@dfbdfb - Sorry but why do I need to demonstrate “yet what proportion of legacy admits are taking slots that they wouldn’t take anyway?” Isn’t that easily available on Google for you to look up?
^Hurwitz did a well designed study on legacy, although he didn’t and probably couldn’t control for legacy status separate from donor status. If you’ve read Hurwitz and don’t agree with his conclusions, I can’t imagine anyone on CC will be able to add anything that will change your mind.
@dfbdfb - Well, there it is, Hurwitz’s study on legacy sounds perfectly designed for your needs.
Do elite universities make enough information available on this to draw any real conclusions? From what I can tell by looking at their OIR sites, they provide enough for the IPEDS data and that’s about it. Personally, I suspect the last thing that admissions staff want is true transparency on these issues. Likewise, even if they were fine with transparency, there’s no incentive beyond compliance to provide it and it would just be extra work. I’ll probably read Hurwitz’s book at some point.
There is a way to make some inferences about some of the craziest hooked* applicants–Naviance scatterplots for ischools with numerous elite school applications. Looking at our local high schools scatterplots, (Ivies and Stanford; somewhere between 90-200 applicants/each which is significantly more than three of our lower-esteemed directionals), you see occasional boggling anomalies which I always figured meant “I play football/basketball.” Visually, the effect looked more pronounced with Stanford but this might be due to number of applications (about 2X any of the Ivies) or it might be a PAC10 sports thing.
*presumedly. Another cause of the outliers might be a data entry error. I find this unlikely because the X and Y axes were both low and a data entry error is likely to have a bad X or Y not a bad X and Y.
There is a simple reason for the increasing standardized test scores around the nation.
Simply look at the names of National Merit Finalists-especially in CA.
Asian Immigration.
It’s a fact.
Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
@fragbot - Elite schools want least degree of transparency; in fact, they’ll sue to protect their inner workings.
Actually, @roethlisburger and @TiggerDad, that’s precisely my point—@TiggerDad is making claims about legacies (and other hooks) “taking away” slots from other applicants, but given the data we have access to, there is absolutely. no. way. to know whether such a claim is correct or not.
It’s fine to make such a claim, but once challenged on it to continue to try to prove it via nothing but repeated assertion? Not right.
“There is a way to make some inferences about some of the craziest hooked* applicants–Naviance scatterplots for schools with numerous elite school applications.”
I have found the scatter plots “interesting”. However, it is impossible to know which hooks caused each of the most extreme outliers, except in two cases where my daughters knew the individuals who were the outliers. One was a superb athlete. One was URM. Both were actually nice people and good students. I am not convinced that going to a school where their incoming GPA was below the 25th percentile was doing either of them a favor.
I agree with @dfbdfb that we just don’t have the data to know what is going on. We can suspect, we can withhold donations to our alma mater’s to protest the fact that they don’t seem to want our kids for spurious reasons (although my alma mater might be more forthcoming about this fact than most), but I don’t think that we can really know what is going on.
And of course, if we can get over being hung up over a few “big name” schools, we can benefit from the fact that there are hundreds of really very good universities where our 4.x WGPA kids can do very well.
@dfbdfb - I’m “making claims about legacies (and other hooks) “taking away” slots from other applicants…” ???
This is getting really bizarre, as I don’t ever recall making such a claim. You even quoted “taking away” as if that’s what I had stated. I never stated anything even remotely close to that! If you go back to my post #54, you’ll see that I referenced the book, “The Price of Admission” in which the author mentioned the former Cal-Berkeley chancellor, Bergeneau’s estimation that 60% of elite schools’ admitted students are comprised of various hooks. I pointed this out to address the OP’s question regarding college admissions. The thought that these 60% students “taking away” other students’ spot has never even occurred to me until reading your post.
Here’s my earlier post in direct response to the OP’s thread question. I wanted to state what’s going on in the elite college admissions without being judgmental as I don’t like to get into what’s right or wrong about any aspect of it. For example, I don’t take any stance on the issue of legacy. As far as I’m concerned, if a student got in by whatever means, the student got in, period. If the college wants that particular student for whatever qualities, why should others object to that? If, down the road, my Princeton admitted son gets to use legacy advantage to help his own kids into Princeton, I’m not going to apologize for it. In any case, you’ll see in the following that I make NO judgments that @dfbdfb would like to keep insisting that I have:
[Quoting someone else’s post:] “I heard from someone who knows a Princeton AO that their hooked admits were approaching 70% last year. If that is true it would reflect a recent trend at those top schools. Its quite plausible given that Princeton is on record saying they are on a mission to increase such numbers: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/opinion/princeton-takes-on-class-divide.html. Anecdotal evidence like increasing yield among all top schools and higher aid by schools seem to suggest more hooked kids are admitted each year. Whether such trend continues remains to be seen. But its unmistakable that admission to 15-20 schools which is an obsession on CC has gotten worse for unhooked kids in recent years.”
I’ve posted the following elsewhere but worth repeating here: In the book, The Price of Admission, its author Daniel Golden estimates that at elite schools, URMs make up 10 to 15% of students; recruited athletes, 10 to 25%; legacies, 10 to 25%; children of people who are likely to become generous donors, 2 to 5%; children of celebrities and politicians, 1 to 2%; and children of faculty, 1 to 3%. A former chancellor of Cal-Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, once estimated that roughly 60% of admitted students at elite schools are comprised of these hooks.
That was 10 years ago. As far as these hooks go, nothing much has changed since then. What’s missing back then and has been steadily added since is a newer yet significant hook: FLI, First-Generation, low-income, to address the class divide that the above linked article discusses. At Princeton, the share of FLI among the class of 2017 is 14.9 percent and very likely to grow even more in the future judging by the university’s president Eisgruber’s proactive stance on this.
If Birgeneau’s 60% estimation at elite schools was correct a decade ago and that percentage has held steady to this day, the aforementioned Princeton AO’s statement that the university’s hooked admits, including FLI, were approaching 70% in the latest admissions cycle, shouldn’t shock anyone. That leaves the unhooked applicants a very very tiny window of opportunity.
So, to return to the OP’s question, “Isn’t College Admission Supposed to be Getting Less Competitive?,” the answer is exclamatory NO as far as elite schools go. It’s become extremely more competitive for unhooked applicants AND, to a lesser extent, for hooked applicants, as well, since the number of applicants aiming at these schools has grown larger as the pool of super-wealthy, URMs, legacies, etc. has also increased significantly and will increase even more so into the future."
As usual, people always look first to race/ethnicity when it is really the fact that the US immigration system selects for well educated immigrants from most source countries (e.g. through work or PhD student visas – 70% of Indian and 50% of Chinese immigrants have bachelor’s degrees, far higher than in India, China, or the US overall). African immigrants also have a higher percentage with bachelor’s degrees than the US population overall, but no one seems to make race/ethnicity inferences in their case because they are relatively few in number compared to African Americans who are not of recent immigrant heritage.
Well, except in Lake Wobegon, someone’s going to be in that 'bottom 25th percentile, even at Harvard, even at Stanford. And it is not like most of the elite schools have that large of a spread. Many of those students were in the top 10% of their high school classes, some may have had a really good ACT or SAT score, some have good reasons why their gpa was a few points lower than the others entering Harvard, such as no APs offered at their schools or no weighting for ‘honors’ or AP or IB. They are not in the bottom 25% of all students going to college just a step below the extremely gifted group going to THIS school.
Have you read the Hurwitz study?
Tigger, the problem with your math is that each of these subsets do not comprise distinct groupings. Legacy’s who are also mega-donors; Athletes and URM’s; Staff children (not just professors-- Harvard is candid about the fact that local kids get a finger on the scale-- how much more so when that kid is the child of a building services employee or librarian).
Adding up the alleged percentages presumes that no legacy could be a URM which is demonstrably false or that no employee ever spawned an athlete.
@blossom - I don’t know what “math” you’re talking about. According to the author of The Price of Admission, he cited Birgeneau’s (Berkeley former chancellor) “estimation” of 60%. I’m sure Birgeneau’s aware of cross-groups. And does it really matter whether it’s 60% or 55% or whatever. The point was to answer the OP’s question, “Isn’t College Admission Supposed to be Getting Less Competitive?” with resounding NO because of such percentage of hooks comprising each year’s class. It’s certainly not easy for these hooks but for those unhooked, the task is daunting to say the least.
The answer may be “no” for some of the most selective colleges. But it is probably “yes” for many other moderately selective colleges.
@ucbalumnus - That I agree, as I’ve stated the same elsewhere.
@TiggerDad @ucbalumnus @dfbdfb
One thing to note about Hurwitz’ study is it was for 2007 admits. So the long term answer is “yes” as # of 18-24 and international applicants had been steadily rising (in general) up until 2007 or so.
Since then the # of US 18-24 has flatlined and/or decreased a bit, but international applications continue to increase (at least until this year. Current visa and immigration issues are expected to hold it steady and/or decrease it slightly)
So I would guess that for the past 10 years or so, it has not really gotten significantly more difficult, but not a whole lot less difficult either.
Certainly the # of applicants in not decreasing and in many cases continues to increase. What we don’t know is if the quality of the applicant pool is also increasing or if it is being bolstered by unrealistic applicants.
“Certainly the # of applicants in not decreasing and in many cases continues to increase. What we don’t know is if the quality of the applicant pool is also increasing or if it is being bolstered by unrealistic applicants.”
I think it is pretty clear that top end admissions have gotten more competitive over the past 10 years. Due to the increase in the number of applicants seeking admission to the same top 20 or so schools. Which is caused by the market for high end admissions moving from local/regional to national/international.
But I don’t think admissions will get any tougher over the next 10 years, and might ease up.
The overall number of college seeking applicants should be going sideways. The number of qualified applicants within that pool seeking high end admission to a top school (the top 1-5%) I think will also be sideways. I think a big driver of the competition has been a lot of smart kids from all over the country entering the game. By now, I think the days are fully gone when a smart kid in Kansas would only be applying to his local/regional schools. Those kids now routinely also chase a spot at Stanford, Yale, Duke or Rice.
There’s now about 15 schools that have ACT ranges of around 33-35. It is probably mathematically impossible for that to be pushed any further. Also think the schools have pretty much maxed out their available tools – is anyone really going to go much beyond filling 50% of their seats through ED?
The number of apps may continue to rise a bit (and admit rates fall) in the coming years as the same number of high end applicants throw more applications at the top 20 in response to the lower admit rates. But more apps from the same number of qualified applicants is just noise.
If the number of seats in the top 20 schools is flat and the number of qualified kids chasing those seats stops growing, then the competition can’t get any keener. Although the gaming and distortions of hooks and ED may make the RD unhooked portion of the market even crazier. But that’s not really tougher competition – just increased process and friction for the flat number of top kids to find their seats at the top schools.
“Well, except in Lake Wobegon, someone’s going to be in that 'bottom 25th percentile, even at Harvard, even at Stanford. And it is not like most of the elite schools have that large of a spread.”
This depends on how large the spread it. I don’t necessarily see any problem with being in the 10th percentile for incoming students if the student is very close to the 25th or 50th percentile. However, in one case the spread on unweighted GPA was 0.5 – the difference between all A’s and half A’s and half B’s. This was at an Ivy League school.
If it were 0.05 below sure that would be fine. I would not want my kid to go to a university where their GPA was 0.5 below the 25th percentile.