“But that’s not what these schools want. The tippy-top schools could fill their classes with perfect-stats kids many times over. They’d have a pretty boring, monochromatic student body, though, and the schools’ impact on and penetration into society would shrink, because all the kids with special attributes and achievements beyond stats would be thrown out. That’s a bad outcome for Harvard and its peers.”
I disagree with your assertion that these would be monochromatic kids as that’s a huge and disparaging generalization (and note I’m wasn’t by any stretch a perfect stat kid). That being said, even though Harvard and other top schools may not what kids want perfect stats, they enroll a lot of them, and enroll a ton of kids who score above a 2300 or 35. If their SAT average is 2200/33, and hooked enrolled students average say a 2000/28, there has to be a lot of students with 2250/34 and higher to balance that class out.
Wow, it’s “reality,” when he never saw apps, essays, ECs, LoRs, etc, never discussed reviews, processes or goals with adcoms? (And theh colleges of students examined were not named?) But Zakaria and various interest groups say it, so it’s true? And you say Zakaria states there are quotas, so there are?
He concludes that a few elite schools have soft quotas after looking at the percent of Asians hovering at the same percentage while their percentage has gone up at schools that don’t weigh URM as heavily (UCs, MIT, Cal Tech, other stem schools). He compares this to how the ivies kept out Jewish students in the early 20th century by imposing hard quotas (legal back then) and changing from stats only to stats and other considerations (holistic today). He’s not part of any interest group and his point was for people to do their own research on where the soft quotas were going on.
They can enroll lots of high stats kids because they’re cherry picking among a huge volume of them. But, when you look, eg, at the info on the Princeton,admissions site, you can see less than 10% of applicants offering a 4.0 or 1500-1600 SAT were admitted. Granted, some is that is geo diversity, balance in majors. gender, etc. But a chunk is also about the additional attributes the college wants, what they feel makes a vibrant, engaged campus. And, how kids present themselves. Not all top performers necessarily get it.
“Very-high-stats” isn’t the same as “perfect-stats”, @theloniusmonk; the latter is the phrase I used, and I stand by what I said. Harvard could easily fill its class exclusively with kids who have 1600 SATs or 36 ACTs and perfect grades. It would then be the collegiate version of Stuyvesant High School, the most selective public high school in Manhattan, where your admission is based on how you score on one test (see here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-05/welcome-to-stuyvesant-high-school-hostile-takeover-high?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social).
But if Harvard did that, it wouldn’t be Harvard, and it would be a much more imperfect mirror of society than currently. Stuy is about 74% Asian and 1% black, which, notwithstanding that everyone’s an individual, strikes many people as monochromatic - so much so that there’s a movement to make the admissions process there more holistic.
Harvard takes about 20 kids a year from Stuy (which has a senior class of around a thousand). That’s more than almost any other high school, but still only about 1% of the admits Harvard hands out, because Harvard is looking for many kinds of people, from all over the world and with all kinds of talents and attributes, in building its class. Harvard expects that the kids it takes from Stuy will be superstars, and that all the other kids it takes will be as well, in different ways, and will be prominent in different areas of society and different places.
My real point, though, is that there’s a world of difference between very-high-stats (e.g., 2300/35) and perfect-stats in terms of the net you can cast. If you center the class near very-high-stats, you vastly expand the possibility of entry, enabling you to assemble a much more diverse class in terms of backgrounds and talents while taking a large number of super-brainiacs and maintaining a highly intellectual atmosphere. If you center the class much closer to perfect stats, though, you curtail the admissible population and the resulting breadth of your mix sharply. That was what I was trying to say in my post.
“My real point, though, is that there’s a world of difference between very-high-stats (e.g., 2300/35) and perfect-stats in terms of the net you can cast.”
Of course, as you go lower down the scores, the number of test takers and potential applicants increase, by a significant number. But there’s not a whole lot of difference between a 2300 and 2400, in fact there are students now that are taking both SAT and ACT and getting a 36/2300, so in these cases they’re the same person, they just found one test easier. Secondly, the college board gives ranges that show that a 2400 has a range of 2300 to 2400 while a 2300 could have a range of 2250-2350, meaning that if they retook the tests, they could get the same score.
What is this difference you talk about, is a 2400 someone that goes to the library, studies all the time and doesn’t do much for the high school while the 2300 gives up the 100 points on the test so he or she can run the mock trial team when they’re a senior or captain the soccer team?
The article makes a distinction between public and private universities. But there are no true publics anymore. The UNC system universities get about only 20% of their operating budget from the state; the remainder is primarily from tuition and endowment funding. And the state of NC is near the top. At UVA, the state contribution is about 6%. These are not like public primary or secondary schools. They are semi-private, mostly-private, and tend to have much lower FTE endowments. I still prefer the non-legacy policies of ‘publics’ like the UCs, out of fairness.