<p>@2018RiceParent, I forgot about sports. Sports definitely take a lot if discipline and athletes often are very good at managing their time in college.</p>
<p>I only did two ECs in high school, orchestra/music and science Olympiad. I was very committed to both and attended a well known arts camp for orchestra during two summers. However, it seems on here, most people are doing a lot more and have leadership positions in student run organizations. The reason I did not do more was because my school have over three hours of homework a night, and since I am very introverted, all of that left me exhausted. I would have liked to do research but all the opportunities I knew of required connections. I had connections but my parents were unwilling to use then. </p>
<p>I also have never been interested in student led organizations as I don’t like the idea of a hierarchy among peers. I very much march to my own drummer.</p>
<p>My intense focus however was much more successful in college and lead to several prizes for research along with admissions to five top ten grad schools. I honestly felt research was infinitely more fun than science Olympiad since you get to a point where you are truly the expert regarding your project and discover and understand new things. However, the kind of research I do would not have been feasible as a high school student. It basically requires a good amount of quantum mechanics preferably at the grad level.</p>
<p>If WD were a soccer striker, he would be of one those who scores a few but wastes most of the chances he might get. His writings are all over the place and alternate common observations with asinine conclusions. He observes, at times correctly, but never connects the dots in a sensible manner. As far his “solutions” he appears to have spent a bit too much time at the School of Education in Morningside Heights talking to Freire wannabes. </p>
<p>In the end, I wish he would collaborate with Amy Chua and Ferguson for the ultimate fictional book about the admissions and experiences in selective colleges. And ask Rocky to borrow the title The Expendables. </p>
<p>@oldmom4896 :
“OMG, how do the kids who don’t have parents to obsess over this stuff and guidance counselors with the inside track ever get into selective colleges?”</p>
<p>Write good essays. At least, that use to do the trick. These days, probably write good essays and apply ED (ED admission rates at the top privates are similar to RD admission rates to those schools about 2 decades ago; RD admission rates these days are insanely tiny).</p>
<p>Oh, or have fantastic numbers and apply ED to certain schools. There are some well-regarded privates out there who, I’m pretty certain, would admit virtually every perfect 2400 SAT kid if they felt said kid would attend if they sent over an offer.</p>
Well said. I hardly believe that we baby boomer generation is holier than the new generation who is suffering because of what we did do or did not do in our great time. And many of us will burden them to save our butt in our retirement years!</p>
<p>Although this is not relevant, I can not but think of this: If the author of the “excellent sheep” was born, say, 20 years earlier, he might have a much easier working life in academia and he might not “criticize” the new generation so much. I heard that for some older generations, many college students do not need to care very much about their chosen major and can still have some good shot at getting into a good career after graduation. Heck, even some high school graduates had a decent chance to make it into a solid middle class by taking a blue color job back then, as long as they have what it takes to work hard to climb the ladder from the bottom on a job. They did not need zillions of ECs in high school (maybe working hard to earn some money to get a used car to enjoy their youth?)</p>
<p>There was a dramatic shift in the competition for slots in elite and upper-tier programs beginning in the late 1960’s as the leading edge of the baby boom wave moved into graduate and professional schools. Superimpose on that a new view on women in those positions, and it became a lot harder to do anything than it had been in 1960.</p>
<p>Admissions offices try to assemble a class, so they look at the mix as much as the individual. It is not all about scores, grades and other stats. I also think they value authentic interests w/depth versus resume building. Leadership positions in the usual high school extracurriculars really aren’t that important. They say that character if high on the list of criteria.</p>
<p>There are many very interesting, passionate learners at, say, Harvard.</p>
<p>There are many very interesting, passionate learners at countless state universities and liberal arts colleges too.</p>
<p>The career focus is happening everywhere, not just at Ivies. We just had a recession, and of course both tuition and debt are running high. The most popular major at less elite schools is business.</p>
<p>I’m not talking about that change. Im talking about law school, med school, b-school, and graduate programs, all of which did allow women, but didn’t see nearly as many women applicants as they saw beginning in the early to mid-seventies. Basically it meant that the credentials needed for Harvard law, or Penn medical school, went up dramatically. If 90th percentile was how far a program had to reach to fill their class in 1966, by 1976 it probably was up to 94th or 95th, which is a big difference. </p>
<p>There were about 2.6 million births in 1940, and by 1955 there were 4.1 million. So if we look for 90th percentile males, that puts 205,000 of them above that cut-off vs. only 130,000 of them fifteen years earlier. Assume that women were absolutely equal at that point in propensity to apply to those grad/professional school programs, and it means that there are now a total of 410,000 competitive candidates above 90th percentile vs 130,000 fifteen years earlier. That’s a little exaggerated by my assumptions, but you get the drift. It simply got progressively much more difficult to be admitted to the upper tier of any program from the mid 60s on up to the early 80s, when the birth rate had stopped rising (early 60s). </p>
<p>What is “overly pre-professional?” The purpose of having colleges, of having a well educated work force, is so that they can go out into the economy and work and produce more than the uneducated workers in other countries. “Overly pre-professional” sounds like “too rich” or “too smart.” And it’s silly to claim Jews are any less pre-professional than Whites and Asians. Everyone needs money. </p>
<p>In the United States we value those who make more money. They pay more taxes, they add more to the economy, etc. We don’t value the starbucks barista who likes to read philosophy in their spare time. That’s why America is prosperous. And that’s what people are responding to. </p>
<p>Actually, I heard of this kind of theory as well: from the management’s point of view in the corporate america, for the majority of the jobs, they prefer excellent sheep who tend to not question, say, “authority’s motives” and just follow the order from the top to do what is expected of them. When a business leader like Bill Gate asked for more H1B workers, it is hard to believe that he and his management team value the intellectual curiosity of these workers. Other than the benefit of keeping the cost under control, there H1B workers are more like excellent sheep to me because the attrition rates will likely be controlled by the corporate america rather than these workers.</p>
<p>This is at least one way which America relies on to make sure America is more prosperous than, say, many countries in the Europe.</p>
<p>@Vladenschlutte, if everyone just tows the line and doesn’t think for themselves, then who are going to be the next big innovators? You say America values people who make a lot of money, well a lot of those people happened to be very creative and even dropped out of school. I’m not saying I agree with this for everyone, but it seems to be a sign that they were nonconformists and wanted to do things their own way. What about scientists and writers and legal scholars, etc.?</p>
<p>Where did I say anywhere that Jews are less preprofessional that Asians? They seem to be similar in that area for all I know. In my parents college experience, a ton ofJewish parents wanted their kids going to medical school.</p>
<p>Not everyone who has intellectual interests is a Starbucks barista. That’s a pretty stupid way to look at things. Being an intellectually engaged person allows you to learn to think so you can take what you learned and apply it to whatever you do. If you can’t think for yourself, you’ll eventually get left behind in whatever field you are in. Fields like medicine have radically changed over the past decade. To be successful requires the ability to continue to learn and evolve during your whole career. </p>
<p>Also, the expansion of colleges and universities in the 1950s to 1970s meant that there was an expansion of faculty job opportunities during that time, so that the competition for faculty jobs relative to the supply of PhDs was not as fierce then as it is now.</p>
<p>With colleges and universities in steady state for capacity, consider the numbers: a faculty member at a research university supervises far more graduate students to PhD degrees than are needed to replace himself/herself.</p>
<p>Note that most of the highest volume employers are subcontracting and outsourcing companies (e.g. Infosys, Tata Consultancy, Wipro, Deloitte Consulting, IBM – these are #1 through #5). Note also that the subcontracting and outsourcing companies’ pay levels are much lower than those companies that appear to be hiring H-1B visa employees directly to work on their own projects (e.g. Microsoft, Google, Qualcomm, Intel, Oracle, which are scattered through #8 through #17).</p>
<p>So it is entirely possible that the companies in the latter category are using the H-1B visas as intended (i.e. to directly hire quality talent that is difficult to find domestically), but are being crowded out by the cheap subcontractors and outsourcers who are abusing the H-1B visas. So Microsoft, et. al. have a reason to complain, but perhaps they should be lobbying to get the subcontracting and consulting companies disqualified from using the H-1B visas so that they can be used for their intended purpose.</p>
<p>We can all debate the right amount of pre-professionalism in a university’s culture. But anybody who’s been around the block a few times could tell you that there’s a lot LESS of it at Yale than at Illinois, to say nothing of West Whoville State. The whole premise of attacking Ivies for pre-professionalism is backwards – for good or for ill, they are one of the last bulwarks of old-school gentlemen’s liberal arts.</p>
<p>The Ivy League schools do vary. Penn (with the prominence of Wharton) and Cornell (with several divisions of pre-professional majors) do appear to be more pre-professionally oriented than Dartmouth, for example.</p>