<p>So what’s it all mean? If it’s much harder, does that mean something about the product or outcome? I’m sure I am being defensive, but I can’t help but wonder for instance, if it means kids are any better prepared to be socially and financially contributing members of society. Current hard times aside, are kids more, or less likely to live independently at graduation? I’m pretty sure they are more likely to be in debt! </p>
<p>I guess this should be a new thread, but I don’t know if I’m THAT interested…(smile)</p>
<p>^^^^
I don’t think you can draw any conclusions. Plus I think there will always be kids that are ready, and kids that aren’t and I don’t know how much that even has to do with academics.</p>
<p>I was pretty good academically (not like some of the rock-stars on here, but okay). Nevertheless I struggled a lot starting off in college and it took me a while to get my “sea-legs” in the “grown-up world.” Other contemporaries of mine, including a few who went off to the service after school, or started up working right after high school, developed and matured faster than I did. I wouldn’t be able to draw any conclusions myself.</p>
<p>Slightly related to this – the Northwestern alumni magazine just arrived, and one of the letters from the dean of the college of arts and sciences said something to the effect that they were welcoming the smartest class of students, ever. </p>
<p>I happened to run into another NU alum who was a few years ahead of me, and she said, “Did you see that article? I was so offended I wrote them a letter and said that they might have been the best-prepped class, but we were just as smart!” LOL.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I don’t know anything statistical about Northwestern applicant pool then and now, although monydad’s comments to the contrary, I think the applicant pools are much larger for good schools and that some of this is because that schools are getting many more applicants from other parts of the country (airfares are a lot lower in real terms than they were) and from foreign countries (there are many, many more apps from places like India and China than there were 30 years ago and how many apps were there from Nepal 30 years ago). If these schools are getting applications from a much higher percentage of the upper tails of the distributions from other parts of the US and from India and China (where the upper tails are huge in absolute numbers), the overall intellectual caliber of the admitted applicants should be higher if a) the school is choosing for intellectual caliber; and b) the number of slots at the school has stayed fixed. Even at Princeton, where I went back in the dark ages, I had three freshman roommates – from Michigan, Illinois and Florida – but I would say the market was national but with a stronger emphasis from the East Coast. There were definitely international students (from Iran, Vietnam, Ireland, …) but they were many fewer in number than now and generally from extremely economically advantaged families. Anecdotally, in the affluent New England suburb in which I now live, Northwestern is considered a strong school for good students while in the affluent New Jersey town in which I grew up, I don’t recall that Northwestern had nearly the same reputation. As a consequence, it has probably benefited greatly from an enhanced national and international reputation and from the rollover effects as the Ivies have been swamped by a tsunami of applicants. It would be very surprising if, from a statistical standpoint, the school could not choose a stronger group now than 30 years ago. However, it is not clear that this is actually happening.</p>
<p>First, there is probably a greater emphasis in admissions on true excellence and passion in something, and often that something is not academic. There is, at some schools, probably a greater emphasis on athletics and at others, a greater emphasis on certain kinds of diversity. Both will, on average, lower the pure academic numbers of the admitted group. And, the compression of grades and SAT scores makes distinguishing on (one definition of) academic talent harder.</p>
<p>The other thing I see, which I mentioned above, is that smart kids have to do much more to get in than they used to. Would you or I have done those things if we needed to? Yes. But, we didn’t have to at the time. So, the direct comparison over how accomplished today’s admits are versus yesteryear’s is a bit skewed as you point out.</p>
<p>I graduated in 1976 from a decent public high school in a suburban Denver. We had very few AP opportunities and the smartest one or two in the class applied to Stanford or an Ivy. The next tier applied to places like Pomona. I was in that tier and applied sight unseen to several liberal arts colleges. Because Washington D.C./Watergate were in the news, I sent away for info about Georgetown and and that’s where I went, with a lot of financial aid. There was one little essay question and teacher recommendations. My parents had almost no input into any of this. And, I don’t remember talking to my guidance counselor. I remember taking the SAT and ACT once. Don’t remember my scores. My only EC was being the editor of the school newspaper.<br>
I think families in the 60s and 70s were less kid-centric than our families are today. There were 5 kids in my family and our family life had very little to do with enrichment of the children’s intellectual capacities. We did our homework without being told, watched t.v., played outside, got together with friends and occasionally read books. None of us were burned out when we started college. Nor had we seen/done it all by then. It was a great and exciting adventure.</p>
<p>Wow, this thread is VERY interesting. Probably the most interesting parts of that .pdf are:
1)Bryn Mawr had a higher SAT average than Yale, and
2) Penn and Stanford had average SATs of 1280 and 1270, respectively.</p>
<p>Bizarre.
People’s personal stories are also fascinating. I’ll share a few from my family:
Father graduated from high school in '68. I believe he was a good student, but his strong suit was the SATs, where he scored a 1590 - at the time, an impressive feat. His entire family had graduated from Harvard with the exception of one brother, so it was a forgone conclusion. He was also accepted to Tufts.</p>
<p>My mother was also merely a good student, but an excellent test-taker. She too scored in the 1500s, although slightly lower than a 1590. Her father was a first-generation American immigrant from the Ukraine, who had somehow tested his way into Columbia medical school in the '30s. They were very proud to have a daughter scale once unattainable heights. She went to Harvard as well.</p>
<p>Neither of my parents were especially active in ECs or any leadership, and their selling points were their standardized testing (and in my father’s case, legacy to the extreme). Times have certainly changed.</p>