@designdad- The argument that is raging out there is about the admissions process to the elite schools, and how they pick the kids that get in, and the problem with the meritocracy is what defines that. I am not saying that the elite schools are doing something deliberately, that they are trying to recreate the old wasp elite schools of the 19th century, or that they are bad with financial aid, I am not.
The main problem with the ivy admissions process, is that the kind of things they are looking at, the hyper stats, not only favor those with significant economic means, but can be gamed, and the kind of resources required to get the 2300 SAT, 4.0 GPA with the 8 AP classes, the EC’s, requires resources that a lot of kids don’t have. Put it this way, when you have school districts like Scarsdale, NY, that routinely gets kids into Ivy level schools, it is no big surprise, they spend something like 25 grand + a kid, the kids for the most part are from very well off families, and the schools practically start grooming kids for high level colleges from middle school on (I believe that is one of the districts that offers SAT prep starting in middle school). Likewise, often the Ivy league schools point out the kids who get massive aid or free rides (and the ivies are very generous with that, there is no doubt), but when you look at who those kids are, it doesn’t really prove anything. Many of those kids are Asian, they are the children of immigrants, and it is really, really great those kids get a shot at the top schools, they have worked very hard to get there, impressive because often their parents are not well educated themselves, it is a classic success story. The only problem with the narrative is those kids also tend to live in areas where the public schools (usually in certain cities) provide programs for talented kids that allows these kids to achieve (usually because the cities in question are economically powerhouses, like NY and places on the west coast). In NYC, Stuyvescant high and bronx science are roughly 40% Asian, and between that and the G and T programs, or schools like the Hunter School, they have a support base that is as good or better than many private prep schools (probably better). It doesn’t mean that these kids shouldn’t get into elite colleges, not at all, my problem is that in many ways they seem to be measuring things based on a standard that is implicitly unfair.
Which is more impressive, a kid from Scarsdale, with two college educated parents, schools that are some of the best in the country, with tutors and test prep programs, who has done academic stuff outside college who has the stellar stats, or the kid from a rural high school or an old rust belt city in decline, who has had to face mediocre schools, ,minimal resources, indifferent teachers, who ends up with ‘good’ stats, let’s say a 2000 SAT, 3.7 GPA, maybe no AP’s, and some school based EC’s, assuming the school has them? (lot of inner city schools these days, the only EC’s seem to be sports)…and what critics are pointing out is that in admissions there is little will to compare outcome to inputs in admissions.
The real problem, and I am not the only one saying this, is assuming equal outcomes from differing backgrounds. One article I sent to someone else pointed out that in ivy league admissions, something like 69% of the kids come from family backgrounds with income >120k a year. While 120k a year means different things in different places, in some places that is almost middle class thanks to the cost of living, others it is a fortune, it represents twice the median family income in this country, and is roughly in the top 10-15% percentile in the US. So kids from let’s say 15% of the families in this country represent 69% of admits, that says a lot.
My dad hit the nail on the head with this one, looking at it a different way. There was some event, I think it was NHS inductions, and the principal was talking to parents , bragging about how 90% of the kids went on to college, how a good percentage went to very competitive on up schools, and my dad looked at him, and said “yes, but what did you really do? You are talking a town where most of the families have middle to upper middle class income, large percentage have both parents who are college educated, what have you done to achieve your claims? Given the stock you are taking in as inputs, what have you achieved and what was handed to you?”. It is much the same with admissions, do the stats they seem to key on measure great achievement in the kid in question, or is it something that the kid achieved because they had great things to work with?
The irony of all this is things like SAT scores, GPA, EC’s, APS, and the like, were designed originally to try and make admissions more egalitarian, to get out of the age where for example the Ivy League was the finishing school for Wasp ‘gentleman’, and turn it into a place out to educate the best of the best, no matter the background, it was designed to filter out the snobbery and such and it achieved that. On the other hand, they also created a statistics based approach that leads itself to unequal outcomes in assuming that the things they look at are achievable by everyone, and in a sense is leading to another kind of elitism, based on economic background.
Music is much the same way, the level of playing required to get into elite music schools is such that it requires a lot of parental resources, either the economic and other support resources to get a kid involved early and getting them to the right teachers and such, or having someone able to navigate a very tangled system to get them the resources given modest family financial resources, the archetype of the kid from the middle of nowhere getting into an elite music school, especially on one of the solo instruments, is even more distant than it once was.
That of course leads to another argument, about whether in fact you need to go to an elite level school to achieve, but that is another discussion.
I think the music at Pomona is separate from the music at the other schools which is joint among the other 4 schools. For swimming (and all sports teams) Pomona/Pitzer is one set of teams, Claremont-Mudd-Scripps is the other.