I said, to understand this magic “transparency,” you need to understand the values and goals of the colleges, in the first place. Too many call for transparency without delving first into the very info that IS available, that yields many of the keys you demand. Why should I spoon feed it to you? If you want Harvard, you should be researching Harvard, not asking what they want and how their criteria balance. It’s counter-intuitive.
And an open mind helps.
Could you write a hypothetical “Why Us?” for Harvard, cmsjmt, that resonates with its adcoms? (Many questions in the supp are to learn your awareness and judgment.) Several thousands of kids do well at matching themselves, each year, without being told what to do. And many more don’t. H fills its class with those it finds compelling and promising.
Transparency as in % accepted in each racial group, median SAT scores, range, median GPA?
As far as I know that kind of data isn’t available anywhere. I believe the most discriminated group at Harvard today is the unhooked(non-athlete, non-legacy, non full pay) Christian whites, especially those involved in anyway with the Republican Party, tea party, evangelical churches, or any conservative organizations.
Put all the data out there and then let’s see just how much that good essay is worth. Even better, show example essays and ECs that caused the rejection vs. acceptance so we are all clear.
I believe both Yale and Johns Hopkins give examples of a good essay on its site. Cornell in its A & S information session gives examples of bad topics for essays (comparing yourself to a tree or a sandwich, how you broke your arm when you were 8 and now want to be a doctor and I forgot the 3rd one). I do see nothing wrong with seeing % in each admitted category. I would like to see it by stated major or area of interest and for those by gender (does STEM hurt boys and help girls?) They have all these statistics they are not publicly available.
Frankly, throughout this whole process I still have trouble understanding what top schools want. I look at who among the unhooked Harvard took and frankly they are barely distinguishable from those they did not take. It seems like they flipped a coin most of the time. Among the schools ranked 8-18, I felt the same way, this friend got WL at Northwestern, that one was rejected but WL at Vanderbilt and accepted at WashU. It seemed very random. The kid that got into Vanderbilt had shown no interest there while he interviewed and went to Wash U twice from the east coast, applied ED and eventually got rejected but got into Cornell and had higher stats than the kid WashU took.He had never even seen Cornell until he was admitted and hated it on sight, hence Vanderbilt.
It was like they threw everyone who was in range up in the air and took the ones that landed in the circle.
A number of universities have a part of their Admissions program where the audience can play AdComm. The better ones seem to be the ones on campus (v road show) because the numbers are smaller and there is more discussion, but the format is similar. The audience is given a general mission statement for the college, and a list of some current priorities in the college (eg, just finishing building a new center for X subject, strengthening the flagging DIII sports, just got a big grant in subject area C, etc). The audience is then given short profiles of 4-6 applicants who all ‘made the grade’- as in they are all seen as candidates who would be good additions to the class, and were on a level (eg, hooks were not in play)- and asked to say who should get the ‘last place’ in the class.
I have done this with my Ds for multiple colleges, and it is interesting each time. As the discussion goes back and forth you see the complexity of the decision process. In the Tufts version (which was at a road show) they discussed the student profiles in stages: Stats (GPA & test scores); ECs; Recs; Essays. Before we started the evaluation everybody was asked to rank order the candidates as to who they would take (by show of hands), and then again after discussing each element. The significant majority of the audience changed their rankings substantially: the candidate who had been ranked #4 / 5 in the first vote came #1 by the end of the discussions.
^^ this is true in it’s raw form. The piece that is missing is how they fit with who has already been accepted and with the institutional objectives. People see who gets in and who doesn’t as being completely a referendum on that students qualities- and it isn’t necessarily.
Ucbalumnus: not to mention, a highly active Republican presence and notably conservative voices among faculty. The superficial assumptions just don’t cut it.
So, following collegemom, people call for this clarity as if it could be delivered in the abstract. They want to hear whether the research intern is valued over the kid who pets kittens at the shelter. (So that they can look for an internship? Why couldn’t they pursue experience in their major without being directed to?)
Or whether it’s “better” to throw a party and collect 2k for a distant charity than to dedicate effort locally over a few years. Plenty of other examples, but they’re still thinking hierarchically: what’s better?
And all the while, some continue to insist stats are the primary measure. That’s not the sort of broad thinking these schools covet. Stanford starts with ‘academic excellence’ but goes on to ask for ‘intellectual vitality.’ Do you really need a formula or guideline in order to express (show, not just tell) your intellectual vitality? If so, you’re in trouble. Yup, even if your stats and rigor are high.
See, you had me until you made that bold, unsubstantiated claim. I think, quite to the contrary, if Harvard were to chose between two equally qualified candidates, they’d choose the Christian Young Republican over a generic agnostic liberal kid if only because the former is less common in the pool of applicants. Of course we can only know that if schools like Harvard were to share the stats on how many of each type actually applied and were accepted. “Inside baseball” statistics/analytics that they no doubt keep but are not inclined to share.
What would be really helpful is finding out how many actual seats are available once you eliminate those reserved for the hooked applicants. We visited one elite LAC where the adcom doing the presentation was very transparent about the fact that ~80 percent of applicants were “qualified” to be accepted at her college. What would have been nice to know is what percentage of seats the unhooked members were competing for. We can never know the stats of each applicant, but of the students who applied from my son’s school, the two legacies were accepted and the unhooked was not, even though the one denied was the only one to receive NM recognition and took the more challenging courses. Of course, the school has every right to choose a legacy over an unhooked candidate, but IMHO it would show a lot more integrity to say that the unhooked pool of seats is more like 350 or 400 seats, not 500 (or whatever) so students know going in if it’s worth submitting an application or not. But, of course, that might end up reducing the total number of applications, which Can. Not. Happen. in a world where US News rankings dictate so much of what goes on in admissions offices.
Why not? They receive enormous tax benefits as 501(c)(3) nonprofits. I don’t think they need to get into specific stuff about research interns or kitten petters, but they could disclose a lot more of the stats we know they’re already keeping. I bet they even score each applicant on things like “intellectual vitality.”
And it’s totally subjective based on the readers. Having a lot of this info still wouldn’t really help people navigate the college landscape better.
I haven’t been inside an undergrad adcom but I have been in my MD/PhD adcom and it’s amazing how two people can look at the same piece of info and draw entirely different conclusions. For example I was told after I was admitted that my double major in biology and classics to many on the committee was a sign of my great intellectual capacity/pursuit and strong writing skills, to one member of the adcom, it was a sign that I wasn’t really commited to a career in science and an indicator that I should be rejected.
This happens everywhere. I submitted a grant for PhD students and it was rejected. Among the criticisms, one of the reviewers said it didn’t align with the organization’s goals enough, the other two said it was perfectly in line and would be of great significance to the field. In grant reviews for this organization, if one of the first 3 reviewers gives it a bad enough score, it doesn’t even matter what the other two give it. It’s competitive enough that one really bad score gets you thrown out before going to the greater committee.
I’m not sure about that. It could cause a certain percentage of students to skip applying to the reachiest of reach schools altogether. If that percentage were to get high enough that it caused a statistically significant drop in applications overall, the schools might re-think what they’re doing, especially if it affected their U.S. News rankings adversely.
For the individual student all he can do is vote with his feet. If you believe the game is rigged, then DON’T PLAY. Seriously. If Asian Americans truly believe the elite college admissions system is biased against them, they need to stop feeding the beast. Organize among yourselves and boycott these schools for a year and see what happens. Take your talents to schools that value them and help turn those schools into academic powerhouses. Of course that would require a “unilateral disarmament” that would include all those Asian Americans who could/would be admitted to the tippiest-top schools.
Which brings up a question I have: Do Asian American students who have been admitted to the highly-coveted elites also believe that there is an institutional bias against their cohort? Are any of the witnesses for these pending lawsuits students who were admitted? Do they consider themselves vastly more qualified than their classmates of other ethnic/racial backgrounds?
“The admit rate for applicants considered under regular decision, including the 3,197 early action candidates who were deferred to regular decision, was 3.1 percent, down from last year’s rate of 3.4 percent. Twenty-one percent of students who applied early action were accepted in December.”
Someone else on CC relatively recently dissected early admits minus athletes. You’d have to find that.
But now do you see why the competition is called fierce and an ordinary high stats/rigor kid with a few ECs is a long shot? You can also find the number of legacies admitted and play with the numbers.
It would be more helpful if the decision numbers were broken down by ethnic group/race the same way the acceptance numbers are. (Or maybe that info is there and my monitor isn’t picking up the color variations?)
Your point is valid, that the number is extremely low for everybody applying to Harvard. Still, for some, the difference between a 10% chance and 1.5% one might make a difference in deciding whether or not to apply at all.
And Harvard isn’t the only school deserving of scrutiny. Unfortunately, it’s the most desired so it receives the most criticism.
3.1% chance- and all the talk about holistic, not rack/stack- isn’t enough to open eyes? Someone needs to bluntly point out how rotten bad 3.1 is?. Gads. I hope you don’t mean some kid would be encouraged by 3.1, but wake up if it turned out to be 1.5%.
These kids can’t even slot themselves by the data that IS available.
Are you saying that race isn’t taken into consideration when adcoms make their decisions? Because if the school can “slot by race,” then why shouldn’t the student?
And while I personally might find it silly to be “encouraged” by a 3.1% admit rate over a 1.5% one (some folks skip ANY school below a certain arbitrary threshold – say 20% or 10% or 5% – take your pick), but IMHO it’s not unreasonable to want to know if your particular cohort is facing better or worse odds than average.
You keep making it sound like it’s just these deluded “kids” who don’t get it. I personally have no dog in this fight, but I honestly don’t get it either.
Because the student is generally poorly informed to begin with, by his own hand.
I believe where he needs to start is not the usual “But I’m Asian American,” but by digging into the specific colleges, same old stuff I keep advocating- their values, the sorts of kids they tout, because that’s what you should aspire to. And more.