occasionally both, classical languages from scratch. To be admitted to course II, there is no requirement to have studied Latin or Ancient Greek previously. History of Art is also more likely to be offered in independent schools at A level, but you can study it at university without the A level ( although if it is offered, and you intend to do a History of Art degree, it may be a good idea to take it).
A P exams probably do not have the depth of A levels do to the fact they are not the same as A levels. They are only being used as an approximate equivalent of A levels. For example, it would be very unusual - and in most schools just not allowed - to take more than four A levels, and you have to follow specific courses to prepare for your A levels (and that’s basically all you do, apart from sport, maybe some extracurricular activities and volunteer work; possibly a few short courses). Advanced Placement exams were originally just tests designed to demonstrate that students know enough to skip basic introduction courses at some universities. They weren’t designed to be the equivalent of A levels; they are just being used that way.
Can you provide a list of schools, because to my knowledge, with the exception of Waterloo Engineering, no university/faculty does this (and Waterloo only does it to a very small number of schools).
Are the British schools truly merit only? It seems they require a personal statement and interview only the top candidates. Certainly kids with the ability to hire tutors and go to the best schools are more likely to do well on A levels and the Oxford-specific tests required in some subjects. The Oxford web site even states that they get so many applications that many “excellent” candidates are denied.
They are merit only. While money helps a lot on merit too, it’s much harder to buy good scores than good ECs. When they interview the top “excellent” candidates, their professors drill academic knowledge to them to go beyond the test result, instead of gauging their leadership skill or demonstrated interest.
@mom2and The British definition of “merit” is ability/talent in your chosen subject. Thus your ECs are irrelevant to your application (personal statement) unless they are specific to your subject. No need for any community service, sports, etc. (indeed top students wonder why you’d bother if it takes away from studying). My S18 didn’t even mention an EC he has spent 1000+ hours on, which is a core part of his US applications.
So British students focus on academics and some (but by no means all) may have some interview prep if they want to apply to Oxbridge (nowhere else interviews). But you’ll be expected to do better if you are prepped than if you are not (and they can tell: the tutors interview dozens of people each year and do hundreds of tutorials with current students). There is much less test prep than candidates do in the US for SATs/ACTs, though it is a very long tail test (a perfect score is basically impossible): tight on time and harder questions, thus harder to coach for. S18 did 2-3 past papers as practice, no interview prep.
So yes Oxbridge is intensely selective, many excellent students won’t get a good enough score on the test to even get an interview, many won’t show enough talent in the interview. But outside Oxbridge/LSE, if you have the right academic scores, you’ll almost always get in.
And as an example of why prep is not that relevant, his interview (PPE) went like this:
I: Welcome:
S18: Thank you
I: Here are two phrases: A… , B… . Discuss.
…