Ah, but not all opinions are created equal, @theloniusmonk.
@ucbalumnus is astute.
Among kids who can get in to elite privates and who’s families have both the desire and means to donate millions of dollars, stuff like diversity does seem to matter. A pitch by colleges to fund fin aid for poor deserving (underrepresented) kids seems to attract more donors than a pitch to establish more merit scholarships (that would go disproportionately to the upper-middle-class/rich).
@ucbalumnus I don’t completely agree with your assessment:
“Admission = enough right
Rejection or waitlist = not enough right”
I think that yes, “not enough right” would understandably result in a rejection or waitlist.
However, with the number of qualified candidates applying to these highly selective schools I posit that this formula is also valid.
If that is true, then yes Admissions has to decide which “enough right” kids to accept and clearly they are not picking them at random so there is some reason they picked Enough Right Kid A over Enough Right Kid B. But it becomes unknowable to applicants why one kid with “enough right” was chosen over another kid with “enough right”.
In this case, the college redefines “enough right” to a higher standard.
Yes, but thelonius was talking about what kids prefer, and you’re talking about what a very small subset* of parents prefer.
“A pitch by colleges to fund fin aid for poor deserving (underrepresented) kids seems to attract more donors than a pitch to establish more merit scholarships (that would go disproportionately to the upper-middle-class/rich).”
There’s a market for both. Plenty of schools have established/expanded competitive merit relatively recently to attract high-end kids that will burnish the rep of the schools.
Robertson Scholars at Duke, Hesburgh Scholars at ND, Woodruff Scholars at Emory, Jefferson Scholars at UVA. College these days love to tout all of the Rhodes, Marshalls and Fulbrights they produce.
Even though most students may not care about diversity per se, they may want to have enough of their own kind at the school. So if a school wants to be attractive to students from high, middle, and low income families, it may want to have enough of each to be attractive to future applicants from all such families.
ucbalumnus, I think that you are right that the colleges redefine “enough right” if they have too many students that fit into that category. However, I am skeptical that the redefinition of “enough right” involves adjustments on the academic accomplishment/ability scale. It is more likely to hinge on other factors.
Stanford was pretty annoying in my view, when they sent out letters to students that S deferred SCEA saying that they probably wanted to see the first semester, senior-year grades–of students with 4.0 UW GPAs in a challenging mix of AP and post-AP college courses already completed by that point. My thought as a parent was, “Why? It’s just going to be more of the same.” And it was. So the letter conveyed no real information. This affected more than one local student. On reflection, it’s pretty clear that they just sent out a generic letter, even though the number of deferred SCEA applicants was small enough that they might have done better.
Yes, “enough right” is whatever the college wants it to be.
The problem with the “enough right” framing is that it assumes that there is something wrong with the applicants who didn’t get accepted – and that does not work in a situation where there are more well qualified applicants than spaces.
It really is the height of conceit for anyone to think that they (or their kid) is entitled to admissions in this environment. The acceptance process obviously is one of first screening applicants to figure out which have “enough right” – and then selecting among that narrowed pool based on which have the most appeal to the decision makers --with “appeal” being very broadly defined to include both objective and subjective criteria. And that criteria may vary over time within the same institution, as their needs shift depending on who they have already admitted.
“Enough” isn’t good enough in this context – the ones who are accepted will have enough plus.
And I honestly think that is why there are so much disappointment this time of year – and at the same time some kids reaping in the admissions – because it is the ones who bring more than “enough” to the table who get selected.
It isn’t even enough plus. It really is what ever the particular set of admissions officers that read your folder think is that plus. Sometimes it’s an oboe, sometimes it’s Ultimate Frisbee, sometimes it’s writing about ordinary achievements in a way that catches someone’s attention because it’s funny or clever. You may be plus at Yale, but not at Princeton. Or my kid who seemed a more obvious fit for MIT got turned down there, but accepted to Harvard.
Yes, there isn’t just one universal formula for what colleges want. Different colleges emphasize different criteria to different degrees, particularly in regards to personal qualities and institutional needs.
Colleges also have different applicant pools, which can relate to what types of students are favored. For example, MIT vs Harvard was mentioned in the post above. I expect the Harvard admission pool has a smaller portion of top STEM kids than MIT due to self selection and Harvard generally being weaker in engineering fields. In recent years, Harvard has been trying to expand their engineering program and related STEM fields, so it’s not surprising to me that with a smaller supply of top STEM kids in their admission pool, Harvard would favor those students to a greater extent than MIT does.
I don’t question the survey cited by theloniusmonk that says diversity is not among the top considerations in choosing a college for most students. It’s also probably not a top concern for many, perhaps even most, colleges. But we’re not talking about all students and all colleges here, we’re talking about selective-to-highly selective colleges. They do genuinely care about diversity which they view (rightly in my opinion) as an invaluable component of the 4-year residential college experience they give their students. And although it’s a very small sample, I can say with certainty that diversity was hugely important to both of my daughters in their college choices. They wanted to meet, interact with, and get to know people from different parts of the country and different parts of the world who had different life experiences from their own. They both did that, and their college experiences were much richer for it. It’s perhaps something of a luxury good; for most students, cost, educational quality, and job prospects upon graduation are of paramount importance. But for highly qualified students who can choose among a range of excellent schools, and perhaps especially for those less constrained by financial considerations, it can be pretty important. But I’m not surprised it doesn’t show up in a survey of all college students.
Lehigh draws well over half its student body from Pennsylvania and New Jersey—in fact, more from New Jersey (341 newly enrolled freshmen in 2014) than Pennsylvania (296). Another big chunk come from New York (184). Those three states accounted for about 72% of Lehigh’s entering class in 2014. Add in 69 from Massachusetts, 48 from Connecticut, and 26 from Maryland and it’s over 90% of the entering class from a handful of Northeast Corridor states. Lehigh does appear to try to get geographic diversity—most states are represented, but 11 states sent no freshmen to Lehigh in 2014, and many sent just 1 or 2. So if Lehigh cares about geographic diversity, it’s a good bet being from New Jersey is a pretty significant disadvantage. There’s likely no shortage of well qualified applicants form New Jersey—in fact, they’re a dime a dozen at a school like Lehigh, and they’re not all going to be admitted, but a similarly qualified applicant from Arizona (1 enrolled freshman in 2014) or South Carolina (2) is probably going to look a lot more interesting to the admissions committee. Sometimes “doing the right thing” might be something beyond your control, like where your parents chose to live and send you to school.
Here’s my experience … 3 kids — first two accepted at schools like WPI, Northeastern, BC, Tufts etc At the time we had $$$$ Third kid no $$$$ much higher GPA 4.6+, high SATs 760, 750, SATII 780 many other talents and more activities etc. Far superior student with a ridiculous straight A performance in many AP classes (Calculus, Physics, etc). Result kid #3 roundly rejected ----- unless you can check a box, it is all about the $$$$. Thankfully at a “most selective” in top 12 school he was accepted with a very large grant — so there you have it, scores and grades mean nothing if you don’t have an angle and you have no money (at many schools). If you have a top student make sure he applies to a few truly need blind elite schools. The “safety” schools he might choose don’t want to risk rejection and would rather offer the money to a “checked box” candidate. Best way to get into tier 2 schools — have money to pay most or all of the tuition.
As ucbalumnus points out students use diversity for the opposite intention of learning from different perspectives, that is going to a school that has a large percentage of their race or ethnicity or SES background. Wealthy white people by and large want to be around…other wealthy white people. See any of the threads on race, athletics to see the discussion on why lacrosse and rowing are offered at so many universities. That’s what the surveys also say, I think, one of the studies is one that’s done been for years, the 2015 one covered 205K students who hadn’t started college and had chosen one.
Sure. I don’t think anybody would dispute either of those points. But it’s not like top schools have any problem achieving a quorum of, e.g., rich white students—this is really about achieving critical masses of URMs. And point B is easier said than done. The fact that Middlebury, e.g., only has 4% black students (up from 2% not long ago iirc) isn’t because the rich white students there don’t like blacks (as they vociferously demonstrated when Charles Murray visited), but because Middlebury isn’t prestigious enough and/or rich enough to attract a larger percentage of high-performing black students away from more prestigious LACs like Williams (8%) or Ivies (7% at Harvard). So a sizable presence of URMs presumably accomplishes two things: your point B, and also signaling that the school has the prestige and financial wherewithal to support sizable URM communities, while 1) maintaining an endowment large enough to continue to overpay administrators inter alia, and 2) maintaining academic standards in keeping with the school’s current position in the USNWR pecking order.
@theloniusmonk I think your comment about the life stories of wealthy people of different races/ethnicities being the same is just plain wrong. That’s not the reality for a lot of people, where if you’re black you better not go into certain towns unless you are dressed impeccably and driving a high end car with the right college bumper stickers, or if you speak spanish at a high-end restaurant/store people’s heads practically swivel off their shoulders trying to see who’s talking. Or complete strangers asking you about your child’s ethnicity because their skin is such a beautiful color. Or people putting swastikas on your house because of your race. You can be sure that one of the make it or break it things on our visits was to see enough diversity where the different groups didn’t self-segregate.
^ That also depends on region. In CA, there are all races of all SES. But yes, in many other parts of the country, there definitely are stereotypes, even if unconscious.
There have been a few posters that did see group self-segregate at schools known for their diversity, so I agree that’s a good thing to look for and you would get some idea if the college is pursuing diversity for PR or if it’s actually substantive.
“I think your comment about the life stories of wealthy people of different races/ethnicities being the same is just plain wrong.”
I didn’t say same, but yes similar. As PurpletTitan suggests, it’s possible that being in CA biases my opinion more than it should on this issue.