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Emory is quite clear on this point.</p>
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<p>What specifically makes Caltech’s engineering department better than Rice’s?</p>
<p>Engineers at Rice and Tech both learn the same material and have great teachers.</p>
<p>How will majoring in engineering at Tech make you any better of an engineer than if you majored in engineering at Rice?</p>
<p>It’s possible that if Caltech didn’t have such low acceptance rate and sat ranges, its programs wouldn’tbe ranked as high. Which gets back to my original point about cal Tech’s inflated selectivity.</p>
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<p>You make a good point. In the UK, most people would consider ** natural and fair ** that university applicants should be judged solely on their academic achievements ** and ** academic potential, as opposed to extracurricular activities or non-academic criteria such as ability to play sports or race/ethnicity. </p>
<p>The interesting thing though is that most British universities believe, contrary to the majority opinion in the US, that focusing solely on academic credentials does not prevent them from recruiting precisely the students who are most likely to make an impact in the future and contribute the most to campus life. See e.g. what the University of Oxford [has to say about that](<a href=“http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/international_students/index.html”>http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/international_students/index.html</a>) on its international students admission page (read the paragraph under “Admission on academic ability and academic potential alone.”)</p>
<p>You say “selective,” and I say “meritocratic.” =)</p>
<p>^ Indeed! The American college system is NOT a meritocracy, except for holdouts like Caltech.</p>
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<p>Depends on how you define “merit.” Many schools consider achievements beyond grades and test scores to be a part of the merit equation.</p>
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<p>…and a very high proportion of some of the smartest students on the planet.</p>
<p>I said meritocracy specifically, not meritorious; I mean meritocracy in the traditional sense of academic and perhaps personal excellence, but NOT including race, gender, legacy, sports recruit, etc. Certainly all of the elite schools select meritorious students, but not according to a meritocracy. Cf. Oxbridge.</p>
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Maybe I misunderstood my grandmother and she’s on the track team and has a scholarship.</p>
<p>^^Wow!! Your grandmother is a scholarship athlete on a college track team? That’s one impressive grandmother!</p>
<p>(Sorry, I couldn’t resist)</p>
<p>^^Only on CC lol</p>
<p>I’m going to Caltech next year. I scored 800’s on SAT2 physics and math 2. I’m one of the top-scoring students in the City of Chicago Math League. Oh yeah, and I’m half Mexican. I don’t care that Caltech isn’t diverse or doesn’t have any good sports teams, I’m going there to learn. I go to a diverse magnet school (which in Chicago just means that it’s almost as good as normal schools in the suburbs), but in the upper-level classes I’m sometimes the only Hispanic in the class, so I didn’t really notice a problem with the Caltech student body when I was at Prefrosh Weekend. I don’t think diversity is a problem with Caltech’s admissions, because they’re right in only selecting the best. The only way to make schools like Caltech more diverse would be to increase educational standards in schools where there are many minority students. By the way, I got into UChicago but was rejected by MIT, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.</p>
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<p>The worst part about the admissions process in the US is that it is handled by people who should not have the final decision on how should or should not be admitted.</p>
<p>In the UK for example, or at least in Oxbridge, undergraduate admissions are handled by college tutors, i.e. the people who are actually going to teach the students once they are admitted. Based on exam results, interviews, letters of reference and their own experience, tutors try to figure out then who among the applicants is likely to do well in the classes or tutorials/supervisions they will teach.</p>
<p>In the US by contrast, it appears to me (I may be wrong though) that professors have little or no input or involvement in undergraduate admissions. Everything seems to be handled by “adcoms” who are not made up of academics (a recent MIT dean of admissions was even a fraudster as you may recall, who pretended to have a PhD degree she had never earned !). </p>
<p>The saddest part is that the reason professors don’t get more involved in undergraduate admissions is probably not because they wholeheartedly believe in the “holistic approach”, but rather because they don’t actually care. Of course, no one wants to teach “bad students”, but as long as the admitted students are qualified on average (as indicated by a certain range of SAT scores or GPA), it doesn’t really matter to them whether the school is necessarily admitting the best applicants. </p>
<p>Conversely, when it comes to graduate students, US universities behave like their UK counterparts, i.e. professors have a strong say on who is to be admitted or not and admission is based almost solely on academic achievements and research potential. The reason for that is quite simple: when a professor recommends the admission of a new prospective PhD student, that person is someone who, 3 or 4 years down the line, will generate the flow of publications that will add up to that professor’s CV and boost his/her career. So it matters directly to the professor whether the admitted student is qualified/potentially a good researcher or not.</p>
<p>I know I am being cynically blunt and I may be wrong, but it is the truth IMHO.</p>
<p>Sounds like a good idea for professors to have some input, but I am not sure of the feasibility and availability of time for those professors. Let’s say the average of student to faculty of a competitive university is 15:1 and the acceptance rate is about 15%, on average a professor will need to read about 225 applications. They have to do this around January time frame and have about 2-3 months to complete the whole process right in the middle of school year. That is easily 2-3 applications a day everyday in that period of time. I don’t know about how UK students application process works but with the current state in the US where a student apply to a lot of places because of competitiveness and to spread the risk around, it is a daunting task for admission at various university. They have a lot of full time staff for this for a good reason.</p>
<p>You highlighted the fact that fnord did not get accepted to a bunch of other really good schools does not at all indict the system. You only see a snippet of his stat, that is not enough evidence that yield the whole story. Again, I think it can’t hurt that professors have some input but I am not sure how that is possible in current state of things and definitely not because they don’t care, I believe.</p>
<p>TTparent,</p>
<p>It is feasible for tutors at Oxford/Cambridge to run admissions because students apply to a specific major only, i.e. they apply directly to study engineering, mathematics, history, etc. The number of applicants per course is obviously much smaller than the number of total applicants to the university as a whole. </p>
<p>Second, Oxford and Cambridge are collegiate universities, i.e. they are actually divided into various colleges that handle their own admissions. A student applies then to a specific college (to study any major offered by the university) and, once admitted by the college, is automatically admitted to the university. Again, the number of applicants per college is much smaller than the total number of applicants to the university as a whole.</p>
<p>My estimate above takes that into account. The faculty student ratio is the average number of students for each faculty at the school. Faculty would need to read applications within his major but on average that is how many he needs to look at.</p>
<p>Oops, my math was wrong. 15:1 ratio with 15% acceptance yeild 100 applications. A lot better but still about 1 applications a day for 3+ months. Sorry about that.</p>
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<p>This is very much how Cornell University, and its seven undergraduate colleges, admits its prospective students. So, the admissions procedure you describe is not exclusive to Oxford/Cambridge and the UK, though it is possibly more the norm across the pond.</p>
<p>"I said meritocracy specifically, not meritorious; I mean meritocracy in the traditional sense of academic and perhaps personal excellence, but NOT including race, gender, legacy, sports recruit, etc. Certainly all of the elite schools select meritorious students, but not according to a meritocracy. Cf. Oxbridge. "</p>
<p>Who is to say that a star football player with a twenty one hundred sat and 3.8 is any more impressive than a fat unathletic kid with a 4.3 and twenty 4 hundred?</p>
<p>The football player had to train for many hours daily (like 3-4) while the fat unathletic kid who doesn’t play sports could spend all his time studying. People think “Oh, he is a good athlete, he had good genes, he was jsut lucky” but most athletes had to train very very hard.</p>
<p>I think James Casey who had a 3.84 gpa at Rice and will be an nfl star is a far more impressive person than a rice student who doesn’t play sports with a 4.2. Casey had to balance all of his time studying with like 4-hour days of football.</p>
<p>There is no reason that athletic qualities are necessarily any less important than physical ones.</p>
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No, it’s quite different. Cornell divides its students into arts & sciences, engineering, ILR, hotel, etc.</p>
<p>Oxford has colleges that have the same programs. In other words, each college admits biology students, each college admits English students, etc. Each college is a complete unit (with certain programs as exceptions) in and of itself.</p>
<p>Unlike Cornell, each of the colleges at Oxford is using roughly the same admissions criteria.</p>
<p>^ Thanks for setting the difference straight, I stand corrected. It should be noted that Cornell also narrows the focus down to departments within the colleges. Admitted students receive an acceptance letter from the department within the particular college (who are the final arbiters of the acceptance), and another from the university as a whole. In any event, that is how it works for the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.</p>