<p>^ yup. My school gear rarely gets worn. My alma mater rarely (if ever) gets mentioned. It’s a conversation killer. Not ashamed but I’m in circles where there are few if any Ivy-type graduates. That just goes w/the territory.</p>
<p>And I know no Ivy grads in my area (Midwest) who try to inject their college in introductory sentences.</p>
<p>Where did I go to college? “Out East”</p>
<p>But I love the fact that my nerd-cum-athlete 15 year old loves to wear her MIT T-shirt to her Varsity Cheerleading practices.</p>
<p>My younger s still gets periodic school related stuff in the mail (summer programs, etc0 and hes a graduating senior! He just got somethig the other day. Cant recall who it was from. It just got put in the circular file.</p>
<p>annasdad- This is a sincere question. What pleases you? What makes you smile? What can we do to escape the continuous nastiness? Do tell.</p>
<p>Whether or not I interject my (or my kids’ ) schools immediately into a conversation depends on what sport season it is. Same with the shirts. I’m currently digging down through my t-shirts to find some Indiana stuff since basketball is going well. Around here people tend to wear school shirts a lot, but they are usually either Tennnessee orange, Vandy black/gold, Kentucky blue, 'Bama red etc. A Harvard or Penn shirt doesn’t get much interest.</p>
<p>I dont have any more of my undergrad t-shirts. Would be a collectors item about now (colors used to be pink (rose) and grey, now they are maroon and grey). That said, a friend who was a few years ahead of me went back for a reunion several yrs back and bought me a present-- a big warm sweatshirt. I do wear it occasionally (though it has a coffee stain on the front now). I usually just wear it around the house, but occasionally I go out to run an errand and have it on. Does this mean I am bragging? </p>
<p>I do wear my grad school t-shirt to the gym and especially when we play the the flagship state U in the big rivalry football game. I live, as they say, deep in enemy territory. Get lots of supportive comments from other grad, and we tend to acknowledge each other in a “we are family” kind of way. If we win the football game, I wear the shirt a few more days to the gym :)</p>
<p>jym! I didn’t know you went there! I always loved those rose-and-gray colors, and I was really disappointed when they felt they had to change just because they were admitting boys, too. I imagine there’s still something of an underground market in pre-coeducation colors.</p>
<p>My favorite college stuff identifies our college only to those who know a lot about it. I have a 'Brook Tang t-shirt lovingly preserved (although it no longer fits), and our last car had a Saybrook College decal. And I used to wear my Saybrook tie. That was perfect! It didn’t have the college coat of arms, or even its colors. It was just a specific rep tie with ugly colors that didn’t go well together (or with anything else, really), that J. Press had put together back in time immemorial (i.e., the 50s) and designated the Saybrook tie. If you hadn’t bought one yourself, or at least thought hard about it, you would never recognize it. </p>
<p>The sweatshirts I wear most often are just as snobby, and just as obscure: Wellfleet Public Library.</p>
<p>My wife used to wear sweatshirts from our college, but she shifted over to our kids’ college.</p>
<p>With my relatively new Vanderbilt sports obsession, there isn’t much room in my life for any other school as far as adorning my body. I even got Vanderbilt pillowcases for Christmas. I have a game day outfit that even includes Vanderbilt earrings.</p>
<p>Well, I think schools could change a lot of things in their selection process if they were willing to sacrifice quantity for quality of applications. They could target school and community leaders with mailings before going after students asking them to identify any truly remarkable young people they’ve come across that might be good candidates. They could direct soliciting toward students with proven achievements in a variety of both academic and artistic areas, not just in sports as they do now, and most importantly, they could provide potential applicants with lot more information about the selection criteria and their likelihood of admittance, discouraging the hopeless apps which the current system invites. Clearly no school wants to be too forthcoming with this information but I think it would be the fair and honest thing to do.</p>
<p>And let’s be frank, the current system is not necessarily succeeding in the presumed goal of getting “the best freshmen class possible”. Assuming this can be measured by post-college achievements, a) many kids who are rejected from these schools and attend other places go on to accomplish extraordinary things and b) many of the grads from elite schools are nowhere near the top of their fields and have rather ordinary careers and lives. The point being that, imo, a revamped system could do a lot better job of identifying potential with an emphasis on quality rather than numbers.</p>
<p>I personally am well aware of the benefits of an “elite” education but what gets me is the suggestion that these schools are so far above the fray, and that their place in the world is so well established, that they are unconcerned with staying ahead in the perceptions game by maintaining their selectivity.</p>
<p>The problem with your suggestion, Wildwood, is that it would allow all sorts of other people besides the colleges admissions departments to be gatekeepers. And generally the college admissions departments don’t want to do that. </p>
<p>First, and most importantly, they don’t trust most of the people they would be soliciting to have the same value system they have. Second, they want the ability to take different sorts of students for different sorts of roles, and the Wildwood method would cut back a lot on the diversity of interests represented by their applicants. And, finally, like any other bureaucratic cog in a big bureaucratic machine, they need to justify their own existence, professionalism, head count, and budget. Obviously, it’s easier to do that if they are engaged in a mystical holistic review to sieve out the brightest diamonds from tens of thousands of applications than if they are taking a much more limited set of recommendations from grandees. </p>
<p>They really don’t just want to look at whoever the local principal or clergyman thinks are the most appropriate candidates. That’s going to produce a lot of Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy types, and not so many deep thinkers with secret obsessions. Not that they don’t want a few Jack Armstrongs, but that’s not all they want by a long shot.</p>
<p>And what’s the downside? A few tens of thousands of high-achieving kids experience a little rejection and disappointment. Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo. They get over it really fast. (Their parents nurse grudges for longer.)</p>
<p>JHS- Yes you knew that-- we had that conversation. I was a class behind an inlaw of yours. And my bro was in Saybrook too, though I don’t recall if you overlapped.</p>
<p>Back then the touch football (or was it flag football?) team we had was called the big pink!! I agree, bring back pink (errr… rose)!!!</p>
<p>Bad idea. It is subject to favoritism and even nepotism on the part of the local leaders and is no more objective than the subjective parts of the current “holistic” methods. The favorable local reports would be basically rec letters once removed.</p>
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<p>They do some of that now, hence the filtering based on PSAT or SAT score - an academic achievement.</p>
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<p>Great idea. Except for very data-driven state schools, it often seemed like my daughters were groping in the dark in the admissions process. It’s this almost total blackout of the admissions process that generates all the endless Chances posts and threads. Those threads are futile and even dumb, but the motivation for posting them is certainly understandable.</p>
<p>I’m not suggesting teachers and community leaders make decisions about who gets admitted, I just think it would be another means of finding those diamonds in a more targeted way. Suggested candidates could then receive the letters from the colleges encouraging them to apply. Right now, the PSAT is the filter used by most of these schools, but I think there is a pretty low cut-off in scores used. As far as I can see, other than geographic and school diversity, there are no other filters in the mailings. Seems to me an unnecessarily wide net if seeking truly exceptional students. I’m sure any filtering methods would have issues but it’s a moot point because no school is now going to stop the mailings and risk receiving substantially fewer apps.</p>
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<p>Okay, although I don’t really agree with you that there is no harm done when overall expectations are artificially raised in the application process (and not just for the mailing school) but my point here is that there is a lot more self-interest in pumping up app numbers that some are willing to admit to. There can be more than one purpose for blanketing the applicant pool with promotional material and I think if it were just about finding great kids who wouldn’t otherwise apply, there are other more effective methods to be found.</p>
<p>What’s the big self-interest? A tiny, and I mean tiny (see posts #88 & 90), nudge in the USNews ranking score? Is that worth getting, processing, and handling thousands and thousands of additional apps? Or is there some other self-interest here?</p>
<p>There must be, since every spring there are a flurry of press releases, “XYZ University sets another record with the number of apps from the class of 20XX.”</p>
<p>Coureur, as I said before, it is not just for the effect on the U.S. News rankings, which I agree is technically minimal. But like it or not, people (high school students, undergrads, parents, alums and the general public) DO tend to judge a college’s prestige and value based on its selectivity that is best identified by its admission rate. There is no denying the general perception, as misguided as it may be, that admission difficulty is a proxy for quality. Colleges know this and play the game accordingly, because after all, more prestige means a greater demand for its product, and so the cycle goes on.</p>
<p>I truly believe that if Harvard’s admission rate climbed to %10, above that of a few rivals, it might be seen as an anomaly for a year or two, but eventually, people’s perception of its desirability would change. Of course this is silly and superficial, but its the way perception works.</p>
<p>Here is a thread illustrating this phenomenon:</p>
<p>“They could target school and community leaders with mailings before going after students asking them to identify any truly remarkable young people they’ve come across that might be good candidates.”</p>
<p>Horrible idea. Rewards the suck-up kids, rewards the kids who play the game, rewards the “visible” stuff (captain of the football team, editor of the newspaper, class president, etc). My kids’ major EC accomplishments weren’t even KNOWN to anyone at their school (why should they be?).</p>
<p>And let’s be frank, the current system is not necessarily succeeding in the presumed goal of getting “the best freshmen class possible”. Assuming this can be measured by post-college achievements, a) many kids who are rejected from these schools and attend other places go on to accomplish extraordinary things and b) many of the grads from elite schools are nowhere near the top of their fields and have rather ordinary careers and lives. The point being that, imo, a revamped system could do a lot better job of identifying potential with an emphasis on quality rather than numbers."</p>
<p>Whoa. Are you saying Harvard et al hasn’t gotten the best freshman class possible because some kids who go to not-Harvard do well in life? Does everyone at Harvard et al have to strive for continued greatness in their fields at all times, lest they live perfectly nice but ordinary upper middle class lives?</p>
<p>I consider the fact that people who attend not-Harvard can do really well in life a feature, not a bug.</p>