Stress free competitive process sounds like an oxymoron no matter how hard you try.
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Still disagree. Most kids are not worried about ED/ED2/REA/SCEA. It is very common here on CC, and I’m sure it’s prevalent in some high schools or communities, but most high school kids just apply to their state schools and don’t bother with all that nonsense.
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I agree. CC is not an accurate depiction of what’s normal. Most kids are not at all stressing about competitive admissions.
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40% of kids aren’t going to college. I suspect most of them aren’t concerned about holistic admissions or test optional. I also suspect many of them are successful and happy.
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I agree, too, but nonetheless there is a significant percentage of teens (and youngsters) that are dealing with this pressure - usually imposed upon them by others. No one is born caring about elite colleges. I am not sure what percentage of youth are impacted by it - probably around 10%? That’s still a big number. Just because many of those come from high earning families doesn’t make it an illegitimate concern.
A girl in my town died by suicide a few weeks ago, and the (icky) gossip was that she had just come off of a college tour during spring break, and the pressure was too much. Whether or not that is true, that the gossipers think that is a plausible explanation says a lot about where we are on this issue.
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I don’t think anyone claimed that most kid are stressed, just that more kids today than ever are stressed by the college admission process. The two aren’t the same. Some kids don’t care about colleges at all. Some kids don’t care about “elite” colleges for a variety of reasons. “Elite” colleges (and there’re apparently more of them now than ever before) are always out of reach for most kids. If something you know is out of reach, you generally wouldn’t care about it. However, if a college like Harvard tells a kid that Harvard is within her reach, and it may cost her family less than the cost of her in-state public (or it may even be free), I’d bet she would be interested. If she is a superstar student and everything comes naturally to her, she isn’t going to be stressed either. The problem is that the majority of those who apply because they thought they were within reach aren’t superstar students. They likely feel stressed in order to keep up with the superstar students. There’re more and more of them now than ever before, because the colleges, their parents, many on CC, and almost everyone, tell them these colleges are high reaches but reachable, in the absence of definable measures.
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How about a university where the courses, curricula, and research and other academic opportunities are comparable in quality to those of elite universities, but is not so selective that ordinary US high school and transfer applicant academic criteria are unable to be by themselves reasonable means of admission selection?
Elite in the US means that a university will have more applicants pressed up against the ceiling of the usual academic criteria used in admission. But if a university can be made elite in academics taught there, but not in admission, then that may be more of what you would find desirable.
But then it probably would need to be much larger than what are currently considered “large” universities in the US.
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We looked at quite a few LACs that fit this description!
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That’s right. To me, day-to-day HS life in the UK appears to be less stressful compared to the US because homework, lab work, projects, quizzes/tests, etc. don’t count (some exceptions in courses such as art). On the other hand, the months leading up to GCSE and A level exams are likely more stressful because these exams count for everything. But, from my observation, if you’re well taught and are academically strong, most of the anxiety comes from wanting to secure top grades rather than simply doing well.
The UK university application process, even for Oxbridge, appears to me to be more straightforward and less stressful than applying to highly rejective US colleges. One application, one personal statement for all schools (drawback is that you can’t apply for vastly different majors at different schools), and, in general, a clearer sense of your chances of admission.
With respect to Oxbridge and other universities that require entrance exams and/or interviews, my D22’s school organizes subject-specific prep sessions (typically 45-minute sessions after school once a week) a couple of months before the entrance exams and a couple of mock interview sessions a month or so before they take place. At least at her school, that’s it. Of course, her school prides itself on providing a rigorous education (i.e., strong foundation) in the years leading up to university application.
One of the drawbacks of the UK system - particularly through an American lens - is that it is much more rigid and offers fewer choices. Most UK students take (and can only handle) 3-4 A level subjects - so, if you are looking to apply for a STEM degree at a UK university, you might be required to take STEM A level subjects exclusively because they are pre-requisites for university entry. My D22 was in this position and had to give up foreign languages.
(For the history buffs among us, in the past UK secondary school education ended at 16 (essentially after completing GCSEs, which are quite broad-ranging in terms of subjects taken by each student) and A level studies served to prepare students for their courses/majors at university. That’s why A level subjects largely track university courses/majors.)
There’s also the matter of curricular offerings. My D22’s school offers 20 or so A level subjects (with really boring names!) whereas Andover (we had an opportunity to move MA a few years ago and she was offered a place there) touts 300+ courses.
The upside of the UK system (that’s why I’ve included AustenNut’s quote) is that you don’t see competitions to outdo each other in terms of the number of AP or DE courses taken. Even the brightest students take only 3-4 A levels and it is extremely rare (I’ve actually never seen it) for a student to take a course at a university while still in high school.
In addition, because UK universities are not holistic in the way practiced by highly rejective US colleges, you don’t see a nuclear arms race in terms of ECs. In this way, you really can be authentic and pursue your passions in terms of ECs because UK universities largely don’t care.
To me, one great advantage of the US college system is the broader liberal arts education. I personally think it’s too early to specialize at 18 (or 16 if you consider A level) but I know some others like the UK system because you can specialize early on.
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It has been brought up several times that these private elite colleges have their priorities and their admission process serves those priorities and it’s the parents fault if they don’t get it. After reading through CC posts for a few years, I think I finally get it. The first priority of these private universities has never been to educate the best students. The first priority was, and to a large extent still is, to educate students that have the biggest potential to be rich and powerful so that the college, which is actually a business, can continue to get richer and more influential. This is how they were founded with oil or other blue blood money to educate their founders offspring. They still give preference to the children of the rich (old and new money) and powerful through legacy and donor admission but now have enough money, through endowment and exorbitant tuitions, that they can afford to accept some bright middle class and low income kids.
First generation immigrants from Europe and Asia, which do not have such private institutions with those special priorities, do not know the historical context and fail to understand the true nature of this elite colleges (which are also tiny compared to the general population). There are no private colleges where I come from. In my country of origin, the mission of the publicly funded universities is to find and educate the best physicists, poets and doctors (medicine and law are undergraduate degrees) so that the country as a whole has good public services, etc. Nobody cares if a future doctor plays lacrosse or the piano. Legacy admission does not exist.
America being supposedly the beacon of democracy and self-made success, it’s no wonder that so many immigrants are confused by this very undemocratic system and think that our kids just have to try harder. Our kids don’t have to try harder. They just have to find good public institutions similar to the univitsities back home.
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When everybody is working all the time, small differences can determine whether one is accepted or not.
Yes, the next year. Great. So if you have a bad exam day, you now have to take the class again, and then take the exam again at the end of a year. That’s MUCH better. For the A levels, you wait another year to do the test as well.
Look at the articles I linked to above. Almost all British students are stressed by their exam system, even those who have no interest in applying to Oxbridge.
So again, this myth that UK students aren’t stressed by University application system is a myth, not reality.
Here is something that I have not seen mentioned in the comparisons between the UK and the USA - acceptance rates.
Acceptance rate to Oxbridge are much higher than to HYPSM, any of the other Ivies, U Chicago, Rice, etc. Acceptance rates to Oxford are around 17%, and to Cambridge, they are 21%
Let that sink in, people.
Acceptance rate to Cambridge are three times higher than acceptance rates to Yale. In 2021, there were 50 “elite” colleges in the USA which have acceptance rates that were lower than those of Cambridge, and 34 colleges with acceptance rates that were lower than those of Oxford. When looking at this year, I would guess that there will be closer to 70 and 50.
Most of the American students who are stressed out because they want to be admitted to an “elite” colleges are applying to colleges with acceptance rates that are lower than those of Oxbridge, some have admission rates that are 1/4 those of Cambridge.
There are around 300,000 UK students who apply to college each year. There are around 6,200 students of these who end up at Oxbridge. That is around 2.1%
There are around 2,000,000 students applying to colleges every year in the USA. Around 5,000 of these will end up at HYPSM, so 0.3%. If we look only at those who are applying to 4 year colleges, it goes up to around 0.5%.
So a UK student is 4X more likely to end up at Oxbridge than an American student is to end up at HYPSM.
This is true for all “prestigious” UK colleges versus similarly “prestigious” American colleges.
Back when admission rates to the most “prestigious” colleges in the USA were 4X than they are now, the stress levels were far lower, and likely far lower than they are in the UK.
So not only are the UK students highly stressed about admissions to university, any possible reduced stress they have, compared to USA students, can easily be attributed to higher acceptance rates at their universities.
Because of less competition, last year, in the UK, 73% of all applicants were accepted to their first choice university, which was 84% of all students who were accepted to a university. Only
In summary, if UK students are less stressed than American students, it is more likely the result of a much higher likelihood that they will be accepted by the university of their choice than because they have test-based admissions.
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Are you now talking about elite US college admission?
Every single admissions system in which there are far more applicants than there re places will have this result. The lower the acceptance rate, the more likely it will be that small differences will determine whether an applicant is accepted or not.
In the USA, there are simply far far more applicants than the UK, and there are far more people obsessed with “prestige”.
If you adopted the A levels, there would simply be more students with As than HYPSM could accepted, then there would be far more students with A*, and then we would have mire students with all A*, and then what?
7% of all UK students got three A*. For the USA, that would be 140,000 students, which is around 20X the number of places at HYPSM.
How are you going to choose those lucky 5%? Interviews? there are simply not enough faculty to perform that many interviews. Maybe check for academic prizes? Oooops, those are ECs again.
Add more exams, and, once again, small differences will determine admissions.
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Have you asked yourself the following questions:
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Why do acceptance rates at US “elite” colleges become so much lower and keep getting lower? They weren’t this low before, were they?
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Does the increase in the denominator of the acceptance rate really commensurate with the increase in US population? Or is it the result of telling everyone that s/he should apply because most of the applicants, including those who are ultimately rejected, are “qualified”?
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Don’t Oxbridge have much higher percentages of international students so the comparison of US vs UK population sizes isn’t valid?
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BINGO! And, they are not actually private institutions. They receive government research grants, but more importantly, they are tax-exempt institutions, not paying local property tax, and with endowments that grow tax-free, and as such, are effectively publicly funded, leading to multi-billion dollar endowments.
Their “holistic” admissions processes are solely a fig leaf to attempt to conceal the fact that the schools are simply accepting whom they want to accept, for their own purposes. That was the origin of the process in the 1920s, in order to put a stop to admission solely by academic achievement, which had been allowing first gen Jewish boys to out-compete the sons of the WASP elite. The modification made to the application process then required the applicant to state their religion and submit a photograph of themselves, in addition to adding a fungible “good character” score, much like today’s racist “personal” score. Nowadays, instead of the process being used to specifically keep out Jews and specifically admit the sons of the Brahmin WASP elite, it’s also being used to encourage large monetary donations, to achieve a diversity of skin color that has nothing to do with having been the descendant of US slaves, supposedly to achieve a bit of economic background diversity, and to selectively admit those whom the school believes have a high likelihood of bringing future honor that will reflect well upon the institution, and more importantly, future monetary donations that will greatly benefit the institution.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens after the Supreme Court rules on the cases challenging racially preferential admissions now being considered. What would be more interesting would be for Congress to eliminate the tax exemption for private educational institutions, and religious institutions, thus eliminating the public subsidy.
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By that logic General Dynamics and St. Paul’s Church would be government institutions. The universities are private not public. Sorry, the game will continue. B7.
I can’t speak for all Asian parents but many feel that the best pathway to financial stability is strong education and attending the “best schools”.
They will literally pour all their resources into the kids. Unfortunately the byproduct could be very stressed out kids with unworldly expectations. Some kids will crack. Other kids will thrive and the years of studying makes them battle tested under the most strenuous academic environments when they actually attend college.
The other aspect is that many Asian parents understand the odds are stacked against them. The kids may believe in equity and diversity but their parents think it’s fundamentally unfair that they and their kids’ work and sacrifices are being undermined because they are the wrong race. Elite schools - “We have a 25% Asian student population so it shows that we are “fair” because Asians are only 5% of the overall population”. This type of reasoning is what makes Asian parents furious and something that many non-Asians don’t understand.
The Stop Asian Hate movement seems to have opened some eyes from non-Asians, many of whom believed that Asians were treated the same as whites.
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For those endlessly extolling the virtues of the British system, you may want to take a closer look at how Asian students have fared at the top British schools.
Take Oxford, for example. In 2019 (pre-Covid) the offer rate for White applicants was 24.1%. For British Bangladeshi and Pakistani students the offer rate was 12.6%. For other British Asian students the offer rate was 14.7%. And, in comparison to other ethnic groups, Asian students consistently receive offers at a lower rate than expected given their predicted grades and subject choice.
2021 entry UCAS Undergraduate reports by sex, area background, and ethnic group 2
I guess one could look at these numbers and argue that, generally, the British Asian students must not be as deserving as the British White students, but given the discrepancy in expected results compared to actual results, I have my doubts that this is the case.
ETA: for the decade ending 2019, the offer rate for British Asian applicants averaged about 5.5% less than expected given predicted grades and subject choice. This means that the offer rate is over 1/3 lower than expected given predicted grades and subject choice.
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Bristish students need to have a certain GPA to be accepted (achieve AAA or better at A-level). Here are the numbers for UK-domiciled students. I don’t see any blatant injustice there.
| # of students achieving AAA | # of students receiving offers to Oxford | % of AAA students accepted to Oxford | |
|---|---|---|---|
| White | 25,040 | 2,049 | 8.18% |
| Asian | 4,830 | 308 | 6.38% |
| Black | 840 | 95 | 11.31% |
| Others (including mix heritage) | 2325 | 223 | 9.59% |
Asians apply to Oxford in greater numbers (more than half of eligible students), and I also presume that most of them applied for STEM/medicine. That is why their acceptance rate appears lower as there are only so many places for math/CS
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You seem to be finessing the statistics here. There aren’t 25,000 white applicants to Oxford. There are generally about 9000-9500. And close to 25% of those are given offers, a rate more than double to some British Asian groups, and almost double others. I don’t understand why you’ve made the denominator the entire pool, as opposed to those who apply? Are you willing to do the same for US Universities?
Why are you willing to make this concession regarding the Oxford but not Harvard or Stanford?
- Don’t a higher percentage of qualified Asian Americans apply to Stanford and Harvard? Aren’t they more likely to apply for STEM/Medicine?
- If so, then won’t their "acceptance rates appear lower because there are only so many places for math/CS?
It seems like if your logic holds (I’m not sure it does) it should apply equally or moreso with schools like Stanford and Harvard.