<p>they do not know anything, but they think they know everything.</p>
<p>Like you in this post?</p>
<p>I’m with T26E4. College admission does matter, and the people they select are chosen generally for good reason. I doubt any of them truly believe they know everything, though.</p>
<p>You could at least expand an argument instead of making a kind of weak claim. Just outright saying that is rather baseless.</p>
<p>College admissions isn’t really superficial - most of the criteria, if not all, is based on merit and character.</p>
<p>I mean, there might be a small minority of applicants who were rejected for superficial reasons, like the admissions officer was having a bad day and rejected someone because the applicant had the same name of his ex-wife, lol. Half joking.</p>
<p>OP, what changes do you think they could make to make it non-superficial?</p>
<p>I think that in general, the students who are accepted into top schools deserve to be there. Admissions counselors probably do miss out on a handful of students who have great potential, but do make relatively good decisions.</p>
<p>My teacher just told us, don’t make a statement UNLESS you have FACTS and evidence to support it.
Life lesson 101.</p>
<p>I agree that your statement’s probably a little too cynical. There are certainly some good-hearted, talented students who fall through the cracks, as well as some kids at top schools who probably do not deserve to be there… but for the most part I think the majority of kids deserve to be there.</p>
<p>And hey, if not, well then college applications are just reflective of how the real world runs. Honestly, are job applications any less superficial than college applications?</p>
<p>
No kidding? They’re judging people based off a piece of paper with some numbers on it. They’re judging 60,000 applications of numbers and overly long essays (that would be annoying to read after a couple of hours) in a short time. It’s pretty obvious that the judgment is going to be pretty superficial. When did you realize this? This is how the world works. The world, for the most part, isn’t some meritocracy. It’s funny how silly (and ignorant) people are on these forums are.</p>
<p>^ And honestly, college admissions here in the US are pretty darn personal compared to other countries. Many college systems in other countries admit or reject you based purely on test scores and grades. At least here there is at least SOME attempt to add some personality to the process, with interviews and essays.</p>
<p>The process is not objective. Because admissions are wholistic, it ends up having a large subjective component. I described the process to my colleagues in Germany, and they seemed kind of horrified/terrified by it; here admissions are just based on a single score you get at the end of high school, and most programs are actually open so that anyone can enroll (though there is a large weed-out in the first year). Which system is better? No one is going to win that debate. There’s no perfect solution, but I wouldn’t say that makes the whole thing superficial.</p>
<p>nano: one could argue that in the US, the top student has his/her choice of applying to schools with holistic admissions or schools that only admit based on stats-based, objective formulae.</p>
<p>If not one person wanted to “endure” the so-called *superficial evaluation <a href=“which%20is%20what%20I%20believe%20the%20OP%20is%20equating%20w/holistic%20admissions”>/I</a>, then the remaining 80% of US colleges would heartily welcome that application.</p>
<p>No one is forcing kids to apply to Holyoke or Pomona or Cornell.</p>
<p>If Rodrigo is so disgusted with the superficiality, an easy solution would be his withdrawal of his application to “know-nothing” Penn (to the delight of the remaining applicant pool) and then to solely apply to his local public universities.</p>
<p>But do even these universities really work just based off of pure numbers? Don’t most schools try to take into account the rigor of coursework and the school when considering grades? And they’ll wait differently factors like test scores and grades. It’s still not an objective process in most situations.</p>