Physics, also I don’t want to crowd this thread and my profile has a thread with stats and asks for recommendations.
Can we move off of the personal off-topic conversations please?
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Ah - I see. So they showed the list both including and excluding? I must have missed that version. For unhooked, it you are not at the top (even of an elite institution), it’s challenging.
Princeton is decidedly NOT relaxed unless a kid has chosen a purposefully light load. Out of all the ivies it is the only school that Groton kids report back that any level of hard work is needed (and it’s a lot). Contrast to Harvard, with its magnanimous grade inflation where a Groton B- is a solid Harvard A.
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This thread is about grade deflation. Move any other conversations to PM or to a new thread.
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I’d think Caltech and MIT are also serious academic places.
really depends - at our LPS (not a magnet or anything) I know of 5 kids who got into ivy’s ED/EA this year, plus plenty of top 20 schools. They always have ~10 go to an ivy and plenty to top SLACs etc.
I actually have had a conversation with my own kid. Peer group/ course rigor will be very high at many of prep schools kid applied to, but kid likely will be middle of pack. I doubt they will do better in college admissions at the private/prep school vs. having attend LPS (assuming they stay in hardest classes and do OK). We can support /bolster guidance/college counseling (for which private is FAR better).
I agree that it depends. Could also be a regional issue. Here in the Midwest, Ivy acceptances are exceedingly rare even among the very top kids, who tend to end up at schools like U. Michigan, Cal Berkeley, Purdue and maybe Wash U.
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Yeah, lots of regional norms/biases, in a variety of ways.
One example: in my upper-middle class (on average) community there are plenty of parents of HS students who went to ivys and top 20s, etc. Different educational background than upper-middle-class parents in many states. (There are many other LPS near me considered better, and in richer towns).
Also, our LPS knows how to play admissions games with colleges- no rank, no percentiles, so kids with high GPAs in many APs all stand a chance. In their case, that is a LOT of kids. I am not even sure they have a valedictorian, so couldn’t tell you where they get it:) I think these practices are somewhat regional, too. Could be wrong on that.
I’d also be curious how many kids from midwest applied to “top” schools versus east coast. In my, admittedly outdated, experience it is wildly different.
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I have no doubt this was true in 2015. It was true in 2018, when my oldest began his BS journey. The point that current BS parents are trying to get across in this thread is that it is no longer true at many universities.
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Colleges have not lost any understanding of the rigor of a BS education. I believe the heartburn is brought on by how some believe a BS GPA will penalize them with a narrow list of colleges. Letting go of lists will cure the heartburn.
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If these “many universities” are ones that are only now getting BS applicants because kids are casting a wider net, that may be true.
If these “many universities” are ones that have traditionally received many BS applications, I really doubt admissions offices forget everything they ever knew overnight. The challenge is that many of these universities have seen record low acceptance rates in these past 5 years, so some applicants and their parents are clutching at straws as to why they were not accepted.
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Again, it’s not a narrow list. But that’s just what current students, parents and BS AOs are observing over the past 2 years. The shift over the past couple years has been surprising to all of those stakeholders.
But perhaps those who have not been in the game for years know much better…
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Obviously our definitions of “narrow” differ. As long as all BS students can still find a seat at a college, I don’t see an issue with BS grading.
But it is true that I no longer have a horse in this race, so carry on.
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I am friendly with a number of BS CCs. They did report a very challenging year or two during and immediatelyafter covid, particularly when everyone was test optional and colleges had piles of students choosing to defer, athletes being offered 5th years, etc. In that regard, @Altras is right. They felt very uncertain of how the game was being played and how to advise students as a result. It wasn’t even clear that the college AOs were sure of what they were doing! While most students ended up happy with how things turned out, there were more than a few who had surprising outcomes, and let’s face it - if you’re one of them, it doesn’t matter that almost everyone else was fine!
But across the board, the “wrinkle” of covid has passed, and the CCs I know seem to now understand better how to navigate the new normal, and certainly what I have seen in the way of acceptances would seem to substantiate this. The students who graduated in '21, and to a slightly lesser extent '22, were right in the middle of the tide change.
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There are 37 000 high schools in the USA - and 37 000 valedictorians yearly. Add international students and the amount of valedictorian applicants must be over 40 000 per year.
Top 20 colleges admit approx. 36 000 freshmen yearly (see table below according to WSJ-THE rankings). It’s no wonder some valedictorians go to other schools. Especially when athletes, legacies, under-represented minorities etc. are a priority.
| Undergrads | 1/4 = Freshmen | |
|---|---|---|
| Harvard | 6 695 | 1 674 |
| Stanford | 6 366 | 1 592 |
| MIT | 4 361 | 1 090 |
| Yale | 4 703 | 1 176 |
| Duke | 6 696 | 1 674 |
| Brown | 6 792 | 1 698 |
| California Institute of Technology | 901 | 225 |
| Princeton | 4 774 | 1 194 |
| Johns Hopkins | 5 383 | 1 346 |
| Northwestern | 8 642 | 2 161 |
| Cornell | 15 182 | 3 796 |
| U Penn | 9 871 | 2 468 |
| Dartmouth | 4 556 | 1 139 |
| U Chicago | 5 900 | 1 475 |
| Vanderbilt | 7 057 | 1 764 |
| Columbia | 8 216 | 2 054 |
| Washington University in St Louis | 8 034 | 2 009 |
| Rice | 4 076 | 1 019 |
| University of Southern California | 19 907 | 4 977 |
| Emory | 6 937 | 1 734 |
| Total | 145 049 | 36 262 |
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Not all great students want to go to large universities for undergrad. It is easy to feel lost in the shuffle. I knew plenty of cum laude students in my own class who felt more at home in smaller liberal arts colleges. My best friend, who admittedly was a mama’s boy, went on to great things after doing well in a well known PA liberal arts college, then worked for the Senate Judiciary committee and then one of the best JD programs afterwards (name undisclosed but trust me its considered as one of the best programs).
Looking back on my own undergrad, I can’t help if I should have gone to a smaller LA college instead of the bigger well known Top 20 schools.
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Respectfully, from what I have seen and heard this simply is not true. It is definitely not true for athletes - they are still dealing with college kids transferring and having an extra year. It is not true for BS applications which were again crazy high this year and a lot of kids who normally get in from middle schools near me were shut out of the normal BSs they go to. It is not true for summer programs which have been getting record numbers of applications (maybe to make up for missing school during COVID-19??). So either the covid wrinkle is the new normal or it has not been ironed out yet.
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I think at the college level, which is what I was referring to, there are some things that are part of the new normal, like more TO policies.
And of course, at the D1 athletic level, the NLI rules are very disruptive. Transfers are insane!
The wrinkle I was referring to was all the kids accepted to start in 2020 deferring to 2021, the sports disruptions, the kids who stopped out for a year – all the things that conspired to make a mess for the 2021 graduates by effectively reducing number of seats. By most accounts, most schools are back to their old # of freshman. So yes, there have been other things that have happened but I would argue that there has been pretty steady, swift evolution in college admission for quite a while now. In that sense, there is really no new normal nor was there an old normal. But the CC had ways of gleaning info on how to navigate all those abnormals!
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IMO, it’s the new normal. I don’t see things ever returning to pre-Covid “normal” in many aspects of life. I hope I’m wrong as my D26 is approaching the recruiting window next year but there is likely going to be the continued ripple of the athletes getting an extra year of eligibility. A gap year is becoming more and more the “norm” for girls in her sport.
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