@dfbdfb “Also: I looked it up, and it isn’t 1 in 5 taxi drivers who hold a college degree, it’s 1 in 7—still more than one might expect, but a lot fewer. Interestingly, the taxi drivers with a college degree out-earn those who don’t have a degree by more than 15%, so even there there’s an advantage to college”
15% was the number in 2010, before Uber age. I imagine if surveys were conducted today which count Uber drivers the number may be north of 20%. The point is the divergence between the top half and bottom half of colleges just like in the larger economy as better colleges are getting harder to get in and others are easier.
@jzducol, in defense of the numbers I offered, the 1 in 7 statistic came from a 2017 report based on numbers collected in late 2015 (which showed no net change in the proportion since 2010). Those are the most recent numbers I could find; “I imagine if” scenarios, even if reasonable, aren’t nearly as reliable.
I would argue, though, that even if the numbers are at 20% you don’t have any basis on differences between outcomes at different “status levels” of colleges without information on where degreed taxi drivers went to college. As I said in my previous post, I was unable to find such information; if you have access to it, it’d be good to know where to find it.
@elguapo1 said: " I hear you re scores. There is no question of grade inflation, but I also believe students are much more accomplished than they were in our generation."
Absolutely. Whether there is grade inflation might depend upon your definition of “grade inflation”. Clearly there are more kids with straight A’s than there used to be. However, I think that this is because there are more strong students. I think that the importance of education is more widely believed today and there are more kids who are determined to do well. There are also resources such as what we can all find over the Internet which weren’t available when I was in school. The work that brings in an A or an A+ today also would have brought in an A or A+ when I was a kid. There are more kids doing this today.
Not sure it’s necessarily more difficult as even 2+ decades ago, international students were mostly expected to be full pay and held to higher admission standards than US citizen counterparts.
Agree that the recent influx of internationals with questionable academic quality are mainly an issue for schools well outside the Ivy/peer elite tiers…or lower.
That’s not what I’ve been hearing from Prof/TA friends who teach in universities…including Ivy/peer elites.
One thing they did notice was a marked increase in higher SES students and sometimes even parents to increasingly dispute grades…sometimes even threatening to hire high priced attorneys to threaten lawsuits if their special snowflake didn’t get the “A they deserved” even when the actual quality of work in question fell far short of quality meriting as such.
Can’t speak for the Ivies, but the institutions I’ve worked at, they never lost such a case while I was there.
Really, once you get to that point, you need clear evidence of capricious grading (which would easily be caught in the internal appeal process) or clear discriminatory intent (which is almost certain to be caught in the internal appeal process).
What skews the number of taxi drivers is the fact that most are immigrants. Many immigrants come with a college degree, but its usefulness here is not always realized.
@jzducol I would argue that it’s more important to do well in college, not attend an elite college. I know a far greater number of folks who got degrees partly or fully online from regional schools. I can’t point to research on where these underemployed college graduates come from but I doubt the top 25% at four year universities are part of it. The other factor is poor choices of majors without a plan. Psychology is a great major if you intend to go to grad school for any number of things from LCSW to Clinical Psychologist but too many think they can get a job related to their major with just an undergrad degree in psychology. (I’m an advocate of psychologist, it’s just an easy example of a popular major that isn’t always well thought out).
Another thing to consider is the phenomenon of college graduates being underemployed in this manner is nothing new. Sometimes it could be due to a cyclical downturn in a particular field/industry/ies.
According to older relatives and colleagues, there were plenty of ChemE majors driving taxis, waiting tables, and doing similar types of jobs back in the '70s and early '80s due to the dismal job market for ChemE grads.
Things were so bad then that many parents who were engineers or knowledgeable about this situation made it a point to urge HS seniors and college first-years to avoid majoring in ChemE for that very reason.
Similarly, I knew plenty of engineering/CS majors who worked with with me in startup environments or who were finishing up their undergrad/grad programs in those fields ending up driving taxis, waiting tables, or working as customer service assistants at computer/tech big box stores because they lost/ended up getting no-offered at the last minute due to the dotcom crash of 2001.
In 2011, found one car rental customer service rep was a CS major who graduated right into the dotcom crash and ended up never working in the field and being underemployed for several years before picking up his customer service gig at a car rental chain several years after graduating.
I do think unhooked applicants that were trying for the top schools. If you read the admitted threads, it looked like the same set of kids got admitted to the tops and most of them with hooks. But the flip side is there are more perceived top schools than when I was applying in the 80’s (UCLA, NYU) that I think overall, it’s easier to get into a top school today.
My current wonder is how much of the decline in admission rates is due to actual increases in selectivity or simply many students who would never have got in applying anyway, potentially due to the encourage of the schools themselves.
For example, I do think schools like Chicago, Emory, Tulane, Rice, WUSTL, etc., probably have increasing national awareness and thus lower acceptance rates due to that. Emory’s acceptance rate was around 40% when I was a senior in high school, and it was generally known as the place where excellent students from the Southeast went. Even Stanford may have benefited from that a bit - it wasn’t even really regional, but as an East Coast kid growing up I was only vaguely aware of Stanford. I had, of course, heard of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia.
But things like a 6% rate at Harvard and Yale? I wonder how much of that is kids throwing their hat in the ring because it’s “easy” just “to see” what would happen. I had a friend in high school who applied to a few extra elite schools she had little chance of getting admitted to and had no intention of attending even if she was admitted. At the time, it was harder to do so, but her parents were invested enough to allow her to do that. I wonder how many of her exist now that the Common App makes it trivial. I wonder what the rate would be like if you strained out all of the kids who were at least one standard deviation below the mean in SAT scores, for example.
It’d be cool if the elite schools published a grid kind of like AMCAS, where they show you what percent of applicants at specific cross-sections of SAT scores and GPAs were admitted. I know that it’s holistic blah blah blah, but let’s face it, it would take an otherwise REALLY REALLY outstanding student with a 1240 SAT to get admitted to Yale.
You can argue that it isn’t for many LACs and specialized tech institutes below MIT/Caltech (like RPI, WPI, etc.); really, any school that has a gender imbalance or is rural, but for Ivies/equivalent research U’s, it’s way way harder.
One thing that was helpful to me was that if you’re not in the Top 10% of your HS class you basically have zero chance of admission (Stanford rates Class Rank as “Very Important”). So, with D18 sitting at 12% after her junior year, it would be pointless for her to apply there even though she’s above the 50% for her test scores, GPA, etc.
@droppedit: Do note that that is top 10% for a regular HS. For magnets and prep schools with highly competitive admissions, at least in the past, many schools had just deemed all applicants from those schools in the top 10% (because they were compared to the overall population).
@PurpleTitan – my D18 goes to a good public HS. Unfortunately, her HS has group of people who are AP collectors (online, summer, etc) and they have distorted the rankings
I can’t find the stats with a ten minute google but I know I’ve seen it before. The number of perfect SATs and ACTs has increased tremendously since the 80’s. It doesn’t matter whether this is because the test is easier or prep is better. The end result is more high test scores and a student can’t stand out just by scoring a 1600.
If I’m wrong on this test score trend, someone please correct me. I’m sure someone will. :))
The number of perfect ACT scores has steadily increased. The number of true perfect SATs was only 583 among 2014 college bound seniors. The number of perfect SATs would increase with super scoring.
It is also lists under “High School GPA Ranges” a line for “4.0 and above” implying that some sort of weighted GPA is used, but without specifying what the weighting is. This makes that table much less useful.
Under the transfer admission tables, only SAT and ACT stratification is shown, even though prior college GPA is presumably much more important than SAT or ACT or anything else from high school (particularly with Stanford’s apparent emphasis on non-traditional students for transfer admission).
Brown has similar tables, which show that rank #1 > #2 > top 10% in admission rate, but #1 applicants still only had a 19% admission rate (versus 10% for other top 10%). Below top 10%, admission rate was only 2%. Maximum possible test scores (800 on SAT sections, 36 on ACT) also seem to be of significant help.
Of course, if high school students see tables like this, that may intensify competition for #1 rank, or encourage excessive retrying and cramming for SAT or ACT.
These tables also indicate that the admission rates for Brown are higher than for Stanford for any given high school rank or test score range listed.
@Sportsman88 "I can’t find the stats with a ten minute google but I know I’ve seen it before. The number of perfect SATs and ACTs has increased tremendously since the 80’s. It doesn’t matter whether this is because the test is easier or prep is better. The end result is more high test scores and a student can’t stand out just by scoring a 1600.
If I’m wrong on this test score trend, someone please correct me. I’m sure someone will."
The college board made major changes twice, I think, first in the mid 90s where they made the average a 1000, from a 900. And now more recently I think they made it easier to get higher scores but may not have changed the average. So there are a few things, the test may have gotten easier, it is also scored easier, you have the test prep and the kids are smarter.