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<p>Oh, spare me the faux “surprise.” Give it up. We all get the burden it is when you can’t shoehorn every single deserving applicant into the Ivies.</p>
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<p>Why are you surprised? It’s an elite school value that part of what makes the interesting ‘stew’ at elite colleges is the opportunity to be with an extraordinary mix of people that you normally wouldn’t have been with - whether that’s the tuba player from Montana or the diamond-in-the-rough kid from Watts or whatever. We’re all so, so very sorry that the elite schools in this country don’t do admissions by racking-and-stacking SAT scores because that hurts the feelings of those who think that merit = SAT scores, but the dirty little secret is - they must be doing something right if you so desire to still join their club even if they construct the club in a way you allegedly don’t like.</p>
<p>LF_ Are you suggesting that my asking you which school you work for, given you have brought it up yourself, is nasty? Are you equating asking which school my kid goes to with asking you which school you work for, given your claim to expertise? </p>
<p>I asked you which school you worked for on a thread in which kids were trying to make sense of the rejections last year and you were busy “pronouncing” them as delusional. </p>
<p>If you didn’t want to be asked that question, you probably shouldn’t have mentioned it, given it is against the TOS. </p>
<p>carry on.</p>
<p>UCB - your gradescale is messed up. It does not include the Asian F, aka A-.</p>
<p>[Asian</a> F - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_F]Asian”>Asian F - Wikipedia)</p>
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Whenever I see a question or comment like this, I can’t help thinking that the person making it has a misconception about the sorts of people that the Ivies admit through their race-based affirmative action. They don’t go down to the ghetto or barrio and sign up somebody standing on the corner. Rather, when you look at the minority people they do admit, they are highly accomplished people with really high grades and scores–just not quite as high as the grades and scores of the average non-URM student. They would all be top recruits at state flagships. Indeed, the Ivies can’t find as many URMs with the necessary qualifications as they’d like–which is why URMs are still underrepresented at those schools compared to the proportions in the general population.</p>
<p>talk about your nastier posts, as per usual LFward’s eventual degeneration… I find you will inevitably, always, begin to dismissively post about students. As much as I’m sure that AD’s daughter would be pretty horrified, I’m pretty sure your kids would feel the same, for their own reasons. Nice? You know the TOS also has words about personal attacks et al? </p>
<p>Anyone who got into or whose kid got into a top school can be proud. Despite the CC belief these are flukes, cancer researchers, rich kids, underqualified URMs, conformists, kids who started big charities, Olympic athletes or Intel winners, (and despite that we sometimes can’t tell why a school took our kid,) in that holistic eval, something clicked for the adcoms. A string of “somethings.” </p>
<p>More later, I think- unless someone, please, says fuggedaboudit. My explanations are not what this thread is about. I was just going to quietly pm Quant. You want it? Feel free to say, no.</p>
<p>any kid who got into a school they can afford to go to and gets good enough grades at that particular school to graduate can be proud.</p>
<p>Why the parents can be proud? I’m not sure. But they can be if they want to be.</p>
<p>As for "top’ schools, many of the “top” schools now weren’t even places people would go when I was a kid. things change. top schools change, and plenty of the best programs in any given subject aren’t even in generically rated “top schools.”</p>
<p>Here’s the thing LF: I don’t like the things you say to kids some of the time. They are kids. They haven’t been out in the world and I find that your comments lack compassion and real understanding and come off as crass and know it all. To. the . kids. You can say what you want to me. that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.</p>
<p>I will avoid you in the future, as I have been, except in cases where I find you harsh towards students and institutions you know nothing about. carry on.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure it’s differentiating between 3.9s and 3.85s as much as the concern that many colleges…especially private colleges tend to award what they view as an excessively high proportion of A level grades. </p>
<p>This was illustrated when newsmedia wrote articles about HYS graduates having overall average GPAs in the 3.6+ range or Harvard mentioning in its own literature having around 80% of its seniors graduate with honors. </p>
<p>In the eyes of most grad/professional school adcoms and corporate executives, something’s really off when more than a top quarter of the graduating class gets honors or when the average graduating senior class GPA is around -A. As far as they seem to be concerned, there can’t possibly be such a high proportion of students who are excellent genius-type students or at the very tippy-top of above average and something’s rotten in the way grading is conducted in higher-ed. </p>
<p>The most bellyaching of this type seemed to be from publications like the WSJ and other business-type publications.</p>
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<p>I fully support AA. My surprise came from perhaps misunderstanding of the word holistic. If holistic takes everything into account, won’t that make AA unnecessary? Currently AA hurts URMs.</p>
<p>To go back to Pizzagirl’s remark in post #282, asking why people “desire to still join their club,” while questioning some aspects of the selection of the “members,” with regard to the Ivies and/or other top schools . . .</p>
<p>First, to pre-empt some possible responses: I support affirmative action. I think that there are some classes where the discussion is definitely enriched by having students from different cultures and from different socioeconomic classes. I realize that the one of the selling points of top schools is the quality of one’s classmates. I don’t think that students should be ranked by SAT score and then admitted from the top down.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I understand why even the most stats-oriented applicant might still want to go to a “top” school, if the admissions office used a dartboard and phone book pages to select the incoming class. There are some subjects where students actually do tend to learn more from the faculty than from their fellow students, because it’s in the nature of the subject (e.g., physics). To me, it makes sense that a student might want to study with people who are among the most eminent researchers and scholars in a field, independent of the admissions procedure for constructing the class.</p>
<p>It has become a commonplace that many of the “top” schools could construct a class that would be essentially indistinguishable in quality from the admitted class by replacing the admitted students with some of those waitlisted or rejected. Whether one really believes this or not, it is certainly said.</p>
<p>However, I have never heard this said about the <em>faculty</em> at these schools. Could the faculty at a top school all be replaced, with no discernible difference in quality? In my field, no–taking into account the difficulty of getting top people to move (so I am ruling out just permuting the sets of faculty among the “top” schools, without regard to how difficult that is to accomplish in actuality). </p>
<p>So, since students of high caliber can be found in many places–certainly enough for a good circle of friends–perhaps it actually makes sense to focus on the quality of the faculty in choosing a university?</p>
<p>True, there are faculty “stars” in many different places as well. My colleagues (large public research university) definitely have their strengths. A few have been hired away to “top” places. However, if you interchanged the entire group of us with the Harvard faculty, it would definitely be possible to tell the difference. You wouldn’t even need to know that much about the subject to tell the difference.</p>
<p>Holistic and AA are two different concepts. Holistic just means that the school will consider more than just grades and test scores in admission. What they will consider is up to the school, which may or may not include AA. Caltech for instance uses holistic admission but claims not to practice AA. HYPSM on the other hand use both.</p>
<p>“It has become a commonplace that many of the “top” schools could construct a class that would be essentially indistinguishable in quality from the admitted class by replacing the admitted students with some of those waitlisted or rejected. Whether one really believes this or not, it is certainly said.”</p>
<p>Here is a quote from Princeton this year.</p>
<p>“I am sorry to inform you that we were not able to admit you to Princeton University this year. The admissions process is a difficult one for students and families, and we realize that you are likely to be disappointed with our decision. We received an applicant pool of over 26,000 candidates, most of whom were in the admissible range. In fact, we could have filled five or six Princeton classes with the thousands of accomplished students who applied.”</p>
<p>I do plan on dissuading my second kid from applying.</p>
<p>^^^
That would make me feel a little better. A little.</p>
<p>Fortunately, (assuming you recieved this message in your household) I think your kid made out pretty well regardless TPG. ;)</p>
<p>Thanks Bovertine. I am sure the kid will be happy on your side of the country. </p>
<p>I am still wondering, did they throw 12000 entries in to a huge drum and pick 1800 or whatever?</p>
<p>^MIT once posted a picture of application folders thrown down the stairs and joked that they picked the ones that slid down the furthest. (Or was it vice versa?)</p>
<p>texaspg, if your second kid should apply to Princeton if they like it. They just have to go in to the process with their eyes open.</p>
<p>Oh good grief, you know they didn’t throw 12000 entries into a vat and pick 1800. You know exactly what the process is, and it IS pretty evident that they could have easily filled 5 classes worth with viable applicants, but they just can’t. The. End. Why everyone tries to act like this is such an unfathomable mystery is ridiculous. Apply if you can live with a sub-10% acceptance rate, don’t apply if you can’t. Just because you can’t predict who will get in doesn’t mean there isn’t a process.</p>
<p>QuantMech wrote:
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<p>yes!</p>
<p>and:
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<p>yes yes yes</p>
<p>QM - thank you</p>
<p>So, um, I guess we’re not talking about Jean Arthur any more? :o</p>
<p>And to think acrimony could persist without hearing the drumbeat of the piccolo and tetrazinni article…</p>
<p>@lake42ks, Texas doesn’t practice AA in the sense that term is often used to imply numerical results–quotas, targets and the like. I don’t think any school can constitutionally employ that sort of AA in admissions; rather, I think the AA label is used pejoratively by the plaintiff (and media and other opponents of the consideration of race). As CCers know, holistic review connotes consideration of the whole person, not just their stats. The disgruntled plaintiff in the UT litigation is arguing that holistic review should NOT include any consideration of race. The brief you linked by the amicii Ivy et al. group beautifully articulates why it is desirable to continue the consideration of race among all other factors as prior courts have deemed constitutionally permitted and how ludicrous it is to think admission officers can conduct holistic review and maintain blind ignorance of race and ethnicity.</p>
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Knowing the context, and since the response was directed to my comment, I’m fairly certain he was joking.</p>