Excellent point. If she is pretty sure (doesn’t have to be 100% sure) she wants to be a doctor, a 7 year BS/MD program is really nice. It means you are done with medical school at age 26. Done with residency age 29-31 depending on which specialty. This helps you avoid the pressure to try to get pregnant during residency (both my sister and I did this, and it was no fun.) Of course now that egg freezing is a thing, there is less pressure, but still.
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Exceptional athletes span all levels of intelligence and academic performance. (And in general school sport participation is significantly associated with academic achievement.)
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Yep. Proof by example, logical fallacy, etc., etc…
Exceptional athletes span all levels of intelligence and academic performance. (And in general school sport participation is significantly associated with academic achievement.)
I agree with this statement, but there are only so many hours in a day. There are many more “HS” athletes who, even though they will not be recruit able, spend a full 40-hour work week traveling with club teams, doing strength training, studying video. Long gone are the days when HS athletes stepped on the fields for 2.5 months and then got a break between seasons to catch up on studying.
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I spoke directly to someone who goes to admissions meetings at a NESCAC where applicants are discussed. He told me that “half” of the kids who sent apps there were disqualified quickly upon review of their transcript not being rigorous enough. I’m sure we will never get a real number of these situations. How could we? But I was actually a little surprised when he said that. I just assumed the vast majority of kids knew it was a waste of time and money to apply to sub 10 percent acceptance rate schools without the rigor needed.
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I think you need to be careful with you athlete assumptions as well. While we do know some average students who are outstanding athletes, we also know a LOT of stellar students who also excel big time in their sports winning state titles and beyond.
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It wasn’t ever posted - it was in a private message, meant for your eyes only, which clearly you had read, but didn’t remember how to get back to. Thank you for having made the contents of a confidential private message public knowledge.
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I have heard that (similar) statistic from a lot of selective schools, but I take it with a huge grain of admissions marketing salt. If we look at the schools’ CDS and the bottom of the test/GPA distribution of matriculated student, the bar for “qualified” is very low. For example, looking at the 2021 Harvard CDS, we have students admitted with SAT’s in the 500’s for both ERW and Math; ACT’s in the 18-23 range; and GPA’s between 2.5 to 2.99. While these are very small percentages of matriculants (and I am sure massively hooked), Harvard made a determination that they were academically qualified.
While this info is dated, the Yale AO in a conf call with certain alumni leaders stated about 2/3 of applicants had the test scores and transcript to do the work with about 6,000 making it to Committee for the 2,200± spots. This was back when total applications were in the 30,000’s.
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Did your daughter also submit at least 1 LoR from a STEM teacher and 1 from an English/Humanities teacher? If 1 of the 2 primary LoR’s for schools that will only take or strongly recommend 2 LoR’s, was from a non core academic teacher, that could have put your D at a disadvantage. Your D’s violin achievements are exceptional and to be commended, but the schools/programs you were shooting for are looking for the best combination of students. Based on comments of Yale AO’s in several debriefs, LoR’s are critically important to them to separate the “exceptional” from the “excellent”.
With that said, I am sure your daughter will thrive at whatever school she chooses among the excellent choices that she has.
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The actual difficulty of college work across colleges mostly does not increase as rapidly as admission selectivity. So what we have is that less selective colleges fill their classes with students at high risk of flunking out or otherwise not being able to handle the academic work (in addition to dropping out due to running out of money), while the most selective colleges mostly select admits from a pool of applicants well above the “can do the work” threshold. Only at a very few colleges is the minimum rigor level in college so high that admissions has to pay attention to academic strength at all times, rather than having a pool of “well qualified” applicants that is still many times the number they will admit. The 2.50-2.99 HS GPA, 5xx/5xx SAT, 18-23 ACT super-hook admit may be able to find a way to graduate at Harvard (probably with helpful tips on course choices from advising and use of tutoring services), but not at Caltech.
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Try disabling Java Script in your browser settings, then refresh the page. Usually that gets you past the paywall.
I will somewhat disagree with you, and actually claim that the difficulty of college rises much faster than the drop in admissions rate (across colleges, not in time). However, it plateaus in colleges with moderate acceptance rates, and does not actually rise much more, except in some specific cases .
The rigor of Connecticut College (37%) is equivalent to that of Bowdoin (9%). The rigor of UIUC (60%), and UMN (45%) are the same, and neither is likely all that much less rigorous than UMich (26%) or UVA (22.6%), though that also depends on the college in the university.
Moreover, the increase in applications over the past 20-30 years was not really correlated with the rigor of the colleges. So while UChicago’s acceptance rate dropped from 27% in 2009 to 6% this year, and the rigor has not changed.
I do agree, though, that the correlation between rigor and admission rate is generally weak.
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Yes, this is particularly true as many look at acceptance rate and rigor as being related. They are only partially related. If you look closely at admit rates and actual underlying data, you can find schools with far lower stats than others but similar acceptance rates. I won’t point these out. Not all schools are looking at the same calibre student.
I’ve only looked at freshman science/math classes as per things kids returning to school have told or shown me, but anyone thinking rigor doesn’t change between colleges at the entry level ought to compare a little bit.
Some colleges have their Bio 101 = an AP class. Other colleges assume their students have had AP Bio as their foundation and go from there.
One of my sons took a cc Bio class while in high school and sat in on his brother’s Bio 101 class at a Top 30ish college. Forever afterward he called his own Bio class, “Bio-Lite.” When I asked him the difference he told me, “In my class we learned there’s an enzyme that helps with this process. In my brother’s class they were learning about 11 different enzymes, by name, and what each one did in the process.” (11 is made up - it was so long ago I don’t recall the specifics, but it was a bit more than one.)
Not everyone needs to know the enzymes, by name, and what each one does… it’s ok. But the rigor is hardly the same IMO.
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CCs have a VERY different mission that four year colleges. At many CCs, the assumption is that the intro bio class is for students who did not take any higher level bio course in high school. At four year colleges, they assume that a student has at least take college prep bio in high school. If the course is for bio majors, they assume that the students have taken at least honors level bio, and that some have taken AP bio and want to repeat it.
The level of intro bio for bio majors at four year colleges is generally equivalent across a very wide swath of colleges. The difference in the intro classes is how well the students are prepared, and how well they do. The big difference in class depth and width comes in the more advanced classes. There can be a pretty large difference in the rigor of a 300 level course at different colleges.
Of course, there are also differences which are not related to rigor, per se, but can determine how difficult a student finds a class. A class at a LAC can be very different than a class covering the same material at a larger university, even if the two cover the same material at the same depth. Some students will find the LAC class to be more difficult, which others, who are equally academically talented, would find the university class to be more difficult.
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IME, the schools that allow a CC or AP class to “be” the Bio class have their own intro classes at a similar level. Those that expect kids to have had that level merely as a foundation go into more depth.
YMMV - as I said before, my experience comes from the kids who returned to talk with me at the high school where I work. I merely used my son’s experience because he put it into words well.
As for math, there are colleges that allow calculators and those that don’t. Plenty of those that don’t also often use variables rather than numbers to make calculator use rather pointless. There can be a rather large difference in tests from what I’ve seen - with all classes listed as Calc 101 or College Alg.
ps My son had already had college prep Bio (Honors - as high a level as our school offers prior to the DE class) before taking the DE class. Everyone in that DE class had to have already taken college prep Bio first. Not everyone heading to college needed to take the DE class. Most didn’t.
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Allowing calculators often has a lot more to do with the teaching methodology than with rigor. This is similar to open book tests. Non-programable calculators just help with arithmetic, which is the least important part of calculus.
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True, but the rigor often corresponds IME. I tell kids they definitely need to know the concepts and not just how to push buttons to get the answers.
Unfortunately, in my school district (and many others) a lot of math is taught by calculator and what buttons to push. This starts in early grades, so by the time they get to high school I’ve had kids in Alg II classes not know how to do 2x100 or (-2)^2 in their heads.
When it moves on to college and they only need to know how to push buttons with basic questions after memorizing steps, I consider those less rigorous classes.
Again, these can work for those who merely need a math class to fulfill some core requirement with a non math related major, but not all colleges allow that level of a class to exist, or if they do, they keep them pretty hidden.
Let’s get back to the OPs post now
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