<p>Aw! We might have met in real life!</p>
<p>I’m not that old, but we had a party line at a vacation home on Cape Code in the early 1970s.</p>
<p>I think that many of the people who grow up to do incredible things as adults were probably gifted as kids, but not identified as such. But I think a lot of smart people just aren’t that interested in doing things to make them famous. I’ve met two MacArthur recipients. One, I went to high school with, and she just seemed normally smart. The other I had lunch with (once) at Harvard and it was an unforgetable experience. I knew the guy across the table from me was a genius. Interesting, but somewhat intimidating!</p>
<p>I was far more involved with my son’s college application process than either of my parents was with mine. Other than the fact that my mother took me to visit everywhere I applied except Harvard (I didn’t bother going, although I did have an alumni interview), I’m pretty sure I did everything myself, and I know I didn’t show my essays to my parents or anyone else before I sent them in.</p>
<p>PS: I knew my Harvard alumni interview wasn’t going to go well when I was waiting for it to start, sitting in a chair with faded red velvet upholstery in a corridor of the Harvard Club in NYC, and a rat (or an alarmingly large mouse) ran across right in front of me.</p>
<p>A minute later, I was called in, and when I saw what I was in for – an interview panel of three old men sitting there scowling at me, at least as I perceived it – I really knew it wasn’t my day.</p>
<p>“But I think a lot of smart people just aren’t that interested in doing things to make them famous.”</p>
<p>I agree. There are lots of very smart people quietly doing what makes them happy.</p>
<p>" I’ve met two MacArthur recipients."</p>
<p>I’ve met one, a guy who is about my age and won his Macarthur about 15 years ago. He was very nice and personable. </p>
<p>I also met a former Rhodes Scholar, who was in his 30s when I met him about 10 years ago. Another nice, personable person.</p>
<p>Some of the smartest people whom I know are very down to earth. A friend, for instance, has a Stanford undergrad degree, Yale law degree and doctorate in Chinese lit or history, and speaks fluent Mandarin (She’s a white American) and is one of the nicest, most down to earth people whom I know. I’m sure she has the smarts to become very famous if that were her goal. Instead, she’s a law professor at a mid tier (?) university, her choice of a place to work because there, she still has time to enjoy being with her husband and kids.</p>
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<p>We had a party line around 1980 in a tiny town in Colorado. I had just had my son, and the other people on the line had teens who would lift the receiver and slam it down repeatedly if they found someone else on the line when they wanted to use the phone. You eventually gave up and hung up, so the rude kid got what they wanted. The phone company refused to give us the names of the other people on our “party line”, but did reveal that it was up to 8 families. Needless to say, I wrote a lot more letters and saved a bunch on long-distance charges that year!</p>
<p>My dad got into Columbia back in the early 70s with a 1260 SAT, which he remembers as being a very uncommonly good score. He went to an above average private school in NYC and did pretty well, but not straight As or anything, and was captain of the football team as his only EC (would later go on to play for Columbia… football might have helped him get in.) He actually got in a lot of trouble with his high school on more than one occasion: multiple suspensions, he even got banned from prom as a punishment for something (although he still won’t tell me what it was).</p>
<p>My uncles like to joke about how there is absolutely no way my dad could have gotten into Columbia again if he were applying nowadays. I guess it was just less competitive back then.</p>
<p>When I was applying to college in 1971, there was a much bigger gap than there is now (both perceived and real, I think) between Penn and Columbia on the one hand, and H, Y, and P (and Brown, too) on the other hand, in terms of popularity and how difficult it was to be admitted to them. With Columbia, I think it had something to do with the lingering effect of all the SDS stuff and building takeovers, etc., driving applicants away. And I know that Penn back then was perceived as being in a very dangerous neighborhood, at least from what I heard.</p>
<p>^Penn was my safety school, so yes I think perceptions were very different back then.</p>
<p>NSM, I think we’ve both met the same MacArthur recipient. I agree he was nice and personable, but he was also the most brilliant person I’ve ever met. And he continues to do interesting things, not just in his specialty.</p>
<p>“My dad got into Columbia back in the early 70s with a 1260 SAT, which he remembers as being a very uncommonly good score.”
That’s interesting–by the time I was taking the SATs in 1980, a 1260 was not too good. I know, because I got something like that score, and I was embarrassed and disappointed in myself. Also, I agree that Columbia and Penn were not that difficult to get into. YOu just didn’t strive to get into ‘top’ schools, with the exception of H, Y, & P, which were prestigious then, though easier statistically to get into.</p>
<p>Interesting also about the differing experiences. It’s true top Northeast privates were fixated on Ivies even then. But most schools, including top public, were not, at least not to the degree they are now. And I find that the obsession with Ivies now is directly correlated with social class. The richer the school you attend, the more obsessed the students & parents are with Ivies. I’m a teacher, and teach in a low income school, where the focus is on community college for the top students–they’re completely on their own, no checks from parents, horrible family lives, etc. In my own children’s excellent south Jersey school, the student body is generally blue collar, with some white collar. There isn’t an obsession with Ivies at all, although the students are proud if they get into one. It’s far more similar to my own upper income public school in north Jersey 30 years ago. That school now is much more obsessed with Ivies.</p>
<p>But regardless of social class, parents are far, far more involved, for better and worse, in their children’s school lives.</p>
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<p>I guess that depends on what you mean by “not too good”. If you look at page 51 of this thing you’ll see the average Stanford SAT in 1978 was 1270.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf[/url]”>http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/409.pdf</a></p>
<p>The big differences between then and now:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Except for Harvard and to a lesser extent Yale and Princeton, the market for colleges was regional or even state. Now most colleges in the top 25 and probably 100 have global markets.</p></li>
<li><p>To deal with the increasing competition, colleges needed additional ways to differentiate among essentially identical kids. [Thought Experiment: If the top 5 kids in every northeastern HS applied to Penn in the old days, they would have needed one set of admissions criteria. If the top 5 kids at every HS in the US apply, they would need another set of criteria. Ditto for the world]. So, ECs, which mattered somewhat began to become critical. There was a period in which doing adventurous social service was attractive to adcoms. Then everyone did it to appeal to adcoms. Now that has become the floor – they would question why you didn’t do social service – but it doesn’t help advantage an applicant relative to the others. </p></li>
<li><p>Good hoop-jumpers had a sense of the hoops and jumped through them. There are many more and higher hurdles. You have to show that you are or could be great at something to distinguish yourself from the gazillion other applicants.</p></li>
<li><p>There has been compression at the top in quantitative criteria. That is, many high schools have had significant grade inflation. All of the top 20 kids in a HS had 4.0 unweighted. Some are tremendously gifted. Some are hardworking but merely reasonably smart. [My son used to call a small group of girls in his class the OCDs as they came in at 6 AM every day to meet with their teachers to go over the homework they were going to hand in that day to make sure it contained no mistakes. Not brilliant, but could get good HS grades]. </p></li>
<li><p>SAT scores. They mythology was that you could not study for them. So people didn’t take them twice of study for them. A 1600 score was quite rare. Two things have happened. First, people now study and retake the tests and can improve scores. Had kids back in the dark ages done that, scores would have been higher. Second, ETS/The College Board “recentered” the test in a way that compressed the top scores. [See
<a href=“http://ftp.ets.org/pub/res/researcher/RR-02-04-Dorans.pdf[/url]”>http://ftp.ets.org/pub/res/researcher/RR-02-04-Dorans.pdf</a> if you need a sleep aid]. However, Figures 12 and 13 on page 11 show that for verbal, the whole distribution was shifted over and it looks like anyone who would have scored 730 or above on the old SAT would get an 800 score on the recentered SAT (it is a little hard to read the figure precisely). Secondly, it looks like anyone with a math score of 730 or above on the old SAT gets a higher score on the recentered one and anyone at 775 or 780 on the old test would get an 800 on the recentered version. </p></li>
<li><p>The consequences of compression at the top is that it has become much harder to distinguish on quantitative measures the really smart (by one set of criteria) from the smart and hard-working and then the population of kids applying to college has soared. So, colleges have had to add many other, sometimes arbitrary and inefficient ways to separate the really specially from the typical top-of-the-high-school class kid.</p></li>
<li><p>Classes were much less diverse. Now there is a major emphasis on certain kinds of diversity and this alters the class composition relative to selection based upon both quantitative criteria. </p></li>
<li><p>The greater emphasis on extra-curricular academic and non-academic activities that is required because of the compression at the top advantages the kids of the upper end. Well-to-do parents can pay for coaches and travel to fencing tournaments. Kids need to get hooked up to play squash or lacrosse or cross-country skiing or skiing early enough in life to become good enough to be recruited. They have connections. A friend got his 8th grade (a bright kid, no doubt) with a summer job (probably unpaid) where he got trained in Java programming in the lab at a HYPMS institution run by one of the friend’s former doctoral students and will be able to work in that lab or equivalent all through HS. The former doctoral student can return a favor to her advisor and gets 4 years of free work from a diligent, pretty smart kid. But the kid would never have gotten the job without the dad’s intervention/influence. But, who knows, he may get his name added to a publication from the lab before he applies to college.</p></li>
<li><p>This competition is most intensified for the non-hooked spots. There aren’t more alumni kids, though there are more development cases and athletes as the market has globalized. The emphasis on diversity has likely reduced the number of spots for unhooked kids. And, the competition is no doubt significant in each group of the hooked as well. But, for kids who are not legacies, development candidates, recruited athletes, URMs, etc., the competition has intensified the most because the applicant pool has globalized and the number of slots has probably decreased.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>The consequence of all this is that back in the dark ages, we didn’t have to jump over nearly so many hoops. I was near the top of my HS class (I don’t think I got all A’s) and had good board scores not 800’s (recentered I think math would have been 800 but not verbal), was on the state championship HS tennis team (but I was a doubles player, so not good enough to be recruited anywhere – but didn’t start playing until 7th or 8th grade per my comment above), went to a National Science Foundation Summer Program on math and social science at Michigan State, had summer jobs writing software for Bell Labs in my junior and senior years (and was very good at it, though I don’t think I asked anyone there for a recommendation). I can’t think of anything else meaningful that I did. My parents did not push me to enhance my resume or to study for SATs or work harder in school. Had the competition been much tougher, I would have targeted the additional hoops as well.</p>
<p>I don’t recall working very hard in HS relative to what I see my kids doing.<br>
I went to an Ivy and really had to step up my work level when I got there. Fortunately, I did well there academically despite the fact that I had a job every semester and summer writing software or doing research and played on a minor varsity team.</p>
<p>With respect to MacArthur fellows, I have met or know a number. Some that I know well are quite different. A couple are extremely gifted but are also tireless self-promoters. One I used to say was campaigning for a MacArthur (he succeeded). Others are also extremely gifted but quietly just go off and do their own thing and love to create new ideas. So, you get both kinds.</p>
<p>NYC private school (a certain other private HS in riverdale), took SATs twice, everyone went to private colleges (and a couple U Mich). College admissions were competitive, from student’s perspective felt not much different than today from what I can tell. Except Harvard & Yale were 1/5 instead of <1/10, Cornell was 1/3 instead of <1/5. Still felt plenty competitive to us. It was not “Ivy or die” at my school, but the students were well aware of, and did care about, the reputations of their college choices.</p>
<p>My school offered many fewer APs than my kids had. Grading standards were much tougher though.</p>
<p>IMO top colleges were actually not so regional, they were national and international, pretty much as per today so far as I can tell. At least this was the case at Cornell, I had classmates from all over the US and the globe.</p>
<p>People applied individually to each college, using a typewriter. Result was undoubtedly many fewer applications overall. But due to the effort involved, you cared about each school you applied to.</p>
<p>Parents were completely uninvolved in my college process, I took a Greyhound bus by myself to get to the couple colleges I visited.</p>
<p>I didn’t read this entire thread, but what I remember that still seems incredible to me was that in 1979 the average GPA at UCLA for admission was a 3.0.</p>
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<p>Before the mid 1980s, if you were UC qualified (top 12% grades/SATs in the state) you could pretty much pick whichever UC you wanted. The average SAT at Berkeley in 1980 was something like 1150. Times have sure changed here.</p>
<p>I was the top student at a decent private school in Western New York in the early 70s, and it was practically a given that I could go to college wherever I wanted. Harvard and Yale each accepted 3-4 kids from my school every year, and Dartmouth, Williams, Amherst, Cornell, Penn were all similar. Those were the most popular schools for kids in the upper half of the class; Hamilton was where the less academic types went. Columbia and Brown were less popular, although one of my best friends went to Brown. One or two kids per class, no more, went to the local high-quality public university; it was almost a scandal when the top African-American student in my class decided to do that rather than go to a prestige college (which she could easily have done). My sister, a couple years behind me, went to Stanford with a B+ average (in tough courses) and ~1400 SATs.</p>
<p>I had 1560 SATs (800 verbal, which was quite rare at the time). I took two designated AP classes in my senior year (French Lit and the equivalent of Calculus AB), which was as many as my school offered. I had also taken the Spanish Lit AP my sophomore year, which I spent in Spain with the School Year Abroad program. I only had two years of science. (I would have had three, except for going to Spain, and I took Music Theory instead of Physics as a senior.) I had taken a university course on Spanish Renaissance Poetry in 11th grade, something that was unheard-of at the time.</p>
<p>My school was very big on well-roundedness. I played soccer, squash, and tennis without being very good at any of them, although when I decided to play intramural soccer in 12th grade I finally got to be a goal-scorer. I sang in the glee club, acted, and even danced a little doing musicals. I edited the literary magazine, and won prizes for poetry. (Once I tied myself for first place in a local competition where work was submitted anonymously. The two poems were in different styles, and the judges were a little gobsmacked that the same person wrote both.) I wrote a one-act play and produced it. I got into various censorship tiffs with the administration – one over a piece I had written (which, if read carefully, definitely deserved an X rating, but it was several days after publication before any adult figured that out), and once over a piece I wanted to publish by a 7th grader that used the f-word (the poem was an apology for giving her sister the finger, and accurately described what the gesture meant).</p>
<p>The other really smart kid in my class was a math-science type on scholarship. He was often disparaged for avoiding sports and ECs (other than science competitions), and for avoiding manly pursuits like drinking and chasing girls. He went to RPI; he refused to apply to MIT (more disparagement for that).</p>
<p>I wasn’t a class president type, but I was definitely one of the leaders in my class. When the chair of the school’s Board of Trustees wanted the class to change graduation speakers, he came to me and my best friend to make it happen (which we did, in return for letting a friend of ours graduate, whose parents were in the middle of an angry divorce and had stopped paying her tuition). Basically, we were part of the Establishment in our city.</p>
<p>Anyway, I only applied to two colleges (those two colleges), and I didn’t have a lot of anxiety about whether they would accept me. (No early admissions for those colleges then.) I had started to apply to the third, and decided not to bother, but they had a file open on me. They sent me a letter in February saying that I didn’t have to write any essays, but they couldn’t accept me if I didn’t pay the application fee. Sort of a likely letter, but better. It was MUCH less competitive then.</p>
<p>Yes, there is no comparison to how difficult it is today – it was much, much easier to get into all the top schools. I graduated in the mid-70’s from the top school in my southern state (a public) in a class of 500. But we were tracked, and there were really only 60 kids that I ever had classes with, in what was essentially a small gifted program within a larger school.</p>
<p>Of those 60 kids, I can’t remember anyone not being accepted into their top choice college. Multiple acceptances to all the Ivies and top LAC’s, MIT, etc. It was just no big deal to get into any of these schools and no one worried or applied to more than 4 or 5. I am still in touch with many high school friends, and we all discuss how we would not be accepted at our alma maters today.</p>
<p>The school was in a wealthy area and most kids were full-pay. I don’t think any college was need-blind back then, and I’m sure that played a part in our success in admissions.</p>
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<p>Or handwritten. I am positive some of my apps were handwritten!</p>
<p>I think the Common App may <em>not</em> have been a good thing, in retrospect, by making the cost of applying to incremental schools virtually zero.</p>
<p>Handwritten apps – absolutely!</p>
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<p>I’ve actually got my NMS application from 1974. It’s one of the few things my mom saved (other than a bunch of those class pictures). </p>
<p>I don’t see anything on here like an essay. Just a 2x3 inch box called “Self-description” where I typed something really stupid. Half of the form I typed and half I hand-wrote. It looks like I handwrote things when the typewriter started to slip and I was typing at an angle.</p>
<p>Well over half of it is for the school to fill in - grades, school’s “characterization” of me, etc. Of course, I don’t know what they wrote here.</p>