<p>Isn’t it reasonably accurate to say that Harvard’s mission has always been to be to America what Oxford and Cambridge were to the British Empire? Preserver of culture, generator of knowledge, creator of networks among and between the nobility and talented commoners, example for the world, and certifier of executive talent for the nation. And as America’s influence and status has grown, Harvard’s mission has been morphing into doing all that for the world.</p>
<p>You want the future leaders to be in contact with the best minds, because someday the leaders may need to take advice, and they ought to know what quality is.</p>
<p>^ I don’t believe that to be the goal but they are looking for people who will make a difference in someway.</p>
<p>I know a young teacher (Harvard grad) locally who said he spent time in the industry and felt he was not fulfilling his core need and so he started teaching in his old high school instead.</p>
<p>There is a guy from Yale who joined Houston ISD as a teacher, started a non-profit initiative to recruit underserved community kids to top schools, and got recruited to head up a program for the entire school district.</p>
<p>"Given that the mission in paragraph 1 and the mission in paragraph 2 above seem somewhat at odds to me, I wonder how the “merely brilliant” applicants fare in general? "</p>
<p>I guess it has to do with how nervous one is about somewhat competing missions. We all have competing missions in our own everyday lives. I want to have a mission to save as much for my future / for a rainy day so I’m not a burden to my children – but I also want to see the world, travel, have certain experiences. Harvard wants to be the nurturer of the future researchers – but also the future movers and shakers who may be technically “less smart” as measured on the SAT’s but have other qualities that make them movers and shakers. </p>
<p>it’s only a “problem” if one’s brain is so linear and pedantic that one has to unilaterally prioritize A over B over C. Those of us who are more comfortable with nuance have no problem letting A, B and C all be priorities, and each will “float to the top” at different points in time and with different circumstances and with different people. Harvard doesn’t have to admit every-single-genius for them to prioritize having geniuses in the class. Harvard doesn’t have to admit every-single-class-president-or-charity-starter for them to admire and want to admit kids who can get things done. I’m sorry some people on here are so uncomfortable with nuance, but that tells me that there are types of intelligences that they just don’t get. </p>
<p>For what it’s worth, none of the kids who I knew who got into Harvard were really the “mover and shaker” types. I think some of the “movers and shakers” got into very good schools, perhaps schools that they might not have gotten into on academics alone. Most of them have continued to be movers and shakers in college and afterwards, too.</p>
<p>I suspect Harvard only takes people who are utterly brilliant at moving and shaking.</p>
<p>“Added: What would someone mean by “utterly brilliant” if that did not include creativity, independent thought, and intellectual curiosity? That combination of qualities drives the motivation and perseverance.”</p>
<p>I could be utterly brilliant if I aced the USAMO and never interacted with another human being. I could be utterly brilliant if I came up with a really novel idea for a charity and acted to put it into place. You keep defining utterly brilliant in extremely narrow terms. </p>
<p>Well, I suppose that depends on how you define “utterly brilliant.” I know a kid who applied to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, Cornell, and Penn back in the mid-2000s. Straight-up generic STEM kid, but all around good student. He had as high a GPA as you could have at his good (not great) public HS. Had excellent (although not perfect) SAT scores he never did any special prep for. Nothing else exceptional about him aside from being a NMF. No special prizes, clubs, competitions, etc. White, middle class. He was rejected at all the top schools he applied to except one where he had a legacy connection. He ended up graduating early from that university and had his choice of graduate programs in theoretical mathematics after that, including those at Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton. He didn’t choose Harvard. </p>
<p>I can’t speak for the rest of you, but in my world, anyone who qualifies for a doctoral program in theoretical math at Stanford, Harvard and Princeton is “utterly brilliant” (or, at the minimum, “merely brilliant”). And maybe that’s the kind of student Pinker would like to have more of in his classroom. Now, was Harvard “wrong” to pass on this kid? By “holistic” standards, of course not. I’m sure he didn’t fare very well on their “point system.” By Steven Pinker’s standards, however? Maybe a rigorous entrance exam would have allowed someone with this academic talent to prove his mettle and maybe Harvard should consider admitting some segment of students this way? </p>
<p>In the grand scheme of things, of course, none of this really matters.This young man has done just fine for himself and will soon be making his own contributions to the academy. As the saying goes, the “cream always rises to the top.” But I’m hardly going to credit Harvard (or any other school) for having a foolproof process for admitting the “utterly brilliant.” While that line of thinking certainly serves Harvard’s interests well and allows their admissions officers (and all their apologists) to sleep better at night, common sense tells me it just can’t possibly be true. Unless, of course, the “utterly brilliant” person always demonstrates precocious talent of the type that a Harvard admissions reader can easily recognize it. What exactly are these admissions folks’ special qualifications that make them faultless screeners of brilliance, BTW? Is having a scintillating personality or outstanding “leadership qualities” really that important for a theoretical mathematician?</p>
<p>Well, of course Harvard can only admit people who are demonstrably utterly brilliant. And Harvard gets many applications from kids with excellent grades and scores who do have something–or multiple somethings–that are exceptional. These are not even the utterly brilliant kids. This is a normal Harvard (or other Ivy) admit these days.</p>
<p>Is it possible that more testing of some kind could identify kids who have the potential to be utterly brilliant, even though they haven’t really demonstrated it yet? Maybe. But would it be worth Harvard’s while to invest in such testing? Is it really a problem–for Harvard or anybody else–if some of that potential is nurtured not at Harvard but at some other very fine institution?</p>
<p>I don’t know how we are defining “utterly brilliant” but when we talk about identifying students who will get some of those very few university tenure track jobs, I’m seeing a handful (or maybe two handfuls) within my kids’ social circle. (I find this rather astounding, myself) It is too early to say whether they will get tenured but they will have the necessary publications. I think some of them do really ground breaking research. Excluding the math/science kids, I’m pretty sure all got into their first choice college. Not every one wanted to go to Harvard. They chose departments, not schools, and one stayed at the same school for his PhD. I bet they hire him when an appropriate position opens up and after he’s been tenured elsewhere.</p>
<p>There is a parallel thread talking about whether test scores are predictive. One of the young women in a new tenure track job this fall didn’t do that well on her GREs. She really really really didn’t want to retake them. She called up the professors at the PhD program she wanted to attend and asked if her scores would be “good enough” and they told her not to worry. But they already knew her. That match had already been arranged.</p>
<p>adding: “utterly brilliant” may have to be supported by a pretty enriched environment to be apparent to the naked eye.</p>
<p>There is a kid starting in applied Math doctoral program at Stanford (could have gone anywhere) who is considered brilliant. Problem is that he is 15, went to college at 11 without graduating high school because he was bored in school through some special program in Tennessee. So his family is moving with him to provide support mechanism while he starts his doctoral program using his NSF grant.</p>
<p>I can’t see him applying to Stanford and Harvard at age 11 and have any semblance of what someone might call a holistic application. He just walked into college and started taking classes because a special program allowed for it.</p>
<p>Lucie The Lakie: The problem with an anecdote like that is that by your own (near) admission, there was no good way at the time of admission to tell whether this student was brilliant or not. He was a good student at a mediocre school. Maybe the teachers at his mediocre school didn’t fully appreciate him, or didn’t do a good job of communicating their appreciation – that happens all the time. Maybe his writing skills were not such that he communicated his own brilliance well. That happens a lot, too, especially to STEM-oriented 17-year-old boys. Unless a kid has had lots of access to high-level math instruction, it’s completely impossible to tell who is going to be a talented pure mathematician and who is going to be a workaday actuary – except that there will be a lot more of the latter than the former.</p>
<p>No one at Harvard or anywhere else would claim that they are perfect, or even close to it, in choosing whom to admit. A decade ago, someone at Yale said, “We are very confident that we can identify the top 4-5,000 candidates in our pool. But we can only offer admission to about 1,900 of them. And we have absolutely no confidence that we know how to distinguish among any but a handful of that group. We have to do it, so we do it, but we can’t claim to do it all that well. We can sleep at night because we know that none of those applicants is going to be denied a first-rate education.” Now, that’s a little sugar-coated, but I think it expresses something real.</p>
<p>Each of the colleges you mentioned could well have had scores, maybe even hundreds, of applicants whose applications looked just like your friend’s application. They all maybe even accepted some of them, but they couldn’t possibly accept all of them without turning down lots of other compelling applicants. And you can bet that very, very few of that category of blank-slate-maybe-high-potential applicants are currently in top-level mathematics PhD programs.</p>
<p>JHS, #60, comparing Harvard’s mission to that of Oxford and Cambridge:</p>
<p>Oxford and Cambridge admit almost entirely on academic merit, though. There is special consideration given to students from comprehensive schools (sort of the equivalent of a mediocre American public high school). The Choral Scholars and the Organ Scholars are admitted largely on the grounds of their talent in music. As important as the boat races are to the colleges, I don’t think anyone is admitted based on skill as an oarsman.</p>
<p>The Oxford and Cambridge colleges are very lively places.</p>
<p>@Hunt, you’re the one who stated you “don’t believe that any of the utterly brilliant applicants are ever denied in favor of the institutional needs people.” I was simply responding to that claim. Now you’re telling me being “utterly brilliant” has to be “demonstrated” in some way, but acing a rigorous entrance exam isn’t a reasonable or realistic way to do that?</p>
<p>I happen to think most “utterly brilliant” people have a lot of raw, natural talent, not necessarily lengthy resumes by the time they’re 17. You’re arguing for demonstrated accomplishment over sheer potential. That’s fine if that’s the institution’s priority, but I’m not sure the former establishes “brilliance” better than the latter.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, I’m in complete agreement with you there are plenty of fine institutions for all these kids. Just for the record, I’m not the one complaining about Harvard admissions practices! The eminent Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, is the one who apparently has an issue with them! :-)</p>
<p>But if both Harvard and Oxford are lively, and both produce many highly successful graduates, why should either one of them change its admissions practices? Again, I haven’t seen any real evidence that there is anything wrong with what Harvard is doing, other than typical disagreements about whether certain institutional needs are valuable or not (i.e., whether to have athletic recruits, legacies, affirmative action, etc.). Are there universities who would like to be able to hire brilliant PhDs, but are unable to find any? I’m doubtful.</p>
<p>“Is it really a problem–for Harvard or anybody else–if some of that potential is nurtured not at Harvard but at some other very fine institution?”</p>
<p>Bingo. So Harvard gets Genuises A - M but misses out on Genius N . So what? You’re all crying tears for Poor Fair Harvard? What, will Harvard get its feelings hurt? Are they not Living Up To Their Mission if they don’t go over to Genius N’s house and beg him to apply?</p>
<p>We are talking about human beings and tradeoffs. Some of you are all aflutter that Genius N has to slum it at CMU or Tufts, and you frankly don’t seem to care that Potential Geniuses O, P and Q don’t even know what Harvard is in the first place, because they live in Appalachia and no one around them has more than a high school education and they’ve only vaguely heard of Harvard in the first place and no one is there to tell them that they could go for free. But whatever, obsess over Poor Harvard and Poor Genius N. Talk about wildly misplaced priorities. </p>
<p>I agree. And as I have stated before, there is nothing “unfair” about an institution stating that it values qualities apart from stats and acting accordingly. They state from the outset that it’s not about those with the highest score/grades. When people start screaming it’s “unfair” that Susie the saxophone player got into Harvard while Phil 2400 SAT didn’t, they are implying that SAT score is supposed to trump all, that because Susie only had a 2350, this makes her admission “unfair,” or indicative of some kind of “problem” that needs to be solved. </p>
<p>@JHS, again, I have no issue with Harvard’s admissions practices! I’m simply taking issue with the claim made up-thread that they never pass over “utterly brilliant candidates . . . in favor of the institutional needs people.”</p>
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<p>All the more reason to consider adding another mechanism (such as a standardized test) to catch this type of “brilliant” student if it will make your own faculty members happy! Is the Harvard process so perfect it can never be improved upon? Apparently Pinker doesn’t think so.</p>
<p>And just to clarify, this was not an “average” kid academically in any way, although he was, no doubt, an “average Harvard applicant,” with all the requisite 5s on AP exams, etc.</p>
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<p>Who in this thread are you referring to? Who said anything about “slum(ming) it at CMU or Tufts”? We’re discussing Pinker’s assertions. He’s the ONE who has an issue with Harvard admissions practices. Clearly HE feels he’s not getting the best talent in his classrooms. And Harvard’s administration apparently disagrees. Some people think Pinker makes some valid points; others disagree. Isn’t that what we’re discussing here? I’m not sure how from that you got to some of us “frankly don’t seem to care that Potential Geniuses O, P and Q don’t even know what Harvard is in the first place.” </p>
<p>Really, this entire discussion is about holistic vs. stats-based admissions at selective universities. There really isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, but Harvard, like it or not, is kind of the standard bearer. </p>
<p>Harvard professor writes about the limitations of Harvard admissions and it becomes Something Worth Discussing. Take it up with The New Republic if you have an issue with it!</p>