USAMO is nice. So is a poetry award from a similarly national organization. But it won’t overcome limited thinking, a limited record that doesn’t show the range of qualities a top holistic seeks.
Figure…it…out. Be that sort. Not the one who assumes. Not the one who thinks it’s all heirarchical, best stats, best club titles, best income. Have some energy to dig a little, to be a thinker.
Your assertion is just silly @jzducol
Look at Tulane’s AOs, helpfully they posted for a group photo:
https://admission.tulane.edu/meet-our-counselors
15 are male. 11 are female. At least 10 look “not white”. Can’t tell if they know what USAMO is from the photo but if you click their names you will find a number of STEM majors.
Now how about you show me one that’s all white female humanities majors?
^look, you can always pick some college that shows the exception to the rule. The point is inside top colleges admission offices, its probably accurate that humanity major, white, female are the majority. When they believe student body benefits from diversity of different views–it may or may not be be true these days-- they seem to forget that they themselves are a very homogeneous group. If they want to practice holistic approach where human perspective and judgement are key, IMO they should first diversify their own ranks.
jzducol, you are taking this thread badly off track. You’re just throwing out some assumption and challeging people to engage you in an argument.
Not worth it.
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Then it will be easy for you to show them to us @jzducol
Like Stanford maybe.
https://admission.stanford.edu/counselors/officers.html
Oh wait, no plenty of men with names that don’t suggest “white” there too, imagine that.
Northwestern? Nope. http://admissions.northwestern.edu/documents/Territory%20Manager%20List%202017_2018%20REV_October2017.pdf
Penn? Whoops, not that one either. http://www.admissions.upenn.edu/contact/contact-staff-members
Maybe Michigan? Oh no…not that one either. http://www.admissions.upenn.edu/contact/contact-staff-members
Maybe you meant Dartmouth? Nope… https://admissions.dartmouth.edu/contact-us/admissions-officers-team
Schools with high volumes of applications that need to be read holistically probably hire seasonal workers to do initial readings.
On the initial thread topic, I think it is pretty clear that one can’t chance students who are in the general ballpark for “top” school admissions, without knowledge of the intangibles–what is in their favor beyond the GPA, course rigor, standardized test scores, ECs, and other listable accomplishments.
So it seems unwise to chance students, if the intangibles are not known.
Beyond that, if–like me–you have a suspicion that you only partially “get it,” then you probably don’t have a good basis for chancing.
I have sometimes commented on chances with the idea of encouraging students, when it seems reasonable to encourage them, without going overboard. Also, to borrow a quotation from the writer of the Inspector Lewis series on BBC: I am “not so much green as cabbage-looking.” (I am only partly clueless.)
Initial readings are done by seasoned AOs at top holistic privates. That’s “first cut.” Then the rest of the team will join in, some long term additional readers who know kids and that U, some places it can be faculty or staff, and/or other area reps. We don’t want lurkers to think temps are trashing their shot with the initial read. Or the notion some have said on CC that it’s work study kids.
I don’t think you’re clueless, QM. I’ve seen you value the right things many times.
It looks like some of the holistic privates (and publics too) are going to the committee based evaluation model:
Yvonne Romero Da Silva is now at Rice.
I think I have reported before that one of my children, for several years, regularly did seasonal work reading and scoring applications for his alma mater. For part of that time he was sharing an apartment with an admissions officer, who was also a close friend, and several other admissions officers of both sexes were in the same social circle. So it was pretty easy for him to be on the same wavelength as they, and they understood and trusted him. I don’t know how many others were doing the same work, but he was not the only one.
In terms of background, he is a professional big data quant analyst, and his housemate was a math major who went into math teaching at various prep schools after he left the admissions office. They would hardly have automatically valued poetry prizes over USAMO, quite the opposite. They would have felt they understood what USAMO represented, and they would have been curious about the poetry prize: who was sponsoring it, who was judging, how deep was the pool? My other kid had won poetry prizes, so he would have had a sense of how much or how little they could mean.
It is the case, however, that admissions offices have a responsibility to produce a student body that will want to learn what the faculty wants to teach. As a practical matter, in this STEM-obsessed era, that probably means people who are reliable future humanities majors do have some kind of admissions advantage. By most accounts, STEM types outnumber them overwhelmingly in the applicant pools, but the number of tenured faculty in the English and history departments may not be a lot less than those in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.
Re JHS #170: The sound of thundering hooves in the distance? Applicants stampeding toward the humanities.
(Probably not, really, but there are students who are looking for any edge.)
JHS’s post suggested to me a term that might be better to substitute for “culture” in my posts, namely “wavelength.” Possibly more accurate.
A couple of things one can say about chancing: A short-term involvement with a charitable group (Day of Volunteering, Week of Work and Sun in Central America) carries very little weight with admissions. But if you flip this around and look at it from the student’s viewpoint, the student has usually given up something to participate; and that carries more weight with her/him. (No wonder some of the students are clueless.)
If the students in the local school fall asleep in class due to over-work (with any frequency), then a break day spent volunteering in the community carries a cost. Some students may commit to it just for the supposed admissions edge. But some may want to help out, yet face rather stringent time constraints. This is no doubt limited to a fairly small number of school districts. But if the students in a school skip lunch to take an extra class, it’s a pretty good bet that they are also experiencing severe time constraints. Of course, they would not have to take the extra class, but that too carries costs in terms of the “rigor of schedule” rating.
The students who volunteer in Central America for a week may be giving up the kind of unencumbered spring break that stops being possible as one gets older. I am reminded of the recent Pearls before Swine cartoon, where the young person has time to travel, but no money (Nuts!); the middle-aged person has money to travel, but no time (Nuts!); and the elderly person has both time and money, but two bad knees (Nuts!). Lately, have you (parents) been as unencumbered as you were as high school or college students? I’d guess for most of us the answer is “No.” Of course, exactly how much of a spring break is being given up depends on the Work/Sun ratio in the week in Central America. In any event, this experience generally carries little weight with admissions, and there are many booby traps that can be accidentally sprung in an essay about it.
A decade ago, in my (relative) naïveté, I would have been impressed by a student who organized a substantial fund raiser for a community charity, or a world charity. This may still have been impressive back then, but it doesn’t count for much at all now, in terms of college admissions.
And don’t even get me started on the Founder of Pie Club! 
TL;DR at the outset: No, there are quite a bit more STEM faculty out there than humanities faculty.
Using the BLS’s definition of humanities faculty (which includes, f’rex, linguistics faculty with a primary assignment in English departments but not those with a primary assignment in linguistics departments, so it’s a somewhat imperfect measure, but it’s what we’ve got), in 2015 humanities faculty made up ~12% of all college faculty (numbers from eyeballing the graph at https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatorDoc.aspx?i=71#fig320).
Faculty in the natural sciences made up a somewhat higher proportion of all faculty, at ~13%, and engineering was ~5%. (Social science faculty made up ~10%.)
Couldn’t find numbers on what proportion of these faculty members are tenure-stream (I know the numbers are out there, but I’m too pressed for time at the moment to properly search for them), but my initial suspicion would be that the proportion would be similar for the humanities and social sciences, possibly slightly higher for engineering.
As an addendum to #171, I realize that most students don’t have the option of spring break vs. “Week of Work and Sun in Central America.” I didn’t.
To fill in the missing assumption: I have assumed that students whose families can pay for “Week of Work and Sun in Central America” could also pay for a traditional spring break trip. An exception would be those students whose participation in the trip to Central America is funded by their church, school, or other charitable organization. Our church is not large enough nor rich enough to do that; the school is strapped for funds; and there are not other charitable-organization sponsors around here. But I should acknowledge the possibility of the exceptions.
That seems backwards.
The leaders of the university should be setting direction based on what will have the biggest impact in the future, with the understanding that they are not looking to what is important over the next 5 years, but rather the next 50 years. They can certainly take guidance from faculty, but should also be getting it from their own research and outside sources. If that means more students and faculty for subject X and fewer for subject Y, so be it.
Depends on the mission of each individual college, really.
Some are oriented toward responding to student demand, some are oriented toward providing an entry into education for marginalized groups, some are oriented toward career preparation, some are oriented toward research, some are oriented toward training in critical thinking, some are oriented toward [insert any number of other things here].
And you know what? That’s one of the biggest strengths of the US’s higher-ed system.
In many areas around the country, student groups from moderate or low SES high schols earn the funds for those work trips. Now the question becomes: was it a “work” trip?
U leaders are looking forward. The general public just doesn’t see it. And there’s an obligation to face the present, as well. Plenty of threads have addressed the value of humanities studies.
And it’s not as simple as that all-stem kid suddenly declaring an urge to study History. Gently, I want to remind CC that adcoms at top holistics do read applications. It’s the vehicle.
The problem with fundraisers is who contributes and what the target recipient is. For many kids, joining an adult fundraising effort for a community org can benefit in more ways than Pennies for Pencils or throwing a party in the gym, where mostly parents write tidy checks.
There are exceptions.
I would be interested in knowing how the students from moderate or low SES high schools earn the funds for the work trips, and how much the trips typically cost them. What is their effective hourly rate of pay when they are earning the funds? What about transportation to and from the airports? Do they take charter airlines or regular commercial carriers? What kinds of accommodations do they have? What about meals? Who provides the tools, if tools are needed? Do the students earn the money for construction materials and tools as well as the trip expenses? Do they coordinate with the same on-site organizations year after year?
I ask partly because our church does offer partial sponsorship for one or two students to go with a small number of adult volunteers (who pay full freight), depending on the cost of the trip and the destination, but that’s it. We could not send whole groups pf students. Organizing a volunteer trip from the ground up, without connections to established foreign sites, would not be something that most students could manage, let alone afford. For that matter, comparatively few adults could manage it well, without pre-existing connections.
At college level, the fraternities, sororities, band, and some of the non-revenue sports teams earn money with car washes they hold, but I think that some of the revenues from the car washes are really just donations. The community will only support a limited number of car washes–and pretty much none in the winter.
Students whose families need their incomes from part-time jobs around here can rarely spare the students’ income for trips.
Whether a student can go on such a trip, how she/he manages to cover the costs, and how the trips are viewed by admissions would all affect the student’s chances, and how those chances should be estimated.
There was a much discussed item in the news a few years back about how Stanford was looking for more humanities major applicants for all the reasons mentioned. I wonder if a stampede did result.
From an upper middle income area here.
My kids did service trips, S through a church (not our own) and the trip was paid for by church members’ donations. They went in a couple of large vans, slept on church floors, host church in disaster area fed them. I think it was Missouri after flooding that time.
D went on 2 trips sponsored by the HS. This had a cost of about $400 per student (which was less than the actual cost due to donations for this fund from a local org), but even that “co pay” could be fully or partially waived if you demonstrated financial need. These kids got on a charter bus and also slept in sleeping bags on floors and were fed by host orgs. They worked every day of the spring break (7-8 days I think) except one - that one day they did fun stuff in the area. She went to New Orleans and also to Oklahoma, hurricane and tornado cleanup/rebuild.
In no case was there fundraising involved.
@dfbdfb Neither of us has the time to check, I’m sure, but I bet (a) the proportions at hyperselective universities as a group are meaningfully more humanities-weighted than the national averages you linked, and (b) humanities departments at such institutions are more heavily weighted to tenured faculty than are more fashionable departments (since junior faculty complements are relatively easily manageable in the short and medium terms).
@hebegebe (1) At the types of universities we are talking about (private, hyperselective), faculties tend to be very powerful, both in the actual decisionmaking structure and in terms of philosophy. (2) Even if they weren’t, an admissions director who produced a student body that was completely out of whack with the classes offered by tenured faculty in the university would not be admissions director for long. (3) Most importantly, if you think taking a 50-year-view elite university leadership believes that humanities are unimportant, you are dead wrong.