<p>Now that we are talking about the UK schools, I’d like to share an anecdote with no particular point to make. My kid was invited to an interview at Oxford. They indeed didn’t even request high school transcripts as part of the application. They did look at SAT’s and AP’s together with an write up on “intent” for which they had very specific requirements and specifically stated that EC’s unrelated to the major DC wanted to get in didn’t need to be mentioned. In addition, they asked DC to take an additional aptitude test before the interview decision was made. Now, here’s the interesting part. It so happened that two professors sitting in the committee were Americans (who had received at least part of their education in US institutions), and they asked DC to send in HS transcripts, which was done “informally”. Well, for those of you who are looking into UK schools, watch out for that one.</p>
<p>“One additional note: I strongly suspect that you can’t both attract more low-income students to elite colleges and at the same time increase the number of graduates going to graduate school and other lower income careers.”</p>
<p>This is a great point. </p>
<p>@isabella314, slightly different focus. I agree a kid who has put in the effort to really know a college, and has intelligently reviewed her match, can then much more easily tackle an application and the supps. She can more easily see if her “brand” will both be fulfilled at School X and if it’s likely to attract them to her. And then form her self-presentation (in the app.)</p>
<p>So, I can agree with soccermum that it’s not all that hard. But most kids, here or IRL, don’t seem to have an idea of their “college-worthy branding.” Or to have gotten to know the colleges well enough to start that thinking- and then do a good job of showing themselves well on their apps. My issue with k-12 (in this respect) isn’t about the quality of the educations, but with the conformity of the thinking k-12 encourages. </p>
<p>I have no issue with savvy parents guiding them. But many parents fall into the same high school conformist thinking,hierarchical thinking- "my kid gets great grades and scores, is top-ranked, took x and y tough classes, is in clubs, was co-captain of the team, got this award, held a fundraiser, teachers “love” him, he wants to be a [fill in the blank: doctor, engineer, economist, physicist, professor, writer, etc]…he should be looking at the most competitive colleges. If/when they try to “puff up the brand” - well, the brand they are focused on is still per high school parameters. (Of course, at the other extreme are the kids and families who think you have to cure cancer or “stand out” in silly ways.)</p>
<p>So yes, there are what some may feel are “extraordinary” kids, but who do get rejected. And some who, on inspection, may seem only “great,” but who resonate in many ways- not just what they did, but how they present it, how they seem to “get it,” and what adcoms can then project.</p>
<p>I don’t think most folks understand the impact of a college like Harvard getting 35,000 apps, at least half from academic top performers- the extraordinary free-choice this gives a school with roughly 2000 admit letters to send. </p>
<p>Much of this thread discussion includes a gang of us who argue this ad infinitum. Many still want to rate kids by stats or by their own personal evaluations of their accomplishments. Or in comparison with more “ordinary” high school kids. They forget the weight of choosing about thousands and thousands, cherry picking.</p>
<p>Low-income students by and large do not have the savvy or grinder mentality to utilize an Ivy experience.</p>
<p>Not from my perspective. I get in trouble with some for saying it, touch a nerve, but a lot of the low SES kids who are aiming for Ivies have been striving and accomplishing for years- and when you look at their full pictures (what else they do- and I don’t mean the quick and easy stereotype of babysitting their dozen siblings,) they are leaving more financially secure kids in the dust. Assumptions are risky. The best of these kids are getting solid mentoring, being shaped, along with using their own strengths and resilience. </p>
<p>Good lord Isabella…way to stereotype people. Just because somebody is low income does not mean they don’t have the savvy to go to and fit into elite schools. You make it sound as “those” kids are misfits and ground dragging knuckel morons! I can assure you that if you met my kid you would have NO idea that she grew up poor. She went to an “elite” UG and is now a successfull medschool student. She is not, and has never been out of place in any situation at her schools. Poor doesn’t mean you are socially inept or can’t make a noteworty contribution to a campus at an elite school.</p>
<p>One could argue that’s the whole point – that exposure to elite norms and ways of behaving is <em>more important</em> for the diamond-in-the-rough than it is for the upper middle class kid who will already do just fine even if he winds up only at State Flagship and not Harvard. </p>
<p>Whether you like it or not, one of the strongest elite norms prevalent among those who set the mission, vision, and direction for Harvard and its ilk is that giving a hand to the disadvantaged is a good thing for all involved – both in helping those kids achieve their full potential, and in exposing upper middle class kids to a world beyond New Canaan and Short Hills. The attitude of “let them eat cake” isn’t an elite norm. Noblesse oblige and all.</p>
<p>“In my experience, Oxbridge mathematicians are acutely sensitive to mathematical power and reasoning. Confidence has no effect on them, except secondarily”</p>
<p>First of all, I’m arguing that there is a secondary effect, so it would seem you agree with me. But regardless, a small fraction of Oxbridge applicants want to study maths. Humanities, social science, law, medicine, etc. are inherently more subjective.</p>
<p>Another myth is that only students who graduate from elite schools get good jobs or into grad school and professional school and make a lot of money in the work force. There is plenty of data out there showing that performance on the job and personality has as much to do with earnings and advancement in the workforce as anything and that plenty of executives went to large state schools or even lower ranked liberal arts colleges. </p>
<p>The trick is to find a school where you kid can excel emotionally, physically and intellectually (and some would add spiritually). </p>
<p>aiming for the sky is normal and acceptable if its done properly and not an obsession or resulting in an attitude of “failure” if you dont get into an Ivy. It’s simply not the case. </p>
<p>The secondary effect of confidence that I mentioned meant this: If the applicant happens to be more confident, then the applicant may be better able to focus on the questions being asked, and may be able to handle them better. It’s not a positive reaction by the interviewers to confidence, per se. Confidence accompanied by difficulty in answering the subject matter questions is worse, vis a vis Oxbridge interviews, than low confidence accompanied by difficulty in answering the subject matter questions.</p>
<p>The other subjects are more subjective than mathematics in terms of the material being assessed. But they are not more subjective in terms of the focus of the interview. The interview is still strongly academic. For example, this site shows the Cambridge colleges that have a test at interview for an applicant in history, on top of the interview:
<a href=“Study at Cambridge | University of Cambridge”>Study at Cambridge | University of Cambridge;
<p>The mention of Oxford and Cambridge has two main points: First, I disagreed with JHS that Harvard’s mission is very similar to the missions of Oxford and Cambridge. There are some similarities to be sure, but the undergraduate environment at Oxford and Cambridge colleges is in general more intellectual (in my opinion anyway), and I believe that this is related to the differences in the admissions process. Pinker would probably enjoy teaching the Oxbridge students more. Second, for the extremely scholarly type who is looking for an extremely scholarly environment, the English universities might be someplace to consider. I don’t know why their thresholds for the SAT’s are so low. If an applicant is in an IB program, all of the degree programs that I checked in Cambridge require 40-41 points on the IB exam at a minimum, with 776 at HL, and some require additional tests. I think this is higher than the SAT + AP threshold–but I don’t have that much experience with IB.</p>
<p>I was surprised when I learned about 30 years ago that socioeconomic mobility is greater in the UK than in the US. But to the very best of my knowledge, it was true then, and it is true now.</p>
<p>If American exchange students are encountering only “posh” British students at an Oxford College, then my top two guesses are 1) Magdalen and 2) Christ Church. Others are more diverse.</p>
<p>I don’t know about PPE. It used to be that English undergrads who were going into the Civil Service read “Greats.” </p>
<p>Totally fine with me and most other high test scorers :)</p>
<p>Tough luck for others who didn’t, life isn’t fair. </p>
<p>“I don’t know why their thresholds for the SAT’s are so low. If an applicant is in an IB program, all of the degree programs that I checked in Cambridge require 40-41 points on the IB exam at a minimum, with 776 at HL, and some require additional tests. I think this is higher than the SAT + AP threshold–but I don’t have that much experience with IB.”</p>
<p>In reality, the admitted american applicants for Cambridge typically have much higher SATs than 2100, which are actually NOT the main factor in admission. Instead, They have to have at least five 5s in related APs in order to be considered for interviews. </p>
<p>Oxford has somewhat lower SAT/AP requirements. </p>
<p>I don’t know what Steven Pinker was smoking last week, but the latter part of his article flies in the face of established social science (and he’s an experimental psychologist, which makes me sad).</p>
<p>hat would it take to fix this wasteful and unjust system? Let’s daydream for a moment. If only we had some way to divine the suitability of a student for an elite education, without ethnic bias, undeserved advantages to the wealthy, or pointless gaming of the system. If only we had some way to match jobs with candidates that was not distorted by the halo of prestige. A sample of behavior that could be gathered quickly and cheaply, assessed objectively, and double-checked for its ability to predict the qualities we value….We do have this magic measuring stick, of course: it’s called standardized testing.</p>
<p>And the only reason I didn’t start laughing was because I’m at work. This is when I looked up who the author was, and I expected some hack, but it’s Steven Pinker, a notable experimental psychologist who should know better. Standardized tests have been shown time and again to give advantages to the wealthy and to have ethnic biases. They’re also neither quick nor cheap.</p>
<p>We have already seen that test scores, as far up the upper tail as you can go, predict a vast range of intellectual, practical, and artistic accomplishments</p>
<p>…we have? Where? WHEN? The middle part doesn’t even make statistical sense, as you can’t really detect many differences once you get into the upper tail. Once you get to the top ~5% of scorers they’re all basically indistiguishable from each other.</p>
<p>*As for Deresiewicz’s pronouncement that “SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely,” this is bad social science. SAT correlates with parental income (more relevantly, socioeconomic status or SES), but that doesn’t mean it measures it; the correlation could simply mean that smarter parents have smarter kids who get higher SAT scores, and that smarter parents have more intellectually demanding and thus higher-paying jobs. Fortunately, SAT doesn’t track SES all that closely (only about 0.25 on a scale from -1 to 1), and this opens the statistical door to see what it really does measure. The answer is: aptitude. Paul Sackett and his collaborators have shown that SAT scores predict future university grades, holding all else constant, whereas parental SES does not. Matt McGue has shown, moreover, that adolescents’ test scores track the SES only of their biological parents, not (for adopted kids) of their adoptive parents, suggesting that the tracking reflects shared genes, not economic privilege. *</p>
<p>No, no, no.</p>
<p>Matt McGue’s (and others’) research puts heritability of IQ at around .5, with a confidence interval of .4-.6. Basically, about 50% of IQ is inherited from parents - a substantial amount for sure, but only half! So the other half is explained by…other stuff. (Some people have estimated as high as 80%, but it’s more commonly put lower.)</p>
<p>And the relationship between SES and the SAT is around 0.22 * at a given college or university*. That makes sense, because similar students are more likely to be accepted to and select the same college, so the range restriction (i.e. the similar students) makes the correlation look much smaller than it actually is. By the College Board’s own statistics, if you look across the entire SAT-taking population (not limiting it to one particular school) the correlation jumps to 0.42. The College Board says</p>
<p>*Thus, samples of enrolled students underestimate SES–test relationships in the college-bound population, leading to the conclusion that the population of interest must be specified when one estimates the correlation between SES and test scores. *</p>
<p>The mean within-school SAT-grade correlation was 0.35, meaning that the correlation between SES and the SAT is actually almost the same size as the correlation between SAT and grades. Furthermore, the same report shows that any SES and grade correlation is nearly fully explained by the connection between SES and SAT scores.</p>
<p>This isn’t just true of SAT scores; the link between SES and testing has been found with all kinds of standardized tests.</p>
<p>And you know what, I am willing to believe that at this point parents in higher income brackets are, on average, more intelligent than parents of lower income brackets. They then pass this intelligence on to their children - both through genetic links and through environmental ones (as I pointed out, studies have shown that genetic heritability only explains some of the relationship between parent intelligence and child intelligence - parents transmit intelligence to their kids in other ways. Wealthier parents say more words in the home; their sentences are more complex, and they use more advanced words. They speak to their children in different ways, asking questions and encouraging their children to figure things out on their own. They are more tolerant of boundary-pushing and question-asking, and they have more books in the home). So yeah, sure, on face “smarter parents have smarter kids who get higher SAT scores, and that smarter parents have more intellectually demanding and thus higher-paying jobs.”</p>
<p>But that’s because of a cycle of inequality. I’m not making a value judgment on whether the inequality is fair or good or not, but it’s inequality nonetheless. Smart people get better, more intellectually demanding and higher-paying jobs. They have kids who they transmit their intelligence to, and those kids go on to get more intellectually demanding and higher-paying jobs because they are also smart. And so on and so forth.</p>
<p>But over time, this becomes less an issue of intelligence and more an issue of generational wealth. Your kids are intelligent because they were born to you, and because you pushed them and asked them questions as a child, and because they had access to A Wrinkle In Time instead of Pat the Bunny when they were in elementary school (because you didn’t struggle with reading in school because you were Smart and read it as a child yourself, so you could recommend it). And because you had the social capital to take time off work to fight for them to get into the better charter school in Capetown rather than the dingy public school in Cloaktown. And because you took calculus in high school yourself so you could help them think through that tricky problem they had issues mastering…</p>
<p>And…at the extreme end, let’s say that you’re a smart parent who has an average kid. Average kid can’t really hack it like your friends’ smart kids, but you want your Average Kid to be wealthy and successful like your friends’ kids - and like you, and your grandmother and grandfather and ancestors. But you know, you’re wealthy and powerful and you went to Harvard, so you’ve got a friend on the Board of Trustees at Harvard, so he can help Average Kid out…and you’ve got a little money to build a new reading room in the library, or whatnot…and then another friend is the head of HR at that cool company Average Kid might like to work in.</p>
<p>“The savvy in ingrained from an early age, there are social mores developed over a lifetime, there’s an aggressiveness and a polish to excellent sheep that is very rarely reproduced outside of affluent enclaves.”</p>
<p>I love this kind of thing (and I do agree to some point, though I don’t like the term excellent sheep).<br>
What do you, or what does anyone else, characterize as those social mores / norms? Beyond, of course, studying.</p>
<p>I would characterize them as feeling entitled to at least ask if rules can be bent (under the never-know-unless-you-ask philosophy). I certainly have brought my UMC children up with that attitude - which is not to say they aren’t subject to the rules, but there might be circumstances where they can (nicely and politely) ask if something else could be done or if there is an alternative way (with, of course, maintaining a good attitude if the answer remains no). What others would people say are these social mores? Neither of my kids could be characterized as aggressive. </p>
<p>^^^I would add, in fact, that aggressiveness and polish are somewhat mutually exclusive. Aggressiveness past the point of politeness can come across as really striving or pushy. Stating your case eloquently and logically is, in my view, what polished kids bring to the table. I’m probably a little less polished and a little more pushy - when I’ve advised my Brown grad D to say this or that to a potential employer, she’s quick to tell me what she thinks about the appropriate tone and the correct balance. My point is, that sort of blatant aggressiveness does not do them any favors. My S at Harvard says the same thing…self serving pushiness is not effective in an environment where so many students are like that…the most polished really do transcend that sort of behavior.</p>
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<p>It also depends on what situational context one is in and whether one apply the aggressiveness in critically measured doses or whether one uncritically applies it in too many situations where it’s too much/totally inappropriate. </p>
<p>The latter is one area where some college classmates from higher SES backgrounds end up getting themselves into trouble in college/work/grad school if their parents/they themselves hadn’t taught them/learned to control their emotions and learned alternate social skill strategies to deal with obstacles/conflicts or they happened to “ask if rules could be bent” to someone in position of power who is extremely inflexible and regards even asking such a question to be an offensive affront in itself and are unable to diplomatically deescalate and disengage from that situation. </p>
<p>It gets really serious when one’s workplace supervisor/grad school Prof is threatening termination from work/grad program because one failed to learn/employ emotional self-control and alternate social skill strategies in situations ranging from heated classroom discussions to grade/employee evaluation meetings. </p>
<p>Isabella: In my experience, at least, HYP (and similar schools) have plenty of (a) world-beating students from low SES backgrounds, and (b) very smart students with some fundamental streak of laziness. </p>
<p>And if you haven’t met any B-average high-school students who work hard, read all the time, and are passionate about learning, it’s because all you know are places with massive grade inflation. The high school I attended didn’t have an A-B-C scale; it was High Honors, Honors, High Pass, Pass, Fail (with no weighting) Classes were about 120 students each, and during all of my time there (8 years) there was never a class where more than two students per year had a High Honors average (and many classes where no student in a particular year had a High Honors average). My class sent four people to Yale and three to Harvard and only one of us had ever had a High Honors average for a whole school year (and it wasn’t either of the ones who now have tenure at Stanford or MIT).</p>
<p>The system cannot be perfected. The far east is standardized test based only, and kids spend a quarter of their lives slaving away learning how to take a test. They are cookie cutter, noncontributive people for the most part. </p>
<p>Probably the only flaw is that admissions offers actually think being an SCA Vice President teaches you leadership, and spending 200 hours in Africa because mommy and daddy could pay for the $2000 volunteer camp actually means you care about people. It should be skill and accomplishment based. Eg, give credit to kids with real, provable talent on musical instruments, and kids who wrote books. They do give credit for those, but it’s muddied up by the volunteer and leadership crap. </p>
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<p>Not sure how you figure the latter part considering top university grads in East Asia tend to dominate the leadership in both the private and public sectors along with many other areas of their respective societies. They’ve founded many private businesses which grew into large corporations and some have also made notable contributions internationally in academia and other areas as well. </p>
<p>Then again, one factor to keep in mind is that unlike here in the US where we love to dump on and look down upon our public sector, the public sector in those countries has usually been highly respected and regarded as plum positions for the most competitive elite college graduate. </p>
<p>In fact, the same mentality carries over to the colleges themselves as unlike here, it’s the public colleges which tend…with minute exceptions…to dominate the elite tier of colleges and private colleges regarded as institutions for those who don’t make the cut for the elite/respectable publics. </p>
<p>One friend who is from one of those countries said they tend to regard private colleges with few exceptions in a similar light as to how many clued in Americans view private for-profit colleges here in the US. </p>
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<p>I think you should reconsider your position. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. A lot of very smart people have to blunder for him to get this far.</p>
<p>Nathan Kuncel is the Marvin D. Dunnette Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Minnesota. A lot of very smart people also have to blunder for him to get this far. Listen to what he has to say, if you have not already done so, on an area where he is a recognized authority:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv_Cr1a6rj4”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv_Cr1a6rj4</a></p>
<p>I can list others, but I am sure it is not needed.</p>
<p>Pinker knows what he is talking about.</p>