The Secrets of Elite College Admissions

Applying to College
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Any college with decent enrollment management should be able to assign each admit a yield chance based on the admit’s characteristics. Even if they cannot be sure that an individual admit will yield, they will know that (for example) admits of this profile will yield 30% of the time, so admitting 10 of them will give an expected 3 matriculants (or that admitting this one student will add an estimated 0.3 student to the number of students in the class).

Of course, COVID-19 may have altered yield chance in ways not easily known to colleges, but that applied to all colleges, not just “‘prestigious’ LACs or privates”.

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@ucbalumnus Forbes article you cited says “ in 1984, less than half of people on The Forbes 400 were self-made; today, 69% of the 400 created their own fortunes.”
To me, 69% of self made people on the Forbes list is a huge number. These are recent figures too.

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@Happytimes2001 I’m not looking for fairness, and it isn’t really the job of private colleges to solve the academic woes of the country.

It is up the state governments and the federal government to make sure that every kid gets access to the same high level of education, no matter what their economic background, and it’s up to state and federal governments to make sure that the public universities and colleges are as good as the private ones. It’s not really up to Yale to solve the public education woes of Mississippi.

However, at the same time, I am extremely bothered by the people who claim that there simply is no problem at all with the education system, and that all of the issues that poor kids have in having the stats and the ECs to be competitive for very selective colleges are the fault of the kids and their families, and that the USA is a fair place where every kids has the same opportunities, no matter what their SES.

Any person who claims that admissions that are solely by “merit”, with merit being stats + ECs are fair and egalitarian is, in essence, making that exact claim.

@ucbalumnus The problem with the Forbes 400 is that they aren’t representing 400 people, they’re representing 400 families. Since 300 of those 400 are over 60, and almost 80 are older than 80, we’re talking about far more than 400 who are in the top 0.01%, of which 276 are self made. For example, Charles Dolan may be a self-made man, but sure as hell his 6 kids aren’t. Gordon More, likely one of the smartest of the billionaires, is self made, but his kids and grandkids aren’t.

So those 400 aren’t the “top 0.00025%”, they are 400 of the 1,600 or so people who make up the top families by wealth. Of those people, 17.35% are self made.

According to this study, 37.8% of the top 10% received, on average about $1.2 million, at the top 1% it was 41.1% and the average was $4.8 million. The study didn’t check the top 0.1% or the top 0.01%, though. However, it is likely that the percent is higher as are the amounts.

Of course, it also depends on what one calls “inheritance”. If a kid gets an expensive education, get set up in a very high paying job, gets stocks, etc, how much of that can be considered “inheritance”?

Moreover, while I may have underestimated how many tech billionaires there were who sold their own product, I am quite correct in that the majority of people who didn’t inherit their money made their money in finances. They are business people.

Even the majority the tech people are only super wealthy because they were able to market their stuff. Hundreds of drugs are created or invented every year, yet only one man was able, or willing to translate that into billions.

Of the billionaires, the people who actually created a new product were Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Jan Koum, Gordon More, Brian Acton, Gabe Newell, Nathan Blecharczyk, Elon Musk, and Evan Spiegel, and maybe a few more. The rest made their money by monetizing existing concepts, software, and technology.

Bottom line, even those tech geniuses did not make money because they were tech geniuses. They made their money because they understood the marketing potential.

I still stand by my claim that the correlation between intelligence and income is spurious at best.

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The most selective colleges and universities are mostly private schools. They can do as they please in selecting their student body, IMO. They make more of an effort to close the economic gap with their funds than the vast majority of state schools.

I was surprised, by the way, to see that some state schools are not need blind in admissions. With exceptions for transfer students, wait list, certain parts of the school( almost always the non residential, “night” and weekend programs aimed at non traditional students), international students, I’d thought the vast majority of schools in this country were need blind for admissions, and simply gapped when it came to meeting need

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ECs and self story-telling in an application (aka “packaging” of an application) are the factors that most influenced by SES. They are, not coincidentally, among the most important factors in “shaping” a class.

1 Like
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I just want to clarify that, from my perspective, you can’t “broad brush” lower SES kids into some frightful corner where they have no academic or personal strengths, no ECs, no savvy. It’s just a mistaken assumption that all this is e-zee to view based on what we think we “know.” And not fair.

Usually, on this sort of thread, someone will point out the kid barely making it into a cc, under-prepared, unable to afford that. But that’s not the comparison to make, when it comes to private (elite) colleges offering opportunity. (Academic, support, financial.) It’s not easy, it’s not always perfect, etc. But watch your own assumptions.

Influence, impact, success are not as simple as who gets on a Forbes list. I don’t see how you begin to justify that. It’s superficial.

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Is quality of ECs really the factor that is most hindered by SES, as used by "elite’ colleges for admission? This certainly did not seem to be the case in the Harvard lawsuit analyses. I’d expect factors that are more directly correlated with school quality and school resources to have larger differences.

For example, one of the analyses involved Harvard’s expert simulating how the class would change with proposed alternative admission systems that gave a far stronger preference for low SES and took other measures to increases low SES enrollment, combined with removed preferences for higher SES ALDC groups. In the most extreme of these simulations, Harvard’s expert estimated that the portion of lower SES “disadvantaged” students would increase to nearly 80% of the class. Only ~20% of the class would not be SES “disadvantaged.”

With Harvard’s admission system changed to make approximately 80% of the admitted class SES “disadvantaged”, Harvard’s expert estimated that the portion of students in the class receiving high (1-2) ratings decreased in all core categories. However, the EC rating category had the smallest decrease. 61% of admits received 1-2 in Harvard’s existing system with only a small portion of class being lower SES, and 60% of admits received 1-2 when 80% of admits were SES “disadvantaged”. Athletic rating, Academic rating, and Personal rating all seemed to be weaker points on average among SES “disadvantaged” students than EC rating.

I expect that part of this result relates to Harvard considering ECs in context of environment. They also consider additional factors. For example the reader guidelines specify that a high “2” EC rating “Can include significant term-time work or family responsibilities coupled with extracurricular engagement.” I’m sure Harvard is not the only “elite” college that considers environmental context and values students being involved in work and family responsibilities,. It’s not just about activities that require a large payment to participate.

Other changes in this strong preference for SES disadvantaged admission model include:

*Recruited Athlete Admits Decreases by 94%
*Legacy Admits Decreases by 84%
*Dean’s Special Interest List Admits Decreases by 75%
*Children of Faculty/Staff Admits Decreases by 54%

*Physical Science Majors Increases by 21%
*Engineering Majors Increases by 15%
*Humanities Majors Decreases by 15%
*Undecided Majors Decrease by 27%

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The NYTimes today has a Frank Bruni piece “The Coronavirus May Change College Admissions Forever” that dovetails well into this discussion. He uses his discussions with Jeff Selingo to draw some conclusions about possible permanent changes to the admissions process.

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@lookingforward Agree. Thinking that every low SES kid is unprepared for college is insulting at best.
With online learning, the public library and many programs many of these kids are as well prepared as others. And colleges do consider work, family obligations etc.
Also using the Forbes list to determine anything is not indicative of anything given how few make the list.
The broader trend over the last decades has always been to make the pie bigger and more inclusive of all. There will always someone arguing about the size of their piece or that they didn’t get a piece at all.

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@mwolf I don’t think there are many people who don’t see issues in education. The responses vary based on what people expect as an outcome. I think most people want strong public schools and colleges. IMO, privates will always have more resources. Most nations only have non profit Public U’s. The US history of education began with Privates so our path has been very different.

Interesting that you believe tech entrepreneurs all made their $ based on their ability to market. Our family has been in tech since the 80’s. We have started and sold multiple companies ( tech and non tech), never has been about marketing.
Actually, it’s usually about the financials and underlying technology. It can also be about patents, or companies huy another company for their staff and/or the know how of the inventors). Few tech people cross the line into marketing. Perhaps you are thinking about twitter and a handful of other consumer apps. Most tech money and growth has not been in consumer based products but products which change businesses ( who incidentally can pay $). You can’t market something that doesn’t work, or if you don’t have $ from sales. Or, you can but it would look like the 90’s and .coms which all went bust. Remember pets.com?

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“it should be no surprise to anyone that colleges ‘shape’ their classes”

Not many people relatively speaking have read Gatekeepers, you make it sound it’s some national bestseller, it’s amazon ranking is 53,000, another book also written in 2002, John Adams, is 10,000.

Very few people on a percentage basis know about shaping classes, that’s why the WSJ published the article and expect more articles to come. So at least according to WSJ, it’s a surprise to many, probably the majority of the country.

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“ECs to be competitive for very selective colleges are the fault of the kids and their families, and that the USA is a fair place where every kids has the same opportunities, no matter what their SES”

You keep bringing up strawman arguments that nobody believes, just to keep some kind of narrative going. This thread and c/c in general is full of posts about the unfairness of the US education system and unfairness in opportunities, especially at the K-12 level.

“I still stand by my claim that the correlation between intelligence and income is spurious at best”

Again, this is a something you keep bringing up, maybe one poster mentioned it and you’ve assumed it represents all of c/c. It doesn’t.

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@theloniusmonk I was responding specifically to a poster’s claim which I quoted. I don’t need to post something which answers every single question posted by every single person on the thread.

There are a few issues with this:

A. One of the major issues of low SES families is lack of access to reliable internet.

B. Learning from home is extremely challenging for low SES kids because so many do not have quiet private space inside their homes to actually learn anything online.

C. Libraries are only open for a few hours outside school hours, and it is often not safe to travel to and from these libraries in low income areas. Moreover, the number of consoles, seats, textbooks or anything available in a public library is but a fraction of the number of kids who live in the area who do not have internet access at home.

So many of these kids do NOT have “online learning”, their access to public libraries is curtailed, especially compared to the access that middle class and wealthy kids have to internet, and there are so many children below the poverty line, that the programs barely reach a fraction of these (15 children million below poverty line, and close to twice as many across the bottom 20% by income), those programs provide little.

For example, in a large proportion of low income neighborhoods, internet access is poor or nonexistent. So how are these poor kids supposed to access online classes if there isn’t access to halfway decent internet service from their homes?

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/02/05/neighborhood-broadband-data-makes-it-clear-we-need-an-agenda-to-fight-digital-poverty/

But this is just a digression.

My main points stand:

A. “Elite” private colleges cannot accept purely on stats, since that would not allow them to to maintain the services and that they provide or the advantages that they confer. The only reason that MIT is able to do so is that we are 30 years into a tech revolution, and MIT is able to generate money.

B. Stats are not really any more indicators of intellectual capabilities than any other of the factors going into “holistic” admissions - all other things being equal, they favor the wealthy.

C. Family wealth is not an indicator of family intellectual abilities, but rather an indication of the money-making capabilities of some members of the family.

PS. By “marketing ability” I meant “the ability to sell one’s ideas/product/invention”. No matter how great an idea is, to get rich you need to convince others to put out money

PPS. @Twoin18 If all of British high school kids were getting the same great education and providing the same opportunities to all, Oxbridge wouldn’t be recruiting half of its students from eight (8) high school, six of which are private. Kids attending private high schools in the UK are also twice as likely to apply to Oxbridge.

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46470838

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I missed the edit window, but that “those programs provide little.” should have been deleted…

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That article says they accounted for 6.6% of admissions, which is a far cry from 50%. It doesn’t seem like you know very much about the UK if you could believe that 50% of students at the top universities went to 8 schools.

Helpfully there’s a similar list of the US schools that sent the most students to Harvard, Princeton and MIT (which take about 4100 students per year) between 2015-18: https://www.polarislist.com/

Over the four year period, 6.6% of students would be about 1080 students, which is fewer than the number admitted from the top 18 schools on this list (of which 8 are private and many of the rest are selective magnet schools - something that is very rare in the UK since most parts of the country don’t allow selection by ability for admission to state schools).

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A few points:

  1. Most of us who find the current practices of so-called “holistic” admissions at some elite colleges distasteful do not favor admissions at these elite colleges be based solely on stats (or even principally on stats). Some of us do think admissions should be based on merits (which include stats as one of the components), calibrated to take into account applicants’ SES.

  2. Some of us who grew up poor but are successful now have a tendency to think all poor kids have the same opportunities. They don’t. There’re different circumstances and everyone’s chances are different (and random in some cases). It’s a fallacy to assume all poor but smart kids will have the opportunities to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

  3. Wealth, education, intelligence are all positively correlated. However, the famous words still apply: correlation isn’t the same as causation. In addition, the correlation isn’t even close to 100%.

  4. Few ideas or products sold themselves. Almost all good ideas and/or products still need to be marketed: first to convince the funders to raise the capital necessary for the execution, and then to convince the consumers to purchase the products/services.

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I think you convey a mixed message, MWolf. Some, I agree with.

The elite privates (for lack of another term) cannot take each kid out there who wants to pursue college. Nor are these kids equally qualified, as a group of low SES. The idea is more to start *somewhere * using the many resources a wealthier colleger can offer to kids who evidence promise. Evidence. And many do.

One by one, we hope to see results. The point is NOT to use an elite to resolve the k-12 issues. It is, i think, a more 'trickle down process. It takes time.

But John, who has been lifted (terrible term, judgmental, but I don’t have better at the moment,) now goes on to influence and encourage others.

Harvard has said, that influence comes in many forms. It’s not all about wealth or fame, not at all. The old example was the local baseball coach, a great teacher, etc.

And you do find these folks taking interest, encouraging, serving as active mentors. Look at the make up of many notable support groups, putting in hour by hour. Slowly, that pebble tossed into the water has a wider ripple.

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This is a great point, it is K-12 education that we should be focused on improving.

It’s K-12 education that is failing many kids/families, including low SES, not the college admissions process. (Of course the college admissions process can be improved.)

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Part 2. It is true many poor kids suffer lack of resources. The amazing thing is the sort of family support and encouragement many do get. Starts with their families. It used to be thought of as uniquely American, the notion one can triumph over adversity, go on to pursue dreams, change their status.

It’s a mistake to assume this doesn’t still exist. We can see it, if we look.

One also needs to look at many cultural elements. The influence of local religious and community organizations leads many poor kids to local involvement well past expensive soccer camps in significance, or some of the miniscule efforts some higher SES think is grand. They’re out there doing.

As well, if you look at their actual records, they participate in school activities, do well in classes, get solid, well written LoRs from teachers, and more. Their families do strive, do support.

Many of these kids, poor, when you see their apps, have siblings in college, some pretty impressive. That’s the cycle.

Don’t miss them, to focus primarily on the toughest situations. No one should assume all poor kids are lost in an impossible fog.

Or that family money and fame bring better character.

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It does not exist for every student. For example, students with parents who had a nasty divorce are likely to be much more limited in their college choices than others.