Predictors of (college) Success

Parent Cafe
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Included in a list of “predictors of college success” at one LAC -

Specific examples of the predictors admissions readers can check off for an applicant include “Comfort in Minority of 1,” , “Delayed Gratification” and “Risk Taking”. (I wish I could see the whole list).

Olin goes all the way to an actual in-person audition (of engineering skills - it’s a design challenge and they’re evaluated on things like adapting on the fly, communicating with others, etc).

MIT now allows a portfolio submission, describing/showing a project they’ve done.

It also discusses geographic/ethnic/SES diversity, ability to pay and other more often discussed aspects of holistic admissions…and how those and other factors affect rankings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/what-college-admissions-wants.html

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Of course, the article focuses on colleges at the upper end of the selectivity scale, not the much larger number of moderately selective colleges where admission is solely or mainly based on GPA and/or rank and/or test scores.

On the other hand, using legacy preference also leaves the college vulnerable to unfairness arguments, since legacy status is an unearned (by the student) attribute that correlates with being advantaged.

Also, if much of the admissions class of a college is filled by those with various unearned preferences, it could cause applicants without any such unearned preferences to believe that it is not worth the bother to apply there.

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Well yeah, but so does this forum :smiley:

True…I think? People here talk about needing hooks and chances without hooks, but seems most still apply anyway.

4

I really like the ability to overcome adversity. So often on here are students trying to explain away their GPA because of adversity. For the really high potential student, it is the ability to maintain despite the adversity. I feel that you are much more likely to survive future adversity if you can show that you navigated it in the past.

5

This is just another example of elite schools—in this case Yale–erecting more barriers to middle/lower income students in the name of the holistic admission. To create videos like the one that made the difference in Yale’s admission (judging by its camera angles, steady shots and storytelling techniques) one has to have thousands of dollars of video equipment and years of practice or hired a videographer/filmmaker or had a brother who happened to be one… Anyway, you get the picture—if schools like Yale set the trend then the arms race for slick videos, portfolios etc is on…

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The Yale application only asked for a video if you were applying through Coalition, the common app didn’t ask for it. Plus, it wasn’t just a video, they asked for a document, video, image or audio file, with a short accompanying essay explaining it.

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Before we talk about predictors of college success, should we be asking about predictors of professional success? What are he hoped for goals of a college education? Why bother with education at all if we don’t have an idea what we are trying to accomplish?

IF the goal is to produce better professionals, it is relevant to ask what better predicts the professional success of a graduate? Are rank in class upon college graduation good predictors of professional success? Is professional success the real question, or do we need a “happiness success” metric to tell if a college actually made a difference in the personal growth of a “responsible” citizen? Should we use job placement? Is the purpose to assign social status to an individual? We can go “bananas” here trying to define goals.

A university still needs goals defined before it can use any metric to measure success after graduation. An admissions office wants a cost effective way to find/select the students who will meet these goals in the environment of their university. There is a field out there called behavioral science which implies the application of a more thorough understanding of the process. How did we end up assuming that it was all about classroom grades, ACT, SAT, GRE and RIC. This is not a neat science and it is ripe with assumptions. Just the early history of the IQ test is an eye opener! See https://www.verywell.com/history-of-intelligence-testing-2795581.

IF a university defines their goal as professional success (e.g., engineering, science, medicine, law, journalism) they could decide to study the relationship between RIC upon graduation and a proxy measurement made up of patents awarded,and professional awards achieved over a twenty year post graduate history. Will they learn that the grades they awarded their students significantly predicted their professional success or will they find that the top and bottom 10% of the graduates performed just the same or some other unexpected result? Perhaps they will find there was no significant relationship between the variables. They might question their metrics and their educational model.

What qualities are we not measuring in our standard test that we need to better identify if we want to pick the “winners” as defined by the university goals. Is “grit” the issue, is it “creativity,” are they mutually exclusive events? See http://prospect.org/article/can-grit-save-american-education.

In my experience secondary school standardized test scores are overrated, secondary school GPA are better, but are only better at predicting university performance in the first two years of college. Selective colleges tend to collect a fairly homogeneous student population by these measurements and are likely have no definitive studies to indicate that their college RIC has any significant relationship to a stated university goal.

It is comforting to know that some admissions offices are looking beyond the standardized test scores and grades for better answers, but how are they defining success?

:bz

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I interpreted the “predictor of (college) success” title to mean success at finishing college with adequate grades. I don’t think it relates at all to later career success.

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Selective colleges certainly want students who can handle the work, succeed, get good grades, play sports/music/whatever. That is success, as measured by grad rates and such metrics.

But they also want students who will succeed after college, financially or socially or politically or scientifically or something, and they want them to feel good enough about that college that they give back to future students - financially, mentoring, speaking, something.

10

This seems like a Maslow thing to me. Once everyone is past a certain level of GPA/SAT/ACT scores, then you are looking at finer points such as empathy and risk taking. For students in the bottom tiers, having the background as evidenced by grades and standardized test scores tends to be the best predictor of whether they can get through their college courses.

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I would think it’s possible to do a study of college graduation “failure,” equivalent to the idea of FMEA (failure modes and effects analysis), which is applied to industrial products. What are the predominant factors in failure of admitted students to graduate? Illness, finances, family problems, accidents, behavior (drinking and drugs), or academic skills and “readiness”? I know that colleges sometimes undertake these studies.

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@compmom Thank you! You raised a third issue.

Are we asking about:

  1. How an applicant successfully gains college admissions, or
  2. How a college optimizes selection of students who will graduate from the institution, or are we
  3. selecting the students who will profit the most by some other definition of success?

The first is a common applicant perspective. The second is a common admissions perspective. The third addresses a much larger issue for both groups: Why are we doing this? An attempt to answer this last question rightfully belongs to the faculty government and to the board of trustees. The boat still needs a steering wheel, admissions is more like the engine room. This brings us back to http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1853666-turning-the-tide-rethinking-college-admissions-a-new-report-endorsed-by-many-top-universities-p1.html. This discussion should not be restricted to the ivies as it deals with all of us.

In a perfect world, applicants would spend more time looking into differences in institutions and not let their self-image be so defined by relatively small differences in test scores and GPAs. I believe that would help college admissions do a better job of selecting successful students as defined in question two. :bz

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@sylvan8798

A quick view at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs is my sole exposure to Maslow’s hierarchy. It’s chief criticism states “In their extensive review of research based on Maslow’s theory, Wahba and Bridwell found little evidence for the ranking of needs that Maslow described or for the existence of a definite hierarchy at all.” I hoping this means the rest of us (my SAT scores were only 620 and 720 fifty years ago) are still able to communicate. :bz

14

https://www.publicagenda.org/pages/with-their-whole-lives-ahead-of-them says that the top (not mutually exclusive) reasons for dropping out of college are the need to work to earn money (major reason for 54%) and the cost of college (major reason for 31%).

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Deleted duplicate

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Sorry, but those scores do not put you in the group “the rest of us”. I have students in my courses with scores below 300. I’m not worried about their ability to empathize. I’m worried about their ability to find the sine of theta or the inverse of 1/x or to understand college level textbooks, as some of them are functionally illiterate.

17

In the classes I teach, being able to put the cell phone away for 50 minutes correlates to success.

18

^^ this

I just heard on the radio that bribing kids on standardized tests (i.e. money for each correct answer) resulted in better scores :slight_smile:
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2017-11-20/how-us-kids-might-have-performed-better-in-math

Re: mapping maslow to college entrance criteria, it’s interesting there are NIH studies showing that SAT is more predictive of college gpa the “higher the ability of the student”. Their method was to observe colleges with high avg SAT scores and compare them to colleges with lower avg SAT scores. They looked at the correlation of SAT with college gpa and found it stronger in the colleges with the higher SAT scores.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3090148/

I don’t know much about this study so can’t comment further, but it seems to hint that SATs are better used to separate the upper levels of the pyramid.

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Re: #17 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3090148/

They found that SAT correlation with GPA for “high ability” (mean SAT 1158, mean GPA 3.17) subjects was 0.35, versus 0.19 for “low ability” (mean SAT 921, mean GPA 2.87) subjects.

HS GPA in various other studies tends to show higher correlations than 0.35 and/or higher or similar correlations than SAT or ACT scores to college GPA. This particular study does not mention HS GPA.

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Not graduating from college is not always a negative. The title of this thread is Predictors of (College) Success which may be very different from success at work or in life :slight_smile: