As somebody who grew up mostly outside the USA, I have found the obsession with sports, from elementary school to college, to be extremely strange, considering the fact that the USA is far from the most athletic of countries.
Forget about SLACs, “elite” private high schools are recruiting middle school athletes!
Of course, parents who want their kids to attend one of the “elite” private high schools are getting a head start on this insanity. From a quick perusal through the high school threads here on CC, it looks as though the admissions process for “elite” high schools is just as bad as that for “elite” colleges, and we’re talking about kids who are not 17 or 18, but 12 or 13.
If admissions to college damages kids, it would seem to me that the damage suffered by kids in the admissions process to “elite” high schools would be even worse.
well, no, it really isn’t like the Olympics-those athletes face constant evaluation in competition and know precisely where they rank at any given time starting at a very young age. So if you are not in the top 50 or whatever gymnasts in the country by age 14, you almost certainly will not be going to the Olympics. Their rankings are quantitative and public, so 99.99% are able to accurately forecast their likely outcome. Maybe number 24 will move up sufficiently in the rankings, but number 424 won’t, and they know that early on. So really they are competing with a very small subset of athletes and have a large body of data on their performance. I think very, very many high school students lack an understanding of how their performance compares to others outside their school.
No joke. We actually went through this when looking at a career/geographical move that could have been justified custodywise only by the kid’s getting into a particular local elite prep. I decided we were going to have strictly limited insanity there – some ISEE prep (nice test, btw), a visit (which she loved), a check on stats and odds. But the admissions director was doing all the hyperventilating I wasn’t, and was really upset that I wasn’t trying to game things with a full-court citywide elites admissions press. Like there was pindrop silence when I said that this was the only place she was applying to, and that if she didn’t get in we’d just stay where we were. She was trying hard and somewhat irritably to get me to get with the program. Kid got waitlisted, which was fortunate, because I’d already decided the job wasn’t really for me. If she’d gotten in, I’d have gone through with it just to give her that opportunity, but I’m not sorry it didn’t happen.
Because these private high schools want to send as many of their students to the “elite” colleges so they can become more “elite”. They reasoned, probably correctly, that if they adopt the same practice as these “elite” colleges, they enhance their own chances.
It may or may not be worse, depending on the high school, but it’s certainly a “chain reaction”.
Meritocracy. That’s a term that is bandied about a lot in threads about these topics. It seems disingenuous to claim that T20 admission should go to only those deemed the most deserving, but then suggest that those who are the most deserving are incapable of figuring out how to best research, apply and decide upon an appropriate list of universities.
I would argue that any student that can’t figure out their approximate chances of admission to a college they have dreamed about attending “forever” is no more deserving of admittance to that college than any other applicant. Either these so-called best-of-the-best applicants are bright enough to be deserving and they can figure this out, or maybe it really is worthwhile for colleges to consider the entire student/person during the admissions process, after all.
Yes the real percentage for unhooked students is lower than the overall percentage, but It might be more helpful if you refrained from just making up numbers.
This is a weirdly narrow view that assumes that all people are interested in and well-suited to stats games, and that this particular interest/ability should be the gatekeeper one for important things in life. It really has nothing at all to do with the talents and interests of a great many bright, talented people. But it is symptomatic of the admissions business as it exists now.
So you are saying that only 50 gymnasts spend significant hours training before the age of 14? Are you saying there aren’t significant numbers of people who spend significant amounts of time training/practicing/etc (huge investement to use your phrase) who never make the Olympics?
I am certain hundreds of thousands of little girls train hard before age 14, but likely they continue with other little girl activities too, like school-they don’t all get pulled out to homeschooling so they can practice more. So out of a million girls at age 3, maybe tens of thousands drop out each year as they realize that either they don’t like it or they aren’t good at it. Those who continue in adolescence either have a rational basis for doing so, or choose to do so despite knowing they will not be elite, and that is ok, too. In any event, they should know years before the event what their chances are.
Applicants often can’t predict accurately their chances of admission on the day they apply.
And today there are millions of kids getting a good start on their lives at state universities. Some do have debt no doubt. But average debt is about $37k from what I have seen. Lifetime earnings increase with a college degree is about $900k. Good investment even with the debt. We should be asking ourselves what it is about college degrees at this point that makes them not work the costs (assuming that is the case).
There are a lot of adults you don’t know who are looking to prey on you/take advantage of you. Its reality. Most people learn that long before college. I would ask the question why the kids you talk with didn’t learn that before college.
Now you are moving the goal posts. Seems to me you are trying too hard. My point is that people doing things they don’t like with a bigger goal in mind but not reaching that goal isn’t limited to the Ivy league (no other colleges look at ECs bwt?).
No discussions about stranger danger with your kids? Talk with them about advertising? Scam artists? Do you lock your doors to your house and vehicles?
As I read through this thread we seem to keep returning to kids (through the eyes of their parents) who feel like they were victimized by an unfair and corrupt system run by adults. These innocent kids have been denied access to critical info and “wasted” their time pursuing athletics or charitable causes they hated but erroneously thought would serve as golden tickets. The system is implied to be “fixed” and require “gaming”.
With that in mind what should we tell kids that some how managed to beat such a horribly sinister and corrupt system? Are they somehow complicit in the victimization of their peers? Is their acceptance a symbol of their somehow checking boxes better then the other kid, total luck, perhaps being better at masking the apparent rampant insincerity of their EC interests?
It somehow seems we inevitably arrive at diminishing those that make it through by making those that don’t into victims.
No sour grapes here as my kids were admitted to their reach schools. But my kids had the advantage of a parent who has been studying this game for a while and they entered this competition with their eyes wide open.
My point is that there is plenty of blame to go around. Starting with the college side, how many of you would have guessed that legacy can result in a 5x or better admission advantage? Before the SFFA lawsuit, I knew it helped, but it was only afterwards that the magnitude of the advantage for that hook and others at Harvard became clear. So yes, I do blame colleges for being intentionally vague for how admissions are done.
Likewise, a lot of students do a poor job of putting their lists together, focusing too much on reaches and not enough on safeties and match schools that they would be happy attending. Every year we see someone on CC with outstanding credentials going reach heavy and being shut out, or close to it. It is sad to see.
That’s the problem with admissions preferences, it’s far too easy to say “X isn’t that smart, he just got in because of his athletic prowess/legacy status/parent’s employment/URM status”.
Most adults are not looking to take advantage of teenagers. That’s particularly true of most of the instructional faculty and staff they’ll ever meet in college (we’re definitely not there because of the money), most of the teachers they’ve ever had, most of the people in healthcare, most people.
I do meet a fair number of people who will say cheerfully and unthinkingly that the world’s full of horrible selfish lazy people, that this is just how people are. I’ve been around for a long time and in a lot of kinds of places, and I cannot say I’ve found this to be true. I do find however that the people who talk most readily and enthusiastically about how horrible and lazy people are by nature tend to be people who were taught as kids that people are horrible, lazy, criminal, etc. A sad majority, if asked, see themselves as horrible and lazy even though they are demonstrably not, even though often they have some sort of core confusion and don’t really have a lot of their own going on, and have punted to doing what they were told they were supposed to do, even if they don’t think much of it. An even sadder minority are in fact horrible and/or lazy, and are committed to the idea that everyone must, deep down, be like them. Either way, my half-century on the planet does not support their conclusion.
Er…I can’t speak for others, but my posts have not run along these lines. What I hear above, though, is “I won fair and square, no fair to knock me down for it.” Bully for you? You won, hooray.
I would argue that most of the kids who do fight through and win are just as victimized, if not more, than the kids who don’t. They went through exactly the same abusive process, they lived with the same panics. Now some chunk of them are fixed on the idea that actually this was a mistake and that they’re frauds, but that they have to go on playing this game because the alternative is life in a gutter somewhere, plus now they’d have to deal with the shame of not making it through and making it in some acceptably prestigious career given where they’re now starting from.
There’s a reason why I stopped dating Ivy guys, and they came through in a time when all this was much less intense. I don’t even want to think about what it’s like now.
I really fail to see why this sort of scheming and gaming should be necessary for a 16-year-old to do. If you’re a 48-year-old trying not to be poor in old age, okay. Maybe. But this? For children? No, I don’t see a good reason for this.
I think that if we’ve set up a society in which this is important for kids to do, we’ve done a bad job of setting things up.