<p>I guess you never heard of places like Breck or Blake in Minneapolis, Chicago Latin School, Greenhill in Dallas, and quite a few of their brethren around the country? </p>
<p>You obviously don’t understand that there are three seasons for sports, most kids in the school play on a team and so forth. </p>
<p>Never mind, though. I was just using one example of how the scales are tilted. You don’t have to believe it. You can go on believing that Ivies take 40+ percent of their students from private schools like Exeter because those students are academically superior. </p>
<p>But here’s spme data to chew on. from 2007 to 2009, Philips Exeter sent an average of 76 kids per year to ivies, while having about 22 NM finalists per year. My D’s HS averaged more NM finalists per year (even being in MA, which has the highest cutoff in the country. Prep schools use permanent residence address if I recall, so an even comparison would have a public school with several times as many NM finalists). Yet this public school only sent about 30 kids to ivies. </p>
<p>I can anticipate your response yada yada, but the facts speak for themselves.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that. In fact, I specifically said that their concentration of academic talent is better than the average public, but not so extreme as to justify the number of admits that they get. In fact, I was shocked when I found out that up to 40 get in Harvard. For comparison, the public magnet that I went to had 4–despite the fact that we had the highest performance in the country in the US math team tryouts (with 6 in the top 100 alone) my senior year with similar performance in science and even humanities competitions. We had 70-something NM finalists. In short, I get what you are saying in general. </p>
<p>Recruitment for weird sports may play a role, but a bigger role is the fact that prep schools like Exeter have a long-standing relationship between them and top ivies, a relationship that doesn’t exist for randomn prep schools in the midwest (or probably California).
I am familiar with Chicago Latin school, and I don’t think it has any special pull in the admissions world, especially for east coast schools. As you are from massachusetts, i think you are making a big logical leap here in saying that they are feeder schools like East Coast prep schools. </p>
<p>I’m familiar with this area, but if there is any special advantage to going to Chicago Latin, people in Chicago aren’t aware of it. It’s a good place to go if you actually live in the city, where the public schools generally suck. Wealthy people in the suburbs don’t send their kids there, because there are publics which are even better respected educationally and no one thinks that there is any special admissions advantage. My gut feeling is that private schools in the midwest don’t have that type of pull. I don’t know about those two Minnesota schools, but I think my friend went to one of them and I think he was the only one to get in from his class. Maybe he went to a lesser-known one, though. I’m not sure.</p>
<p>In any case, I think you are making a big logical leap to make these blanket statements about the advantages of wealth, unless you expect that kids to move to the northeast for prep school. There are better ways to get at the problem. Maybe they should limit the # of recruits for these weird sports and get the rest from people that have shown athleticism in other sports. This would work for crew, which doesn’t involve a lot of skill. As for prep school advantages, maybe they should stop taking 40 people from Exeter, instead of saying all people above a certain income should have a tougher time getting into schools. Of course, I suspect that HYP doesn’t really care that much about the whole socioeconomic issue.</p>
<p>That’s wrong. Admission officers themselves say that there are more qualified applicants than seats and people worthy of admission get rejected.</p>
<p>I postulate that reactions to the article depend on the reader’s view of equality. Is ethical equality primarily concerned with equal opportunity or with equal outcomes? The majority of Americans conceptualize equality in terms of opportunity: oppressed groups like minorities are treated equally so long as the system is meritocratic and they, if they work really hard, can succeed with determination. </p>
<p>The dominant mode of thinking (equal opportunity) of course, advantages the dominant class since they have greater opportunities to begin with. In politics, for example, we believe in “liberty and justice for all” because all theoretically have an equal opportunity to vouch for their interests. However, in practice, women, the poor, and minorities are often underrepresented in political decisionmaking due to a lack of political and economic capital. In other words, equal opportunity tends to advantage dominant groups (i.e. white anglosaxon protestant upper class males). Hence, many who are critical of “the system” believe that equal outcomes are a preferable method of viewing equality. In this example, historically oppressed groups may have the opportunity to achieve equally to dominant groups, but only if they jump through a series of rather difficult hoops that are relatively easy for dominant groups. The article mentions many of these hoops: SAT scores, test dates, expensive extracurriculars, cost of early decision, etc. In other words, this view would say “yes there are indeed some minorities/women/poor people who were accepted, but as a whole their admission was discouraged due to unjust practices”. </p>
<p>It may be the case that the article is overreacting to the college system, but those who call him a quack are also equally overreacting in the opposite direction. He just holds a different way of viewing equality than the majority on this site do - one it wouldn’t hurt to consider.</p>
<p>There is no doubt that this article has an element of truth to it. Nothing is straightfoward in the college admissions process. My daughter found out that she had better, much better SAT scores than some recent presidents and vice-presidents, Bush and Gore to be specific, (yes, they are made public) I seriously doubt that she will get in to Yale or Harvard. They were connected, she is not. Does she have a shot? Yes, maybe a one in ten shot. Face it, there is no such thing as a level playing field. One increases their odds by taking SAT prep courses, piano lessons, dance, etc etc. This takes money. On the other hand, with some effort, the less wealthy can also rise above their circumstances, and get into Harvard or whereever. It just might be a little harder, both doing it and paying for it. Where I think it is easy to get a raw deal is if your in the middle.</p>
<p>“and athletes who are, contrary to popular belief, not all poor ghetto kids adept at football and basketball, but are primarily wealthy white kids who are adept at lacrosse, rugby, crew and polo.”</p>
<p>So my chance at Yale is 50/50 considering I’m a recognized Rugby player living in a poor area? SCORE!</p>
<p>Curiously, your kid does NOT increase her chances by “taking … piano lessons, dance, etc etc.” </p>
<p>Some ECs are “golden”. Some are not. Some will even work against you if they signal things that are not sought by the elite college as they form their entering class. For example, there is much suggestive evidence that ECs such as orchestral music (i.e. certain instruments found in orchestras as opposed to marching bands) are not a plus factor and may even be a negative. Some (not I, of course ) even think this is deliberate on the part of some elite colleges in order to minimize the number of asian kids without resorting to the way they dealt with Jewish students until the 1960s - with quotas and a distancing from high schools that had a lot of jewish students. Not that they would do anything remotely like that today…but it it curious to compare the asian enrollment at Berkeley to HYP.</p>
Here’s what I don’t get. In what way are these middle and lower class students “exceptional?” The article claims that they get lower SAT scores because of finances, and that their ECs are inferior because of finances. We also hear that their schools are inferior because of finances. So how, exactly, would a college know that such a student is exceptional?</p>
<p>My view is that none of this is a scam–it’s just the business of running a top private university that trades on academic excellence and prestige. A certain percentage of admits are reserved for reasons of self-preservation of the college: developmental admits, legacy admits, and athletic recruitment are all needed to keep alumni giving money (and to make it more likely that the alumni will be able to give money). The rest of the admits really are exceptional. Unfortunately, as many have noted, access to resources makes it more likely that a person who has the potential to be exceptional will be able to demonstrate it. A certain number of slots are given to people–URMs–who are exceptional in context, but perhaps not when compared to non-URMs.</p>
<p>There simply is no method for identifying people who *might *be exceptional if given better resources.</p>
<p>What is true is that there is no upside for elite colleges to make more than a token effort to do this. One only need look at what happened at Yale in the 1960s under Inky Clark to see both the impact of such changes as well as the pushback from the then existing constituents. </p>
<p>Your comments about “self-preservation of the college” are indeed ironic in light of what’s happened since the 1960s, when a revolution took place in admissions in HYP. Back then, the establishment used the same justification for the anti-meritocratic policies then in existence. What happened? these same places increased their endowments many fold and rose in stature globally when they started admitting “less desirable” middle class, public school and jewish students. </p>
<p>newmassdad, what is the method for identifying individual people who might be exceptional, but who do not have high SATs or impressive achievements in ECs? Grades? I really don’t know what the method might be.</p>
<p>I understand how finances might limit one’s EC’s, but I don’t get why it should impact grades/SATs once you are at least middle class, particularly if you are comparing them to wealthier people at the same school. I mean, do you need to be rich to solve basic algebra problems for the SAT? And the verbal is best prepared for with a library card, or if you want to do ‘prep’, if you just check out a Princeton Review book at the library you can get everything you need. </p>
<p>And one argument that I’ve heard before, that some people might not know that there is a point to studying, is just absurd. If you don’t know that, then maybe HYP is not the most logical next step. </p>
<p>I went to a school with Westinghouse winners and people on the US math, physics, and computer olympics team. They were all middle class. If you aren’t at the top talent-wise, it’s basically impossible to get there with money even if you were just a notch below them. However, some of them couldn’t pay for the elite schools they got in; that is a bigger issue. </p>
<p>The problem is that the SATI/IIs are extraordinarily easy. If you give people 100 point boosts or something then being middle class, what happens to the people who have more money but who get perfect scores? You can’t win in that scenario.</p>
<p>There are a number of approaches one could use. For instance, since we know that SAT scores are highly correlated with family income, we could look for performance (i.e. scores) that exceed the score predicted from family income. We know that part time jobs adversely affect academic performance. We also know that some SES kids work in order to help out their family. We could identify and evaluate these kids. And so forth. </p>
<p>Finally, one could look at what Julian Stanley did in his Study of Exceptional Talent, where he used the SAT on kids under 12 years old as a screen to identify mathematically precocious youth. There are limitations to this approach that are way beyond the scope of this discussion, but his pioneering work would be thought provoking to anyone seriously interested in finding talent “in the rough”, as Dr. Stanley did. </p>
<p>Perhaps elite colleges do this or something similar already. But independent published research shows that, holding HS grades and test scores constant, there is NO advantage for kids coming from lower income families, so I doubt any weight is given to these factors.</p>
<p>That would not be valid. Correlations describe trends in populations, not the potential of any given individual within the population. And all populations of reasonable size contain outliers. It cannot be concluded from an overall population correlation that any specific outlier “would have been” an even greater outlier had the correlating factor (this case lack of money) not existed. You just don’t know.</p>
<p>In other words, the correlation between wealth and SAT scores suggests (but does not prove) that providing more money to poor people will raise the overall or average SAT scores for that group, but it tells you nothing about what will happen to any given individual within that population</p>
<p>The problem with associated wealth with SAT scores is that there are a number of confounding variables. For instance, I imagine wealth may correspond with how advanced the student may be. If you have two students, one wealthy and one middle class, with the same class lists, maybe the SAT difference goes away. So it would be inappropriate to give one student an advantage in that case. </p>
<p>I see this in practice sometimes. If a student is taking an SATII in a class where they haven’t taken an AP class, then I don’t expect the same score. However, I think it’s ridiculous that if 2 students have taken the same class in the same high school, that one would say that the wealthy person had an advantage on the SATII. This assumes the time spent on part-time jobs doesn’t exceed the time the other person spent on EC’s. </p>
<p>And I’ve heard this argument here. That if you gave one kid cash then they magically would start doing better. It doesn’t work that way.</p>
<p>College alum says “The problem with associated wealth with SAT scores is that there are a number of confounding variables”</p>
<p>No. That’s why we do studies. Studies help factor out the confounding variables. The results from studies are significant because they demonstrate that SAT scores are highly related to wealth after confounding variables are considered. </p>
<p>Coureur says “Correlations describe trends in populations, not the potential of any given individual within the population…In other words, the correlation between wealth and SAT scores suggests (but does not prove) that providing more money to poor people will raise the overall or average SAT scores for that group, but it tells you nothing about what will happen to any given individual within that population”</p>
<p>This answer presumes a different argument is being made by the author of the article. The authors of the article does not pose the solution “provide more money to poor kids”. Rather, s/he simply describes the world - that there is a bias towards the wealthy. A lack of causation between wealth and SAT scores, does not refute that the large preponderance of high SAT scores among the wealthy creates a system biased towards them.</p>
<p>“Except that exceptionality, as most parents can attest, doesn’t come cheap. Athletes require coaching and often traveling teams; musicians require lessons and instruments; scientists require labs and internships; poets require classes and opportunities for publication.” </p>
<p>and so why is this news to the middle class? If you didn’t know this you really are at a disadvantage. Further, there are a lot of “middle class” families taking vacations and driving in new model cars. I suggest they sell the car and buy some lessons for their kid if they want more opportunities at top colleges down the road. </p>
<p>To me this article points out that the middle class doesn’t value education more than their car or a vacation.</p>
) even think this is deliberate on the part of some elite colleges in order to minimize the number of asian kids without resorting to the way they dealt with Jewish students until the 1960s - with quotas and a distancing from high schools that had a lot of jewish students. Not that they would do anything remotely like that today…but it it curious to compare the asian enrollment at Berkeley to HYP.</p>