She was ranked 23rd in a school that had previously sent 3 kids to Ivies over a decade. Keep in mind the school graduates approximately 650 kids per year, so this translates into 3/6,500 kids over 10 years.
You would have to assume the 3 were either tip top academic students or hooked in some way.
With that in mind it doesn’t seem like this result should have been a surprise or a function in changing demographic demands although the trend certainly didn’t help.
The articles author choose a poor example of the point they were seemingly trying to prove.
The college counselor may not remember whether students got into, or attended, less widely known Ivies like Penn, Brown and Dartmouth or even top colleges like the WSJ’s alma mater, Colby College. Kaitlyn applied to both Brown and Penn (Wharton?). The counselor did state that half go to four year colleges so being 23rd in the class apparently wasn’t enough. Note that many at Texas high schools won’t attend, or apply to, top 30 universities due to a value equation.
This student desired to attend top twenty colleges but fortunately also had a safety with merit backup. In hindsight, UT McCombs was a reach vs. a target for this applicant.
I would question the quality of the guidance counselor if they couldn’t remember the “lesser” known Ivies or top colleges😀. Wouldn’t exactly instill me with confidence in their ability to convey rigor or advocate for the student. Consequently I gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed they understood the context relative to the subject of the article.
I’ll assume the counselor knows all eight of the Ivies, however, only mentioned Yale and Princeton admissions. I’d assume no Harvard admissions. I’m going to guess he doesn’t suggest that students like Kaitlyn apply to northeast LACs.
At my kid’s Dallas HS, one might think this year is an outlier because Auburn waitlisted a ton of students that normally get admitted in EA.
As a parent of a kid at a school very much like McKinney High, I suspect the counselor has no idea how many overall students from the school have gone to Ivies - he’s going from memory of the kids he has personally worked with, probably in response to a specific question from a reporter. A quick glance at the school’s website shows a total of 7 GCs for a school that likely has 3000 or so kids, so this GC has 90-100 seniors every year and remembers 3 going to Y and P. Unless he happens to overhear another staff member talking in the hall, he isn’t likely to know about others. I promise you that my daughter’s GC doesn’t have any idea how many grads from our school go to Ivies and isn’t going to do a deep dive in Naviance to find out - it’s not her job. Her job is to keep underprivileged kids from dropping out and to clear up scheduling conflicts.
“In a given year, about half of the school’s graduates enroll at four-year colleges; most attend public universities in Texas, Dr. Cranmore said. He recalls two McKinney graduates enrolling at Yale and one at Princeton over the past decade.“
What is the point of both the quote and its inclusion if the GC is clueless about its accuracy or context?
I’m betting this is a hilariously naive question, but why does it matter whether the high school has sent kids to top schools before? Is the assumption that even though this student had excellent stats they are less excellent because the school is not known? So these expensive boarding and private schools have yet another leg up, in addition to all the resources and privilege they already have?
Selingo’s book Who Gets In and Why confirms that admissions officers have relationships with feeder schools. They know students from those high schools are well-prepared to succeed at their institutions— so, yes, those students have a leg up over a student with great stats from an unproven, unvetted school (that might be too generous in grading, weighing rigor, etc.).
It could be even worse than this, actually. For the student applying from an unknown-ish public school, there are so many possible complications involving track record: no one has gone recently (why would we take someone from this rando school), someone has gone recently (we already have someone from this rando school), someone has gone and not done well (this rando school isn’t rigorous enough), someone has gone and was a true high school superstar (why would we take a lesser applicant from this school)…the list goes on. Unless an AO has a compelling or perhaps personal reason to increase admissions from a non-magnet middle class public school, the students at that school will generally fare in admissions on the basis of their hooks (FGLI/URM/recruited athlete, primarily). The unhooked non-superstars (average excellents) could be subject to the strikes listed above, as a way to justify choosing similar students from known quantity schools (elite privates, magnets, upper middle class publics).
Except that the Legacies come from historically privileged groups, whereas URMs come from the opposite. So you are, essentially, claiming that giving a step up to kids from groups that have been marginalized is the same as giving privileged kids a bit more help.
It’s like saying that poor people shouldn’t get charity because it is wrong to give charity to wealthy people.
It depends on whether you consider the academic standards for “regular” applicants to be the basic standards that should be required for all applicants. If that is the policy, then indeed those different standards are unfair. However, if you consider that the college is looking for different types of excellence, then the athletes have already demonstrated excellence in sports, and are therefore not required to demonstrate excellence in academics as well.
Since we supposedly have freedom of speech, and private colleges do get tax breaks from the Federal government, it is the right of every citizen to criticize anything in their admissions practices that those citizens find objectionable. That is why people criticized the fact that their admissions standards made it much easier for wealthy White kids to be accepted.
That has been the prerogative of alumni since the colleges were established, especially those alumni who involve themselves in the college.
Again, it depends on whether you believe that private colleges “owe” admissions to the most academically accomplished students in the country. I do not believe this to be the case, nor do I believe that their missions make this statement.
The mission of non-denominational private colleges has always been to provide excellent education to their students. Their tax free status is based on the fact that they are educating their students, and that the college is not turning a profit through tuition and work by the students. Their tax-free status is NOT being determined by whether they have admissions standards that are “fair”, only that these standards do not violate regulations related to protected classes.
I’m not throwing up my hands, because I do not think that the admissions policies of elite private colleges are THE major issue in academia today, or that it even makes it to the top 10 main issues that academia has today. So I am not really bothered by the fact that many kids from affluent families with 4.0 GPAs and “great ECs” were not accepted to a T20 this year.
The USA has, in the past, built an amazing set of public universities, with a mission of providing an education to the public. Those are the colleges that should be available to every qualifying kid in the state. I am much more disturbed by the fact that these are becoming unaffordable to middle class kids than by the fact that the kids of wealthy Americans are not being admitted to the “elite” private colleges of their choices
Help me understand the debate about the advantage of upper income kids and the SAT.
Dont elite colleges admit URM and low income kids with lower SAT scores than an upper middle class white or Asian kid?
Even assuming the upper middle income kids do test prep, their scores will be mitigated by not being an URM or low income. So why is there still an argument about how SATs favor the wealthy when the wealthy have to score much higher.
Even the College Board says that students with higher SAT versus HS GPA tend to be from historically advantaged groups, while the reverse is true for historically disadvantaged groups.
It seems to me that students with resources are better positioned to perform well on SAT. Their parents read to them from birth, enrolled them in good schools, and fostered their interests. It’s not surprising that they do better ( on average) in academic measures. That’s a good thing - we want more kids to have backgrounds like that.
Yes. Let’s assume that’s true. My point is top colleges factor that into the process.
A student from a wealthier area may have to score 100-200 points higher on the SAT than an URM to get into the same university.
In other words, the SAT may favor the wealthy in absolute terms but in terms of it’s weighting in the admissions process, the URM can probably score lower and still have a better chance of being accepted.
Under those circumstances, the SAT is not favored toward the wealthy but the URM if they can score within a range of a white/Asian student.
No, I didn’t claim that legacies and URM admissions are the same or anything approximating that. I said your line of reasoning can also be used to defend legacy admissions. In both cases, colleges have essentially said that: “our mission is to educate, and we can define that mission however we choose”. There’s as much about first-generation students as there is about legacies in college mission statements - which is to say, there is nothing explicit.
I agree that the policies of elite private colleges aren’t among the most pressing issues in higher education. But the thread has revolved around elite colleges; namely, the past, current, and future trajectory of their admissions policies. That’s the context of the discussion. And within that context, I do care, at least to the point where I don’t place “fair”, “broken”, or “elite” in quotes. Those concepts exist and defining them for future generations of society’s leaders is important to me and to many others.
Finally, based on mission statements I’ve read, they are intentionally ambiguous so that they can be interpreted, as needed. Just as Yale’s mission statement (below) can be read as calling for X% of students to come from URMs (a preference with which I agree), I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect Yale to exclude basketball players who score a 1200 on the SAT or B students whose parents donated a new student activities center from their reading of “exceptionally promising students” in their own mission statement.
And to reaffirm, yes, colleges have that legal right. I’m claiming they should be criticized for such practices until they change them.
“The mission of Yale College is to seek exceptionally promising students of all backgrounds from across the nation and around the world and to educate them, through mental discipline and social experience, to develop their intellectual, moral, civic, and creative capacities to the fullest.”
Of course, Yale can define “exceptionally promising” and “all backgrounds” however it likes. This would be analogous to colleges that claim to “meet need” with financial aid, but define “need” however they like and often very different from each other.
I am honestly curious. Do you have any evidence that URM students are routinely granted an extra 100–200 points on their SAT scores in the admission process? I see the TO issue as being the following: Students got the signal from elite universities that you needed a very high SAT/ACT score to even be considered. This shut out a lot of very talented kids who come from underprivileged backgrounds. Going test optional encouraged these kids to apply, and they have. But I don’t think anyone who was unhooked got into an elite university through RD without a stellar GPA, lots of extracurricular activities, amazing recommendations, and a fantastic essay, no matter their race or background. If that were the case, you would see a drop in average GPA, or average student class rank, recorded in the stats for 2021, and you don’t. If anything pulls down those numbers, it seems to be ED admissions, which cater to privileged kids.
I don’t see what is so extraordinary about her. She’s great, but, at most decent high schools, she’d be in the top 10%. Since applicants to “elite” colleges tend to be from the top 50% of their class or higher, and these colleges choose mostly from the top 10%-20% of their applicants, she would barely squeak into the range for consideration, even in the past. When actual RD admissions rates drop to below 3%, that means that 70%-90% of the students in that range are rejected.
The entire article is trying to make the case that ALDC admissions are primarily hurting White middle class kids. They are mix and matching results from a wide array of different periods, during which the ethnicity profiles students who were accepted to “elite” colleges were very different than they are today, and are extrapolating from Harvard to colleges which likely have a very different system of admissions than Harvard does.
They are using the opinions of paid College Counselors as facts, and are also ignoring the fact that Professional Colleges Counselors have vested interest in presenting a biased narrative of admissions.
A person who is charging more then a top corporate lawyer will always present a narrative that justifies their ridiculously inflated prices, just as they will always exaggerate to an extreme extent the advantages of being accepted to “elite” colleges.
I am sorry, but Mr. Hafeez If-You-Need-to-Ask-How-Much-I-Charge-You-Cannot-Afford-Me Lakhani is wrong. Twenty Years ago, Ms. Younger’s chances would still have been extremely low. While 4% acceptance rates for unhooked applicants is twice as high as 2%, is is not even CLOSE to being “a good shot”. Mr Lakhani should stick to providing his opinion on the chances of the his super-wealthy overcharged costumers.
The difference between now and twenty years ago is that twenty years ago Ms. Younger wouldn’t really have thought of applying to any of the colleges which rejected her, except perhaps Rice. THAT is why so many kids like her are being rejected - because instead of receiving 15,000 applications from unhooked upper middle class White kids, they received 30,000.
The entire article is a mishmash of mix and match statistics, mostly out of context, and mostly bemoaning the difficulties that the poor upper Middle Class White people are suffering. After all, she ONLY was accepted to UT Austin, which, as we know, is The Pits.