Harvard Professor Steve Pinker on the Ideal Elite University Admissions System

<p>Harvard is already free for a heck of a lot of people. I wonder if its student body would really change all that much if it were free for everybody. If it wouldn’t, then I guess Harvard sees no reason to stop taking money from rich people in the form of tuition.</p>

<p>The Newsweek idea is not mine. It’s what Pinker claims faculty members were told at an orientation session for new faculty:</p>

<p>At the admissions end, it’s common knowledge that Harvard selects at most 10 percent (some say 5 percent) of its students on the basis of academic merit. At an orientation session for new faculty, we were told that Harvard “wants to train the future leaders of the world, not the future academics of the world,” and that “We want to read about our student in Newsweek 20 years hence”</p>

<p>from the article linked in the original post.</p>

<p>I agree with lookingforward in the sense that I believe that there are a great many people making important contributions to society, in many different forms. No doubt many of those making important contributions are Harvard alumni who were selected on holistic grounds. And no doubt many of those making important contributions have never set foot in Harvard Yard.</p>

<p>It is fine with me if Harvard wants to select for future success, however they define it. As I mentioned earlier, it’s fine with me if they select on the basis of a formula that involves SAT score and height. I don’t work there. We don’t have any family applicants there (for at least another generation). That doesn’t mean that I conclude that Pinker is wrong in his opinion.</p>

<p>Addition on editing: I tried to correct the typo from the article quotation to say “students,” rather than “student,” but if you put the “s” in square brackets, as I was taught to do when correcting a quotation, then the rest of the post has a strike through it!</p>

<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>Yep, whatever.</p>

<p>It’s not uncommon for someone, anyone, to take one phrase and make more of it than was meant by the original sayer. Spin is about leading you in the directions the subsequent speaker or writer intends (here, Pinker.) Not necessarily proof you can build an argument on. Or a thread.</p>

<p>Plus, if he heard it at his own orientation, that’s 10+ years ago.</p>

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I wouldn’t want to accuse Pinker of fibbing, but would it be quite so controversial if the true story was this:</p>

<p>"At the admissions end, it’s common knowledge that Harvard selects at most 10 percent (some say 5 percent) of its students solely on the basis of academic merit. At an orientation session for new faculty, we were told that Harvard “wants to train the future leaders of the world, not just the future academics of the world,” and that “We want to read about our student in Newsweek 20 years hence”</p>

<p>And doesn’t Newsweek report on Nobel prizes?</p>

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<p>I don’t think Pinker thinks that. On the contrary, I think he thinks something quite different----that there will still be athletic teams; they may not be as good as they are under the current system in which H selects for athletic skill, but they will still exist. </p>

<p>In other words, I think he thinks that at least some percentage of students who would be admitted under a system which only took into account academic success would STILL excel in --or at the very least participate in–ECs in both high school and at H. However, they wouldn’t be cutting class for play rehearsal or for the performance in an a capella group because they would have their priorities straight. For Pinker, that means ECs would come a distant second to academics. </p>

<p>He doesn’t think it’s necessary for the Harvard student orchestra to be outstanding or for its sports teams to have a winning record, etc. </p>

<p>I think there’s some truth to this. Harvard Law does admissions by relying much more heavily on LSAT and GPA than Harvard College relies on SAT/GPA. And, there’s still a Harvard Law student newspaper, at least one musical revue each year, intramural sports, etc. It’s a far cry from Harvard College’s roster of ECs, but with no incentive whatsoever to advance themselves by participating in ECs of a non-academic nature, many students still do. Moreover, many of the law students admitted based primarily on stats played varsity sports in college, sang in a capella groups, played in student orchestras, etc., while undergrads. </p>

<p>I took Pinker’s statement that we shouldn’t assume that those admitted solely due to their academic qualifications must be dweebs to mean just that. </p>

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IBM was under a huge antitrust shakedown action at the time, and wanted to source from third parties on what they did in the PC area. They approached another source for DOS first, but that guy was a tech purist and didn’t want any association with a company that could actually make money and do a lot for a lot of people. </p>

<p>So Gates got a chance and was smart enough to know that he could buy the basic skeleton of a program from someone who’d already done a big part of the work. He and Allen bought or licensed the program, tweaked it up for IBM, and the rest is history. </p>

<p>So he may have had some luck, but that’s something that happens usually to people who work hard and are smart (and who take some risks). I think we probably would have known Gates name eventually anyway, but there’s no way to be sure. </p>

<p>As a person who was a writer for the Harvard Law School musical review, let me just say that nobody was going from there to Broadway. There are ECs at HLS, and people do them, but they are really nothing at all like the ECs at Harvard College–except, perhaps, for some of the law-related ECs. People took those pretty seriously. (And I note, in passing, that it was well known that people on Law Review typically saw their grades decline.) I just think Pinker is mistaken about this–I think the quality of performance in all sorts of ECs would decline substantially if they weren’t taken into account in admissions.</p>

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<p>During my freshman class assembly at MIT in the mid-90’s, Pres. Vest asked us to raise our hand if we had made varsity in a sport. About 2/3 of the class raised their hand. This was back when athletics did not mean much at all; it may have been a tiebreaker in admissions if people really looked equally smart, but that’s it. I think this is a good indication of what would happen if there was no weight for recruited athletes. MIT fields almost as many sports as Harvard does; it might be #2 in that respect. </p>

<p>Today, athletics appear to be weighted a lot more, and MIT is making the national playoffs in many sports (mostly division 3). Records seem to be falling weekly. </p>

<p>I do know students who applied to schools for the faculty. Believe it or not. They have been reading books or articles by certain faculty members for a while and hope to get to meet them when they visit. Those are the classes they sit in on. They take graduate level course work by their sophomore year if not before. I have no idea how large this group is. I can think of at least a dozen within a two year span and I don’t know that many people nationwide. Not close to 3500.</p>

<p>I don’t know if that means they deserve a place, even if they also have perfect stats/grades but I do know they exist. </p>

<p>Harvard Law to Harvard College isn’t the most direct comparison here. How about Harvard College to Cambridge University?</p>

<p>According to the university website, they have 52 sports clubs, including ones devoted to modern pentathlon, powerlifting, and something called “korfball.” I would begin to list some student societies, but as there are currently 34 listed under the letter “A” alone, I’ll just stick with the link: <a href=“http://www.societies.cam.ac.uk/”>http://www.societies.cam.ac.uk/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Hunt, the performers in the Harvard Law Revue may not have been Broadway-bound, but at least one performance was excellent, nonetheless. The singing was really good, the acting was very well done, and the lighting was memorable.</p>

<p>My spouse and I saw one performance when he was a post-doc there. We still refer to some of the jokes from it, ranging from
a) dopey [What do sixteen Ezra ounces make? Ezra Pound! Where are the watchdogs of justice kept? Ezra Pound!]
to b) amusing [The computer that matches students with internships. Student: “I’d like New York! Washington, DC! LA!” Computer: “I can give you Dallas-Fort Worth.”]
to c) the rather biting [Registrar: "Everyone was complaining about the law school exams being scheduled for Rosh Hashanah. So I have changed the schedule. The exams have been moved to Yom Kippur.]</p>

<p>The idea behind it was that an anthropology grad student (Marguerite) was investigating the odd culture at the Harvard Law School. There were clever plays on the Faust story, a wonderful routine about the Seven Deadly Sins, a professor singing "I don’t know the meaning of the word ‘Pass!’, a song about the Law Review (“They thumbed their noses at Larry Tribe”), a romantic song by the male lead, “I can make your life complete, Marguerite,” and an ending in which the lost souls were sent to New Haven!</p>

<p>LF: Do you see applications where students answer the question “Why this school?” with an explanation of wanting to do history, English, anthropology, ancient or modern languages, etc with certain professors whose work they admire and citing examples in the work to explain their interest? Would this sort of answer be seen as a positive or negative? Would it be believable?</p>

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<p>Do they exist in numbers where it would be appropriate to say that they represent the prevailing reason why “academically focused” students choose Harvard?</p>

<p>Personally, I don’t think so.</p>

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<p>QM: How do you define academically focused? </p>

<p>Not QM, but I was highly academically focused, and chose where I went because of a unique program offered there that wasn’t offered at the other schools I was accepted at, but that didn’t mean that I felt I deserved a spot over anyone else, or that my life would have come to a screeching halt if I couldn’t study with The Very Bestest Professors in the World. And part of that is what I react to, because I think it’s kind of a tiresome way to be – that “really great” isn’t good enough, but it must be the Very Best. </p>

<p>I define it tautologically, alh! The academically focused students are the ones who want to go to Harvard (if they do) because of the Harvard faculty! :)</p>

<p>Actually, I don’t necessarily mean future academics. I just mean the students who are focused most strongly on learning, and less on networking or nonacademic college-community participation.</p>

<p>Just as a quick addition to my post #271 about the “Harvard Law Revue” that my spouse and I saw: The song “We’re Sloth and Gluttony!” was absolutely brilliant. Maybe I can find the lyrics on the internet now (probably not, but I will look).</p>

<p>“Actually, I don’t necessarily mean future academics. I just mean the students who are focused most strongly on learning, and less on networking or nonacademic college-community participation.”</p>

<p>This is where it gets dicey. You don’t think that a lot of learning occurs in doing EC’s? And no, I’m not talking about the learning about whether you should serve coffee or hot chocolate if you want to attract people to your booth at the activities fair. I think you are seeing these things are not-substantive. I daresay preparing for a debate, for example, is as academic as anything in the classroom.</p>

<p>“Hunt, the performers in the Harvard Law Revue may not have been Broadway-bound, but at least one performance was excellent, nonetheless. The singing was really good, the acting was very well done, and the lighting was memorable.”</p>

<p>I bet at least a few of those folks were involved w music / theater ECs in undergrad. </p>