<p>Did anyone else find the anti-semitism and social engineering in the cited article a bit creepy? And was(is) it justified to create a better society or merely to perpetuate Harvard's stanidng among the power elite? </p>
<p>However there is little doubt that in society, personal traits often trump intelligence in one's climb up the career/social ladder. I am certain that this is the primary reason that the elite colleges mandate the personal interview. Mumblers with big ears need not apply.</p>
<p>It is that social engineering that is disturbing to me. I am trying to do research on admissions and its effects. And I am trying to see if I can quantify to what extent the non-academic characteristics pick up leadership beyond "So and so has well-connected parents." I also want to know how it affects the choices students make when they select a college for good or ill.</p>
<p>But my work is very preliminary and it's a long way from being a paper.</p>
<p>That could be very interesting research. I suppose extracting data from the colleges could be quite a challenge. An even further challenge would be to carry out such a research in a way that is free -- and perceived to be free -- of ideological biases.</p>
<p>Do you distinguish between "social engineering" and "brand management"?</p>
<p>I think there is the misconception that you can "push" kids, make them "work hard" to "get good grades," and voila you have an academic superstar that Harvard will take. No. The top academic superstars are born that way. They are driven by themselves, not by their parents. They life of the mind (as they say at Chicago) does not care about grades, either. It is the "weenies" (as we used to call them disparagingly in college in the old days) who slaved for grades. They are not the academic superstars.</p>
<p>Parents absolutely can push kids to make them work harder and get good grades. The students with the best grades are not necessarily the "best" or the brightest. They often are the ones who are more conscientious, they cross all the ts, dot all the Is, and never stray from the path. Whereas often the truly gifted are those who devote themselves passionately to a pursuit, but can't muster the same enthusaism for the tedious and the mundane or for subjects that don't interest them. They're the ones who start companies, invent things, write best selling novels. There are academic superstars who are born that way, brilliant and passionate about learning, they become research scientists, historians, professors, they very likely do get top grades and top scores because they have a natural gift. but i would bet that more students are accepted to the Ivies who are not naturally gifted academicians but are privaleged -- moneyed or legacy, or both. It is absolutely true that we have created and perpetuate the existence of an elite society. the best schools, the highest paying jobs, seats on boards, and then their kids are invited into the inner circle.</p>
<p>The two people I know who went on to make 100s of millions of dollars of personal wealth: one went to DePauw and one went to Princippessa. I went to Yale, my boss went to Colgate. The head of our company went to UCLA. We are all doing fine but do not have the personal wealth of the first two I mentioned. So be it.
To get into a top university you have to be great at every subject. In real life, you don't. A great writer may not have taken AP Calc - no Ivy league school there. Steven Jobs went to Reed, a good school but not as hard to get into as HYP. Somehow I don't think he's "dumber" than those who went to HYP! Once you reach a certain level of grades and SATs, it's a lottery at the top Ivies.
As long as you get a good education, your life is what you make of it. No student should feel that if s/he didn't get into an Ivy and had to go to - God forbid - a school like Michigan - that there will be any real difference in their futures. We do our kids a disservice if we let them think that. I have two cousins - the one who went to Michigan became the President of a well known company. His brother who went to Princeton became a school teacher. They both consider themselves successful because they are both doing what they wanted to do.
By the way, to the poster above whose child did not get in early to NYU, I am sure he will go somewhere excellent. My D is going to NYU (she did get in ewearly) and her stats are higher than the student above who was rejected. NYU has such a huge applicant pool, being such a large school, that my belief is that it is very stats driven - just what I have observed.</p>
<p>congrats to your daughter on NYU. We know 2 people who got in to NYU ED with considerably lower stats than my S. One to Tisch though, and the other has a parent that went there. So it's stats, yes, but other things factor in, too.</p>
<p>Mystified - yes, there are cetainly other factors that go into admissions. I think your S was hurt by his GPA. Hopefully at his other choices they will look at his outstanding other credentials.How many award winning cartoonists apply?</p>
<p>A certain good law schools, they used to joke: The A students become professors, the B students become judges and the C students make money. Of course, that was before grade inflation.</p>
<p>They said the same about med students.
Mystified expressed it so well. MIT application asks teachers if this is bright student because works hard and conscientiously, or naturally brilliant? I think both can be successful. I think its hard to judge what a 17-year-old has the potential of becoming. Some kids may appear shy and nerdy because they are top few in a HS, but in college, they find many people with similar intellects and are able to enjoy the similarity and diversity of ideas. People share their sense of fun.
I certainly hope that colleges don't all look for that well-rounded applicant, but seek some lop-sidedness, eccentric kid, with blue or rasberry hair.</p>
<p>Of course we know that some professors have become wealthy, and many C students have not.</p>
<p>Then there's that Harvard drop out ...</p>
<p>Seriously, when HYPS do brand management, wealth is only one dimension of leadership. The potential to be a supreme court justice, a chairman of the Fed, a president or governor or senator, a Nobel Prize winning scientist, etc. are also considered.</p>
<p>I think that the most successful students ultimately are those who work hard and are extremely bright. In high school, because the academic standards aren't that high, many hard working studnets can achieve As as students that are very bright but not studious. Eventually, though, to really attain excellence as a prof or in another field, you need to be dedicated to what you do-because everyone is bright.</p>
<p>Doesn't it bother people that only Harvard College uses this "leadership" criterion? The faculty, the grad school, and the professional schools mostly use the "best student/professor" criterion -- publication, grades, pure academic merit. The exceptions are possibly law school and the MBA program. Yet the faculty and alums from the grad programs probably have more responsibility for Harvard's worldwide rep than those from the undergrad college.</p>
<p>Even the old Harvard mostly used scholastic criteria till the 1920s when the anti-Jewish "leadership" policies started to kick in. From the early 1960s, HYP mostly started to use best student rules to get the top half of their classes again.</p>
<p>I am claiming that there is no proof aside from raw assertion that their leadership rules select many successful individuals who don't come from one of the two categories a) people who would have had a reasonable chance being selected by a school practicing a "Best student" rule a la Chicago or Caltech or b) people with such strong political/financial ties to the elite that school probably played a minor role in their success (cf. Kennedy, Bush, Gore).</p>
<p>Or to take a different example: Until a few decades ago, Stanford was not considered to be nearly in the same league as HYP. Its endowment was much lower than the top ten schools'. Its rise has coincided with the growth of California's wealth and particularly with the rise of Silicon Valley and donations from Stanford's new wealthy alums. Unsurprisingly, the Silicon Valley side of Stanford was mostly founded by those nerdy engineering types who mostly did well in high school on SATs and IQ tests.</p>
<p>As a professor at a first rate school that is constantly worrying about what direction to turn, I can see no clear evidence that well-roundedness counts except when the well-rounded are so close on scholastic grounds that the score/grade differences are mostly trivial. What may differ in college is their interest in studying hard vs. starting a business/writing a novel. But their raw ability is comparable to the nerds. Abandoning purely meritocratic criteria has little payoff except to please local wealthy elites whose giving is often dependent on enough local children getting in.</p>
<p>There is one upside to this foolishness in my view. It means that there are many brilliant students who are turned down by elite schools who end up at very strong smaller colleges or state schools, which then have a chance to raise their reputations. But it's still unfair to the rejected students.</p>
<p>I understand the general direction of your argument.</p>
<p>I do want to correct an incorrect impression some people may have, though, that Harvard does not collect brilliant people. In fact, at the level of clear academic superstars, Harvard is pretty dominant, "mumblers with big ears" (as someone previously posted) or not.</p>
<p>For example, if you look at the Putnam, the most prestigious mathematics contest at the college level, Harvard ranks in the top 5 more often than either Caltech or Chicago (with Princeton making a very good showing as well); only MIT competes with Harvard at that level of consistent winnings.</p>
<p>Yes, when it comes to your run-of-the-mill 1500 SAT (2300 now?) A-average top 5% applicant, which are frankly a dime a dozen, Harvard will look for other qualities ("well-roundedness" is probably not one of them), and often the decisions will appear -- even be -- unjustified, that being the nature of the hunt. But at the level of the truly brilliant, the evidence is that Harvard pursues the applicants, and Harvard usually gets them.</p>
<p>A look at this list suggests the schools hoping for political leaders might want to check their methods, an eyeball only survey suggests that Stanford is the most represented undergrad school, but the dominate schools are the state universities:</p>
<p>Also there is a difference between political celebrities and political clout or leadership. The WSJ recently asserted that particularly Harvard's influence has declined dramatically in the past 30 years, while Chicago, Stanford, and others and their respective students, have been much more politically and socially influential. Perhaps some definition of political and social leadership is in order, and I will bet there are many at HYP that are entirely engrossed in academics.</p>
<p>I'm not sure what the "best student" criteria are either. Chicago for one does one of the best jobs of evaluating beyond the "numbers" of any school. It seems to , however, look for students who are primarily drawn to the love of learning (not saying other schools don't have those students) and the joy of playing with ideas foremost over other considerations. If that is what is meant by "best student," then perhaps that characterization of the admissions goal is accurate, whether or not any of the colleges succeed in their goal is another matter.</p>
<p>I agree with Not Quite Old. Let's drop the "leadership" criterion entirely. It's either a popularity proxy or racial and weath social engineering. As if they could truely measure leadership potential! Maybe points for being good looking would be a substitute.</p>
<p>As for admitting students who spend the time on music, sports, and community service to the detriment of better students, I don't believe for a second that including the former improves the education of the latter in an important way. Such diversity is readily available to them in high school, in the neighborhood, in the media. An physics major's education does not benefit from having a doofus jock down the hall. </p>
<p>True diversity of background and perspective does add to the education of all. That might justify the elites admitting some poor people, foreigners, etc., but isn't really accomplished by admitting a Spanish-surnamed prep-school kid.</p>
No, but speaking as the mother of one Physics major, another potential Physics major and the wife of a Math major, it might just help them to develop more social qualities! Not intending to bash the physical sciences types (clearly, I love them) but I can't imagine living in a world populated exclusively by them. Exposure to other personality types and interests enriches all of us, in my opinion.</p>
<p>While I do not agree with everything in that WSJ article you referred to -- the sweeping simplications make for a good read, but reality I think is more complex -- Chicago is definitely an 800 pound gorilla in the realm of ideas, no question about that.</p>
<p>I cannot reproduce your eyeball count, however, of the undergraduate schools of the senators (I used the "search" cability on Acrobat). This is what I get (again, following your count, looking at undergraduate pedigree only):</p>
<p>"it might just help them to develop more social qualities! Not intending to bash the physical sciences types (clearly, I love them) but I can't imagine living in a world populated exclusively by them"</p>
<p>Hence the concept of a university as opposed to the traditional institute of technology (MIT, but not CalTech, sees this point). Your physics majors benefit from interacting with arts and social science types. Is it worth it to add jocks and "leaders", as such?</p>