What on earth is an academic automaton?
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I think my post must not have been sufficiently clear. I’m not stereotyping anybody. I’m referring to that band of academically highly accomplished kids who struggle in the ways I did clearly describe for a multitude of reasons, emotional IQ and judgement being two that create some of the biggest problems I encounter. This is CC, so I’m sure this will be picked apart and some data will be thrown at me for consideration, but that’s the claim, not what you wrote.
Unless I’m completely misunderstanding what you’re trying to say, I don’t think those issues I referenced as coextensive with academic ability or accomplishment. There are plenty people who are well adjusted and well rounded who don’t suffer from those issues. But you’re telling me that SAT distributions suggest 75% of the kids at MIT have low emotional IQ? If so, I don’t buy it. Maybe “automaton” was a poor word choice.
I’ll give you an example of what I mean. My D was part of an astrophysics research team over the summer a few years back. One of the other undergraduates in the cohort, hailing from Wellesley, was her roommate who wound up spending time with us over the summer. Not a bad kid, but incredibly immature and really struggled to ‘read the room’ in social settings. Amongst a group of people she didn’t know, she mocked the dumb kids at her school who studied economics: “I just don’t know why anybody studies economics. It’s so stupid.” When watching a world cup game, again around a group of people she didn’t know well, she remarked after a goal, “I don’t see what’s so hard about that [playing goalie]. Just get in front of the ball.” And she was serious, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was watching the best players on the planet.
Now imagine that kid anytime soon navigating the subtle politics of the workplace. That’s what I was getting at. Being highly academically accomplished in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. But if that is all on which you focus, not infrequently (in my travels) you can run into this sort of thing. I don’t think this kid has many outside interests or experience beyond school. That’s limiting. Just one person’s opinion. It wasn’t a study.
I wouldn’t think emotional IQ is correlated with academic ability either way, just a normal distribution like in the rest of the population.
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I very much agree with you that it is highly desirable and beneficial for people to pursue interests in areas beyond academics. Where I struggle - with respect to your previous comments in this thread in favor of holistic admission (“There is a very good reason why they want seasoned admissions people who can do a 360 review of a candidate. Yes, academic preparation is paramount. But it doesn’t and shouldn’t end there.”) - is that the narrowly focused and socially inept (my words) student you mentioned here ended up at a highly selective school (Wellesley) that practices holistic admission .
And I suspect (though I could be wrong) that the “band of academically highly accomplished kids who struggle” you have in mind probably attended top US colleges (i.e., that’s one reason you view them as “academically highly accomplished”), most if not all of which practice holistic admission.
So, are you saying that holistic admission as currently practiced does not work (or is not working well)? Apologies if I totally misinterpreted what you meant.
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I’m not talking about any specific college, and it was your suggestion that there are “legions” of people with strong academics and low emotional IQs, not mine.
“Just one person’s opinion. It wasn’t a study.”
You said it was a fact and a challenge for you at work, which no one is denying, but it can’t be an opinion and a fact at the same time right.
“is that the narrowly focused and socially inept (my words) student you mentioned here ended up at a highly selective school (Wellesley) that practices holistic admission .”
Yeah I didn’t want to even get into that, not good form imo to denigrate an undergrad for their views on anything, much less soccer and econ majors.
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How do you tell an applicant’s EQ in college admissions? Via alumni interviews? EQ is perhaps even more related to genetics (not race). No college education, or any other training, is going to turn that Wellesley student, if she indeed has low EQ, into a super salesperson.
Good question. I don’t have the answer.
Is it the purpose of colleges to select for EQ in admissions (even though alumni interviews probably select for EQ (perhaps unintentionally) because good in person sales skills can help sell the interviewer on the worthiness of the applicant)?
Also, selecting for EQ can lead to unintended biases by SES or other factors. For example, most alumni of highly selective private colleges are upper middle SES at least, and mostly from upper middle SES at least upbringing. In an alumni interview, an applicant from a lower middle or lower SES may exhibit EQ attuned for lower middle or lower SES environments, but out-of-touch with upper middle or upper SES environments.
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Not all elite colleges require interviews so it’s hard to tell if there’s a uniform purpose. But if you look at boarding schools and other elite private high schools, they almost uniformly interview. Applicants with better social skills will likely receive better overall ratings. Do interviews generally disadvantage students of lower SES? Absolutely.
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Ok, wrong word choice on my part.
Ok, an inconsistent pairing of words on my part.
you’re quoting another poster here, but both you, and he/she, raise a good point. if holistic admissions works, how can this ever be a problem? I suspect the answer is that it’s an imprecise and flawed approach in part because, as another poster suggested, it’s likely quite challenging to vet for these qualities/challenges in people, most of the time without meeting them.
So does it work? My guess would be that it does, though, at best, very imperfectly. The theory I’m advocating is that if you have interests beyond your school work, or have an interesting life experience or otherwise show evidence of being a well rounded person, you’re perhaps less likely to suffer from some of these issues. Maybe that’s not right, but it would seem so.
That seems a little dramatic to me. She 21+ years old and has bad social skills and lacks any sense for how what she says will be heard by others. She’s a smart kid but alienated people at the research school, including the sponsoring faculty member. I don’t care if you don’t care about the factual context that formed my particular experience with her. A room full of people mentally rolled their eyes. That kind of thing can affect her later on if she doesn’t clean it up a little. Nobody’s privacy was compromised here, so we can just agree to disagree.
That’s a good point. One would hope that this can be accounted for in a process that desires to attract applicants from varying SES and backgrounds. One of the things that high SES can give a person is confidence and a perspective that getting into a particular school isn’t going to be the difference between making it in life or failing.
That’s probably right.
While there is good reason to consider SES in admissions, I would caution against emphasizing SES over race and other factors.
Of paramount importance is the fact that simply being black is a unique experience, regardless of SES status. The same can be said of other races and ethnicities, as well. Any policy that doesn’t recognize this is anti-diversity.
Placing undo importance on SES status is also an excuse to perpetuate the biases that “objective” evaluations are supposedly free of. Testing was developed by and for the majority, and has evolved into nothing more than a game. A very mean game, however, as testing assumes to measure the academic worth of a candidate, but the scope is so narrow that it cannot possibly be such a measure. So the minority is continually denigrated by “low” scores and accusations of “lowering the standards.”
True diversity is inclusive of everyone in society. Colleges cannot be truly diverse because 2/3 of people don’t go to college. And selective colleges are even worse, so it is of even greater importance for schools like Harvard to assure as much diversity as possible, which includes considering race as a factor.
The conversation of “academic automatons” reminds me of the comments I always heard about Asians in math…that they were not as creative and just had rote memorization going for them.
I thought math was black and white and was surprised when someone on this forum mentioned that math involved creativity. Then DS showed an interest in math and ultimately got involved in AMCs and luckily I found AOPS for him. It was eye-opening to me to start to understand the creativity involved in math.
So yeah, certainly there are some academic automatons out there but I also think there are many very accomplished academic kids that excel in the “common sense” area too
Finally, many like to talk about the accomplished kids and the 1550-1600 scores…the kids at the top are not adequately measured by the SAT in my opinion. It seems to me that many think that in order to be successful at what is considered a top uni one must have a top SAT score but that does not appear to be true at all.
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Note that while colleges may lack diversity in the above respect, they are often more diverse than the locally based K-12 schools which draw from small often relatively homogeneous (in both SES and race / ethnicity) areas*. Commuter colleges draw from larger areas than high schools, although they lose those who do not go to college (although nontraditional students add age diversity). More residential colleges gain diversity by drawing from an even larger area, but lose diversity by skewing SES upward.
*The US as a whole may be diverse, but many local areas are highly segregated by SES and race / ethnicity.
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All great points, and this is part of the problem. Perception of others is often defined by what is presented on TV, newspapers, books, etc. Every race and ethnicity has high points and shortcomings, but it is impossible for any medium to reflect that in an accurate and balanced way. Living and participating in a majority-minority district allows experience to be the teacher, but many people run from this opportunity out of irrational fear.
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“Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh”
I read “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson and she also points out that the Nazis looked at Jim Crow and lynching in the south as one of their inputs on modeling their society, pretty chilling.
Agree, this has come up before as well, the kids applying to MIT, Cal Tech, stem programs at Stanford et al have 800s pretty much across the board in math standardized tests, including 5s on all the APs, Calculus BC in 10th grade is pretty “common” if I may say. So these schools use the AMO, other olympiads, science fairs to distinguish, at least on the academic side.
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By “majority-minority district” do you mean most populated places in California (and most colleges in California from the point of view of prospective college students)?
Majority-minority in K-12 districts made up of one or both of the two underrepresented demographics from the Harvard lawsuit—black and Hispanic students. Not Asians.
I’m not familiar with California, but I imagine from statewide demographics, plenty of places have high populations of Hispanic students. But concentrations of black students may be sparse?
Yes, in California, areas (and school districts) with high populations of Hispanic people are common, but areas with high populations of Black people are less common, simply based on numbers.
For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District has about 520k TK-12 students and about 575k total students, with 73.4% Latino, 10.5% White, 7.5% African American, 3.9% Asian, <1% American Indian / Alaska Native / Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islander, 2.0% Filipino, 0.6% Not reported, according to https://achieve.lausd.net/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=66505&dataid=109597&FileName=Fingertip_Facts_2021_2022_FINAL_ENG.pdf .
Oakland Unified School District has a relatively high African American enrollment at 21.4%, but that is outnumbered by Latino enrollment at 48.3%. Others are Asian at 11.4%, White at 9.6%, Multiple ethnicity at 5.3%, Not reported at 2.1%, Pacific Islander at 0.8%, and Native American at 0.2%: https://dashboards.ousd.org/views/Enrollment/Snapshot?iframeSizedToWindow=true&:embed=y&:showAppBanner=false&:display_count=no&:showVizHome=no#4
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