Ivy Rigor

Parents Forum
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<p>Pizza- I think Caltech is not the Place to Be because your typical BWRK striver type of kid can’t get in-- and knows it- and therefore it’s off the table as an object or totem of prestige. Most of the plain vanilla Vals and Sals at your typical HS can’t get into Harvard either- but the Harvard value proposition isn’t as explicit (Hey! There are kids who major in English at Harvard! I like English!) and because Harvard has been around longer and has had more occupants of the oval office, Senate floor, Supreme Court, etc.</p>

<p>I think a kid who can get admitted to both Cal Tech and Harvard can have a pretty Harvard like experience at Cal Tech and vice versa (except for the weather, and Pasadena- hey, what’s not to like?)</p>

<p>But HS kids are neither blank slates nor fully formed objects. I have nieces and nephews and cousins who are now in grad school in very demanding and esoteric PhD programs who you would not have slated as the “academic” type at age 17. Smart, quick, love school, love to learn, the kind of kids who come alive when they talk about a book they just finished, but not necessarily “scholar” profile. That’s what being an undergraduate (and yes, I admit it, at “prestigious” colleges) can do for you. Walk through the doors a bright kid- walk out with a flaming passion for god knows what that you only learned about two years ago but now you want to travel the world studying and learning and researching and giving papers on that subject.</p>

<p>That’s why I’m so leery of the argument that the prestigious colleges are just building fancy summer camps with over achievers and extroverts who want to start charities that have no volunteers except themselves. There really are thousands of college kids out there taking advantage of brilliant professors and fantastic labs and incredible libraries and archives (and yes, centers for performing arts).</p>

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<p>When they tell you that every one of the 10,000 is qualified, people like Texaspg might ask why his D (if she applied there) is not among the 2,000. How the 2,000 were picked out of the 10,000 is the question.</p>

<p>Back to AA and holistic one last time. From a URM’s point of view, it would be much better to admit as many or more URMs without the existence of AA. It sounds like holistic can do just that.</p>

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<p>The moderately and less selective state universities are likely to be the ones that select purely by academic criteria. For example, most California State Universities select based on a formula of GPA and test score for freshman admissions, and prior college GPA for transfer admissions. No EC, legacy, URM, etc., although a few are in NCAA D1 and may bend the rules for recruited athletes.</p>

<p>But such universities do not have applicant pools with more near-maximum-academic-credential applicants than their admissions classes.</p>

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<p>*Yet if we use Caltech as the platonic form of the university that selects primarily on academics, without much impact of legacy, URM, athletics, etc.</p>

<p>A) It’s got a concentration that excludes a lot of fields of knowledge so it’s off the table for anyone with serious humanities interests, and;
B) as much as I hate the word “prestige,” it doesn’t have the prestige (except in selected circles) as, say, Harvard - because there is not a general perception that Caltech is The Place To Be. So fewer people apply per seat, which tells you that it’s just not viewed as interesting / desirable as, say, Harvard which is seen as the place of the future movers and shakers. Which tells you that people see universities as not just academic, but as where you go to find and surround yourself with future movers and shakers. *</p>

<p>IMO, it’s more A than B…although both are in play along with a strong anti-intellectual/pro-glad handing(a.k.a. Leadership/BS Artistry skills) popular culture. However, the perception of prestige also depends on which circles you happen to inhabit. </p>

<p>At my STEM-centered high school and among STEM types…especially engineering/CS types, Caltech trumps Harvard by a mile when it comes to academic prestige. </p>

<p>Heck, within the Ivies, Harvard engineering/CS tends to be regarded as lagging by many hardcore techies I’ve known/worked with in comparison to Cornell, Princeton, and Columbia SEAS. Certainly was the pecking order in every tech-centered company/department I’ve visited. </p>

<p>Moreover, this has long seems to be the opinion among Silicon Valley folks/VCs and California area startup cultures from what I’ve heard and seen. </p>

<p>Also…not all Caltech graduates are narrowly educated social misfits which seem to dominate your Nerd stereotypes. My Caltech graduate cousin wouldn’t have been successful in starting and expanding his startup partnership to other countries if he was. He also has a love and great respect for humanities/social science fields.</p>

<p>If one spotted him on the street…he’d be much more likely to be mistaken for a medium height extremely well-built Asian version of “Beaver” Cleaver in “Leave it to Beaver”/Bruce Campbell who was a lettered Division 1 athlete at UCLA/Hollywood bodybuilding model rather than a top graduate from Caltech. </p>

<p>Then again, if he knew I said that about him…he’d take it as a serious insult of his considerable intellectual capabilities and be hunting high and low to throttle me in a good natured way that many older siblings would do with their younger sibs who may be annoying in good fun…but whom they click very well with. :)</p>

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<p>You KNOW how they pick the 2,000 out of the 10,000. They have told you numerous times how they do it, and all the things they take into account and how they look for different mixes. You just don’t like it because it’s not predictable before the fact so you can’t tailor your kid to it, and you’re not comfortable with serendipity.</p>

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<p>Harvard may not be a favored recruiting target by the latter due to relatively small numbers of engineering and CS students, competition from finance and consulting recruiters, and inconvenient distance (and your Boston-area trip may as well be to MIT instead). Especially since Berkeley and Stanford are conveniently nearby (so are UC Santa Cruz, San Jose State, and Santa Clara).</p>

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<p>I think most academics at research universities, across most disciplines, would agree with this. It’s not just STEM types. Certainly most social scientists would agree. And so would most people in core humanities disciplines like history, English, classics, philosophy, linguistics, comp lit, foreign languages and literatures.</p>

<p>On the arts side it may be less clear, but I suspect there are still a fair number of people who continue the hold the perhaps slightly old-fashioned belief that the arts represent an alternative path to human understanding, tapping right-brain insights and intuitions that left-brain research and analysis may miss. At least, that’s the justification for academic institutions devoting resources to such endeavors.</p>

<p>I also believe that a lot more academics at LACs share this vision than is commonly acknowledged.</p>

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<p>I think you totally underestimated PG. If she wanted it off-line, she would have taken it off-line and I would have responded in kind. Over the years, she has shown that she knows how to dish it out, and so by extension, she must be able to take it. Otherwise, the behaviour would have been extinguished a long time ago, don’t you think?</p>

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<p>Since you are such a good sport, I will let you in on another one of my great discoveries. Based on my prototypes, I found the science/math types tend to use data to modify their perspectives, while the humanities/social science types tend to use their perspectives to modify data. Once I know a person’s major, informal testing shows that I am batting over 800 or better. Pretty good by social science standards, no?</p>

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How many cousins do you have, cobrat???</p>

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<p>Count me as yet another picking my jaw up off the floor after reading Caltech isn’t considered as prestigious as Harvard, especially together with the view that spreading knowledge seems STEM-my…</p>

<p>I very much like the idea the mission of the university is spreading knowledge. Usually I am imagining a repository of knowledge just trying to hold out against hostile forces.:)</p>

<p>Are schools with larger endowments and more resources better able to spread knowledge? I love Blossom’s post about library and archive resources available to undergraduates at more elite institutions. It may be easier for the public to see the resources with regards to labs. Dstark posted a while back about the inequities in grant funding between very competitive private schools and public schools. This made a huge impression on me. If a student is looking at faculty and departments when making up a college list, and if faculty who have choices are at schools with the most resources to support their research (in any field, not just stem-my) how can less competitive schools ever offer the same educational opportunities to their students as the most competitive ones?</p>

<p>What do we think about the fact schools with the most goodies keep piling them up? And then access is limited because admissions is so competitive? Why shouldn’t my state university have the same resources available to my child as an elite? </p>

<p>^^my own children have actually graduated from (elite) colleges and have almost finished (elite) grad programs and I absolutely support AA. no sour grapes. really. though a small regret that neither my children nor their first cousins have chosen to attend my state university, where many generations of our family have gone, because there just weren’t appropriate educational opportunities for those particular students.</p>

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<p>Um, whose definition? Elite private research universities are amazing, complex institutions, and generally have huge chunks that are NOT primarily about academics. (If they were primarily about academics, for example, I doubt there would be a single graduate business school. Anywhere.) One of the big areas of these institutions that is largely, but not entirely, about academics is their undergraduate colleges. Those colleges are about academics, but also about sports, networking, job-training, personal growth, entertainment, and a variety of other things. Chief among them, from an institutional standpoint, is building an alumni corps that will generously support the institution. </p>

<p>These universities have been ENORMOUSLY successful in that, and in making themselves attractive to top students and future movers and shakers. It is presumptive – and hilarious – for those of us on the outside to cluck about how they are not balancing values correctly when they are on an amazing run of institutional success. And that success is demonstrably dependent on the peculiar values mix their carburetors produce. Look at the natural controlled experiment provided by the University of Chicago. There is an institution whose faculty strength and academic facilities has ranked in the very top tier of American universities for at least a century. Yet its college virtually collapsed, and was without doubt the weakest element of the university, precisely because for a generation it followed an academics-only path, while its peers on the East Coast and California took the approach we are talking about. As, over the past 10-15 year, Chicago largely abandoned its separate path and started looking a lot more like Yale, its popularity, selectivity, and general reputation have skyrocketed . . . and far more importantly from an institutional standpoint, so has its fundraising. It still doesn’t have a football team, and it still has something of a unique culture, but there is hardly a voice there arguing that the past was better than the present. And that, by the way, includes the intellectual and academic quality of the undergraduate student body.</p>

<p>Caltech gets away with swimming against the tide in part because it is tiny, relatively, and also because it is willing to be meaningfully less popular than Harvard, Stanford, or MIT. A large majority of the students it admits choose to go elsewhere. Like Chicago 20 years ago, it’s a well-respected niche player.</p>

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JHS largely beat me to what I was going to say, but I’ll just add that top colleges also have the idea that they are crafting a functioning community that goes beyond academics, so they want Young Leaders as well as ivory-tower scholars.</p>

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<p>JHS… so true</p>

<p>Let’s agree the real mission of the university is fundraising and the main point of admissions is to find appropriate future donors. It is how universities survive. In my opinion it also perpetuates a class system even with modern reforms of FA and AA. If someone objects to that mission, there is no need to participate. Refuse to work at such an institution. Refuse to apply to study there. Except that schools who have been wildly successful with that mission have a disproportionate share of the resources. If you want access to those resources you have to participate in the system, it seems to me. It isn’t so easy to just opt out as pizzagirl keeps suggesting.</p>

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<p>I think it is easy to opt out, just like pizzagirl says. Go to U Wisconsin, Purdue, U MN, Texas A & M, U Washington, etc, etc. Those schools have massive endowments and most do more research than elite privates like Northwestern. It must be a tougher world than I had thopught when you have to ‘settle’ for a degree from somewhere like Wisconsin or A & M. Poor UW grads… crap lives, crap degrees, and no future for them.</p>

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<p>Ooops! I was re-reading my post (and admiring my wit, of course), when I realized that of course the University of Chicago has a football team. Not much of one, to be sure, but bringing back football was one of the hundreds of things the university has done over the past decades to look more like its successful competitors.</p>

<p>alh, obviously universities’ core mission is to preserve, to create, and to disseminate knowledge, not to fundraise. Without getting too Social Darwinist, however, I would suggest (a) that institutions that do not prioritize institutional survival tend to disappear at a rate higher than that of institutions that do prioritize survival, and (b) if you see a group of institutions that have been vibrant and growing over several generations, or longer, you are likely looking at a group of institutions for which survival is a top priority. It’s a huge overstatement to say the real mission of the university is fundraising, but perhaps not to say the real mission of the university is to continue to exist and to grow, and fundraising is one of the most important tools for doing that.</p>

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<p>I am sorry this has to be relatively brief–I am super-busy at the moment, and don’t want to post too many incompletely considered thoughts.</p>

<p>But the recent posts by JHS and alh reminded me of a conversation I witnessed about 35 years ago. Spouse-to-be (large public research university grad, STEM field) was arguing with lawyer-to-be (Harvard) about what a university is. As it happened, their disagreement hinged on what the definition of “is” is–long before Bill Clinton!</p>

<p>One argued for the preserve-create-disseminate knowledge view of what a university “is.” This is the idealistic view that I prefer. The other took the pragmatic view, based on how “elite” universities actually function in society. Her viewpoint was very similar to that of JHS.</p>

<p>Personally, I wish that it were possible to separate Harvard College from Harvard New-Fangled Finishing School–the place that prepares the “movers and shakers,” bankers, hedge fund managers, politicians and people so influential I don’t even know what they actually do. I suspect that HN-FFS really does care quite a bit more about fund-raising than scholarship, unless perhaps the scholar rises to Nobel level. Not expecting to influence Harvard’s admissions policy, though. </p>

<p>Whether the Harvard-like admissions policy, with an eye to the future bottom-line–is essential to institutional survival or not depends on the society in which the university is embedded. Oxford and Cambridge have survived pretty well for the past eight centuries or so. Their admissions are almost entirely academically driven, with a partial equivalence of AA for students from under-represented comprehensive schools. They have recently started fund-raising much more aggressively, though–at least in my experience. It will be interesting to see whether the admissions policy survives that. On the other hand, British society operates so differently that no change in admissions might be needed.</p>

<p>With regard to Chicago, specifically, its recent history should include three eras: before the Common App existed, Common App but Chicago is not part of it, Chicago adopts Common App. Quality of student body: up, down, up (cartoon view).</p>

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<p>QuantMech, (1) I am a preserve-create-disseminate guy, too, at least as far as ideals go, but I try to let my views be influenced by what I observe in the world, especially when it makes sense. (2) The low point for Chicago’s college occurred long before the Common App – probably the 70s-80s. They were having trouble getting acceptable classes of 500-600 students, and gave serious thought to abandoning the college altogether. Chicago’s trend has been up since then, just very slowly at first. Selectivity was increasing steadily and significantly in the years just before it joined the Common App.</p>

<p>Oh, and Cambridge and Oxford have indeed done very well for the better part of a millennium, and they do have almost entirely academic admissions standards (somewhat jiggered, I believe, to a class-influenced view of academic qualifications). But for how long has that second part been true? Thirty years? Forty? Twenty-five? And how have they fared relative to Harvard in that period?</p>

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<p>And can’t survive if they happen to make it in. </p>

<p>For mortals like me, going to Harvard is like playing backgammon. As an amateur, I have a chance. If I cannot do physics, surely I can do sociology. Didn’t the Duke study I post say as much? Going to CalTech is like playing chess. As an amateur, I don’t have a prayer. If I cannot do STEM, where standards are a lot less forgiving, I pretty well have to get out of there, or die.</p>

<p>Vernon Smith said basically as much:</p>

<p>…Caltech was a meat grinder like I could never have imagined. I studied night, day, weekends and survived hundreds of problems…</p>

<p>"…I was majoring in physics, but switched to electrical engineering, which was in the same division (Mathematics, Physics and EE) as a senior. In this way I did not have to take the dreaded “Smyth’s course,” required for physics majors, but not EE, and received my BS on schedule in 1949…</p>

<p>…After Caltech, Harvard seemed easy, and I got virtually straight A’s. …Graduate school is an endurance test, but was not that demanding for me after having survived the undergraduate meat grinder…</p>

<p>…the difference between Harvard and Caltech: “At Harvard they believe they are the best in the world; at Caltech they know they are the best in the world.”</p>

<p>It seems to all go back to my original post where I said the following:</p>

<p>In short, if I am looking for the best of the best, I would look at the major; if I am looking for the best of the best connected, I would look at the school.</p>

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<p>Lee Jussim is probably the world’s leading authority on stereotypes. I think you will find this interesting:</p>

<p>[Oxford</a> University Press: Social Perception and Social Reality: Lee Jussim](<a href=“Human Verification”>Human Verification)</p>

<p>BTW, I said “tends” to be male, not “must” be male. Fastidious in analysis, and cautious in diction, remember?</p>

<p>Got to go.</p>