<p>Interviews in the American system do not play a big role in the admissions process. This is not where adcoms look for signs of diversity. </p>
<p>I don’t like the system described above. The idea of 600 faculty members interviewing 30k applicants is ludicrous. That would be 50 interviews per faculty. Even if a decent match could be made between faculty expertise and student interest, the system favors certain types of students over others. If you saw Nobel prize physicist Steven Chu being grilled by a Senator about the origins of oil and gas in Alaska (“was there a pipeline from Texas to Alaska?”) you’ll see why certain types of students shine in interviews and others don’t. There’s a reason why really complex issues cannot be reduced to sound-bites or even 15 minutes interviews. A student who is fascinated by the Poincarre conjecture or hyperbolic geometry may not be able to hold a decent conversation with someone who majored in French literature or the Classics. And vice-versa.</p>
<p>“The idea of 600 faculty members interviewing 30k applicants is ludicrous.”
How about American medical school style interview? Select 500 out of 5000 to interview and accept 150. Can we work this way with undergraduate admission?</p>
<p>How important are interviews to med school admissions?<br>
In my S’s experience, interviews played no role in his college admission. At one college, he was interviewed by an alum who had majored in East Asian studies (S was a prospective math major) who spent much of her time discussing S’s hobby and housing as well as her own experiences. He got into another without an interview (and had not visited–so much for showing interest).
In several LACs, the interviewers are upperclassmen. I assume their already overworked faculty do not have the time for interviewing prospective candidates. And some top schools do not have interviews at all. Here is one:</p>
<p>There are at least two American colleges I know of which place great importance on the interview. or at least meeting the students and seeing them in action: St. John’s (Annapolis and Santa Fe) and Olin. Note that they are both very small schools looking for a very specific type of student for a very specific curriculum.</p>
<p>Well, yes. Two out of 3,000+ With faculties with very specific interests and highly self-selected pools of applicants. I cannot see students interested in Olin also applying to St John’s nor the Olin faculty teaching at St John’s, and vice-versa.</p>
<p>If we take seriously Harvard’s claim that 80% of applicants are qualified, that means that only 6,000 out of the 29k or so applicants to Harvard this year could be rejected out of hand, and 23k ought to be interviewed. For every half hour interview, calculate about one hour writing up an evaluation that actually is worth reading. And that’s not counting the time spent matching up faculty and student (“Oh, you want to study Han dynasty intellectual history? Hmm… my field is statistics. What can we talk about?”)
My S got two interviews (one was at a school he did not end up applying to). In both cases, the interviewers talked about their experiences, the housing situation, gave some tips about course selection, and asked him about his hobby. And one suggested he ought to consider becoming religious.
What did my S get out of those interviews? Not much. What did the interviewers got out of these interviews? Probably that my S was really the person who’d written his own essays and fit his resume</p>
<p>At least 2 of the schools my son applied to had very broad definitions of diversity. The first school, a public ivy, invited prospective students for a weekend visit centered around creating diversity on campus, the majority of whom are instate. There were students who were from Germany, Lebanon, Appalachia, etc as well as minority students. All the students who participated and were subsequently accepted were offered a partial scholarship. The second school, a private Jesuit University, held a Martin Luther King scholarship weekend and invited students who had shown a commitment to creating diversity and shown leadership in their schools or communities. There were students of all ethnic backgrounds there and for a wide variety of reasons (volunteering, student government, etc). About half were not URMs. The students were interviewed and some were offered merit scholarships based on their essays, recommendations and the extensive interviews. </p>
<p>My point is that many schools promote diversity in the widest possible sense and those opportunities are open to students of all races.</p>
<p>^^Indeed, this is why a student from Appalachia will get a tip in NE colleges, as would someone from the Midwest, Alaska, Hawaii or the Mountain states. I’ll bet that Curmudgeon’s D experience raising goats impressed the Yale and Rhodes adcoms mightily.</p>
<p>That’s plain wrong. The high grades and scores are a given - all admitted students to top schools will have them.
From the enormous pool of applicants with those high scores the school is trying to build a class. Each year they could assemble more then one class of equally fine quality. So some students luck out, others don’t.</p>
<p>Wm Fitzsimmons declared that about 300 applicants per year are admitted into Harvard as academic superstars. It does not mean that the other 1700 admits are slouches in the academic department. It means that the superstars are just that: International Olympiad gold medal winners-level. Having scores of 5 on 15+ APs does not make an applicant a superstar, as far as I can tell.</p>
<p>Correct. While someone with multiple AP 5’s can be a true intellectual, I have met many that are superficial trophy collectors (exam scores). Depth of intellect and self-direction tend to more true of the genuine academic, and there are often insights into that in the student’s past, application, recs, & sometimes essay.</p>
Exactly. That was my point, right?
Where do they look for signs of diversity?
Is that method working well, in light of some of the questions people are asking on this thread?
I’m talking about liberal arts education at the most selective schools, where small group discussion is an important part of the educational experience. Most of these schools boast student:faculty ratios of 15:1 or better. In the Oxbridge system, only the applicants who pass first-round filters are invited to interview. And they are matched to faculty who share their interests.</p>
<p>You might not like the system - fair enough - but it seems to be working for at least 2 of the oldest, most prestigious universities in the world. So on that count it hardly seems right to call it “ludicrous” (if by that you mean completely impractical)
That’s true enough, but it’s true of any system of college admissions.
Our current system seems too easily to favor brown nosers, parent pleasers, and “diversity” opportunists. The Oxbridge system favors the most intellectually capable students who are also the applicants faculty would most like to teach. It favors the life of the mind. It cruelly ignores an applicant’s skills in field hockey.</p>
<p>But I would agree, due to significant cultural differences between Europe and America, we are unlikely to see US schools adopt the Oxbridge-style interview any time soon. I think most Americans prefer a system that offers many paths to admission into the best colleges.</p>
<p>You don’t think that the UK high school system produces the same kind of teacher-pleaser, etc… that you decry in the US? Did you watch The History Boys? The subtext of that movie is how to impress interviewers. </p>
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<p>I’ve already stated that the first round at Harvard would cut out only 4k out of a pool of already self-selected applicants, leaving out 23k to be interviewed. And that’s only Harvard. Size matters. How many students apply to Oxbridge in one year?</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, department size at most colleges does not correspond to size of applicant pool interested in a particular field. You’ll have mismatch aplenty. My S was interviewed by someone who probably had never heard of diophantine equations. How was she going to judge whether he was bluffing his way through the interview or find a topic that showed his investment in the “life of the mind?” His mind and hers work very differently. </p>
<p>Really, in my experience, interviews are not about discovering much that is new about an applicant. One friend who was a Harvard alum interviewer for 15 years recounts his experience interviewing two applicants. One was so nervous she burst into tears right at the beginning. He wrote that he could not evaluate her as she would not stop crying. She got in. Another was incredibly fluent about his passion for politics. He did not get in. In both cases, the dossier was far more important than the impression given at the interview.
A lot of times, interviews favor those who can spend the time and money on travel from campus to campus. Amherst seems to have done quite well without holding interviews.</p>
<p>It seems to me the British system is much more like our grad school. You specialize at once. (Do you have to declare your field when you apply?) In any event in those circumstances it seems to me it’s easier to do interviews. Personally I think American colleges are looking for different results than Oxbridge. Harvard used to say they were looking for future leaders, not so much for future academics.</p>
<p>^^That is quite true, and makes selection much easier. Half of American college applicants are undecided as to major at the time of application. And quite a few change their minds after being admitted (I did).</p>
<p>Oxford and Cambridge have never said anything about looking for either future leaders or future academics. As far as leaders go, they don’t have to; they just do it. Of the 54 British Prime Ministers to date, 40 studied at Oxbridge, 11 did not go to university, and only 3, Earl Russell, Neville Chamberlain, and Gordon Brown, went to other universities (Edinburgh, Birmingham and Edinburgh respectively).</p>
<p>And, yes, here in the UK students apply for a particular field. Most UK universities do not interview in any meaningul sense. It is only Oxford and Cambridge who conduct in-depth subject interviews over several days. So, I agree that it is not helpful, on that score at least, to compare the UK and US systems.</p>
<p>“I don’t see why rich minority students are not just as valuable for creating diversity as poor ones. They may be even more valuable, as they dispel stereotypes that are likely to be held by many insulated rich white kids, for example.”</p>
<p>Some of them are equally insulated rich white kids for all intents and purposes, though. I know a couple where the wife is upper middle class Jewish, the husband is upper middle class one-half Cuban and one-half American. He doesn’t “look” ethnic, the only thing “ethnic” about him is a Spanish last name. Both of their fathers were physicians and both enjoyed a very nice lifestyle growing up. The husband is an extremely successful lawyer (as in, $1 MM+ / year). Now, as their children have applied for colleges, they get a very nice boost because they can check off Hispanic ancestry. I don’t begrudge them that – I’d use that hook too if I had it – but they don’t identify as Hispanic or Cuban in any meaningful way whatsoever, they aren’t treated by society as Hispanic or Cuban in any way whatsoever, and they really aren’t adding to diversity any more than their next door equally rich neighbors with the last name of Jones.</p>
<p>1) The race-baiting industry puts pressure on colleges for “diversity.”
2) Colleges do not like this pressure and go out of their way to show how they encourage such “diversity.” If that means that they give an advantage of the type described by the OP, they really don’t care. All they care about is the bottom line: numbers that show “diversity.”
3) Families who can claim “diversity” of course love this system.</p>
<p>So what we have is an unholy alliance of race-baiters, colleges, and families that supports giving special status to “diversity.”</p>
I would not characterize the St. John’s curriculum as “very specific”. Seems to me it is very general in what it tries to cover, namely a broad range of issues that have been of interest to thoughtful people for a very long time.
This illustrates a scenario that a good liberal arts environment is designed to avoid, doesn’t it?</p>
Well I do not know. However, Oxford has over 11,000 undergraduates, Cambridge over 12,000. These are much larger than the corresponding numbers at most top US schools. Harvard, for example, has fewer than 7000 undergraduates.</p>
<p>True, a few prestigious US schools receive 10 or more applications for each one they accept. Under a test-and-interview scenario, I imagine the ratio would tend to be lower. Oxford’s minimum test requirement for US applicants is a score of 700 on each SAT. Currently, 25% of Harvard students score less than 700 on the verbal SAT. 37% of Amherst students, 43% of Stanford students, and 51% of Middlebury students score less than 700 on the verbal SAT. These schools all admit many lower-scoring students with compensating “hooks”. If these disappeared as admissions factors, the number of casual applications surely would drop.</p>
<p>Again, I acknowledge the issues that interviews can raise. Still, it’s interesting to look at how other countries do things and consider the implications for our own systems.</p>
<p>I don’t think you can get more specific than St. John’s curriculum. Does it over more than one discipline? Sure. But you have no choice. It’s their way or the highway. My nephew is there and loves it, but both my kids can’t imagine a worse fate. Nothing wrong with that, but St. John’s is looking for kids who buy into their idea as to what makes an educated person.</p>
<p>It may well be that the lower scoring students compensate for their lower scores with something that is academically very valuable. </p>
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<p>Nonsense. Hooked applicants are anything but “casual.” If anything, they are probably highly courted by the adcoms. That’s the meaning of hook: the adcom is trying to hook some applicants in.</p>
<p>The American higher education system is by no means perfect (and Oxbridge is not the standard against which most American universities should be compared anyway). But one thing I deeply value, as someone who came in from a French background, is the ability of students to change their minds, and to be trained in a multidisciplinary way (even if this means a certain lack of depth). The willingness of colleges to admit students who do not yet know whether they want to major in anthropology or economics means that interviewers cannot really be expected to quiz them about their preparation as future anthropologists or economics. As well, relying solely on GPAs and test scores means taking no risk on rough diamonds. But these can turn out to be the true innovators.</p>
<p>As for test and interview, please note that Harvard tries to interview every applicant, including foreign ones. Amherst does not; the resulting student body is quite comparable in terms of academic excellence.</p>