Ethics of "Chancing" students

Parent Cafe
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Yes, here is the list of majors at a very selective state university in a rural area:
http://catalog.calpoly.edu/programsaz/
Note the existence of majors like agricultural systems management, animal science, bioresource and agricultural engineering, environmental earth and soil sciences, food science, forestry and natural resources, wine and viticulture.

Would a student interested in such areas be interested in the academic offerings at most of the super-selective colleges, other than Cornell?

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It’s my view that newspaper articles have a history of making misleading references to studies, so I’d want to look at what the authors actually say before making conclusions about accuracy. Looking in more detail, the exact quote from the book is below: The quote says that the decreased admission odds is associated a grouping they call career oriented activities. They say this grouping might include 4H clubs. Saying “might” implies they are not certain whether 4H has a negative relationship with admission odds or not.

“Excelling in career oriented activities is associated with 60-65% lower odds of admission. These activities include ROTC and co-ops. They might also encompass 4-H clubs…”

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“It’s my view that newspaper articles have a history of making misleading references to studies.” Yup. Not written by scholars.

Watch out for your own assumptions, too. Not all 4-H is animals and sewing. Not all “rural” kids are "tied to the land, " so to say. Not all wealthy top stats kids with highly educated parents are productively engaged. That’s where “gets it” comes in. Or not.

Unlike some CC threads, adcoms at selective and higher holistics look at the individual. And that app package.

Kids anywhere can stretch, have strong drives they’re moving to fulfill. Or lean back.

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“Excelling in career oriented activities is associated with 60-65% lower odds of admission. These activities include ROTC and co-ops. They might also encompass 4-H clubs…”

Just one observation: I have degrees from a couple of highly selective US universities. I don’t recall ever meeting even a single student at either of them who grew up on a farm. I am wondering whether coming from a rural background is one form of “diversity” that highly selective US universities don’t care about.

I am not completely sure how this relates to the ethics of chancing students.

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Of course, “career-oriented activities” includes all those premeds out there doing healthcare related things. Or engineering wannabes having great stem experiences. No disadvantage in that.

I think the phrase refers not to being a member of 4-H or ROTC, but having it as your primary centerpiece. An example is high schools that have a vocational track for CNA or tech health jobs and kids who think that bolsters their apps for premed at a highly selective college. Not. Same for those ‘future health workers’ clubs.

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Of course, Espenshade puts his foot in it across several of his attention-getting works. Then comes out to clarify to those who ran with some minor tangent, using it for their own purposes.

“The book does not offer any explanation for the finding about career-oriented activities. And in interviews Thursday, Radford said the
types of activities she and Espenshade classify as “career-oriented” include Model United Nations, mock trial groups, and clubs for young
entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, because the book left out those other activities and specifically cited the ROTC and farming-oriented
organizations, it was recently seized upon as offering evidence that elite colleges are biased against students who love Christ, country, and
life in the countryside.” Inside Higher Ed.

You can also find his Time interview responding to Douthat. And comments that they did not assess “rural.”

Since we’re off track due to this sidebar on rural, let me just say it shows how chancing hs kids so often relies on a responder’s superficial supposed gleanings. You heard this or read that and run with it. That’s a danger.

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I think many do, I have met farm kids at my kid’s school. In the cases I’m thinking they also bring geographic diversity as the farms are out west. I doubt it is a tip or a hook but it is interesting and probably different from most applicants to the typical elite NE schools.

Here’s a NYT article about one org, CCE, that seeks out rural kids by placing college advisers in rural high schools. Which is itself a bit interesting ethically since they are helping kids get to good colleges but also often sending the “best and brightest” to schools far from home - in one example a kid was aiming for UNC but was encouraged to apply to Midd and got in and went.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/21/us/elite-colleges-counselors-rural-schools.html

and this one

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/education/edlife/colleges-discover-rural-student.html?_r=0

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I did not realize that Espenshade was one of the two Princeton authors to whom the WSJ article referred. I don’t believe that the article named the two sociologist. Interesting choice, not to provide the names. Espenshade is marked with a “caveat” in my memory. I suspect that I have disagreed with earlier conclusions he reached, after digging into them a bit. lookingforward makes a good point, in terms of omissions from the book that made the story more sensationalized.

Quoting Data10, “newspaper articles have a history of making misleading references to studies.” True. I think the WSJ tends to be a bit more accurate than most, though their editorial philosophy is apparent in most of the columns.

The colleges may be looking for rural students just to expand their recruitment base, but it seems to me that if they have instituted programs to reach out to rural students, their admissions and enrollment patterns may suggest that it would also be a good idea in the interest of access and/or fairness. No?

With regard to how this fits into the “chancing” topic:

My underlying point is that in chancing, the comment has been made that one needs to know more than GPA and standardized test scores; more than rigor of curriculum and ECs. There is an element of the decision that is based on self-presentation. So one can’t chance without knowing that.

So far, so good. Yet I have qualms about this, because it still seems to me that a self-presentation that shows that the student “gets it” is not likely to have sprung full-blown from the student’s mind and personality, but in large part reflects the student’s environment. And the students who don’t “get it” are also reflecting their environment. So I don’t have more regard for a student who “gets it” than for one who does not. Here I am excluding issues of character [presumed to be good for all of the students in question]. Fine, the students who “get it” are more likely to be admitted. But isn’t there at least a bit of cultural bias operating there?

Who has not known or at least heard of a rather clueless wealthy student? Of course, such students do exist. This may reflect not paying attention to others, or it may reflect an environment that should help the student “get it” viewed superficially, but that in actual fact does not help.

There are people I care about who are “farm kids” and some others who assuredly don’t “get it,” even though they are great people and would add a lot to most college campuses. For the most part, they do not apply to the very top schools in any event–but a few do.

Finally, it is not my intent to equate “rural” with “not getting it.” However, just from my personal observations, rural America is somewhat detached from the mainstream (East Coast) culture.

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There is no such construct as “rural America”. A kid who grows up on a diary farm in Vermont may not have much in common from a cultural perspective with a kid growing up in a mining town in Appalachia.

This country is very, very big and I think it’s inaccurate to describe “mainstream” culture as East Coast. Mainstream is a product of who you are and where you live and what your milieu considers mainstream.

I know people in rural areas of Minnesota who are very liberal politicallyl, very religious, and believe that higher education is one of the best things they can give their kids. I know people in rural Oklahoma who are conservative in the extreme, also very religious but a different religion (and frankly, not that tolerant of folks who don’t pray the way they do, even other Christians) and are suspicious of higher education unless it’s from Oral Roberts or designed to teach a specific skill- computer programming or nursing for example.

There is a huge divide even in rural America, Quant.

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Sure, rural America is not a single block. But I think that practically every part of rural America is culturally different from the dominant cultural group(s) at HYPSM, whether the rural Americans come from Vermont, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, or from the upper midwest, but not Minnesota, . . . etc.

I don’t mean to say that the East Coast has a lock on mainstream culture. However, when you look at the national media, the dominant cultural influences seem to me to come from the East. Perhaps this is just a consequence of limited knowledge based on reading the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. The West Coast is different, to be sure, but I do believe that there are ways in which the coasts are more like each other and less like the central part of the country.

I also think that someone who grew up in the educated, affluent sub-culture of the East Coast can fit into Harvard seamlessly, while for people who did not grow up in that culture, it requires some adjustment to feel at home.

Gross overgeneralizations, yes, but my posts are long as it is, and I am not writing a book!

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I grew up within a 50 cent T-ride away from Harvard and found myself an extreme outlier at Brown.

So I would argue that your point that growing up in the “educated, affluent sub-culture of the East Coast can fit into Harvard seamlessly” is both inaccurate, and a not terribly helpful observation about sociological diversity in America- even in Brookline, Somerville, Alston, Needham, etc. (all towns within a quick bus or T ride away from Harvard Square). There are religious evangelicals in Boston (yes, there are) ,there are people from religious denominations who may live in Boston or New England but whose homes and upbringings would be at home in Salt Lake City or San Antonio or Omaha.

And you are completely dismissing the experiences of immigrants, non-white people, and anyone who isn’t affluent (which is a large proportion of the population btw).

Sorry, not buying your point. Perhaps you shouldn’t base your perspective on reading the WSJ (written from a plutocrats perspective-- regardless of geographic orientation) et al. Not everyone on the Coasts is a member of the top 1%, which IS the worldview which is dominant in the Journal.

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It’s not locational, blossom, it’s cultural. Yes, there are a lot of micro-cultures. Yes, people other than students from farming families find it hard to adjust to the prevailing culture(s) at Harvard.

I might be mistaken, but I thought that you had posted earlier that you were unfamiliar with what it meant to be “in banking,” when you started as an undergrad. I am guessing that many of your Harvard classmates did know what being “in banking” meant? I think that knowledge is part of the “educated, affluent sub-culture of the East Coast.”

(I don’t know any people in banking/finance personally, even now.)

My concern is for anyone who doesn’t understand about the “proper” self-presentation for the top colleges. Other posters have seemed to think that there is something wrong with these students. I don’t think so. I just think their culture is different, and that people should be open-minded about that. While I was using rural students as an example, my concern certainly encompasses people with all sorts of other experiences that mean that they don’t “get it,” whatever exactly the “it” is. (That wasn’t my term originally.)

I grew up in a culture that was very averse to “bragging.” In fact, it pretty much required hiding one’s light under a bushel barrel, in an airtight drum, in a locked room . . . I read student essays (not for admissions) and see a very wide range of how much self-promotion is included. I interact with colleagues, and see a very wide range of how much self-promotion is being done. What is just the right amount of self-promotion (cleverly and subtly done) for a college application is in the eyes of the beholders.

My perspective is hardly based on the Wall Street Journal. I read it on Saturdays. I am not sure that it is exclusively for plutocrats, but there is certainly that angle. On Saturday and all the rest of the week I also read the New York Times and listen to NPR. (I read the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Chicago Tribune from time to time, and read my rather limited local paper more or less daily.) If you are outside the “culture” that is represented by the New York Times or the slightly different NPR “culture,” it is not hard to identify the assumptions that underlie the reporting. This is especially true if you have bought into one of those cultures at one point, and then lived outside of it, so that the implicit content becomes detectable.

I think we would probably actually agree with each other in large part, blossom, if we had a conversation, rather than the limited interaction of posting (I am not suggesting a conversation, just saying that I often see your point of view). My posts collectively over time give an indication of my philosophy, but any individual post may create an incorrect impression. Situations I have not mentioned explicitly are not necessarily being ignored by me.

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Just to add: If one’s upbringing would make one feel at home in a locale with a particular dominant culture (e.g., Salt Lake City–or to take a different example, Parkman, Ohio), then I would view that as one’s actual “home” culture.

There are a few 17-year-olds who cross cultural reference frames easily, but I think that they are quite rare.

(Also, for posters who haven’t read many of my earlier posts: I am not a “Quant.” The QuantMech refers to quantum mechanics, and was initially part of a joke to amuse a poster who is now long gone from the forum.)

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I think that ones home culture is very important and does help kids get it. For me, I grew up where being Jewish was the dominant culture, but every kid there was also very aware, from a very young age, that this culture was not the culture of everybody. From the time one was old enough to be aware of Santa and Christmas, you knew that not everyone was like you, indeed that most people weren’t, and we got an unspoken message from our parents it was important to understand that your culture was the minority culture and to have an understanding of what other cultures are. Our parents and grandparents were in a situation where understanding other cultures was vitally important to success and they had succeeded by understanding this and by not having a problem with it . I think that it’s easier for people who are aware of and are AT PEACE WITH, or even like, being in the minority to succeed in places where they might not “ fit in” the majority culture. This is especially true if those in your community see this place as the best chance for success based on the prior experience of those in the past.

I think for many in communities whose culture used to be the majority one, who never felt the need to learn about other cultures because there was no advantage in it but is now facing erosion of that majority status the cultural message is different. It’s very different to lose something than to never have had it at all. And the reaction to the loss of that status is going to have a different cultural effect in ones own community in terms of views about going into a community where you are the minority.

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Quant- if we were to meet I’m sure we would agree on many, many things.

And if you were to state “an affluent kid from Missouri, Montana, Illinois or Michigan has more in common with an affluent kid from New York or California than they do with an impoverished kid from their own region” I would agree with you 100%. My takeaway from your posts is that you are conflating regional culture with economics. I knew a kid in college from one of the Dakotas- family was third or fourth generation wealthy from mining and drilling. She was a far better “fit” with the other “rich kids” than she was with upper Midwestern kids from middle class backgrounds. Family money from the Dakotas? They didn’t vacation in Martha’s Vineyard or coastal Maine (i.e. different enclaves) but the rest was the same.

It’s lovely and romantic to assume that upper middle class and moneyed kids from St. Louis and Omaha and Memphis and Oklahoma City et al have all these great Frontier/Prairie/Middle American values. But I can pretty much promise you that they aren’t darning grandpa’s socks at night like a character in a novel.

I don’t think the elite colleges are deaf and blind to the advantages that wealth confer. And I think not “getting it” when you are not wealthy is no more or less problematic if you are poor from Chelsea, MA vs. Fargo North Dakota. The issue is the dough, not the geography.

Do we agree?

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I was one, I think I know quite a few now including my own kids and some contemporaries. Are they that rare, especially among the educated and wealthier families? In this age of geo-mobility?

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Thanks for the thoughtful comments, maya54.

We are largely in agreement, blossom. I apologize for the “shorthand” that I was using in describing people. I did not actually mean the description of cultures to be location-based, and apologize for my insensitivity in not stating my opinion more carefully. Location does factor into it somewhat, but it is really a question of the people with whom one interacts either in person or through books, print, and broadcast media (and perhaps especially the people with whom one interacts as friends) in one’s location, or outside of it. Added to that should be the common experiences of people who do not know each other, but who respond to the same circumstances and influences.

Absolutely, the affluent have many things in common with each other that they do not have in common with less-affluent people who live a short distance from them. I do not intend to automatically project prairie values onto students from the prairies.

I believe that colleges do try to limit the advantages to the already-advantaged, in making admissions decisions. (Yet the cynic in me would like to say that I am positive that the elite colleges are not deaf nor blind to the advantages that wealth confer, in the following sense: they are relying on some of those advantages–to the colleges themselves–when they offer special treatment by admissions/development to students from donor families.)

I was not really writing about fitting in to a college group when I was commenting on “getting it.” Rather, I meant to focus on the impression that one’s college application creates, and the reaction to it from admissions staff. Many applications are read with a sensitive appreciation of the cultural circumstances of various applicants. I do not doubt that. And that’s very good (and right)!

Yet it seems to me that a few of the posters look down on applicants who don’t “get it.” I am not sure exactly what the applicants are not getting. Perhaps the other posters are right to look down on the applicants who don’t get something [that has not yet been specified]. To take this totally away from socio-economics, my colleagues and I span a very broad spectrum of the level of self-promotion that we engage in on a day-to-day basis in conversations. I would imagine that our college application essays looked very different from each other’s. I would also imagine that colleges would react more favorably to one end of the spectrum than to the other (assuming the self-promotion to be done extensively, yet subtly vs. not at all) but I also imagine that which approach is more advantageous could differ from college to college.

To return to an issue connected with socio-economics: I do not really think that many colleges would look favorably on a student who was the Teen Campaign Manager for Trump in his/her county. I am a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. But there are people I actually care about who voted for Trump, and who even enthusiastically supported him. (Whoof! This is still causing me some troubled disbelief!). They are not deplorable people. I don’t give much for their admissions chances at the better schools, if their beliefs are telegraphed in their application essays. Would this be an example of an applicant’s “getting it” or not?

I am sure that I am still flatting and sharping my way through an attempt to express my exact opinions. Apologies for that. Also, it is evident that I am not a sociologist, and don’t know much about sociology.

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Even whether an applicant regards the person statement as a statement about her/himself, or whether the applicant sees it as a statement intended to convey what she/he will add to the college community, is based on the local culture, in my opinion. The latter seems obviously more advantageous to me. But I would not look down on a 17-year-old who did not understand that.

I have read on CC within the past few weeks about schools where two weeks of English classes are devoted to “The College Essay,” and I know that there are summer programs that spend time on that topic. The effects of this type of polishing might be detectable, but they might not be. The student with the undetectably polished essay is not automatically better than others. For that matter, the student with the obviously polished essay is not automatically worse than others. They are all reflecting their environments, some more advantageous than others.

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QM, “My concern is for anyone who doesn’t understand about the “proper” self-presentation for the top colleges. Other posters have seemed to think that there is something wrong with these students. I don’t think so. I just think their culture is different, and that people should be open-minded about that.”

I think you’re the one worried about cultural influences, you raised it, no? Who else offered that there’s something wrong with these kids? I’m not the least concerned some kid from a midwest small community or down on the border or whatever, doesn’t have, say, the advantages of having lived in an urban area or rubbing elbows with the banking families. Nor do I lose sleep that what you end up posing as under-exposed stereotypes can’t make an adjustment, say, moving from a small high shool to an elite college.

There are challenges for all. As blossom hints, even a Boston suburb is not the culled group at an Ivy. But, the kids who earn an admit have shown strengths, vision, and a high level of activation, including outside the usual box, and resilience. They have tested their boundaries and stand out in a vast pool of get-along/go-along others, even top performers from top school districts. Maybe you need to learn more about them.

I’m wondering what you even mean by “get it.” Get what? Why this sidebar about rural?

When I refer to “get it,” it’s in the context of a college app and before that, the awareness to make the right choices, along the way, in hs. The decider is the college, which has wants and likes. Does a kid “get” what that college wants? The whole of it. Especially the top colleges so many CC chance-me kids covet.

Too many don’t. Across all SES or other demographics. They and their parents - and the hs kids who chance them - are busy counting AP classes, mesmerized by stats, this club title, that fund raiser, or how many vol hours, etc. Wealthy kids aren’t protected from their hs based assumptions.

Check your stereotyping.

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Re: people who cross cultural reference frames easily

Wouldn’t be surprised if most people’s social contacts were mainly those of similar SES and educational attainment*. In some areas, mainly the same race/ethnicity as well.

*For high school and traditional age college students, consider their parents’ SES and educational attainment for this purpose.