“These aren’t just elite institutions, they’re elitist institutions”

@roethlisburger - to sum up the article, the anti-semitism began in the 1920’s and took the form of holistic admissions, legacy admissions and a photo requirement. The article doesn’t specifically address sports recruiting, but I am guessing you are assuming it is included in the holistic admissions policy. I don’t know if it was one way or the other, It doesn’t say that the sports were created at the time the anti-semitic policies, either. Pretty sure lacrosse predates the anti-semitism, but I have no idea if Harvard recruited lacrosse athletes back in the day.

This is totally a tangent, happy to move on if you are…

Don’t blame H for sending out brochures, if a kid who feels qualified enough to apply can’t react rationally. They shouldn’t be helpless to discern.

Blossom, you have one view, I have another. You keep referring to deep, focused intellectual interests. That’s NOT what gets a 17 y.o. in. Grad school, maybe. UG, no.

Yes, I am amazed how great some low SES kids are. I’ve said, based on my own reactions, many leave the lax bros in the dust. Not because they have 1600, but for the rest, their activation, impact, thinking, etc. It absolutely gobsmacks me when you or others reduce low SES to caricatures. As if it’s impossible they do more.

Coy? I’m advocating better informed, broader thinking. No fault there.

Ratings are evaluative. But this thread is assuming holistic then becomes top-down, rack and stack. And that there’s got to be a finger on the scale, if a 2 gets in and a 1 doesn’t.

Almost all sports except football and men’s basketball lose money. For a college like Amherst to have 25 sports is a large cost center for the college.

And even football and men’s basketball lose money at more than 80% of colleges. A few dozen powerhouses (Texas, Alabama, etc) make money from sports but the vast majority do not, including the elites herein mentioned.

I find it a little ironic that some are complaining about Harvard athletes getting preferential treatment when the whole idea of the “Ivy League” is an athletic conference.

“Almost all sports except football and men’s basketball lose money. For a college like Amherst to have 25 sports is a large cost center for the college.”

I was meaning money in the sense of alumni fundraising down the line.

lookingforward, could you point to any examples on this thread of people suggesting that it is actually impossible for any low SES student to shine? You wrote: “It absolutely gobsmacks me when you or others reduce low SES to caricatures. As if it’s impossible they do more.”

I don’t think anyone has reduced students from low SES families to caricatures. Some posters have pointed out that “low SES” covers a very broad range of personal circumstances. Some low SES students truly have limited access to the opportunities that would set them up to apply to Harvard. I am not writing about caricatures. I am writing about students I have encountered and in some cases, worked with.

While one could be better informed than some families are, especially at the outset of the process for their first child, I think that many people who have been around on CC for a while are as informed as it is possible to be, without having a close friend on an Ivy admissions committee, or access to the applications themselves–which is basically impossible for most of us. So what is the point?

Correctly predicted for the vast majority of individuals, but not every single applicant.

I believe you are the only person in the thread who has said that. The specific example I gave was a non-ALDC’s with a 4 had a less than 0.02% admit rate, while athletes had the same rating had a 80% admit rate – ~5000x higher. The model estimated the same approximately 5000x greater chance of admission for athletes over an average across all low rating combinations, with a variety of controls, including for region and planned field of study. It’s not just 1 kid who got in with a 4 while another was rejected with a 3. It’s only 3 were accepted over a sample of over 18,000, for an acceptance rate of less than 0.02%. That looks like more than just a finger on scale. It’s a hand knocking over the scale, with a different set of qualifications.

You might assume that all of those 18k non-ALDC kids with a 4 academic “can’t react rationally”, but it’s not always obvious to applicants.

The 4 academic applicants were extremely concentrated in one particular group – URMs. The majority of non-ALDC African Americans received a 4 or worse academic rating, yet few non-URMs applied with such poor academic qualifications. One of the contributing factors to why the majority of African American applicants to Harvard seem to be unaware that they are not academically qualified and have essentially zero chance of admission appears to be the recruitment letters and brochures that Harvard sends out. In the recruiting class where Harvard dropped the recruitment letter cutoff to the a PSAT of 1100 for some AAs, the portion of 4 academic AAs applicants suddenly shot up. If an applicant receives a recruitment letter and brochure based on his score, it’s not always obvious that his scores/stats are too low to have a significant chance of admission (4 academic is closely correlated with stats).

While also saying that becoming sufficiently informed requires insider information, such as reading the actual applications (rather than the admission readers’ ratings of them). In other words, it looks like you are arguing that only insiders or those closely connected to insiders can know enough to be better informed.

If the school’s academic prowess and achievements are insufficient, and it has to rely on its ancillary sports, does it really deserve the “elite” label? Presumably we’re discussing academic “elites”, not sports “elites”.

No, ucb, it doesnt take being an insider to understand. To me, that’s a sort of excuse. It does take some effort. Perfect? There is no perfect understanding. In the end, institutional needs dominate. But there’s a difference between trying vs repeatedly calling for transparency down to some formula level. In all the threads on the big bad colleges that don’t reveal more, I almost never see the “more transparency” advocates reflecting on what they did pick up, with a little effort.

QM: it can be subtle or not. “…that kid spends afternoons taking grandma to the doctor and translating, and doesn’t know that if you pick up the phone…” This bothers me. Of course, it is an issue for some kids, many of them out there, across the country. But lumping all low-SES, elite applicants into a " don’t know more" category isn’t reflective of what can come through. As does assuming the trials of an under-resourced school district present an insurmountable hurdle, no interested teachers, no academic opportunities, no mentoring, no parental encouragement. No skill sets.

Same as asking repeatedly if I think they’re into Maoist symbolism, deep and specific topics in art history. Lol. Most kids are not. Not even the wealthy legacy kids. Generally, if there’s a trend, it only gets as specific (and repetitive) as wanting to be a biomech engineer and invent prosthesthetic devices. Or “help the world.”

I personaly feel that relying on CC for advice is a huge detriment. There’s good advice and some frank talk. But a lot of misunderstanding. I’m trying to avoid some specifics, because the thread is already in loops.

By what “effort” other than litigation would high school students have determined the extent of legacy advantage, or the problematic personal evaluations of Asian Americans at Harvard? Obfuscating the process and vague exhortions to examine the whole package is precisely what has led to the current mess of stressed out kids running themselves ragged to meet some undefined applicant threshold of arbitrary admissions.

Data10, you know I’m opposed to athletic pull. If a kid otherwise satisfies academic and non-academic expectations, fine. But the issue, to me, is that pull when the kid does not meet standards, except on the field. I don’t argue what sports means to fundraising. I do mind the slots the under-qualified athletes do take from other sons and daughters.

This thread started about low-SES kids who DO find themselves at an elite college. Yes, there will be plenty who don’t qualify, just as many BWRK kids don’t.

There are many moving parts in an app package. Many places to shine, many to stumble. And stumble they do. To me, this cannot be reduced to a privileged category- as if all legacies have a tip available. We know they don’t.

Ratings are a tool. They can separate applicants into a final pool, sure. But they’re more a shorthand and between notes and final discussions, much more plays.

So, studies show subpools, how likely to be admitted. To me, that’s akin to this new argument on CC that ED kids are more likely to get an admit. It misses what it truly takes for Jonny or Susie to get the nod. Those threads like to “prove” ED is a tip, but skip the part about matching, in the first place.

@roycroftmom First and foremost, to me, is whether the kid understands what the college is looking for. Andcan show that in his own app. That’s what matters, that’s what shapes his/her own chance, not the sidebars about legacy or a particular race. Any kid need to be rational and notice a 90-95% reject rate. Needs to work on his own package, first, not get jumbled about other factors.

Most top colleges somewhere indicate “stretch” is important, by whatever word. Looking at chance threads, too many kids think it means founding something or making money or youtube views, a blog, more titles, national awards. Yes, it includes rigor, but more.

How many on this thread have ever searched for the “what we look for” a college might put out? Not all, sometimes you dig differently, but also some is obvious. (Columbia wants/needs someting different than Dartmouth- and it’s not simply about curriculum. Grinnell needs kids open to the Iowa location. It goes on.) And yet, kids focus on stats and the CDS. And what makes them Top Dawg in their own hs, forgetting they compete with a pool of Top Dawgs.

Many posters will say, you need natl or intl awards. Not. They see results for kids who do have top stats, and awards, and assume that’s what the prereqs are. Primarily. Not.

But you do not seem to mind legacy pull for those who do not meet the usual academic and non-academic (excluding hook) expectations, except through unearned inherited lineage (as compared to athletic achievements that had to be earned to some extent by the athlete, often though considerable additional time commitment while also doing school work). You might say that legacy preference improves fundraising (this is disputed in some studies), but do not seem to mind the slots the under-qualified legacies do take from other sons and daughters.

@lookingforward is being treated unfairly harshly here. I hear her (him?) state two two main themes:

  1. Lower SES students are not a monolith of sad, limited opportunities. I think everyone agrees with this. Great!
  2. Applications aren’t just a collection of objective numbers, and success of an application depends on many factors, including how well an applicant answers the question “why us”. It also can be that a kid’s full package is more than the sum of its parts - which can be true for a rich kid, poor kid or someone in between. It is hard to convey that spark without everyone reading the applications. I don’t think anyone disagrees that that the spark is possible. They just don’t trust the process and think it is easy for a school to make bias look like spark.

People want transparency. I don’t hear @lookingforward saying transparency is bad. But the reality is that applications are protected by privacy. We can’t read and compare all of the applications, no matter how educational it would be. So full transparency is an impossible thing to ask for, and collective stats will never be able to distinguish spark from bias as to a specific applicant. We are left with an imperfect system that can never be fully vetted.

Despite those sidebars being significant, right?

Also, given how elusive you say finding out what the college is looking for is, it is likely that many applicants (without hooks or assistance from well-connected prep school college counselors) who do land on what the college is looking for do so by chance, rather than actually understanding and targeting what the college is looking for. If tens of thousands of applicants throw darts at a small target, some will hit it by chance, even if they are not that skilled at throwing darts.

The compulsory disclosures show that Harvard finds a disproportionate number of Asian Americans lack that “spark” and many legacies do have it. Are you comfortable with that conclusion?

As people are always pointing out, the Ivy League is a sports league. Sports are just as intertwined with the elites’ success as the sports powerhouses. Taking sports out of the equation would no doubt compromise the elite-ness of the schools. There are elite schools who care less about sports (CalTech, I am looking at you), but they still have them. Lots of elite students out there only apply to schools with great sports. And they turn into alums who donate.

Part of what makes Stanford Stanford is its dominant sports.

Lookingforward, I am not prepared to blame a kid in Camden NJ (one of the worst school districts in an otherwise affluent state) who gets a letter from Harvard encouraging him to apply. I am not prepared to state that his life is pathetic just because of his low SES, but you’d really have to be a complete grinch not to realize how different his life has been from a kid up the highway in Montclair or Short Hills.

You want to blame the kid for not being sophisticated enough to understand that when Harvard says they are looking for kids “like him” they don’t actually mean him- because he has a 4.0 GPA at a HS which does not prepare kids adequately for college, and his SAT score reflects that. And the fact that the kid is more likely to be to Af-Am or first Gen than the kid from Short Hills- that’s a coincidence, right?

You keep reminding us that it’s not about stats. We all get it- WE are not the naive babes assuming that a 4.0 GPA from Winnetka or Menlo Park is the be-all and end-all of existence. But if the Harvards of the world need to wait until the disadvantaged kids have the SAME profiles as the rich suburbanites in order to put the same thumb on the scale as they are prepared to do for the legacy kid… they’re going to be waiting a long time.

Yes, these kids who do make it are something special. But of course- the unspoken secret within higher ed. The Black kids whose parents are physicians who emigrated from Uganda when Idi Amin went on his murderous rampage. The Latina whose parents are academics in the Dominican Republic. Not exactly the kid from Camden whose single mom drives a school bus and who attends one of the worst high schools in the state.