As far as I’m aware, colleges can’t see where you’ve applied or been accepted.
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Not generally, although some colleges try to find out (e.g. by asking applicants where else they applied).
I don’t think I’ve had any college ask me where else I’ve applied, interview or otherwise. I’ve checked a few websites talking about guidelines for alumni interviews for alumni and they strictly say that you can’t ask an interviewee where else they applied.
Sometimes schools ask where you’re going when you decline your offer from them.
Not all interviewers adhere to the guidelines. I had several ask.
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Firstly, congratulations on your acceptance to MiamiU.
That being said, as for your rejections, which you seem to be upset about (which is normal and expected), I will say, you must have been more realistic - the vast majority of the schools on your list have acceptance rates in the single digits.
A common misconception, is that if you apply to, say, 15-25 prestigious schools, you’re bound to at least “get one caught in the net”. This is not the case as these schools have their own agendas in terms of accepting the students they do - they aren’t looking to award financial aid for “hard working students” who they don’t see benefitting from - though this isn’t to say you would or would not benefit the school; there are just so much more “stronger” applicants - hooked, legacy, to even simply not needing aid.
Something I came to understand, and recommend you to try to do the same, is that what you make of it makes more of an impact than the name of the school you go to. The sooner you accept this, I guarantee, the sooner you will not let these rejections pull you back. Trust me, UMiami is not one lacking in opportunity.
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I’d be fine with this if privates didn’t get tax breaks on their endowment or received federal money. I’m frankly not that OK with giving tax breaks to hedge funds that also educate a handful of people.
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I mean, you’re just wrong here.
Just because many of the strongest candidates come from private schools (what Brits call public schools) doesn’t mean they practice legacy admissions. Are you shocked that private British schools produce some of the best academic talent in that country?
And a key difference across the pond is that it’s faculty who are in charge of admissions, not adcoms. If you read the deliberations of an Oxbridge admissions committee (I believe it was published by the Guardian of one of the Oxbridge departments), given the general lefty lean of the faculty on the admissions committee, they try to give the benefit of the doubt to public school (what Brits call state school) applicants. The trouble seems to be that many state schools in the UK seem to be in as sorry shape as many public schools in the US.
I agree with this. Limit Pell grants and Federal loans to publics (a huge amount actually go to for-profit diploma mills these days), get rid of the tax shelter of non-profits, and use the money saved to make all publics tuition-free.
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Um, it’s not that cut and dried. He being International is a pretty big factor.
Admissions to elite American colleges is far from the meritocracy you portray it to be.
I don’t completely disagree, but if American, he would have gone 1/2 between St. Olaf and RIT. Trust me, that would not have changed the post; he would likely be no less disappointed.
If you limit Pell Grants to public universities, then you bar thousands of lower and middle income kids from being able to attend “full need” colleges and bar students from upper middle and upper classes to ever interact with lower and middle income peers.
If your goal is to bar for-profits to collect Pell grants, then make for-profits ineligible.
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Well, I believe the rich privates will pick up the slack but even if they don’t, in the grant scheme of things, you’re talking about a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of kids (you know how small the percentage of Pell Grant recipients at Ivies/equivalents are and also that Ivies/equivalents educate about 1%, give or take, of HS grads). Free publics everywhere would also push the upper-middle class talent to publics and companies will follow.
Time to get back to the original post!
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You’re right - they don’t have AOs looking through the applications, they have faculty. The faculty decide between all of the highest scoring applicants based on what? Exactly the same way that they decide which faculty to hire - they decide based on which students are the most like them
You know where the faculty attended high school? The same high schools from which the majority of applicants are accepted. It is because the faculty are deciding that the kids who are accepted are more likely to be from these private high schools for the wealthy.
That is what I mean by there being a system. The faculty choose students from a background which is similar to theirs, Oxbridge grad schools prefer Oxbridge graduates, and Oxbridge prefers hiring Oxbridge DPhils. These faculty, in turn, go on to accepting more students who are like them. As I wrote - it is a self-perpetuating system.
Here is a basic fact - if there are no explicit rules banning it, and no education to counteract it, people hire and recruit people just like them. So faculty accept undergraduates like them, graduates like them, and faculty like them.
Faculty at colleges in the USA have been required to go through extensive training in order to get around that particular bias, and yet it still is pretty bad - in many engineering departments, male applicants are far more likely to get offers than female applicants with the same profile. In fact, the exact same application packet will get for invitations to preliminary interviews if the name on the packet is identifiably male than if it is identifiably female.
Oxbridge faculty who decide which students to accept do not receive this training, nor is there any real oversite as to how they make these decisions.
I have heard that there is a movement to change things. If there ism and we see a change in admissions to undergraduate, to graduate school and in hiring, I may change my mind, as of now, I just see the same talk that has been going on since the 1980s.
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Oxbridge is trying to train its faculty but it’s a long haul. One first step was to put out a publication listing which A Levels were considered “solid” preparation for Oxbridge; until then it seemed “obvious” to them that, say, Business Studies, wasn’t proper preparation for someone who wants to “read Business&Economics” at Saïd, something many students in fact discovered after Year 12 when they got interested in applying and looked at the entrance requirements. So, now, there’s a publication for students at GCSE level and their teachers, so that they know neither Economics nor Business is a pre-req, whereas high-level math is - so that they know what to take for GCSE’s and for A-Level. They participated in the creation of “Further Maths” online modules for students at schools that don’t offer the class - because how can you expect skills and knowledge if the class isn’t offered at all - keep in mind the level at the end of 11th grade is quite high even for students enrolled in Further Maths? Another part of the training has been working on faculty’s perception of accents (Queen’s English or “plum English” speakers were seen as smarter, whereas kids with pretty much any regional accent tended to be marked down, especially if from the industrial cities.) They also have “contextual offers”.
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Some individual Oxford colleges are making a significant effort on this front. Some enlightening reading here:
Let’s hope that other Colleges follow suit, as well as Cambridge.
Kids use Pell grants at all types of private schools, not just Ivies and meets full need schools.
My daughter went to a private school and was only able to do that because of state and federal grants and loans. Florida specifically gives a grant for residents to go to private schools because the state schools can’t handle all the resident student in public schools but wants them to remain instate.
Pell grants might not be important to Harvard or Princeton, but they are to hundreds of other private schools where the tuition is $50k and the schools can’t afford to give grants for the entire amount. Those schools can’t make up the $6000 Pell grants, the $2000 SEOG, the $3000 or so state grant.
If all those students in private schools go to public schools, students with lower stats are going to be bumped. There just isn’t enough room for every college student to go to a public school.
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Cambridge ones are too. I don’t have time to go looking through all the details of who is doing what. My old college at Cambridge had I believe almost 80% drawn from state schools last year. There has been a concerted effort by Oxbridge which begins right from the start by outreach to very non-typical high schools to send the message “you too can go here”, all the way through interviews. It really has changed significantly over the past few decades, in my opinion significantly more structurally than the elite US colleges have.
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