While I agree with blossom #190 that the world need urban planners, the Oxbridge admissions model does not prevent that. Students apply for specific majors in American terms (“courses” in British terms–but the “course” is the major, not one unit of the major). I don’t think that journalism is a major per se at Oxbridge, but the good newspapers in the UK seem fine to me. (Maybe the Daily Mail is also staffed by Oxbridge grads :), but probably not.)
If a kid really, really, really wants to go to HYPS and the rest- then IMHO there is only one thing that a loving and responsible parent needs to do.
Introduce at whatever age you need to (whenever the kid decides he’s Princeton or bust, or that his life will end if he doesn’t go to MIT) the reality and the wonderfulness of a wide range of institutions where your kid will thrive. Have lunch at a cafe near the biotech lab of the nearest flagship U where you live and eavesdrop. Read the portion of the college website where they announce which faculty member just won which grant or awarded the gold medal in his or her field. Visit the rare book collection of a college as you are driving past on your way to grandma’s house, or subscribe to “Archaeology Today” or whatever magazine highlights the cool contributions scholars around the world are making to subjects that your kid is interested in.
That’s how to help your kid. Introduce early on the notion that smart people teach and study at Vanderbilt and Emory and Wake Forest and Holy Cross and Lawrence and McGill and Rice and UC San Diego. There are scholars and thought leaders at colleges your kid has never heard of, and there are brilliant students at colleges YOU have never heard of.
This bizarre fixation that the highest scoring math kids in the country belong at MIT and Harvard and NOT to get in proves that the admissions system is broken is profoundly wrong. BUT- for readers here who DO believe this is true- help your kid. So that ending up at U Michigan or UIUC or Stonybrook or Rice or JHU isn’t perceived as sloppy seconds by your kid who is obsessed with MIT or Harvard.
As far as the Oxbridge workload goes, yes there is a lot of work. But in the science and math courses with which I had some familiarity, the busywork component was zero. Intolerance for busywork does not imply intolerance for intellectually valuable work.
Also, the student communities there are vibrant, without having the students selected for community building. If you think a group of students selected for intellectual strength plus reasonable personal qualities would not form a good community, why do you think so?
(This was originally part of #199, but I didn’t want the question in the second paragraph to be lost among my other blather.)
“Harvard, in this instance, wants thoroughbreds, high achievers in one area.”
Ummm, not that simple. They may cherry pick, but none of the TTs are looking for unilateral.
Well rounded high stat kids may exist at HYPSM but they are the exception rather than the rule in my experience.
@blossom Agree 100%
lookingforward mentioned the Harvard admissions comment, “Would other students want to room with you, share a meal, be in a seminar together, be teammates, or collaborate in a closely knit extracurricular group?”
It is at least a little ironic that Harvard admitted Owen Labrie and the members of the reprehensible private Harvard meme group, given this statement. It is also interesting that Harvard disapproves of the finals clubs, including ones with long histories such as Porcellian, which are certainly “closely knit extracurricular groups,” whatever else you think of them.
I agree with blossom #201 that there are strong faculty (including Nobel laureates) and brilliant students in lots of places–for lots of reasons. Some of the students may not even have applied to a “top” school.
To take one example, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign has a hallway in a science building where the walls are covered with portraits of their Nobel laureates. So far, I have not heard anyone refer to UIUC as a “pressure cooker,” though, at least not for students at the academic level of MIT students. Does this not reflect a difference in the level of challenge of the classes?
The course level is something that a middle-school or high school student probably would not be able to detect during a campus visit.
I think that at UIUC student could have an undergraduate experience that was as challenging as the one at MIT, but it would probably require taking a number of graduate courses, and they might be spread across multiple departments. (There might be some majors where this is not necessary–I don’t have in depth knowledge of the UIUC curriculum–but I am pretty certain that it would be necessary in some majors.) That in turn would require a faculty advisor who was really interested in helping the student and who had information on the appropriate courses in cognate disciplines, as well as within the major department. This can be a bit hit-or-miss, in my observation.
Students who attend Webb Institute, Juilliard, Soka, or St. John’s College?
Quant- methinks that the problem you are trying to fix is at the HS level, NOT the college level.
Tons of busywork homework, rampant grade inflation (and no weighting of the GPA’s), kids on a treadmill trying to keep up, GC’s who advise top students not to bother to aim high so they don’t get hurt or disappointed- this is a problematic HS. Your observations that college admissions is broken based on the experiences of this HS (and others like it in the area) are as incorrect as me observing that the Cleveland Symphony is a terrible orchestra because nobody who learned to play the violin at my community music school has ever become Concert Master.
Kids get B’s because they opt out of the stupid homework assignments in HS? That’s not MIT’s fault. And again, using Feynman as where you place the bar… wow. You don’t ding a college writing assignment because the kid isn’t Hemingway or Faulkner, and you don’t stand in a fine arts studio with students wondering why they aren’t Rembrandt.
I still don’t agree with your notion that there is plenty of room for all the exceptional kids. You can only make that assertion if you are refusing to believe that there are forms of exceptionalism not measured by an SAT score. One of my son’s friends at MIT was widely considered the top musician in their class. Conservatory level performer and composer. Very strong in math and the sciences but likely not the tippy top as you would define it. Should MIT have knocked this student out (graduated with a strong GPA so clearly able to keep up) in favor of the kid with the 1600?
@QuantMech:
“That in turn would require a faculty advisor who was really interested in helping the student and who had information on the appropriate courses in cognate disciplines, as well as within the major department.”
Or a kid who takes initiative.
Most professors seem eager to help point a promising undergrad down the right path if the student just seek them out.
BTW could people opine:
Are there regular (non-magnet/elite private) HS’s where the average GPA is 3.5 or higher?
I seem to have trouble clarifying what I am saying about the high school busywork. I am just saying that I believe this is a source of the feelings of entitlement, if not among the students, at least among their parents. I definitely believe it is a more plausible source than the “all have won, so all must have prizes” culture. Yes, it would be great if the busywork were corrected by the high school.
The willingness to do busywork is not the thing that argues for MIT admission in my view, though. It is the exceptional impressiveness of a student. Well, obviously, I don’t place the bar for “exceptionally impressive” at Feynman. But I might place it higher than blossom does.
Of course there are forms of exceptionalism not measured by SAT score. For that matter, 800s across the board do not suffice to put a student into the “exceptionally impressive” category for me.
I can’t comment on whether MIT should have preferred the musician blossom mentioned in #208 or one of the rejected students with 1600/2400/whatever, for lack of information.
But I think that a lot of people view top college admissions as a benefit solely to the admitted students, and do not look at the benefit to the country of really top quality education for really top quality students in science and engineering. I believe that there is a societal benefit to the extent that happens. The end of the Cold War made the importance of developing top scientific and engineering skill in the US (as well as possible) less evident than it is today. I agree that a top-quality education does not have to happen at the “top” schools, but it tends to be more hit-or-miss elsewhere.
Would the MIT community have been worse off, if they had enrolled only the eventual #2 musician in the class? After all, Boston is such a cultural desert. I don’t think they even have an orchestra whose performances students could have attended. 
Well, ours was public and it was not a magnet. If tests count little enough toward GPA, and there is abundant homework and extra credit, lots of students can get As. I think A range grades are now the most common among high school students, as reported by SAT and ACT questionnaires. I was flabbergasted when a neighbor first told me that her daughter’s 3.7 GPA put her in the top 40% of the class. It’s not the olden days anymore.
Also, I can tell you that the quality of education of a student at my university, including the accessibility of graduate classes and actually useful research experiences, does not just depend on the student’s initiative. It depends on whether the faculty members take an interest or not. Some do, some don’t. I wish everyone did, but that’s not reality.
Where do you draw the line, exactly, and how do you know there is room?
PT, average GPA includes all those kids not headed to college. You’d want to look at the top band, how that’s distributed.
Maybe it has to do with raising kids in the PNW, but I did not see any type of “entitlement” for college admissions. I did see a few with unrealistic expectations due to poor advice. One of S2’s friends applied to a bunch of lottery schools with a 3.8, few APs, and a 1380 SAT score. His parents had gone to these schools back when things were very different. He is happy with his safety.
The closest I have seen was a girl who recently graduated from an Ivy and is now in graduate school. She had decided to attend the public HS instead of the very expensive private where kids are groomed for high rated privates. She lasted about two months, getting Cs in the AP classes, not academically at the level of those in the AP track academic meat grinder of the wealthy suburban public school. She switched back to the private to protect her prospects. The assumption was, from the other families in the private sphere, that the public school was “too easy” for her. Nearly every more capable kid in that AP track went to state schools.
I coached rec and select sports. Kids who won tournaments got trophies. At the end of the season, the parents would get together and decide what to hand out as a keepsake. I doubt the kids whose parents bought trophies were measurably any different from the ones who got photos.
“By and large these kids did, Harvard, in this instance, wants thoroughbreds, high achievers in one area”
Not really for undergrad, as can be seen by the ten admits they had to rescind because of their vitriolic (I’m being kind) posts. Adcoms are human, they make mistakes, a lot of them. However they tend to get it right in their grad schools where Harvard, along with Chicago, MIT, Cal Tech, Princeton, Michigan, Berkeley, Cornell et al. make their reputations.
Adcoms work with the app package. No crystal ball, no psych reports, lol. There’s a lot that can be gleaned from choices a kid makes through hs, patterns, and in the app. Perfect? No.
Oddly, parts of this thread seem to want some absolutes in the definition of perfect- perfect sort of hs assignments, perfect pace, perfect assignments of kids to colleges, and on and on.
I think not everyone realizes the role conformity plays, in hs and in admissions. That’s not choosing carbon copies, but how kids meet “expectations.” From that platform, some kids then leap ahead.
I feel like I’ve saud that repeatedly, each time we argue this “But in my local hs…” Or "But this fellow I knew…:
Quant Mech- hit or miss scientific education? Are you talking about the kid who ends up at Michigan engineering and not MIT? Or the kid who ends up studying physics at Stonybrook instead of Harvard? What bubble do you live in?
Im not sure how the ten rescinded students at Harvard indicate that they werent “thoroughbreds” just jerks, the two are by no means mutually exclusive and in fact may have correlation. My son is at Yale and in many ways, despite my misgivings, could be considered a “thoroughbred” in some sense. Im not sure if its apocryphal or not but supposedly these schools could fill their classes with the vals that apply ten times over. What I do know is that there is a 20% chance of admission with 1600/ 4.0, there has to be a way to differentiate and spikiness, being a thoroughbred, seems to be the ticket, not, by and large, writing an intriguing essay.