<p>Probably, PG, but they were selected for the law school on academic grounds–if they were Harvard Law students. I guess Hunt could tell us whether they brought in ringers.</p>
<p>Debate is an example of an EC that Pinker would clearly support, along with campus newspaper work. Debate is pretty academic. The example that he gave of an EC that he did not think should cause students to miss class was a choral group.</p>
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<p><a href=“Marguerite Shuttle | Stanford Transportation”>http://transportation.stanford.edu/marguerite/</a></p>
<p>I am not sure the bus wants to reciprocate but if thats what gets Harvard law students going… :)</p>
<p>QM-you overweight academics, not surprisingly. 90% of the kids at Harvard and MIT and most every other school on the planet don’t give a whit about who their profs are. Really. They learn mostly on their own and profs are little more than tour guides. Sorry. It’s very clear that you think the teachers are the bomb, and I disagree. The best schools are made by the students, not the profs. Pinker, Ferguson, LePore, Mankiw, Chomsky, Gates, etc could all take a 5 year sabbatical starting tomorrow and about 3 people in America would care. What’s more, 5 years after leaving Cal Tech, MIT, CMU or Harvard the Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduates ( I’m married to one of them) can’t recall 90% of the specifics of what they’ve learned. But maybe they’ve learned to think and write and how to educate themselves, and maybe they’ve learned something by talking to the Math 55 kids and the playwrites and the the hockey players and the community activists and maybe they’re intrinsically smart enough to assimilate all this stuff into a deeper, more nuanced world view. And that benefits everyone. </p>
<p>lol, texaspg!</p>
<p>The situation you report is kind of alarming, doubtful. Maybe if the students paid more attention to the profs, they’d remember the specifics of what they learned better.</p>
<p>Learning how to educate themselves is really valuable, though.</p>
<p>Although I am a scientist, I don’t think that scientists have much to say (qua scientists), in terms of developing my world view. But it is strange to me that a student would go to the “Math 55 kids” and “hockey players” to develop their world views, when they have older adults who have seen and experienced quite a lot, and might contribute very substantially to the development of their deeper, more nuanced world views.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I sort of suspect that some colleges came up with the idea of advertising that the students will learn from each other as much as/more than they learn from the professors, partly to cover for the inaccessibility of some of the star professors. Then the students bought into that.</p>
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<p>Let me try again.</p>
<p>Maybe I misunderstand Pinker, but I don’t think he is claiming that the quality of ECs would remain constant if ECs weren’t taken into account in admissions. He just doesn’t care how good the quality of non-academic ECs is. He thinks that Harvard should leave training Broadway actresses and orchestral musicians to Julliard or Curtis, etc. He doesn’t think having a winning hockey team is worth letting in applicants who wouldn’t get in but for the boost of playing hockey well and that H shouldn’t strive to attract the level of players who can play in the NHL. </p>
<p>However, he also doesn’t think that admitting students based solely on academics would result in a Harvard which didn’t have sports teams or orchestras or singing groups or theatre productions. They would still exist–and undoubtedly there would still be some students who were admitted under an “only academics will be considered” policy who would still excel in them–just as there are still Harvard Law students who do. </p>
<p>And he also thinks that while students are at H academics should be their focus. Students shouldn’t be missing class to rehearse or perform a symphony or a play or play in a sporting event. Many students do so now–at least according to Pinker–because many students view their ECs as being of equal importance with academics. </p>
<p>Oh, and as for Oxbridge—it’s my understanding that in some areas, they use ringers. At Oxbridge, grad students can participate in some sports and ECs with undergrads. A few years back, Cam, the alumni mag for Cambridge, had an article about the fact that the boats for the annual Cambridge-Oxford race had virtually no UGs–and very few UK citizens. See <a href=“The Boat Race 2014 - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_Race_2014</a></p>
<p>"Maybe I misunderstand Pinker, but I don’t think he is claiming that the quality of ECs would remain constant if ECs weren’t taken into account in admissions. He just doesn’t care how good the quality of non-academic ECs is. He thinks that Harvard should leave training Broadway actresses and orchestral musicians to Julliard or Curtis, etc. "</p>
<p>God, how boring. I am glad I went to an elite school that has world-class theater and world-class music schools, and that part of the broader mission is indeed encouraging leadership and creativity in the arts. It enriched the campus experience to have theater and music so available. Indeed, if I had to do it over again, I’d take far more advantage of those things than I did. </p>
<p>And besides, I thought it was supposed to be bad that H merely preps kids for Goldman Sachs. But now it’s bad if kids come out of there with careers in the arts, too? </p>
<p>
We are on the same page here.<br>
It has been my experience that the sharpest students in my classes were not from the upper class. My children discovered the same with theirs. My feeling is that a squished scale allows the elites to bypass them in favour of the rich and powerful. Dan Golden seems to share the same opinion:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Admission-Americas-Colleges/dp/1400097975”>http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Admission-Americas-Colleges/dp/1400097975</a>
The elites have excellent brands. Some of them have become giant hedge funds as a result. Why should they risk it by turning themselves into auction houses instead? It will be a marketing disaster. </p>
<p>"It has been my experience that the sharpest students in my classes were not from the upper class. My children discovered the same with theirs. My feeling is that a squished scale allows the elites to bypass them in favour of the rich and powerful. "</p>
<p>Fascinating how you and your children “knew” the socioeconomic status of all of your classmates. Shades of cobrat. My guess is that you looked for what you considered visible markers (designer handbags on girls, fancy cars for guys) and jumped to conclusions off minute data points. If you’ve spent any real time among wealthy people, you’d know that real money is quieter and you wouldn’t necessarily be able to suss it out through visible markers. </p>
<p>Or maybe you got tax returns for all your classmates. That’s a possibility too. </p>
<p>PG, an academic focus at a university, including a true academic focus among the students, sounds
like Paradise to me. It doesn’t sound boring at all.</p>
<p>From the Harvard Crimson:</p>
<p>"Former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 argues that a strong sports program is a key component of an American university that hopes to attract students from across the country. </p>
<p>“It would be even harder for people who are from rural America to think of Harvard as being a real university and not some elite place where people don’t do the things that college students really do,” says Lewis, who throughout his tenure as dean of the College was an active supporter of athletics. “We would sort of drop out a piece of American culture…And we’d lose a lot of people who come from subcultures of America where sports is one of the ways that you show your ambition.”</p>
<p>“I think Harvard still values athletics because people who have displayed success in athletics have shown a capacity to achieve a level of excellence in a particular domain, and the domains in which we try to achieve and represent excellence are not only academic ones, because very few, in the long run, of our undergraduates are going to go on to academic careers,” says Lewis."</p>
<p>This is one of the best explanations I have seen of why Harvard values athletes and admits approximately 250 recruited athletes per year. The academic standards that are used to admit athletes at Ivy league schools are measured by the academic index ( calculated from 1/3 GPA and 2/3 standardized tests) which must be within 1 standard deviation of the AI of the entire student body. Recent studies indicate that a similar modification of the admission standards are used for Harvard legacies.</p>
<p>May be he knew this was happening?.</p>
<p><a href=“Too Few University Jobs For America's Young Scientists : Shots - Health News : NPR”>Too Few University Jobs For America's Young Scientists : Shots - Health News : NPR;
<p>Well, QuantMech, I thought the Yale I entered 40 years ago was pretty much Paradise. I was exactly the sort of student you want: I had decent ECs, but no one would have mistaken me for anything other than an academic student. I went to Yale (over Harvard and Princeton) in large part because I wanted to work with a specific professor, a few of whose books I had read and admired, and because in general it had a much higher-regarded English Department than the other two at the time. And I did work with him – by the end of my first year, he had consented to be my advisor and to let me audit his key graduate seminar. And when I learned who the other cool literature professors were, I worked with them, too (or at least a lot of them), including the grad students everyone admired and good young faculty.</p>
<p>I entered college with a lot of background in literature – I had taken a 300-level college course in Spanish Renaissance poetry in 11th grade, among other things, and I actually got accused of plagiarism my freshman year for writing above my station about Sappho. But at college, I also got introduced to – gasp! – economics and accounting, and the college helped my get what would now be called an internship on Wall Street that opened new vistas and changed my life. I got interested in African-American folklore, and some years later introduced my teacher of that (Bill Ferris, who went on, among other things, to chair the NEH) to my mother, who carried on a correspondence with him for the rest of her life. I took a course on dance history with a famous dance critic.</p>
<p>And I loved learning from my fellow students – which sometimes meant learning from other senior faculty at one remove, and other times meant learning from people who were the senior faculty of the future. (A few years ago, a political paper my future spouse had written with a number of other women when they were all undergraduates turned up online, and when my daughter saw it she gasped, “Some of the people you were working with are REALLY IMPORTANT scholars!”) My senior year, one of my roommates and I formed a study group to consider things that were not really in the curriculum, and we did feminist theory and sociobiology. Our reading list for the feminist theory program was entirely supplied by classmates. My residential college at the time included three future Supreme Court clerks, six or seven future high-level federal government officials, a future top-5 law school dean, four future department chairs at places like Mass General and the Cleveland Clinic, a couple of Olympians, a future Pulitzer prize winning journalist, a future NFL all-star, a future movie/TV star, and a reality TV pioneer.</p>
<p>Not everyone was super-intellectual, although everyone was plenty smart. Academics was absolutely at the center of people’s lives, even when they were “distracted” (as they often were). I remember one party at which the immediate past captain of the football team, very much four sheets to the wind, earnestly explained his idea for his senior essay (on some pre-Socratic philosophers), and the trouble he was having with it, to anyone who would listen (which was a bunch of people, many asking good questions or offering helpful suggestions). The music, drama, sports, art, were really exciting. So was the sense of being just barely removed from the corridors of power, the places where things happened. But academic investigation and intellectual discourse sat at the center of everything, at least as long as we were there.</p>
<p>It was perfect, or pretty darn close.</p>
<p>I get the sense that things have changed a bit, but not that much. My children’s experience at Chicago was very close to mine, except that the music, etc., was not quite as exciting, and the sense of being close to the sources of power in society almost entirely lacking.</p>
<p>^^When I read texaspg’s post 290,and link, I was hoping you would repeat your story about the future lawyer classmate falling in love with geology even though it didn’t seem directly career pertinent.</p>
<p>OK, yes, my best friend was chugging along as a history major in his junior year, when he took Rocks For Jocks (a geology surveyt course that met general education science requirements, but not geology major requirements). He fell head over heels in love with geology, switched his major (and was given a waiver to count the course he had taken in place of the standard intro for majors). He ultimately went to law school, but then some years later became a non-lawyer policy specialist for Environmental Defence. (He did other interesting, highly romantic things, during college and long after, including a stint in a crab-packing plant in Alaska, sailing around the world, running a mayoral campaign, and being an Outward Bound group leader. One of the things that happens when you don’t require everyone to have a sharp academic focus is that you get some people who are unfocused in a really, really interesting way.)</p>
<p>If it’s not too personal, @JHS, I’d love to know if your precocious interest in Spanish Renaissance poetry sprouted from the “typical American childhood” of that era or if you would consider yourself to have been the child of relative privilege? Clearly you were a highly desirable student by anyone’s standards, but I’m curious if you think your upbringing (aside from parental love, food on the table, etc.) had anything to do with your early successes?</p>
<p>I thought I was pretty smart when I got to college, and I’d worked hard in high school, but I literally HAD NO CONCEPT of the types of educational opportunities my classmates, most of whom had attended elite private college prep schools or affluent public high schools, had experienced prior to arriving on campus as freshmen. I’m talking things like world travel, study abroad, second and third homes, and boats and country club memberships, etc. (Never mind things like “professional courtesy,” lunch with VIPs of all stripes, and introductions to the “right” kinds of potential marriage partners!) </p>
<p>Being exposed to that world was as much an “educational experience” as anything I learned in the classroom! </p>
<p>I have another personal question, since I’m pretty sure there are parents on this board with kids recently or currently at Yale and wonder how closely their reported experiences match what JHS describes. I certainly understand if no one wants to speak for their kids, or about their kids. One thing I wonder (in the 70s and now) if this is the pervasive campus culture or more an example of like finding like.</p>
<p>Students state their GCSE and AS results on their applications and their teachers their predicted A level results. They are usually given a conditional offer which they must meet, though there may be some leeway for non- Oxbrige unis. Those who receive unexpectedly very high results have the opportunity to apply to unis with higher requirements, though I do not know the mechanism and have no idea whether it includes Oxbridge. Those who fail to meet the offer can apply elsewhere through clearing where many are successful.</p>
<p>Not Harvard but my younger son used to complain about the campus culture at Tufts not being the right kind of nerdy. They stayed up late talking about geopolitics while he just wanted to play board games! </p>
<p>I was in the intellectual crowd of my high school. I’d gotten interested in history thanks to a freshman year experience where four of us with funky schedules persuade the history teacher to let us learn medieval history instead of doing Ancient history which we thought we’d already covered too many times in school. I remember learning about the Pirenne thesis and realizing for the first time that history was all about interpreting events and not so much about one linear set of facts. But I didn’t apply to Harvard for any particular professors. My Dad had gone there (and my Mom spent a year at Radcliffe among the many colleges she attended), it was in Boston where I had family including my favorite aunt and uncle. I figured since it was Harvard I’d pretty much be good enough at anything I might want to study. I’d been thinking vaguely of history and lit. In the end my freshman year (and a gap year in France) got me more interested in exploring my arty side, and I realized I really did not want to be an academic. I have not changed the world or in any way been an alum Harvard is going to boast about, but I do useful work.</p>
<p>I was thinking about one of my housemates who majored in the Harvard Crimson (and admits it still) and getting Harvard to divest from South Africa, wondering what she was up to. Well it turns out despite spending all her time at the Crimson (Editor in Chief) she graduated summa cum laude, did some work in Africa, went to grad school in sociology and is a professor. Nya, nya Pinkney!</p>
<p>One factor that might prevent American unis doing a ‘pure academic’ admissions system is the American college structure itself (which I am not criticising, but I wonder if it’s relevant perhaps). In UK universities, students apply to uni to do one or just a few subjects/majors - you don’t apply to Manchester, you apply to Manchester to do physics. (Scottish unis are only a partial exception to this.) This is one reason why the standard of undergraduate work is so much higher at British colleges.</p>
<p>And admission decisions are done by the faculty in those academic departments, purely on the basis of who seems to have the best ability/aptitude/potential in physics. So you really do get students applying with the intention of working with particular professors.</p>
<p>I’m not sure how this could easily be replicated in the US system, where students do not in general apply to specific departments (and may not even have a major in mind). The closest thing to a ‘pure academic’ admissions system here is probably CalTech, right?</p>
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<p>And this goes back to one prior post I made where I stated Oxbridge’s and many international universities’ bachelor programs fall somewhere between an American bachelors and a non-interdisciplinary masters degree in a given field. </p>
<p>My impression is it leans closer to what one will find in an American non-interdisciplinary Masters program as Gen Ed courses would have been considered fulfilled at the high school or sometimes middle school levels. A reason why if one decides to switch majors in universities outside the US, they’d either be unable to at all or be forced to start from scratch. </p>