BTW, the Summer Science Program (SSP), listed at level 7 used to list the colleges where the attendees went to. Out of 72 students each year:
2017: 46 (HYPSM) + 6 (Caltech) + 3 (Oxbridge)
2016: 42 (HYPSM) + 2 (Caltech) + 2 (Oxbridge)
2015: 41 (HYPSM) + 3 (Caltech)
Of course, some of these students might have had accomplishments at higher levels too.
For RSI, listed at Level 9, 76% of the alumni went to HYPSM, 3% to Caltech.
This will be my last post on this topic per skieuropeâs suggestion, but you misinterpreted what I said. To me a person who was borderline at Stanford but rejected and ends up at Vanderbilt means to me that the system worked, not that it failed. And that would still be true if you flipped those admitted and rejected. In both cases the students ended up roughly where they belonged.
There is a large overlap in terms of talent among each notch of school (and for that matter, there is a great deal of talent in state flagships as well). IMO, @1NJParent explained it extremely well, but it seems you didnât like that explanation either.
Surely we can find a better word than âbelongedâ. Thatâs what the HS kids believe- that the Val belongs at Harvard, the Sal belongs at Columbia, and the #3 in the class âbelongsâ at Northwestern. The stoners belong at community college and the kids in the middle donât belong anywhere so they head off to random state school to major in nursing (yay) accounting (double yay) or History (losers for sure who will spend their lives flipping burgers.)
Real life is so much more nuanced.
How about âbest fitâ?
I apologize if I misrepresented what you said. What I think you said was, âto a large extent, those excellent students end up at the level where they belong.â And that more students are being rejected because âmany more applicants aim higher than they should.â And that if a student âmet/exceeded the admission expectations of the school, they would have been admitted.â What did I get wrong? Because, IMO, none of these statements are remotely accurate, and @1NJParentâs comments donât clear them up at all.
The disconnect is when one moves from oneâs perception of the quality of the college (based on distribution patterns, historical reputation, acceptance rates, or whatever) to a judgement on the âqualityâ or âexcellenceâ of accepted students versus rejected students. There is too much overlap in qualifications between these two groups to reasonably conclude that most of the students end up where they belong. In other words, large percentage of those admitted to Stanford are âborderline.â They donât âbelongâ at Stanford any more than thousands who were rejected.
In my own family- one cousin ended up close to home because a parent was about to start chemo and needed the extra help for the younger siblings. Another family member went off to an âuber competitiveâ university- for SURE not the best fit, but the best financial deal and there wasnât a lot of flexibility in the family budget to pay for the âbest fitâ which was more expensive. And still another family member turned down the âBest Fitâ because it wasnât affordable, went to the âworst fitâ but still got a great education and was launched.
If the grownups stop using âbest fitâ or âDream Collegeâ or terminology like that- maybe the HS kids will pick up on the fact that not everyone goes to their dream, best, most beloved- and thatâs ok. How many of us (children of the 60âs and 70âs) went to our dream college???
When cost differences are a major consideration for the (vast?) majority of college applicants, it is hard to see how those students would end up attending their ideal âbest fitâ college based on the admissions criteria outlined above.
I suspect more than today, at least amongst the parents here that came from higher SES families.
For most (prospective) college students, âfitâ is mostly defined by their cost constraints. Only within their cost constraints do their academic and other college admission credentials, or their academic and other preferences, matter in choice of college.
The words âexcellentâ, âhigh achievingâ, âqualifiedâ can be used to describe many students, but that doesnât mean these students are equally âexcellentâ, âhigh achievingâ, or âqualifiedâ . Some of them are more so than others in one area or another (e.g. the prior discusion on math competitions showed that some students are vastly âbetterâ at math than even most âexcellentâ math students). The same thing is true with colleges. Not all colleges are equally excellent. Not all courses with similar sounding titles are similar in content. A cursory glance wouldnât reveal their differences.
I think the key point here is âexpectations of the school.â Thereâs nothing that says that those expectations are academic in nature, or that very high caliber rejected students could have been academically âbetter.â
The word I have issue with is âexceeded,â which implies doing more of something or better at something. The thing that separates for the most part are intangibles. Itâs not more things, itâs different things.
As an anecdote, I know a student who was accepted to Harvard and Yale, but rejected by Stanford. I think we can all agree that when it comes to âelitenessâ tier, they are all equivalent, as evidenced by all being included in the acronym used to represent the âtop,â HYPSM. If decisions were meritocratic, based simply on academic achievement, he should have been accepted to all three or rejected by all three. They arenât though. He didnât have an intangible that Stanford values.
That would be true only if the three schools received applications from exactly the same students and had exactly the same number of spots to fill.
We were asked not to get back into math contests, so I wonât.
In your previous post you insisted that I needed to focus on distributions of âacademically âbetterâ studentsâ and that the distributions of these students at various schools âlikely overlap each other (sometimes significantly).â So by your methodology, these overlaps represent students who are roughly equally qualified, do they not?
If so, then the overlapping students at Duke, UCLA, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Williams, Harvey Mudd, and a host of other schools (even supposedly lesser schools) are roughly equally qualified to the overlapping students at the supposed tippy-top schools, even though many of these students may have gotten rejected from a supposed tippy-top school. If that is the case, then the pool of âequally excellentâ students is much larger than any one college could possibly admit, and there is nothing inherently âmore soâ about any the overlapping students (at least not academically) whether or not they attend Princeton.
Again, not my issue. I am talking about students, not colleges.
Letâs go through each part:
to a large extent, those excellent students end up at the level where they belong
Apparently I need a better word than âbelongâ, but I meant that application outcomes were highly predictable, even when it comes to highly selective schools. I have talked about why and wonât rehash it.
more students are being rejected because âmany more applicants aim higher than they should.
I put most of the blame for this on colleges hiding just how much of the class is unavailable to the unhooked kid âwho only hasâ near perfect GPA, SAT scores, and is captain of the basketball team. She might think she is competing for 1600 spots, when in reality it is closer to 600.
And that if a student âmet/exceeded the admission expectations of the school, they would have been admitted.â
This was in response to a statement by the OP that the vast majority of students who met expectations are turned away. But thatâs because the colleges are intentionally vague about what it takes to get admitted. I agree with you that there are a lot of borderline cases, which is why I brought up Stanford and Vanderbilt in that same post.
I think your using âbelongâ and âbest fitâ is very telling. No need to change them or find different wording.
Different colleges have different definitions of âmeritâ, even within purely academic considerations. Even CSUs, which now consider academic merit only from what can be gotten from the applicantâs academic record, do not all define academic merit the same way.
Harvard and Stanford do, 1700. This also presumes the student was on the bubble. I can assure you having seen LOTS of record, few have the accomplishments this student had. He was not on the bubble academically.
I know kids who were accepted at one or more of HYPSM, but were rejected at UCâs and other supposedly less selective schools. In this thread or another someone mentioned a student being accepted at Stanford and waitlisted a Cal State. Perhaps this year more than in the past, it seems to be pretty much a crap shoot, even for many extremely qualified but unhooked students.
Agree. And while HYSPM may be the âeliteâ when it comes to reputation and desirability, Iâd argue that when it comes to the academic excellence of the admitted students the âeliteness tierâ extends well beyond this small group of schools. I thought this was pretty obvious. But apparently not.
Just a reference to whether admissions to schools with ow acceptance rate is ârandomâ. I think that people are confusing ârandomâ with âindividually unpredictableâ.
When we have students who have received a prestigious award, and 50% of those who apply to Harvard are accepted, as opposed to an average of 4.5%, that is not ârandomâ. However it means that it is impossible to predict, for certain, whether any individual winner will be accepted.
The problem is that an individual is either accepted or not accepted, and no applicant is ever 50% accepted. However, looking at any specific group, it is possible to predict that 50% of this group will be accepted.
So @hebegebe is correct in that admissions can be predicted, in that they can be predicted at the level of a group. But, at the level of most individuals, there are no certainties.
It is, however, never random, unless AOs are taking a group of applications, and tossing dice to decide which student to accept.
Another large component of any âholisticâ admissions is trying to diversify the student pool. That means that many decisions are made based on the specific applicant pool of a specific college. However, all colleges do not have the same applicant pool. So Harvard may have only a single high achieving student from Wyoming for the past three years, while Stanford has has 12. Or the applicant is coming from a high school from which the last 5 who were accepted to Stanford chose to matriculate to other schools, or some other issue. Or there is the much discussed oboe player, which one college needs, but others do not
Moreover, you can have three students, all who are very similar, so selection comes down to some small thing which appeals to a certain AO, but not to another AO. It could be anything from an essay which one AO thought was good, and another did not.
It is rarely an intangible, it is simply local conditions versus global conditions. Admissions are based on âglobalâ factors, such as most hooks, GPA, EC achievements, etc., which increase admission chances at every college. There are âlocalâ factors which are either college specific like legacy or donor status, or dependent of the present student body or applicant pool of that specific college, or the preferences of specific AOs, or their relationship with the GCs of a specific school.
No one AO determines any single studentâs fate. All are ultimately admitted, rejected or waitlisted by committee.