<p>oh hey look, parents over-analyzing higher education</p>
<p>Yeah - the quarter million dollar price tag to educate junior sent us over the edge.</p>
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<p>Sometimes, I feel that this Ivy admission system has an echo of the Chinese imperial examination system. On the surface, the Chinese imperial system looked very “democratic”. Kids from poor families had the same shot as kids from elite families. But if you studied Chinese history, in reality, this system just perpetuated the hold of ruling elite on the Chinese society. Most of time, it was kids from elite families who did well since they had all the advantages (private tutors, tenant farmers/indentured servants working for them). Yes, every year, small amount of kids from poor/middle class families would make good on the exam. One of my favorite historians claimed that this was by design to act as a safety value to give an illusion to common folk that they have a fighting chance regardless of one’s station in life.</p>
<p>Of course, the consequence of not getting into Harvard is quite different from the failure to place in the Chinese Imperial exam. In this country, there are many paths to success. After failing the Chinese imperial exam several times, Hong Xiaquan went on to start the Taiping rebellion that costed over 20 million lives.</p>
<p>The imperial exams are taking a different route now.</p>
<p><a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?;
<p>Oh just you wait furrydog til next March when legions of high SES parwnts will descend on CC and claim that their kid (insert near perfect stats) was robbed of his rightful place by a URM with slightly lower stats. </p>
<p>But he’s wrong. They aren’t “mostly already from upper middle class backgrounds.” Indeed, these colleges go out of their way to recruit at lower SES levels, which causes untold ANGST about upper middle class kids who are “shut out” by poorer kids with lower SAT (etc) scores.</p>
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<a href=“Poor Students Are The Real Victims Of College Discrimination”>http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2012/05/02/poor-students-are-the-real-victims-of-college-discrimination/</a></p>
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If you are talking about the non-ivy and especially those need aware colleges or private colleges heavily reliant on tuition income, you may have a point, but as flawed as the current practice is, it’s the ivy’s that are trying to meaningfully level the playing field in private education. Did the Chinese imperial examination system lower their admission standards for the poor and under-represented minorities? Did they subsidize the poor financially just because they were poor? Did they encourage and consciously tap into the diversity of the backgrounds and talents in those selected? </p>
<p>What would an ivy league college, which is supposed to be an academic powerhouse first and foremost, look like if their students were absolutely <em>proportional</em> to the composition of the population in terms of SEC and racial background and whatnot? </p>
<p>But he’s wrong. They aren’t “mostly already from upper middle class backgrounds.” Indeed, these colleges go out of their way to recruit at lower SES levels, which causes untold ANGST about upper middle class kids who are “shut out” by poorer kids with lower SAT (etc) scores.</p>
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<a href=“Poor Students Are The Real Victims Of College Discrimination”>http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2012/05/02/poor-students-are-the-real-victims-of-college-discrimination/</a></p>
<p>If I have to hear about a daughter being #1 at a private school one more time, I will gag. #1 of a class of 32 students. Wow…better than 31 others in Toledo!</p>
<p>So which is it? Are elite schools supposed to reward academic merit without regard to SES and diversity, or are they intended to serve as playing-field levelers? You can’t achieve both objectives simultaneously. </p>
<p>“Similar studies of competitive undergraduate schools have shown that three-quarters of students come from the top economic quartile, while less than 10% come from the bottom half.”</p>
<p>And what does the APPLICANT pool look like? Not a lot of kids from lower SES backgrounds have elites on the radar screen to begin with. </p>
<p>^That is a different discussion than They aren’t "mostly already from upper middle class backgrounds.". Most are from upper middle class backgrounds regardless of recruiting efforts of kids from lower SES backgrounds. And it seems to me important to acknowledge that fact, regardless of how one interprets it.</p>
<p>“Most are from upper middle class backgrounds regardless of recruiting efforts of kids from lower SES backgrounds. And it seems to me important to acknowledge that fact, regardless of how one interprets it.”</p>
<p>You know, what more can these schools do? Seriously. They participate in Questbridge. The school I’m most familiar with, and many similar schools, do outreach to poorly-served communities in their home city or state from the standpoint of being a “good neighbor.” The top schools offer unbelievable financial aid. At what point are their efforts deemed “enough”, and to what extent does reaching-out-to-the-underserved interfere with the mission of providing an academic experience to the best and brightest? You can do some of each, but you can’t do all of both.</p>
<p>And it’s funny how there’s only worry about the corrosive effect of wealth on the kids who are already well-to-do, but no worry about the corrosive effect of wealth on the have-not kids who beat great odds and get to these schools and get positioned for good jobs down the line. </p>
<p>^^Again, those are different discussions than saying “They aren’t mostly from upper middle class backgrounds” which seems to be an incorrect statement based on all the research I can find.</p>
<p>It seems to be a fact that most are from upper middle class backgrounds. Whether that is a problem is a different discussion. If we regard it as a problem, how to best address that problem is another discussion.</p>
<p>If this were true: “They aren’t mostly from upper middle class backgrounds,” I’m not sure it would be necessary to discuss the points brought up in either of your paragraphs above. I’m not interested in that discussion at the moment, just in the fact that students at “those” schools are primarily from the upper middle class, as far as I can tell. </p>
<p>Well, it seems that someone succeeded in their goal here.</p>
<p>Methadone, people. Methadone.</p>
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<p>You cannot be more off the mark than that IMO. The modern private elite US college admission systems are far more holistic and subjective than the Chinese Imperial Civil Service system or more accurately…systems as it wasn’t a monolithic system, but something which evolved over time…and not necessarily for the better.*</p>
<p>While it wasn’t the complete meritocracy it’s often portrayed to be among Chinese historians and literati, it is arguably more meritocratic in its stated aims…to get the best candidates for imperial civil service as demonstrated by doing well enough to outrank most of the candidates in their intake from the county, provincial, and the metropolitan/capital levels. </p>
<p>It’s certainly better than what we had in Western Europe and the US up until the mid-late-19th century when the British copied the system for its Indian/British Civil Service and in the late 19th century, the US copied it indirectly through Britain to replace rampant blatant political nepotism and patronage policies which prevailed before. </p>
<p>Everyone who aspires to take the exams would usually be aware of what material is covered and start educating and prepping themselves accordingly. </p>
<p>If you want the closest equivalent to the Chinese Imperial Civil Service exam in US education, the best examples I can think of are public magnet high schools like Stuyvesant, Boston Latin, or TJSST BEFORE it moved to a more “holistic” admission system which ended up admitting a class where 1/3 of admitees were placed in remedial classes because they were underprepared for TJ’s rigorous academic curriculum. </p>
<p>In such exam public magnets, everyone takes the same exam and one must score well enough to be ranked within the top set number sufficient to fill the incoming freshman class seats with some possible allowance for those who may opt to go elsewhere. </p>
<p>At Stuy, the minimum score for admission is set after they take the score of the lowest scoring student in the top 900 or so students sufficient to fill their incoming freshman class. That’s the only requirement. ECs, essays, interviews, or perfect attendance records(Talk about LCD) are irrelevant for admission to such schools**. </p>
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<li>By the Ming/Qing eras, …especially the last century of the Qing dynasty, the system became corrupted as there was an introduction of lower ranking “degrees” which could be obtained through purchase rather than by demonstrated exam merit which privileged wealthier students and allowed them to bypass the competition of lower-level county exams. Ironically, in doing so, those dynasties ended up taking a page from one old British tradition of filling its civil service and commissioned ranks in the Army…through purchase.<br></li>
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<p>** Some common concerns which caused such factors not to be used was they tended to favor higher SES students, politically well-connected, those who are much more extroverted, and people-pleasers/conformists who elementary/middle school teachers/admins tend to favor for grades/recommendations because they’re easier to deal with. In short, factors which could bring too many political factors into the public magnet HS admissions process. </p>
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<p>He actually passed the county level exam, but failed the provincial exam and was suffering from some serious mental illnesses as illustrated by his “messianic visions”. While he wasn’t successful, he was just one of the vast majority who ended up being beaten out by examinees who did better and ranked within the top set percentage of examinees in his cohort. </p>
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<p>I think we are conflating elite and middle/upper middle class.
Many of us do not begrudge these schools giving preferential treatment to kids with low SES. The other end of the spectrum, however, is a bit problematic.</p>
<p>What more can these schools do?
How about:
- Assign each applicant a numeric application number - no race or country of origin info.
- Explicitly tell adcom to ban the consideration of legacy, development, parents’ political/business status, faculty status, donation, status of persons writing the recommendation.
- They are free to consider SES to help with kids with low SES (but not the other way around :o) )</p>
<p>At any rate, the bottom line is that these institutions are private. In term of admission, It is within their right to do whatever they please. As I have mentioned, there are many paths to success in this society. There is very little reason to fret over whether the admission at these schools are stacked for/against your kid. I think in general, most people do not fret over this - it is only the CCers. :)) </p>
<p>"What more can these schools do?
How about:
- Assign each applicant a numeric application number - no race or country of origin info.
- Explicitly tell adcom to ban the consideration of legacy, development, parents’ political/business status, faculty status, donation, status of persons writing the recommendation."</p>
<p>Much of this is quite silly, because the number of real developmental cases or children-as-bigwigs at any college isn’t all that large. As for faculty status, why shouldn’t a school want to “reward” its employees with preferential treatment for their children? As for “status of persons writing the recommendation” - the vast majority of recommendations are written by high school teachers and counselors, of course, who have pretty equal (that is to say, not very much) status. </p>
<h1>176 “At any rate, the bottom line is that these institutions are private. In term of admission, It is within their right to do whatever they please.”</h1>
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<a href=“Taxpayer Subsidies for Most Colleges and Universities Average Between $8,000 to More than $100,000 for Each Bachelor’s Degree, New Study Finds | American Institutes for Research”>Search | American Institutes for Research;
<p><a href=“http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/09/24/how-taxpayers-are-helping-to-finance-harvards-capital-campaign/”>http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/09/24/how-taxpayers-are-helping-to-finance-harvards-capital-campaign/</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/03/17/harvard-mit-and-other-research-schools-thwart-obama-administration-effort-cap-overhead-payments/Nk5PT0Mc8MQZihFVNs5gNK/story.html”>http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/03/17/harvard-mit-and-other-research-schools-thwart-obama-administration-effort-cap-overhead-payments/Nk5PT0Mc8MQZihFVNs5gNK/story.html</a></p>
<p>" They aren’t “mostly already from upper middle class backgrounds.” Indeed, these colleges go out of their way to recruit at lower SES levels"</p>
<p>This is the conversation I think we should be having! They are indeed mostly from the UMC, AND the schools are going out of their way to change that. But could they be doing more?</p>
<p>Yes, I think they could be doing more. They pay lots of money to send recruiters around the country, but it’s a lot less than they could afford to spend. Here’s an idea: every year, fly a big group of inner-city and small-town guidance counselors to Cambridge for a weekend. Put them up, feed them, educate them about what these schools offer and what their kids can do to get in. Send them home with a message to spread to their colleagues that this IS possible, affordable (and wonderful) for their top kids. Every rich, ultra-elite school could do this. They’d make a dent in that information gap.</p>
<p>I get flown out to see under-the-radar schools that want to attract my full-pay clients. HYPS, at a minimum, could fly these counselors in to show them what they want the kids to know.</p>