Not necessarily, since different colleges have different admission processes. Indeed, from how the Harvard admission process is described, any preliminary reader can effectively reject an applicant by giving a low score for the specified category that the preliminary reader is reading for (academic, extracurricular, athletic, personal), since applicants with low scores in any category are basically never admitted.
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Thanks for the clarification. I think I understood and represented your posts accurately. Your description of what is predictable involves the tails, but even if it did not, predictable does not mean objective, nor does it mean that many of bulk of chosen candidates are any more academically qualified than many of those rejected.
The schools acknowledge this. An admissions officer from an âeliteâ midwestern has said that the school could swap the last 500-1000 acceptances with the first equal number of waitlists/rejections and suffer little or no drop in the academic quality of the admitted students. Outside of hooks, special demographics, and the small number of truly exceptional accomplishments, the decisions are being made at the margin, and kids with equal academic excellent will end up on both side of the line.
Added (didnât see this at first):
I think our difference is with just how many âborderlineâ cases there are. Iâd say that once you take out the various hooks and the few truly exceptional applicants (by math contest or whatever), they are pretty much all borderline cases.
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Careful now . . . I resemble the comment.
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I think this is an extremely interesting thread and agree with this particular post that perhaps the right description is more unpredictable than random.
But I think that still feeds into the initial question / title here to some degree. I get there are semantics around what unsustainably competitive means per various points above but at some level if the decision is so âunpredictableâ as to not provide generally qualified students a realistic chance of getting in, does the student expend the energy required to be as qualified. And if not qualified enough, they will not apply to these schools. Which sort of leads to an issue I think. I sort of doubt it ever gets to a point of causing a real problem for these schools but it may have an impact.
Let me play this out with a real world situation. Student does very well at a large, super diverse public magnet school where the top of the class routinely vies for spots at HYPSM. Student is not a rocket scientist or into doing independent research at teaching hospital during his high school years and is not taking advance math classes at local public university but is very solid top 15% of class student. Student applies ED to top 30 school where 3 generations of her family have gone before and where she has always wanted to go. Knows more about the school than the quasi-faculty person she did virtual interview with. Student gets waitlisted and ends up going to very good large state school. We donât know why not admitted but end result is not admitted. A mere handful of years ago, this student would have been the schoolâs ideal candidate. But not now. Could student have done something differentlyâof course but sometimes hard to guess what that is or to do so and be authentic. Hey, this is life and a lot has to do with timing and circumstance but we want to tend to think of our colleges as âfairâ and ârationaleâ and predictable and consistent, etc.
Could be that the school really wanted an oboe player from California or basket weaver from Wyoming. Or, of course, somebody from her school that was in top 12% and had daddy fund some faux start up company, etc. Ultimately though the student busted their butt to not get the desired result and has ended up at same place they could have gotten into without nearly all the APs and stress and hard work. Those are, of course, good and helpful things in their own right but begin to pale when motivating the typical high school student to keep pursuing top 30 admission goal. Studentâs friends and siblings all are sort of taken aback and conclude there is no chance for them at Top 30 school if student didnât get in. Will sibling applyâprobably but a lot less âinterestâ than before.
Simply put, the increasing unpredictability makes the application process more like playing the lottery than one wants to think of application to an educational institution which, in theory, has a mission of trying to educate and improve the lives of its students and improving its community (at one point much more regionally focused than Wyoming) rather than focusing on ârounding out the class.â
Another extension of this is at what point do students realize that attending a school that has focused intently on ârounding out the classâ isnât necessarily of any individual benefit to the various studentsâi.e., is there clear proof having that one person from Wyoming (no offense to Wyoming) adds much to the student body apart from getting to claim students from all 50 states.
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Maybe all of these âeliteâ universities should make their application equally elite.
Offer a rigorous application process that is unique to each school, that requires the type of intellect and effort comensurate with the reputation these instituions pride themselves on.
They should detach themselves from the common app if they want to market themselves as uncommon.
Have the applications due by October 1st and post all decisions on April 30th. Give the admissions department six months to disect these application and build the perfect class.
Of course none of this will happen because reducing the number of applications will make these schools demonstrably less âeliteâ in USNWR.
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I know were a little off topic, but that Cal State, was Cal Poly and the major was CS. Thatâs arguably the toughest college admit in CA. They get close to 6000 applications for less than 200 slots. Cal Poly is not holistic, but Stanford is. He was undoubtedly a very strong student, but didnât meet the algorithm cutoff at CP. Things like quality of ECs that can sway a Stanford application a lot, donât do anything in the Cal Poly algorithm. Itâs hours only.
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If your point is that some of the students at many other schools are as âexcellentâ as some students at some of the most elite colleges, I wholeheartedly agree. Thatâs the point about looking at the distributions, rather than at a fixed group of students. If your point is that some of the students rejected by the most elite colleges are as good academically as many students at those colleges, I also agree. Furthermore, Iâd argue that some of these rejected students are academically âbetterâ than some admitted students at some of these colleges. On the other hand, the point of looking at the distributions is that an academically âbetterâ college is likely to have higher concentrations of academically âbetterâ students. Iâm not sure if you dispute it.
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Here is a web site that purports to calculate an older version of CPSLOâs admission formula: https://mca.netlify.app/ . Presumably, it has been changed due to CPSLO, like other CSUs, going test blind for this yearâs admission cycle.
However, it should be easy to see that some characteristics that may be valued at places like Stanford may not add many points to CPSLOâs admission formula (and vice-versa). Unfortunately, CPSLO never shows historical thresholds, so one can only guess (perhaps informed by applicants showing their calculated values, majors, and decisions).
Note that some of the formulaâs bonus points involve reported semesters of math and foreign language beyond the minimum. It has been claimed that not reporting high school level courses taken in middle school will miss out on these bonus points, even though CSU and UC policy otherwise is to validate lower level courses if a higher level course is present in the record (e.g. a passing grade in Spanish 3 creates the assumption that Spanish 1 and 2 were completed). So if the student who got into Stanford but not CPSLO did not report math and foreign language courses taken in middle school, they may have lowered their CPSLO admissions formula value considerably.
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I agree that the decisions arenât purely based on merit, but even if they were and there was no randomness; it would be perfectly normal for an applicant to be accepted at Harvard and Yale, but rejected at Stanford.
Stanford has a many major differences between HY in both their applicant pool and academic needs. For example, ~40% of Stanford students declare engineering school majors (CS is included) compared to ~15% at Yale. Back in the 90âs Yale considered eliminating engineering altogether, and even today a good portion of engineering grads pursue non-engineering related jobs. Iâd expect a very different portion of applicants are applying to CS/Engineering at the respective schools, and Iâd expect there are some major differences in what type of CS/Engineering applicants the schools would accept and reject. A particular excellent prospective engineering kid might be towards the top of one schoolâs engineering applicant pool, but not as high in anotherâs. Similarly Yale probably gets a far larger portion of humanities applicants than Stanford and evaluates them in a different way.
You also have kids who differ in an important non-stat type criteria between the 3 schools. For example, I interview kids for Stanford. Every now and then, Iâll interview a kid who says he wants to major in a popular Harvard concentration that is not offered at Stanford, such as wanting to major in Neuroscience. AOs mention that some applicants even write the wrong name of the school in their essays, by cut and pasting without changing name. Or less obviously a student may put more effort in to their top choice colleges and/or which colleges than better fit with their needs/goals than other colleges that they do not know as well.
The colleges also rate applicants in different categories that Iâd consider merit-based, and emphasize those categories to different degrees. For example, Stanford is big on what they call âintellectual vitalityâ and has multiple related ratings in their evaluation process. Based on the lawsuit, Harvard doesnât directly emphasize IV to the same degree. Or continuing with the math contest example, Iâm sure 3 colleges value math awards to different degrees, particularly at the regional/state type level, far below IMO. The 3 colleges also have different selectivity metrics including admit rate., There are countless merit-related reasons why a particular kid might be accepted to HY, but rejected by Stanford.
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I really dislike the use of the term merit in connection with elite admissions given the number of qualified students for limited slots. Who are we to say that any particular student did not merit/deserve/earn admission? You may not like the holistic criteria used, but with very rare exceptions, every admitted students merited/deserved/earned their spot for one reason or other. Use of the term really is just an effort to diminish some studentsâ acceptances because you think others were more deserving. Merit is inherently subjective and no one is owed a spot at any of these schools.
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I think itâs âon topicâ in the sense that it provides another data point regarding the current state of admissions for competitive programs, even one at a school many would never associate with the supposed elite. It could be âthe toughest college admission in Ca,â but there are a number of other Ca schools where students also face long odds (especially for competitive programs) including Stanford, Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Berkeley, UCLA, and some other departments at various other UCâs. (The âtest-optionalâ numbers arenât out on all these yet, so weâll see.)
If nothing else it suggests that not even the colleges agree on what constitutes a well qualified applicant, even in something like CS.
Thanks for the link. I have read that Cal Poly is test blind this year, along with the rest Cal States, and the UCs. So the old formulas have likely been thrown out the window. I get the impression that it has been a crazy year California admissions. UCLA alone had over 139,000 applicants.
Iâve always maintained that it APPEARS random from the outside.
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They did that website from my âUnderstanding the MCA Post.â They messaged me before they posted it. 
Indeed, missing MS HS classes could be the cause too. Cal Poly is very harsh about not reading the directions on the app. Itâs sad, because the smarter way in my mind is to confer based on highest clas.
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I also think that admission is unpredictable on an individual level but not random. A few years ago, when my daughter was in 9th grade, I stumbled upon CC and some similar posts with EC rankings as posted in this thread. Being an immigrant that came here for graduate studies, I was clueless about the âholisticâ process of college admission. So, I started reading, learned about these competitions, selective summer programs (free), etc and signed up my daughter who is naturally talented (IMHO) in creative writing and languages. She also got advice from a teacher to apply for a very exciting summer program called NSLI, and by the end of junior year she had a âresumeâ that was bigger than mine with numerous activities in the 2-2+ category as described in a post above. With this, and also excellent academics of 4.0UW, 35 ACT, many APs, National Merit Semifinalist, and the other usual stuff that is the absolute minimum for these colleges, she was accepted to Brown, the dual-program at Columbia and rejected from Yale. Exactly the result I was expecting. Also accepted to all the UCs, and invited for Regents interview at UCB (did not get regents). In our immigrant community, none of the other parents did my research and their kids ended up in UCSC mostly.
I am saying all this not because I advocate for this process. In fact, I would not do it again if I had a do-over. My daughter was turned off by the system, and chose to go and study abroad where she is thriving. But there is a clear path to beat the holistic admission game.
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Then we agree. I really didnât think I was saying anything controversial, but I think feathers got ruffled when I suggested that those admitted to school X donât deserve admission any more than rejected students with equally (or more) impressive academic credentials. But thatâs simply al logical extension of the often repeated argument to those who are rejected: âNo one deserves admission to x.â Apparently it sounds a bit different when directed at admitted students, rather than rejected students.
I understand the point. I donât think Iâve disputed it or accepted it in this thread, because to my mind it is a separate and more complicated issue.
Yes, the supposed âacademically âbetterâ collegesâ have a higher concentration of supposedly âacademically âbetterâ students.â But this is largely by definition. The colleges which are considered âacademically âbetterââ play a major role in defining which students are considered âacademically âbetter.ââ These standards change, as we may be seeing right now with the adoption of test optional and test blind omission policies.
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If you are referring to my post above, by âmeritâ I essentially mean not related hook type special preference group. Examples include things like applying REA/SCEA to one of HYS, but not the other two. Or being a legacy at one of HYS, but not the other two. Such factors can influence relative chance of admission between the three colleges, but are not what Iâd consider âmeritâ based. Whether these hook-type preference groups are good/bad, or whether somebody âis owed a spot at any of these schoolsâ is a different matter.
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Wow! As close to a certainty as you can get with these schools.
Itâs not really surprising. The application process for RSI is very similar to the one for college, and the acceptance rate is lower than any of the HYPSM schools.
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Saw this and thought of this discussion:
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Itâs not the toughest admit, probably still Stanford CS, then Cal Tech, Berkeley EECS, then Harvey Mudd before Cal Poly. The caliber of applicants of those schools are not the same, so the 6000 to 200 is not really apples to apples. Most kids that Have CP SLO as a target or reach, donât even apply to Stanford or Cal Tech, in the bay area they could UCB as itâs local.
âItâs not really surprising. The application process for RSI is very similar to the one for college, and the acceptance rate is lower than any of the HYPSM schools.â
I donât think thatâs the case, a quick google search said it was around 7%, a little higher than H or S. Again, this is a stem-based program, the kids getting in to these will have to face athletes, legacies, URMs, first-gens etc, in the actual admission at a place like Harvard.