Smash College Admission: Promote students who are passionate about one subject but lag in the others (NYT Opinion)

Applying to College
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None of us old-timers believe that being affluent gets you into a college with a single digit admit rate. But you’d have to be stone cold obtuse not to see that being affluent confers TONS of advantages, many of which go unseen.

I’ve posted before about the bike helmet giveaway in my town. Funded by a family whose kid died in a traumatic bike accident. Administered by the local fire departments. No paperwork required. You show up with a kid (or multiple kids), the firefighters measure the kids head, chooses the right helmet, shows the kid how to wear it correctly and how to move the velcro around as you grow. Reminds the kid that if you get into an accident-- the helmet needs to be replaced. And that’s it. You walk out with a free helmet. You can be a multi-millionaire and get a free helmet, you can be impoverished and get a free helmet.

Many observers complain that the folks in line are “too affluent, and where are all the poor people?”

Well, their parents aren’t stalking the town’s Facebook page seeing “What’s going on this weekend for families”. Or there is no grown up available to stand on line if that grown up is at work serving pancakes at the local diner on a Sunday morning. And low income folks don’t have the luxury of a personal pediatrician, in a private practice, who they see every year for a check up who reminds the parent of the importance of bike helmets and gives them a flyer for the free helmet giveaway. Their kids go to the ER if they have a bad ear infection or cough that doesn’t go away, and the attending in the ER doesn’t worry about comprehensive pediatric care and safety- they treat you and send you home and tell you to follow up with your PCP which many low income people don’t have.

And low income folks don’t always have safe driveways to learn to ride a bike. And don’t live in a neighborhood where kids ride on the street, or are a few blocks away from a public park. So their kids don’t ride bikes the way more affluent kids do. Our city planners put the subsidized housing units behind an interstate highway. The parks are on the “other” side of town. Etc.

So while it seems empathetic to ask “why aren’t more low income families standing in line for a free helmet” you ALSO have to ask “How do we make sure that every kid can learn to ride a bike safely”. Just asking about the helmets isn’t sufficient.

I will shut up. But I could give you a dozen examples (kids in homes with no internet access- you see them sitting on the bench across from McDonald’s in the evening doing their homework) of how affluent people don’t even recognize the advantages that their affluence has bought them.

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And many elite colleges try to mitigate some of these factors. SAT optional, generous financial aid, fly in programs, class rank among your peers at your particular school not against wealthy suburbs. First generation, URM, etc etc.

Just as you stated, wealthy kids have tons of advantages, colleges also make a strong effort to recruit low income kids. They dont do an apples to apples comparison in the admissons process.

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That kind of, isn’t true. About 15% of Harvard undergraduates are from very wealthy families. According to the NYT interactive survey on economic mobility, that would be roughly equal to the top 1% of income earners in the U.S, or families that earn about $800,000 a year. Nearly 40% come from the top 5%, earning roughly $340,000 a year.

And the crazy part is that Harvard is not that unusual; that’s pretty much the template for every elite college or university that produces the most buzz on these forums. The very wealthy are admitted to these schools in numbers that far exceed their proportion in the population. And no one complains about it because, of course, it’s assumed (rightly, in most cases) 1) that they came by their wealth honestly, 2) they’re entitled to spend it however they wish and, 3) with any luck, and with hard work, our children might wind up in their polished shoes.

T’was ever thus. A college education has always been expensive and an Ivy League education has always been associated with legacy, wealth, and privilege. No one complained so long as the COA was kept within reason, usually with the help of small tuition discounts, most often need-based, but not always.

But those days are over. The families who can afford to pay $80,000 a year to send their kids away for college pretty much dictate what constitutes the proper bang for their buck and, if that includes a 5:1 student:faculty ratio, a Junior Year Abroad, and a brand-new sports facility every five or six years, then a school had better figure out how to pay for it. Middle-class Americans have no say in how to keep college costs down. And that’s the problem.

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So once again you have this dichotomy of wealthy and low income.

40% comes from the top 5% of wealth and about 55% get financial aid? 95% of kids attending Harvard are either wealthy or poor? What about the donut hole families? 5%?

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Their 35% share is hijacked here:

Hence the comparison to a caste system, because the cycle will keep repeating.

But not sufficiently successful.
This is not about deserving/not deserving - ultimately it’s the Nation’s loss if in this country, young talent is not developed to its full potential.

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The donut hole families used to be part of the 55% that got financial aid. But that was probably at about the same time that the sticker price of a Harvard education roughly equaled that of a Honda Accord; a $5000 grant was all it took to seal the deal for many middle-class families. Nowadays, that barely covers the cost of books and supplies at a small New England college. You want more middle-class kids to attend Harvard? Tell Harvard to cut out athletics. According to this Crimson article, they spend about $30 million a year on 1,200 student athletes:
Athletics Halts Capital Projects, Considers Further Budget Cuts | News | The Harvard Crimson (thecrimson.com)

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Which means, this country is not investing into its future, by sufficiently funding education for grades 13-16, but instead spending it elsewhere - and without being willing to generate the revenue to actually cover those expenses.

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To get financial aid at Harvard, a student can have parents with income up to $280,000 (family of 3, 1 in college, lives in MA, no assets), according to Net Price Calculator .

Not sure how many people agree with you that $280,000, which is the 94th percentile household income in the US (and 86th percentile in Boston, MA, and 79th percentile in San Jose, CA) is “poor”.

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I think we have established the income distribution in the U.S., how it compares with the distribution at the nation’s elite colleges - and clearly people, have different opinions/experiences at what income parents can afford those colleges without financial aid.

Shall we wrap this “sidebar” up - and circle back to the original topic:

What, if any, changes are necessary in college admission in general - and specifically in the assessment of students?

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DD, this is your thread. What exactly do you think of the article?

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If I have to put words into DD’s mouth , I’d say the correct metric is whatever gets my (grand) kids into the college of their choice :-). That at least would be my honest answer. The rest is just making the answer sound pretty.

I don’t mean for any level of academic preparation. Clearly the kids need to study to have the skills to survive in this society/economy. But I would like them not to get gamed out of the system in some kind of a political negotiation far above their head. Because that is what all these policies are — results of either explicit or implicit political negotiation.

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There will never be a system that guarantees a student will get into the college of their choice - as long as that choice is an elite school with tens of thousands of applicants vying for a relatively small number of seats. Even if all preferences were abandoned and they went to rack and stack system based on stats there wouldn’t be enough spots. Personally, I’d love it if they dropped legacy, donor and athletic preferences - it seems disingenuous to complain about giving a bump to students of color (who make up a small number of students at these schools) yet continue with these preferences.

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There’s a way to design those classes to encourage and demand the understanding of the concepts and ideas behind what is taught. A good place to start would be to stop giving out inflated grades. Why would any student, except for a few who are highly self-motivated, to exert themselves to gain a deeper understanding of the concepts and ideas, if s/he can get an A without much effort?

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Exams should be setup for high scores to be less than 75 on a 100. And all grades should be on a curve. That will fix the problem very quickly.

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It seems today that kids spend more time on ECs than academics/school. Just wrong IMHO. Some folks (like me) truly love scholarship and spent countless hours on schoolwork and more advanced topics, and we were rewarded by the tippy tops back then…

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I had dreaded the impeding SCOTUS decision, and I realize it’s the plaintiff’s talking, but did find it encouraging that other (race blind) admission models might be at hand to still yield the necessary results.

But mostly, I had been intrigued by the paragraphs questioning if selection based on “merit” is favoring generalists over experts (that’s me rephrasing it). We all know of the stress on students (and parents) chasing A’s in every possible subject, but until now I had taken for granted that at least in return it identified the “most worthy” (I know - I’m cringing too) candidates.

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There are many changes, but they will not happen.

I have some idea as to what is required in order to identify kids who are innovative, but it is not the sort that helps them excel in the much more standardized setting of th eclassroom.

I have the pleasure of volunteering for a scholarship foundations which is dedicated to finding students who are not the kids who fit the “standard” model of what colleges like to call “excellence in leadership”. In Chicagoland, we get around 2,500-2,700 nominees. To actually choose these students requires a large group interview, which allows us and the full time workers to assess how these kids interact with others, then individual interviews to see which will thrive in the conditions, and a final individual interview to see which of these will fit together with each other. The group interviews require about a dozen people for every group of 100 for three hours or so, on top of 4 or so full-time employees. So, if it were full time, that would be around 1 person per 20 applicants.

For the sort of assessment that would find the many many students who do not fit the standardized “academic excellence” that college choose, even those which do “holistic reviews”, you would need interviews on the format of the first two that I described.

I do not see that private colleges, even the wealthiest, would be willing to do this, especially since their main goal, of enrolling students who have a really good chance of being wealthy and/or powerful and/or famous is achievable through the present, cheaper, methods. For Princeton, which gets 30,000 applications, it would require 1,500 extra workers for three months or so.

The colleges which need to consider this are the public universities. Unfortunately, public universities are supported by the public, and the majority of taxpayers have the deeply ingrained belief that the only way to measure any type of intellectual excellence is through grades and tests, especially if these are standardized. It would be a very hard sell to get the people of, say, Michigan, to accept that these weird interviews are demonstrating that these kids with B+ averages will have intellectual achievements that exceed those of their classmates with A averages.

There is a deeply ingrained idea that college admission, especially admissions to public colleges, is a “reward” for hard work. So having a high GPA is considered to be the ultimate evidence of a kid being smart AND working hard. Interviews and similar one-time assessments can seem like ways to circumvent the requirement of hard work.

Truly innovative kids are outliers. There are far more kids, especially with financial support, who are able to achieve high grades and serious ECs through hard work than there are kids whose innovative thinking gets in the way of higher grades and national-level awards. With good financial support, some 10% all kids can hit a 3.9+ GPA and have a good set of EC including regional and state level awards, which would be 10% of most high schools serving affluent communities, and a higher percent for high schools which require entry tests. Truly innovative students are no more than 2% of the population, and many of these can also “play the game”, and still achieve good grades and awards.

As @neela1 mentioned - most parents want what’s best for their kids, not what is fair, or even what is best for society as a whole. That is part of being a good parent. So parents of kids who do well on tests in classrooms and standardized will fight against their kid having to compete with kids who have other talents which are valuable for academic settings, but who are doing worse on tests.

In today’s college admissions world, the vast majority of parents see college admissions as being a zero sum game, so any new assessment methodology will be seen as a way to reduce the admission rates of kids who well on the existing assessment methods. So they will be against it, and, since these re public colleges, number of supporter versus opposers is important.

I mean, once just has to peruse through CC and see how many parents are adamant that the absolutely only way to choose the “best” students is by sticking purely to GPA and test scores.

So, to perfectly honest, I do not believe that assessment will be changed. Private colleges have absolutely no incentive to change a method which works very well for them, just because “it’s good for society”, and public colleges will not change because any other type of assessment will be unpopular among parents of far more kids than will be helped by the assessments.

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You do have a point - despite all my idealism, my daughter directly benefited from standardized testing, a generously funded school district, parent’s ability/availability to involve themselves academically…, and from the fact that as an (allegedly poor) parent, I was able to set aside savings for the college and degree level of her choice at full pay.

But does that preclude me from wishing the same outcome could be achieved for any student, regardless of family economics?

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Those interviews you like favor the glib, articulate and extroverted, at the expense of the shy quiet introvert. There are tradeoffs in any system.

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I strongly believe similar outcomes are achievable by many without regard to family wealth. I speak from my own childhood experience from stack and rank systems that drew from a wide variety of economic strata. I can also speak from my kids’ experience that much of their current comfort, college outcomes etc are a result of early childhood decisions/choices/habits that have little to do with family wealth. A strong reading habit, and early parental interest/guidance in STEM together go a very very long way. You may say that the kids come from an educated family. Yes. Not necessarily a wealthy family growing up. Net worth remained not far from an annual income for long periods.

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