https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/elite-college-admissions-broken/572962/
This article assumes that “holistic” admissions is by definition race-based:
“But the scope and purpose of this “holistic” approach to evaluating students has evolved since then, and today in its most genuine form evaluates each applicant through the lens of her context—her interests and personality, yes, but also her race and parents’ educational background, for example, and the ways in which that identity may have hindered her opportunities.”
I think the University of California would take issue with that characterization, especially as it’s an institution that does far better than the schools mentioned in the article in realizing what are claimed to be the resulting benefits of holistic evaluation:
“Holistic admissions can be very effective at achieving those goals: A recent study by Bastedo and several co-researchers published in the Journal of Higher Education that analyzed higher-education institutions across the U.S. found that those that use holistic admissions are far more likely than those that don’t to enroll low-income students.”
Re: “A recent study by Bastedo and several co-researchers published in the Journal of Higher Education that analyzed higher-education institutions across the U.S. found that those that use holistic admissions are far more likely than those that don’t to enroll low-income students.”
The paper is here: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bastedo/papers/BastedoEtAl2018.pdf
Looks like the sample of universities in the study is from the top three tiers of competitiveness in Barron’s. This makes the claim more believable than what the quoted sentence suggests, since low-income students tend to be densest at moderately and less selective non-holistic-admission universities, such as most of the CSUs in California, and non-selective community colleges, which one might reasonably think when reading “higher-education institutions across the U.S.”.
Although the article’s entitled, “Elite-College Admissions Are Broken,” the rest of the article discusses the Harvard lawsuit as a mere symptom of much larger cultural and socio-economical forces that cause greater demand than the available supply: “The lawsuit, it seems, is a byproduct of the fact that too many students are applying for too few spots at too few colleges.” “‘There’s a disease in that so many people are focused on 10 to 20 highly selective colleges that aren’t any better than 100 other colleges,’ says Richard Weissbourd, a developmental psychologist and Harvard lecturer… ‘If we don’t break the back of that [disease],’ Weissbourd says, ‘we can’t get rid of achievement pressure.’ The Harvard lawsuit is merely a symptom of this disease that will likely continue to metastasize.”
In fact, instead of offering any analysis of how the elite-college admissions are “broken,” the author devotes quite a space in extolling what good these elite-colleges are actually doing while pointing out various culprits (correctly) in everything else from Common App, USNWR rankings, to what the millennials and Gen-Xers’ want for themselves today and prestige as a top priority in incoming freshmen etc.
The article, from its content, should have been more aptly entitled, “Are Elite Colleges Victims of Their Own Popularity?”
Societal pressures. But so much unwarranted.
Unfortunately, pretty much no HS kids are knowledgeable enough to realize that there are many paths to pretty much any goal in this country.
In other words, “How do you stop Americans from associating, to borrow the words of the Harvard law professor and affirmative-action scholar Lani Guinier, ‘selectivity with excellence’?”
The other factors may be things like the following:
- A generation or few ago, a high school graduate was more likely to find work and be self supporting.
- A generation or few ago, college was less expensive.
- A generation or few ago, a college graduate was likely to have decent job opportunities, even from a lower prestige college in a major without much in the way of major-related job prospects.
- The gains from economic growth are now more concentrated in a few industries like finance, and more concentrated at the top of the income/wealth distribution.
Such things increase the pressure toward colleges, and especially elite colleges, in the following ways:
- More high school graduates feel that they need to go to college to get a good job.
- Many of them feel that they need to graduate from an elite college or a high-demand major in order to get better jobs than they could as high school graduates. With college being expensive, graduating college only to take a high school graduate job is seen as a waste.
- Elite colleges are seen as feeders for plutocrat-path jobs in finance, where one can gain a bigger share of the now much more unequally distributed gains of economic growth.
How about the writers stop borrowing the words of a Harvard law professor and borrow the words of a university of [nowhere you’ve heard of] professor instead?
In any case it’s not about selectivity but associating exclusivity with excellence that is the issue (viz designer labels). In many other areas that exclusivity is created by financial means. People may be jealous but they don’t generally view that as unfair. They may be more upset if the exclusivity is reserved for a particular group (e.g. when politicians are treated better than their constituents).
In the case of universities the exclusivity could be created purely on intellectual grounds (viz Oxbridge) and I doubt there would be as much perception of unfairness in that case (though there are certainly some complaints in the UK). Even if it was created on financial grounds I suspect there wouldn’t be as many complaints (say they auctioned off the places at Harvard to qualified candidates). The problem in the US is that the exclusivity is created by a more opaque process and as a result there is plenty of opportunity (whether justified or not) to claim unfairness.
Another thing about this article that caught my attention. As an Asian-American, it never ceases to amaze and sadden me so profoundly whenever I encounter stories of how Asian applicants had to “distort their identities to fit the profile they think the people reviewing their applications will find appealing” rather than being true to themselves. So the article starts with the case of a Korean-American student named Samantha who opted, at the advise of her white tutor and college counselors, not to “write about her violin-playing given the racial stereotypes about such instruments…” In fear of being “too Asian.” Liana Wang, a Chinese-American Yale student: “She and her Asian American peers assumed that 'if you’re interning in the medical center or doing research…you shouldn’t do that because people will just see you being just another stereotypical Asian.”
I don’t know what colleges out there that are “worth” trading your cultural and personal identities over. Although an Asian-American with nearly 5 decades of painful experience with racism, one thing that had never occurred in a single cell of my brain is to betray my own cultural heritage or pretend that I’m made of something other than what I’m. I didn’t raise my boys to shun their own cultural makeup in any way, shape or form. Quite to the contrary. You ARE what you ARE, and to pretend otherwise is one of the worst and the most pathetic type of self denigration. My violin-playing younger son, rather than worrying about how he’d appear as a stereotypical Asian kid to college AdComs, devoted his Common App essay on his violin playing as well as his desire to pursue a pre-med track while majoring in music. Can’t get any more stereotypical than those combinations as an Asian kid!! But so what? That’s HIM and those are HIS aspirations. Screw stereotypes AKA excuses. I’d much rather have my kids be rejected by all colleges simply for being themselves than have them resort to “distort their identities” in order to kiss the system’s arse and to find their seats in some loft. If any sorry-sounding students have to find themselves distorting their identities, you will not find me being sympathetic. THAT was your pathetic choice.
Ask yourself honestly, would you have the same opinion if your kiddo was not admitted to any ivy+ (including top LACs) school and had to go to your state U. (Lets assume you are not in a state with any top 15 publics).
The reason for the perception of unfairness or corruption is that admission to elite colleges, and the commonly perceived basis of seeing them as elite, is perceived to be supposed to be based on intellectual-based earned merit, but that it is seen as being corrupted by other factors (including characteristics not earned by the student), hiding in an opaque holistic process.
Yes, without any hesitation. My older son goes to our in-state public that’s not top 15 in the nation, and I’m as proud of him as my younger son at Princeton. I don’t know why you even ask such a question.
Yes. But of course those who recoil from the idea of permitting race as an admissions factor generally have no issue with permitting the use of class, though it is a rare 17-year-old who has had a hand in the class to which he or she belongs. I would imagine that a 17-year-old entering college is typically about as likely to have earned their class as they were in earning their race. So then no rich kid should be penalized in admissions merely because his parents were rich, and no poor kid should gain an advantage merely because his parents were poor. People are willing to use class in admissions because they think that class influences social mobility. I wonder why they think that race doesn’t.
“But of course those who recoil from the idea of permitting race as an admissions factor generally have no issue with permitting the use of class”
I’m not convinced of that. I think people who believe in selection on the basis of intellectual merit would mostly agree that you need to adjust the achievement criteria to account for the fact that those with more resources (e.g. test prep or schools offering more APs) will generally have higher realized achievements (test scores etc). Oxbridge interviews try to do that and identify academic potential. They don’t do it perfectly, but US interviews don’t even have that objective (for a start they aren’t done by the people who would teach you).
It has nothing to doJust asking because I’m still a little salty about one of my kids not getting into Cornell. He was a perfect fit academically (4.0/1500+) and socially (smart, will talk about anything intelligently, we are from NY and he applied to CALS, and just weird enough for Cornell). My other kid with 4.0/1500+ who is really on a different level in his “spike”, got stiffed from all the top schools. Both kids don’t really care anymore, so its all good to them and I’m saving money.
We’ll see if the older one gets in a top Grad school, although he hasn’t decided where to apply yet. Personally, I hoping for UCB. He is a Bernie lovin lefty 
and it would give me an excuse to visit in the winter and get him out of the northeast for a few years.
OTOH, He might just become an Actuary and not to worry about not being judged subjectively. Pass an exam, more money! Pass enough exams, get promoted. Hey a non-Asian with a 4.0 Math/Physics GPA! How did that happen?
My opinion of Asians is pretty good as the best bosses I’ve had were all from Taiwan. One even said the star of his family has degrees from a few ivies, even though a whole bunch others are just as or more professionally successful. The stars of my family are all MD’s so where you went to school doesn’t matter as long as you got into Med School. I have 2 relatives from different sides of the family who won separate Oscars. The real ones that you see on TV, not the ones they do at the luncheon. They are not on the same level as the Doctors.
FWIW, This entire website basically exists because we are all ivy worshiping! Look at the navigation left panel. I don’t see a placeholder for the Big 10 or SEC.
Lots of paths to any goal.
Lots of paths to any goal.
That and being goal-oriented towards a concrete intrinsically-motivated* life mission that you can mostly control (concrete being something that is measurable and dependent on you and not the opinions of others, so curing cancer would count as would reaching a specific financial milestone or keeping global warming below a certain threshold or being top X in the world by an objective criteria but not being famous or attending a prestigious school, as prestige is in the eye of the beholder).
*Intrinsically-motivated meaning that even if nobody cared about you acheiving your goals/missions or not, you would still strive to reach for it.
I feel that that really needs to be pounded in to high schoolers’ (and their parents’) heads.
Once you internalize that, it’s hard to justify ever sacrificing your ethnic identity or feeling salty about being rejected from any one school (or set of schools) as a door closing here means a door opening elsewhere.
@NoKillli Not everyone on here is prestige worshipping. Just as @TiggerDad is unwilling for his children to deny who they are for college admissions, we refuse to deny our beliefs (based on what we truly worship) and what we value (not discussing consumerism) to fund an elite piggybank.
Fwiw, our non-Asian, 4.0 math/physics very non-elite UG institution grad is now at a top grad school. All of our adult kids have individually achieved their personal goals.
I had typed the above earlier before my coffee and saved it as a draft debating on how to articulate the rest of my thoughts. Came back after coffee and @PurpleTitan had posted in the interim. Exactly. Great post. Said exactly what I was thinking, but better.
Thanks, @Mom2aphysicsgeek.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Closing thread which has devolved into debate carried over from other threads (and less than civil at that).