Never did I say Olympiad winners don’t have huge accomplishments. But that’s a bit unfair if we’re evaluating a college admissions process and think that they should inherently get in over other students, especially if there is this big disadvantage against students without these resources. A bit disappointing to read.
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UCF claims 30% of NASA’s Kennedy employees are UCF alumni. UCF’s Florida Space institute is funded by NASA and offers unique NASA-related opportunities. Many UCF faculty have special connections to NASA and may integrate NASA related content/tech in to classes. If you want to work at NASA, I expect UCF offers a variety of unique benefits and opportunities that students are unlikely to find at other colleges.
While UCF may offer special benefits that may make it easier to be hired at NASA, this does not mean NASA will not hire a well qualified grad from MIT or numerous other colleges. Like typical companies, I doubt that that NASA is focusing on the college name. I expect they are instead focusing on things like relevant experience and having the skillset to be successful on the job. They may recruit more at UCF than elsewhere both due to location and students who have friends + family in Florida and chose to stay in Florida for college often preferring to take jobs in Florida. Not every grad dreams of moving thousands of miles away to work in Silicon Valley at what may be double the cost of living. Other colleges show similar patterns with particular employers, often with a clear location bias at public colleges.
One also needs to separate effects of individual student characteristics from college name. For example, students who attend MIT generally are not the same as the average high school grad. Most MIT admits are really amazing kids with a combination of factors that lead to a much higher chance of career success than the average high school grad, who often struggles to graduate from college. If a kid who is accepted to MIT chooses to attend UCF instead, on average he is going to have a better career outcome than the average UCF kid. That unique MIT admit, may have had a variety of unique opportunities had he/she attended UCF that would not occur for the average UCF kid. So if a MIT grad has a greater degree of success than the average college grad, how do you know their career success occurred because they attended MIT and not because they are gifted and talented, with strong drive and personal characteristics, and wealthy/connected background?
When you look at studies that try to separate college name from individual characteristics with controls, they often come to very different conclusions about the influence of college reputation. An example is the classic Dale & Kreuger study, which is quoted below. D&K found that being the type of student who applies to highly selective colleges was far more influential than attending one.
When we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero.
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First, the kind of leadership that I describe shows up quit often.
I volunteer for the Posse Foundation as an interviewer for the selection process and as a mentor for Scholars. These kids all show this type of leadership, including the vast majority of the nominees who are not selected, and every one of the finalists. Since more than 11,000 Posse Scholars have been selected since 1989, that means that over 22,000 kids have been at that level, and, since only about 5% of the original nominees are selected as scholars, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands.
The Posse staff (and volunteers) choose students because they have these specific characteristics. No choosing people because they are cool, have money and influence, are the football captain, or worked really hard to be elected. These kids are nominated by their counselors because they demonstrated that type of leadership, and Posse Staff and volunteers select the ones for which these characteristics are more pronounced.
Yet here you are, claiming that the only skill set that is important for admissions to college is the ability to perform well is a very specific set of conditions - the ones in which math Olympiads and other tests like these are run.
You simply cannot have it both ways.
More than the winners of the assorted USMO competitions. Being a grad student in the math department at MIT is laudable, but hardly “earth-shattering”. On the other hand, speaking before the UN on climate change or woman’s rights, kinda is “earth shattering”.
In general, people here still don’t seem to get the basic facts about college and about college admissions
First: Admissions to an “elite” colleges is not a reward that is handed to the “most deserving” high school graduates. Nothing that a high school student does makes them more “worthy” of admissions to an “elite” college.
Second: Almost all of the competitions that keep on being mentioned are about math more math, and even more math. Universities are not giant math departments, and kids can be great at math and still not be able to do well in life sciences, social sciences, humanities, and even engineering.
Third: college isn’t high school, and excellent students will stand out in a wide array of colleges. A math genius will be recognized if they attend UIUC or Iowa. One doesn’t need to attend Harvard in order to shine in mathematics.
Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most prominent Evolutionary thinkers in his time, attended Antioch College for his undergrad, after being rejected from Harvard (in 1963, when acceptance rates were far higher than today). He was, however, accepted to Columbia for a PhD, and when he graduated, he was snapped up by Harvard, where he worked for the rest of his life.
The kind of kids who people here claim are being kept out of MIT because of “lesser intellects” will shine at any of 200+ colleges out there, colleges which people here discuss as though they were some fake institute, taught out of somebody’s garage.
As for “SJWs”? The disdain inherent in that word is an attempt to obscure the fact that the kids who are selected because of activism aren’t selected because they participated in 200 protests or something. These are kids who demonstrated amazing organizational skills, were able to enact plans which involved dozens of moving parts, who did everything from grunt work on the ground to negotiations with officials and administrators.
Somebody who spends their time in the library studying with their five buddies for a competition has little or no understanding of the wide array of skills and talents that it takes to put together one of those protests, a town hall meeting, or even a basic event.
People who cannot get six friends together for a movie somehow think that putting together a protest with 5,000 people is something anybody can do and that it doesn’t demonstrate any critical skill sets that are important for colleges students.
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Using Math Olympiads to find the strongest math kids is as valid as using sport competitions to find the best in the sport. When people said that Usain Bolt was the “world’s fastest man”, what they are really saying is:
But that doesn’t really roll off the tongue, so we instead say “world’s fastest man”.
So we really don’t know who the world’s fastest man could be, nor do we know who the best football player could be, nor the best fencer, nor the best mathematician. We only know who has best demonstrated a particular skill based upon favorable conditions.
Among the kids I know, those who were aiming for USAMO trained for it like a sport, with the most common training being AoPS classes, which are very reasonably priced, but likely needs at least a middle class income to afford. But becoming aware that these contests exist in the first place requires attending schools that tend to be higher income. This last part is not the fault of the Mathematical Association of America that offers these contests, but rather of the local schools that doesn’t think it is worthwhile to administer these contests.
But just as the fact that there could be faster runners doesn’t take away from Usain’s accomplishments, the fact that there could be better math contest participants doesn’t take away from those that do well in math Olympiads. I am not exaggerating when I say that the top few hundred students could have excelled in Calculus by fourth grade if they were exposed to (don’t worry, almost none were, but instead they showed their math proficiency early in other ways).
So in summary, there is some merit to what @CavsFan2003 is saying, but that’s true of all competitions.
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Yes! It’s true in all competitions, for all types of accomplishments. And yet there is a certain type of accomplishment, in a certain type of person, that gets devalued and even insulted. Why is that?
Music has a window of opportunity for excellence. You must start early. If you don’t start music lessons until 17, you will almost certainly never be elite despite inborn ability.
Languages have a window of opportunity. If you wait until age 17 to learn a language, you will always speak with an accent. Chess, ice skating, ballet, golf, baseball, swimming, gymnastics…so many different endeavors rely upon lots of early practice before the window of opportunity has closed. It’s not that you can’t take up these endeavors later, you can; but the likelihood of ever being a top performer are extremely low.
I don’t see anybody insulting those who started early and excelled in the other endeavors. I don’t see colleges recruiting golfers or baseball players or musicians who aren’t the best, just because they lacked early opportunity. But somehow the accomplishments of math competition winners (overwhelmingly Asian) are seen as obtained by unfair means (and incidentally any of their piano or violin accomplishments too.) Instead of being admired for their accomplishments, they are stereotyped as the type of person who spends all their time in a library and can’t get six friends together for a movie. The type of person you don’t want to admit too many of to your college. Why the double standard?
I’m not Asian myself. My kids are arts and SJW types. I believe in AA. But I really do detect an ugly double standard.
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I don’t think anyone is insulting impressive math students. Posters are just pointing out, correctly, that all impressive math students are not entitled to a spot at a handful of schools. The same goes for students with other impressive skills. And at the end of the day, they end up at other great schools. Absolutely no one is entitled to a spot at any particular college regardless of the accomplishment under discussion.
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In case anyone was wondering, it’s doubtful the OP is coming back to this thread.
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OP has been creating other threads on similar or related topics. And all “hit and run” for the most part 
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Russian Bot?
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No one is insulting anyone. However, I am not sure why the term “SJW” is being used here, but it is a pejorative.
But there is not a single person here dissing good math/science students.
Are folks here saying winning an Olympiad should automatically qualify that student for a “top school” if we are comparing students with “similar” stats?
If not, what are we missing if I oversimplified it?
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I don’t think anyone has been insulting those who start early in mathematics. What I have seen said over and over is that not every excellent math student is going to get accepted to the ‘top school’ they might think they ‘deserve’. What I have seen said over and over is that other people (and the schools themselves) aren’t only looking for excellent math students.
But I also wanted to point something out that in your examples of other fields, you either didn’t think of, or don’t know. I am going to use the example of gymnastics you brought up as that is one of the examples I know very well…
There are probably hundreds of thousands of girls who start gymnastic classes every year. From those, some move into the JO system and there are about 70k or so JO women gymnasts every year. JO Level 4 has the most amount of gymnastic competitors on any given year - about 22,000. And a huge drop-off in gymnasts when you get to Level 7 - about 8k. Every year after Level 7, the number of competitors gets rapidly smaller and smaller.
Level 8 - 5K
Level 9 - 3k
Level 10 - about 1,500
Now, let’s turn our heads towards college gymnastics and getting into a college as a gymnastic recruit (those are full rides because gymnastics is a headcount sport).
By the time a gymnast is a level 10 gymnast, they will compete to go to JO Nationals to get recruited. JO is separated into 9 Regions. From each region, there is further separation into age groups.
6 Junior Age groups
6 Senior Age groups
The top 7 gymnasts in each region, in each age group competes at JO Nationals. So from 1,500 gymnasts who are level 10 - only 756 of those athletes get to compete at Nationals.
From that, only 1 on each age group will be the AA, and ditto again to each individual event champion.
So, there will be
12 AA champs
Possibly 48 individual event champs (since SHOCKER some of those AA champs will also take individual event titles as well).
There are more spots than 12 or even 48 in the NCAA, but there really aren’t that many headcount spots in the TOP women’s gymnastics programs (usually there are about 5-10 or so programs looked at as the most dominant year after year).
Not all gymnasts who win an AA title at JO are going to go to one of those “top gymastic programs” - UCLA, Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma, LSU, etc) Some of them will be recruited by schools that aren’t as dominant in the previous year’s championships - but those schools are hoping to get student athletes who will elevate their programs. Some of them will choose Div 1 programs with fairly ‘poor’* gymnastic programs but the school’s academics are better regarded.
And we haven’t even gotten to the elite athletes (those trying to do the Olympics) who also get recruited. Sunisa Lee is at Auburn as a gymnast. Jade Carey at Oregon. Etc Etc. Not every ‘top’ athlete will get recruited to the TOP programs. Some of those athletes weren’t even considered the top of their field even 4 years ago (often due to injury).
But my point is that there will be MANY MANY Level 10 gymnasts, gymnasts who have worked by and large for most of their young life to reach an elite level of gymnastics most people can never imagine who will not even be competitive to go on to DIV 1 College teams. They can reach JO Nationals - the pinnacle of the program they are in and - they won’t get recruited, they won’t be asked to be a walk on, their gymnastics career ends when they graduate high school. Are they better than 99% of all gymnasts? Yes. Does that matter when there aren’t enough spots in DIV I (II and III) to recruit them all? No, not at all.
*“Poor” definitely a relative term in NCAA DIV 1 gymnastics programs. These are amazing athletes, and we are talking hundredth of a point defining winners and runners up.
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10char.
Seems that way. We’re not even arguing about the original subject anymore. We’re just arguing.
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I strongly disagree😀
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Now that it’s clear that the OP is gone, I think it’s useful to backup a bit, drop the Asian male angle, and discuss two things:
- USAMO used to be a near golden ticket to at least one HYPSM
- There are still golden tickets or near golden tickets to MIT and other top schools
I have been following USAMO outcomes for a while. From my sample size of dozens of USAMO qualifiers that entered college between the years of 2014-2020, about 80% of them were admitted to at least one HYPSM. And the “very worst outcome” among these students was someone who was shutout of the HYPSMs, all the Ivys, and “only got into” CMU SCS which has a 5% admit rate. And he was widely known as “the obnoxious kid” and I suspect his recommendations were rather poor.
Now anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of statistics will point out that some of those kids admitted to the HYPSMs were admitted because in addition to being good at math, they actually had enough social skills to have six friends, and the organization skills to get them together for a movie. No doubt that’s true, but the 80% stat is useful precisely because qualifying for USAMO does not consider recommendations, grades, essays, social popularity, organization skills, or anything else. Basically, it used to be that if you had good grades and weren’t a social misfit, you did awesome in terms of college admissions.
Now, that’s no longer guaranteed, and it’s worth considering why. What changed such that doing this well on math is valued less than it used to be, particularly since the competition has only gotten harder during this time?
It’s interesting to think about this because when it comes to the very top US math performers, the ones selected for the IMO team, they are more certain to attend MIT in recent years than say 10 years ago. I think that of the 30 IMO team members of the last 5 years, over 25 attended MIT. Same is true for the top 6 US students selected for the Physics Olympiad. These are golden tickets.
To be clear, while I don’t know Chris Peterson personally, I know several people that do, and they have only good things to say about him. MIT admissions is fortunate to have him. But I think Chris knows that these very top awards are golden tickets, and MIT actively recruits those kids to apply. As long as there are no red flags such as poor grades, those kids get in.
There are also other near golden tickets for admission to MIT and other top schools, namely some of the top science and humanities programs. By near golden, I mean a very high chance of admission to the point that someone who applied to all of the HYPSMs typically gets into three or more. And unlike USAMO, admission chances for these awards do not seem to have dropped off.
To illustrate the power of these near golden tickets, one year there were a few dozen students that won a major award in late winter. Over a dozen of these students had applied RD to Columbia, and within two weeks of receiving the award, every one of these students received a likely letter from Columbia.
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I often think that any school, including the most selective, want to be sure that they can offer those stellar students the opportunities that those schools have and that the students expect – time in labs, mentorship, etc. Part of the desire for a range of students comes from wanting all of them to succeed and being able to dedicate the resources to making that happen.
If an NFL team drafted the top 10 quarterbacks in the league, most of them see no playing time, would not develop further, and would be miserable.
Sure, a prize-winning student may have had their heart set on MIT. But the resources for them may be at NCSU or OSU or Olin. And if they are all that, they’ll shine there.
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Ha ha 
We’ve strayed so far off topic!
Maybe it was a bot!
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Probably because the competition in other areas has gotten harder over time.
Compared to a decade or few ago, it is probably easier to know about and have the opportunity to pursue something to a very high level of achievement that impresses college admission readers at super-selective colleges, both generally and especially for those from upper middle class families. Not all of such achievements are strictly limited in number (but still few enough to be highly impressive to college admission readers), but adding such achievers into the applicant pool does add competition that the math contest winners have to compete against at super-selective colleges.
In addition, general baseline standards that even those with the highest achievements (or biggest hooks) need to meet at super-selective colleges are higher now than a decade or few ago. So it is entirely possible that a few “defects” (from a college admission standpoint) in the record of a math contest winner a few decades ago would not have prevented admission at a super-selective college, but the same “defects” may do so now.
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OP started another similar thread - he/she/it has been nowhere on this one or the other -so it could be a bot or something else.
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Is it time to update the thread title? We’ve all been talking about everything but the original thread topic.
Maybe “random musings on college admissions” might better reflect the content as we’ve covered a lot of ground here.
Only half kidding!
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