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<p>D1 had an ACT in that range. She didn’t go to H (didn’t apply either), but went to a pretty selective public OOS and graduated summa cum laude, PBK, was accepted straight out of undergrad to a fully funded grad program and is now at one of the top programs in the nation working on her Ph.D. The kids with higher scores who had to go to school with her apparently survived.</p>
<p>“If you disagree with a college’s admissions’ philosophy so much, why would you let your children apply?”</p>
<p>Oh, because a lot of people on CC are hypocrites. </p>
<p>They decry how Harvard (et al) don’t admit the Very Smartest People out there, and instead fill their class with all of those undeserving pleased-to-meet-ya smooth talkers, lower-stat URMs with sob stories, unqualified legacies, unqualified athletes, and particularly unqualified development cases. And the real Smartest People are consigned to the horrors that are Tufts and Carnegie-Mellon and Michigan and … well, it’s too awful to contemplate.</p>
<p>Yet they <em>still</em> revere these places beyond all reasonable measure.</p>
<p>The normal response to a place that doesn’t admit the way you want to is – boy, I sure don’t want my kid in the midst of such an unqualified pool of people. Let me find out where the Real Smart People are actually going and send my kid there. But it’s a source of perennial amusement how Harvard is simultaneously admitting the “wrong” people but boy I sure want my kid in that club. </p>
<p>PG, the academically focused students want to go to Harvard (if they do) because of the Harvard faculty, not because of the admissions policies.</p>
<p>Hunt, I don’t know what grades Bill Gates got. He attended an “exclusive preparatory school,” according to Wikipedia. There is plenty of evidence in the Wikipedia entry about Gates that he was clearly very smart as a high school student.</p>
<p>I have seen elsewhere a comment by Gates that he got A’s and one C+ at Harvard. There’s no question that his application belongs in the stack of applications from the super-qualified academically.</p>
<p>I would be shocked if more than 50 out of 35000 applicants have any clue which professor is the only reason they want to go to Harvard for (or any other college for that matter) when they are applying. I am sure they google some people or read bios on the department web page to claim something like that but Harvard does not admit to a major and so doing something like that makes no sense.</p>
<p>Someone who won some major prizes in sciences, arts, literature etc might have some role models. I can see someone winning an Intel or Siemens grand prize knowing which professor(s) they want to work with. Everyone else is going there with the view that they might be interested in some area of study. Naming names - not so much. </p>
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<p>However, that very documentary showed TR was definitely a man of his times. One illustration was how he stated there was only one gentlemen ahead of him in an academic ranking where there were 18 students ahead of him. Classist, but that was par for the course of the upper-crust, especially the youth of that time. That did change when he became concerned with taming the excesses of the free market and trying to find a middle-ground between facilitating American economic growth while also fighting for better conditions for the workers and the lower SES. </p>
<p>Incidentally, according to a biography of FDR I read as a child, he accepted being a gentleman’s C student because he found the classes at Harvard to be as interesting as “a dim bulb” or something along those lines. However, it was also at Harvard that he threw himself into working at the Crimson and was heavily moved by seeing lower SES students at Harvard who were struggling to work when not in classes to defray Harvard’s tuition/fees and lived in unsafe rundown living quarters in contrast to the fancy living quarters he and those of his SES lived in. </p>
<p>Even in a stack of Harvard applicants, Bill Gates is an outlier. Persnickety point, he did drop out. </p>
<p>What if Stack A included a young Winston Churchill? <a href=“http://www.lehrmaninstitute.org/education/the-education-of-winston-churchill%20.html[/url]”>http://www.lehrmaninstitute.org/education/the-education-of-winston-churchill%20.html</a> Were he a contemporary American applicant, he’d probably be summed up as, oh, athletic child of wealthy family with connections, tests poorly, disliked by peers.</p>
<p>Priming admissions solely toward those who peak in their early teens has costs. </p>
<p>Here’s another thought. Touring schools with children, I have come to believe that the people they meet on their campus visits are very influential. Like tends to draw like. If the tippy-top students are only 5 - 10% of the Harvard student body, they’re not likely to be giving tours. The well-rounded types, with good enough scores and lots of activities, are giving tours. This may tend to draw the frenetically busy to Harvard, while the hmm, perfect testers, may be drawn to MIT or CalTech. True? Not true? </p>
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But this is post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning. It could just as easily be the case that Gates had a bunch of Bs in high school classes that didn’t interest him, and that Harvard saw his potential based on all that cool computer stuff he did on the side. Sure, he had great SAT scores. One of my kids’ classmates also had great SAT scores, but lots of low grades because he was a slacker. We don’t actually know to what extent Gates benefitted from holistic evaluation. (Heck, for all we know, Marvin what’s-his-name might have gotten Bs and Cs in non-science classes in high school as well.)</p>
<p>Maybe someone who was at Lakeside with Bill Gates would chime in? Personally, I’m betting he had the closest thing to a 4.0 high school average.</p>
<p>Here we go, from the man himself, from the site <a href=“http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/gat0int-3”>http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/gat0int-3</a></p>
<p>"Well, through eighth grade I was sort of enjoying the fact that I could do reasonably well without any effort. They had this thing where you’d get an “effort: which would be one, two or three, and then a grade. And so the ideal I always wanted was an A3, where you had the least effort, but the greatest grade. So my grades weren’t all that great. And then in eighth grade I had been at a private school for a couple of years and decided that I better start getting good grades, both in terms of having some freedom, the way I’d be treated, and thinking about college. So from ninth grade on, I had a reasonably spotless grade record. I got quite serious about grades at that point.”</p>
<p>As with any information sourced from the internet, caveat lector. But this has the ring of truth to me.</p>
<p>That’s just it - I think the choice between Bill Clinton and Martin Karplus is a false choice, because I don’t believe there is ANY school in the country currently populated only by people who the adcoms believe might be future Nobel winners or presidents - and it often turns out that the future Gateses and Clintons would have been pretty darn academically qualified in the first place. </p>
<p>Also, as I’ve said before, the argument that if you don’t like it, then you just shouldn’t go is beyond silly. That’s like saying that everyone who criticizes American policy should move to Canada. Believing something isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you don’t think it is very good and worthwhile. Similarly, believing something isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you think it is an issue of paramount importance. The question of who gets into Harvard vs. who gets into Brown and who gets into Haverford is the definition of first-world problem. So, to an even greater extent, is the question of whether Modern Family or Orange is the New Black should have won the Emmy for best comedy this year, but that doesn’t mean interested parties shouldn’t bother discussing it. </p>
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<p>Well, what we do know is that Kim Kardashian had excellent stats which predicted her success. They may not be the <em>same</em> type of stats that Karplus had, but they are stats nonetheless.</p>
<p>If you offered Kim Kardashian and Marvin Karplus the opportunity to trade lives, do you think either of them would accept? (They might both agree to switch with Bill Gates, I guess.)</p>
<p>A lot of students want to go to Harvard (and H & Y) because of their financial aid policies and their USN ranking. Many more families can afford HYP than any other similarly priced US private college. Forget about fit or that special professor. CC crowd are not hypocrites - they are rationally thinking people. If our special snowflake has to persevere in the company of unqualified peers - so be it.</p>
<p>Sheesh, Gates is one man. You’re giving him an awful lot of glow considering the tens of thousands of less known names who contribute on a lesser-but-still-grand scale and add up in magnitude. Would you give them up for one Gates? Really? </p>
<p>And boy, I agree with Texaspg that most kids don’t know the faculty. They don’t now the range of classes. They look at the tips of the icebergs that freaking US News tells them are poking out of the water. Sorry, but some of you are doing the same as these 17 year olds.</p>
<p>H and Y want leaders. FGS, that doesn’t mean the cover of Newsweek or a handful of household names. How shallow, how limited, how hierarchical. Far too simplistic.</p>
<p>The point about Gates (or anybody else you might prefer to name) is that Harvard is looking to produce leaders of various kinds, and it would like to have some really big leaders, like Presidents, CEOs, and yes, Nobel Prize winners. Also Pulitzer Prize winners. And successful novelists and playwrights and poets. And on and on. Harvard thinks that it can best achieve this by using holistic admissions, and it’s done pretty well in this regard. Pinker thinks Harvard isn’t emphasizing academic ability enough in its overall admissions matrix, and it’s not hard to understand why he might think this. He’s an academic. He’s not wrong, exactly–he is just applying his own criteria, which happen to differ from the overall institutional criteria. Presumably the Harvard football coach has some different ideas. I’m sure the top leaders at Harvard listen carefully to all of these different views.</p>
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<p>I don’t believe that is the case. I would be willing to bet it falls far down on the list behind the thought that the prestige of attending Harvard will lead to better opportunities after graduation, the caliber of students who will also be attending will raise their game, among other reasons which have nothing to do with the faculty. </p>
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<p>I’m not sure he would have even considered applying to colleges considering he had serious academic difficulties throughout his childhood schooling and his father expected him to go into the military service as an officer to start his young life as that was one expected respectable path for men of his social class. </p>
<p>While he was strong in areas of strong interest like history, he was utterly indifferent to areas he wasn’t interested in like mathematics. </p>
<p>The latter aspect factored into why it took him 3 tries to gain entry to Sandhurst Military Academy. When he did pass, his entrance score was so low he was placed into cavalry, the branch of service with the lowest test score/academic requirements in the British Army for officers and due to high expenses…filled with scions of aristocratic/wealthy families who weren’t, on average, as academically/intellectually inclined. </p>
<p>Churchill himself admitted he wasn’t willing to expend the effort to take extra math required to be placed as an infantry officer…a branch with extra academic/math requirements. </p>
<p>Even after he improved his academic ranking through much applied effort to the point he was eligible to select infantry at graduation and much effort exerted in calling-in favors/political influence by his father to get his son accepted into the most prestigious infantry unit, the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, Churchill dashed all of that to join the 4th Hussars cavalry unit to his father’s fury*. </p>
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<li>Especially considering it’d mean the Churchill family was on the hook to provide much more financial support for Winston Churchill’s more expensive uniforms, officer club dining expenses, horse maintenance/fodder expenses, etc. In fact, during his army service he had to constantly write home to his parents for additional annual financial support which would be the equivalent of 1 year’s tuition at private American colleges just so he can meet his military financial obligations expected of the officer class. When that wasn’t enough, he started becoming a journalist to get the needed extra money.<br></li>
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<p>Gates is obviously a smart man but he got lucky. If idiots at IBM have bought DOS outright instead of licensing it - there was a good chance that none of us would ever learn his name.</p>
<p>*various kinds.<a href=“from%20Hunt.”>/i</a> And community leaders who can whip up change and mayors and inspiring teachers or people who create jobs, educational or cultural opps, people who engage in numerous ways that leaved the world a bit better for their presence. Not just darlings, not just the country’s richest or most powerful men and women who may or may not have the least bit of concern for anything but themselves. Their status is bowling y’all over.</p>
<p>And didn’t Gates have a connection through his mother?</p>
<p>I am surprised some posters are so worked up because others are making comments or criticizing Harvard’s admission policy/practice. This is a message board about college. People have opinions about something related and they express them here. It has nothing to do with “hypocrisy” really. We live in an imperfect world. To acknowledge that and express some fantasies about changing it “our way” doesn’t mean you should just go and die without living the life as is.</p>
<p>And you know what my other fantasy is? Harvard should be tuition free to all. With the kind of endowment they have, they don’t <em>need</em> tuitions to keep it running. Where would be the cash flow from? Well, if they do things right, there will be leaders of all kinds making donations on an on-going basis. As for how to identify those leaders, they seem to have figured it out. But whether it’s the best way is open for debate, and it’s OK to debate about it.</p>