Probably so, but will never happen in my school district with the current political climate.
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Perhaps, but parental politics can play a big role. In our local school, parents would so often lobby the school system to have their kids included in the Gifted/Talented program that almost 1/3 of D22’s entire grade was in the program at one point back in the day. It seems to be a real status marker for affluent families to be able to say that their kids are in GT - I’ve seen more than a few parents casually work that fact into a conversation at some point.
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At our large public school in Texas, I think your characterization is pretty accurate - there’s essentially one school for the college-bound, and another school for the non-college-bound. And within the college-bound school, there’s a smaller cohort of top students that are on track for AP classes and high honors; despite having 600+ kids in the overall class, D22 took most of her courses with some combination of the same 20-25 kids. The quality of teachers is inconsistent across all groups - one of the AP teachers is famously awful - but I have observed that the worst teachers (often athletic coaches) are generally concentrated in the non-college-bound courses.
Mine either.
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I remember this so well. At our public school they bragged that 25% were “gifted.” sorry, no way. Well prepared, perhaps, but not truly gifted. It waters down the designation. One of the reasons we switched to private was this jockeying for “gifted” spots which amounted to simply a one hour pull-out per week. And non pull-out kids coming home saying “I’m not smart” because so many kids were bragging about being “gifted.” Yuck.
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I’d say the same about the frequent claim that the majority who apply to “elite” colleges are academically “qualified”.
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Not sure about that, it would matter what your definition of majority is. MIT’s stats suggest that about half of their applicants have over 750 on math and 34 on ACT Math. Brown’s admitted class has 33% valedictorians and salutatorians, so they easily had over 50% of vals and sals as applicants. The number of AP/honors courses at UCLA and Berkeley for admits was around 9 taken during 10th to 12th grades.
Yes it’s different colleges, but if you consider scores, gpa, rigor, the three components of academic qualification, I think the majority are qualified.
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I think MIT is one of the few “elite” colleges whose core requirements deter many “underqualified” students from applying. Most other “elite” colleges have much lower bars for both graduation and thus application. Personally, I also don’t think being valedictorians and salutatorians have much meaning beyond their own high schools (or maybe even within their HSs). The number of APs isn’t meaningful either by itself, unless these applicants also have consistently high AP scores, especially on a few core AP courses.
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They’re not applying with fluff APs, they have most of the core, - APUSH, APCalc, APLit, AP in a science, AP in f/l, APLang. If you don’t include vals and sals, that actually helps my argument you can include more of the class as academically qualified.
It helps to clearly define what “academically qualified” means. At HYPSM… type colleges failing out is almost unheard of. In the Harvard senior survey, 99.6% of students reported >= 3.0 GPA and 92.5% reported >= 3.5 GPA. They aren’t just squeaking by. The overwhelming majority of students at Harvard seem to be A/A- students. One could make a similar type of statement for most “elite” colleges that makes claims about the majority of applicants being “academically qualified”. If we define “academically qualified” as capable of graduating with at least a 3.0 GPA in the major/field listed on application, then I’d expect the majority of applicants meet this criteria.
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Before it was shut down a few years ago, more than 20% of the residents of MIT’s Senior House failed to graduate, even with MIT’s relatively higher minimum academic standard for admissions. We just wouldn’t know about such failures at many other schools without MIT’s more stringent core requirements, would we? If a student can graduate taking only a few, if any, rigorous courses, is graduation at such colleges a good benchmark? Grades are even less reliable indicators with the rampant grade inflations we’re seeing nearly everywhere. What does a passing grade (in many of these colleges where a passing grade is basically a B or 3.0) in a non-rigorous course even mean?
Across all students, MIT’s graduation rate is 96%. This does not mean 4% of students at MIT fail out. I expect the overwhelming majority of these 4% had other reasons for not graduating, such as pursuing a startup/job/opportunity, not being able to afford cost, wanting to take a break for family/medical/psychological issues, wanting to transfer to a different school, etc. I expect a similar statement could be made about Senior House.
The report at https://studentlife.mit.edu/sites/default/files/FSILG%20Spring%202017%20Grade%20Report.pdf shows MIT GPA by FSILG house in 2017. The lowest average GPA house was the Fraternity Nu Delta with 4.06. It the most recent 2020 report, the average GPA across all fraternity and sorority houses was 4.74 . Again there is nothing to suggest MIT’s higher minimum standards are leading to lots of kids failing out or getting low grades
There is nothing to suggest failures are common at MIT or other HYPSM… type colleges with more stringent core requirements. Instead all available information suggests students are academically successful in such requirements.
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Taking five years to graduate at MIT is emphatically NOT flunking out- it is extremely easy (if you have the chops) to do the “five years with both a BS and an MS” program, which in most cases chops a year of tuition off the cost of getting a Master’s degree.
That 96% is the 8 year graduation rate for class of 2016 (what IPEDs currently shows): https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/institutionprofile.aspx?unitId=166683
This may be better as a separate topic, but these ‘submatriculation’ programs have additional costs that aren’t often discussed. In order to do this, the student begins taking some of the graduate level courses as a junior. These students are then classified as graduate students in their senior year which means their undergrad financial aid awards disappear. So, the student is a graduate student for years 4 and 5.
Whether this amounts to any savings will be highly specific to one’s financial situation.
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High failure rate to graduate is one of reasons MIT itself used to shut down the Senior House. The reason I cited it is to illustrate that even at a school like MIT, there were some who fail (most of them didn’t quit because of entrepreneurship). At other schools where there are greater academic disparities, there’re much higher proportion of under-qualified students than at MIT. We just don’t know about them because they aren’t required to take more rigorous courses.
It means that the student has demonstrated the requisite level of competency according to the requirements of the course.
As noted in my earlier post, MIT has 96% graduation rate with the few students earning grades below B. How do you know that the kids in the Senior House who didn’t graduate on time were failing out rather than “pursuing a startup/job/opportunity, not being able to afford cost, wanting to take a break for family/medical/psychological issues, wanting to transfer to a different school, etc.”? There are many categories I listed besides just entrepreneurship. For example kids in Senior House might be more likely than average to need to take a break for family/medical/psychological issues, have financial issues with paying for college, want to transfer to a different school that is a better fit, etc. As a general rule, failing to graduate on time rarely means failing out academically at HYPSM… type colleges.
The colleges I see mentioned on the forum as having a rigorous core most often on the forum are Chicago and Columbia. Both had a 96% graduation rate in the latest IPEDS, like MIT. Very few students fail to graduate at any of these colleges. I expect extremely few of the ~4% who fail to graduate within 6 years were failing out academically. Brown is the college that I see most often referenced on the forums as having a non-rigorous core. IPEDS shows a 95% grad rate – less than MIT, Chicago, and Columbia. I don’t see any evidence of a rigorous core leading to students failing out at HYPSM… type colleges.
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Time to get back on topic? (or perhaps this thread has run its course)
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Or I’d suggest adding MIT to the Ivy League. 
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