<ol>
<li>Colleges are academic institutes with a mission to educate students and not sports academies.</li>
<li>test scores provide insight to students depth of knowledge in a said subject or their overall intelligence to comprehend subjects of higher educations.</li>
</ol>
<p>So in turns test scores seems like a valid measure to identify potential candidates for institutes for higher learning.</p>
<p>On the other hand able to handle a stick or balls or some other sports equipment has no relevance to institutes of higher learnings.</p>
<p>I agree with your post #318 Pizzagirl, but would like to amend one sentence to read: “A school filled with just Asians and upper middle class white people whose parents were uniformly college educated would be boring.”</p>
<p>The key idea here is diversity. These colleges want a wide range of students, representing all socio-economic levels, geographic areas, academic interests, and on and on. In that sense, there are “quotas” for every category. None of these schools wants all their students to be painters, or to come from New Jersey, or to play soccer, or to be pianists, or to be white. There are limits on every “category.” </p>
<p>In fact, there are limits on legacy acceptances, too. It must be very tempting to accept a lot of legacy applicants – they tend to be wealthier so need less financial aid, they probably matriculate at a higher rate than average, and who wants to have angry alumni? Almost every time they deny an alum’s child, the college probably loses donations and volunteer time; they have to deal with angry letters written to the college president and the trustees (I have friends who have written those angry letters). Angry alums don’t go to Homecoming games, don’t buy college paraphernalia, and bad mouth the school to their friends and coworkers. It’s in the college’s best interest to accept qualified alumni children – but they limit those acceptances, in Harvard’s case to 30%.</p>
<p>This is not an accurate statement. Many colleges exist to, and do an outstanding job of, both academically educating students and training student-athletes for world and professional competition.</p>
<p>Those fantastic tales of collusion do indeed show up on CC. The Penn connection is none than Mortimer Zuckerman who bought USNews in 1984. A lot less is made that he also taught at Harvard (HBS) and Yale. </p>
<p>Perhaps he did have his hand in changing the original methodology of the earlier rankings. Of course, the term methodology would be way too charitable for the way in which USNews conducted its first surveys. The original rankings were based on nothing else than the much maligned “peer assessments.” In other words, the first rankings were akin to a popularity contest void of any meaningful metric. </p>
<p>The fact that private schools emerged on the top of the rankings is simply because they combined the recognition of the polled “experts” AND superior measurable metrics such as financial resources, graduation rates, selectivity of students, size of classes. </p>
<p>And, fwiw, it there is one valid criticism that can be hurled at the USNews it is that it has been clinging to crutches to level the playing field for … public institutions by including what they call intangibles. Soemthing that Robert Morse has no issues to admit publicly!</p>
<p>@pg and POIH. Athletics is very much a part of HYPSM’s missions. Participatory athletics. Harvard maintains the largest D I program in the country. MIT maintains the first or second largest in D III. Nearly 25% of students at MIT participate in inter-collegiate athletics. Participation ranges from 15%-19% at HYPS. This does not have happen by accident. Teams need to be supported. You simply can not lose a team one year and start it the next. These schools do it in different ways S-scholarships, HYP-preference and MIT-recruiting (just like all the other DIII schools do). They ALL believe it is important. To me its not about alumni relations-you would not need to maintain that many sports nor that much participation. And its more than healthy mind healthy body. Its what sports bring to the individual as well as the school. Team building and competion. Our US service academies believe much the same way-where everyone is required to participate in athletics on some level every semester.</p>
<p>Yes, I get that some state schools are basically pre-NFL football factories, and if the quarterback mugs for the camera and says, “I ain’t happy till I wins the game! We won 35 - 7 – that’s a 20 point difference!” the college doesn’t much care that “educating” him is a farce, as long as all the fans are in the seats and they get the ticket revenue. But we’re not talking about those kinds of schools. We’re talking about elite schools. Is it <em>really</em> their mission to train student-athletes for world and professional competition? Because I have to tell you, if that’s the case, then I think it’s a disproportionate amount of resources spent on just a few kids. The new engineering building or science lab or whatever benefits everyone who studies those subjects, but helping Billy get to the majors only benefits Billy.</p>
<p>Heaven forbids the Ivies decide to align their alleged quotas to the racial distribution of the United States. Just imagine the quota for Asians at 4.8 percent!</p>
<p>I totally get why Harvard has to have a good football team. Heck, I want Yale to have a good football team, so they can beat Harvard. And I’m not athletic at all. But I still don’t understand why, exactly, it has to have good teams in more obscure sports, to the extent that there is separate recruiting for those athletes (as opposed to just giving them advantages in admissions like people who are good at other things). Sure, the fencing team has some impressive people on it. But what would the impact be if all of the Ivies didn’t recruit for those sports? Wouldn’t some very good fencers still want to go to Harvard?</p>
<p>Pizzagirl - I understand the difference between a preference and quota. IMHO, preference is just an euphemism for a quota.</p>
<p>I prefer to call it a quota when the same ratios show up each year for specific groups of people by ethnicity, legacy, first gen etc. You can go back 5 years for most of the schools and you will usually find the same percentages. I am not expecting 40% Asians or 90% ORMs or any other number. However, if it is strictly done by academic merit, then you truly will not see these fixed percentages year in and out. One year it may be 70% caucasian and another year 30% Asian/Hispanic/African American but not stuck at specific percentages each year since the truly good students coming out different schools each year vary.</p>
<p>Xiggi - Texas schools have reserved seats based on merit, so I could nt care less about 4.8% anyways. There is always MIT at 25-29% too.</p>
<p>Cornell maintains half the student population, and has a much lower admissions selectivity, relative to the University of Michigan. Michigan is a great school, and would be place a nice place to be associated with; but Cornell is not as similar to it as is sometimes suggested on these boards.</p>
<p>Why would the racial distribution of admitted students vary drastically from one year to another? Except for the large influx of latinos in the past decades, very little changes have taken place in the K-12. </p>
<p>In addition, the definitions of merit and meritocracy are rather fluid. While one might focus on tests scores and GPA, others do include several other attributes, including athletic and artistic prowess. </p>
<p>The bottom line is very simple: single digit admissions leave nine to twelve times more discontents. All of us can go in the most minute details to find statistical discrepancies and claim under or over representation. </p>
<p>However, all of those differences only address a small part of an entire application. In a world of holistic evaluations, only the people who have access to each and every application files in one year (or more) can judge how the individual stacks up against his or her competition.</p>
<p>Xiggi - Let me state categorically that I am not discontent with the admissions policy at any school and I have zero problem with how Harvard or Yale or Brown want to admit students. They can admit 1% Asians going forward and it does nt affect me whatsoever. </p>
<p>I am only making a point that there are fixed numbers based on race irrespective of the glorified labels - preference, holistic, or anything else one wants to call it. </p>
<p>If the percentages of specific groups dont change in a college over several years, it is based on ensuring that you admit a certain number of students in each of those groups.</p>
<p>It is a given that the applicant ethnic distribution has changed drastically when the pool went from 17k to 35k for Harvard but the numbers admitted based on ethnicity has nt budged. I highly doubt all of the groups went up proportionally in the applicant pool.</p>
<p>With the exception of a handful of D1 colleges with big time football (UMich being one!), sports in the aggregate are money losers. And since no one ever accused the Ivy League of big time football…</p>
<p>Not only is that nonsense, but all of the behind-the-scenes looks reveal that it’s nonsense. Applicant pools don’t differ all that much year to year. If they do what they keep doing, they’re going to wind up with much the same results year after year. You cannot possibly seriously believe that it would be “natural” to have 10% Asians one year and 70% the next (or legacies, or athletes, or URM’s, or whatever). Of course it floats around the same area.</p>
<p>How, specifically, did that distribution change? Source?</p>
<p>Even so, that raises an interesting question. “Proportionately” based on what? The US population? The population of the area around the school? (e.g., Stanford is in a more heavily Asian area than HYPM) The applicant pool?</p>
<p>And if, for example (just overstating the case for simplicity’s sake), let’s say that over the course of X years, the H applicant pool went from 17,000 to 34,000 and that extra 17,000 were all Asian. Does that obligate H to change the nature of who it admits to take that into account? Of course, feel free to substitute legacy or URM or first-gen or whatever.</p>
<p>Hunt: I had once read a complicated explanation for why the good colleges like to have teams in obscure sports. It had something to do with the requirements for minimum academic standards (as an average of all athletes) and of course the requirements to have substantial participation by female athletes. </p>
<p>It seemed to make sense to me in a Machiavellian sort of way- you could afford to recruit the best football players without regard to their academic standards if your other athletes in fencing, crew, etc could bring up the overall average for all athletes.</p>
<p>I’m not sure how much that kind of logic contributes to the support of teams in less popular sports. And then once you do field a team, naturally if you are Harvard you want to beat Yale (and vice versa).</p>
<p>PG-We KNOW the schools do whatever they want to do! (and will continue to do so!!)
But we do not know what they are doing or why.
What HAVE the trends been in Asian applications? International applications? Legacy applications?
And I really do wonder what the stats and their trends are for the sub-goups currently pulled out/preferred/measured in admissions: both of the applicant pool and of the admitted, vs the whole group. We will never really know this; they will never really tell.
Little pieces come out in statements, but we only can surmise what the picture is, so we do not really know what their goals are if they are accomplishing them.
That is why threads like this exist!</p>
I would guess not many at all … because of the 2000 4 years schools if the IVYies decided to not recruit for sports the other 1990 schools do recruit and virtually no top end fencers would be left. Just look at how many students start threads thinking about applying ED to schools other than their first choice because they believe they have an ED advantage. If everyone else recruits how many top athletes are going to turn down a guarenteed spot to play at Stanford, Northwestern, Duke, Williams, Amherst, Tufts, Ponoma, etc … to take a 10% chance to get admitted to an IVY?</p>
<p>One other comment on the break the recruits get. The vast majority of recruits need to be within 1 standard deviation of the typical admit. About 83% of all students at any school are within one standard deviation of the typical admit or better (67% are within 1 standard deviation and another 16% are above 1 sd) … so the lion’s share of recruits are in the sweet spot of all the students at a school. In reality there are just a few athletic recruits who are really getting an academic break on their admission.</p>