I agree with many of your points. For reasons already stated, students are applying in ever greater numbers to the same set of schools. Given the demographic cliff, the less sought after private schools are in trouble.
It will be an interesting eight years ahead of us (I have 3 more kids to launch). A few things have become clear to me:
schools tend to accept the same type of applicants so kids have multiple acceptances to sought after schools.
– I’ve seen this on CC/reddit and real life - kids with multiple acceptances to sought after schools. Kids with national awards/leadership or great essay writers who can tell their story + obligatory grades/scores.
most families can’t afford more than instate tuition and colleges other than those with billion dollar endowments have to figure out how best to spend their scholarship chest.
– I’ve seen this in real life and online, families (logically) applying to schools they can’t afford but negotiating hard once they are in and sometimes it works.
the higher a school rises in rankings, the higher the number of full pay applicants so yield management.
– Also observed this online and IRL, kids with objectively stats and activities not getting into schools my DD22 did because of yield management.
schools have to judiciously use ED while also managing diversity and making it look like they’re selective.
– Can’t fill the class with all ED because then the reported stats won’t look so good and ED tends to trend whiter and richer.
I’ve seen many who didn’t have the testing stats (partly due to weak public schools)falter in college. Yes, there are poor test takers but there are also many who test strong based on exposure to the material so the gap keeps growing. I think critical writing skills are measurable. So are reading skills. Agree with you on STEM.
Not sure what you are talking about re: stereotypes? Yours, someone else’s? Again, it’s purely opinion. Many think it matters, many don’t. Some are in the middle. Test optional will illustrate if it matters in 4 years once the first wave of kids graduate college. I don’t like to think of a single data point and then extract an entire way of thinking. I’ve seen that most of the kids getting top grades are also getting high test scores. YMMV>
Already happening
FSU changed their admission mid cycle this year.
In years past if you applied to fall they would consider you for summer automatically. Last year they had 65000 apps accepted 21000+ and enrolled over 7000 largest class ever
This year it was October I think they changed it up and emailed all applicants and advised they needed to pick Fall or Summer and would only be considered for that term.
They also added a deferred and waitlist for applicants who applied by November 1st for February notification
This year close to 75000 applicants final number not out and at the February notifications accepted 17000 and 5000 deferred. They are aiming for around 6400 in Freshman class
Is it necessarily true that it will offer more rigorous or advanced courses, rather than it can offer more rigorous or advanced courses?
Of course, a very large school with a wide range of student academic strength may have enough students in all parts of the range (from remedial to highly advanced) to be able to offer suitable level courses for them. But then there is still the question of whether it actually does offer the full range of course levels.
Both our samples are far too small to really form any kind of opinion of what is really happening. And we certainly shouldn’t be extrapolating that to mean anything more than it does.
The poster I responded to was referring to the more “elite” schools. They will have to respond to the needs for their students, or they wouldn’t remain “elite”.
The very large public flagships have all created honor colleges to address the academic needs of their top students. Some obviously have done a better job in that regard than others.
There are a lot or relevant factors besides just the attending students – student body size, budget, availability of mixed undergrad + grad courses, direction from colleges, available fields of study, desires of professors teaching the class, guidelines of what courses much teach for accreditation, etc.
For example, Deep Springs is probably one of the most selective colleges in the United States. Prior to COVID, it typically had single digit acceptance rates and extremely high average test scores. However, their entire college (all years) only has ~25 students at any given time, so this limits their opportunity to offer classes more/less rigorous than standard. This differs from a large flagship, which has the option to offer a far larger variety of courses, many of which are more/less rigorous than standard.
Deep Springs also have a very limited number of available professors to teach and unique institutional goals. In the most recent 2 terms I found listed online, the full list of available courses were as follows. There doesn’t appear to be any foundation math/science type courses available, or even any classes that have prerequisites. I certainly would not assume that Deep Springs must offer “more rigorous courses, faster paced courses, and more advanced courses” than are available at a typical state flagship because they have a higher average quality of students.
Agrarian Politics – Jennifer Smith
The American Financial System – Brian Judge
Arendt – David McNeill
Auto Mechanics – Padraic MacLeish
California Politics – Felicia Wong
Documentary Filmmaking Workshop – Jonathan Halperin
Power – Jennifer Smith
Public Speaking – Jennifer Smith & Brian Judge
Nietzsche – David McNeill
Tectonics and Sedimentation in Deep Springs Valley – Meredith Bush
US Labor-Political History – Felicia Wong
First of all, Deep Springs is very different. It only has to meet the needs of a tiny group of students who choose it for reasons not associated with the breadth and depth of its offerings. Secondly, Deep Springs may have a higher average quality of students than a public flagship, but the public flagship is likely to have far more above “average” quality students that the breadth and depth of its offerings will be material.
You overlooked the word “must” from your quote – “If a school has higher quality of students, it must offer programs that meet their needs: more rigorous courses, faster paced courses, and more advanced courses.”
Deep Spring is obviously an extreme example, but a similar concept applies at other colleges that are more frequently discussed on this site. For example, a very small LAC vs a large flagship. Your earlier post did not distinguish between number vs average quality, which was part of my point. A large flagship may have a much larger number of high achieving students than a small LAC or an Ivy.
You added the word “average” (in “average quality of students”) that I never used. By “higher quality of students”, I meant the existence of enough of such students whose needs an “elite” school must meet (or else it wouldn’t remain an “elite” school for long).
This implies that a key reason such students are attending the college is the availability of more rigorous courses than they could find elsewhere. That is probably true for some colleges, like Caltech. However, I don’t think it is true for the vast majority of “elite” colleges. For example, if Harvard stopped offering Math 55 and similar types of more highly advanced/accelerated courses than students could find at their flagship, I doubt that Harvard “wouldn’t remain an elite school for long”. Harvard might lose a small portion of applicants/yield to YPS… due to lack of such courses, but I’d expect that they’d stil get tens of thousands of high quality applicants, have high quality admits, and would remain an “elite” college in the eyes of most people who care about eliteness/ranking of colleges.
If Harvard stops offering Math 55 and other more advanced math courses, do you think it will be as competitive in attracting top math students in the long run (in order to maintain its status as an elite math program)? I wouldn’t think so. The same applies to the other disciplines.
I wouldn’t use the word “advanced”. Nearly any 4 year college that offers a math major will offer “advanced” math courses. Harvard’s math 55 is something else – a far higher level of rigor than would occur in comparable math courses taken elsewhere. As noted in my earlier post, they might lose some desirable students to other competitors that do offer this type of course. However, I very much doubt Harvard will have a shortage of high quality students to choose from. I expect they’d still have far more high quality applicants than they could possibly admit and would still remain an elite college (using typical forum definitions, which are well correlated with USNWR ranking and selectivity). The original claim was that they would not remain an elite college for long, not that certain students would choose to apply/attend elsewhere.
I am an interviewer for Stanford,. One of the questions I ask applying students is why they want to attend the colleges. It’s common for students to mention , they knew someone who attended (particularly relative), promised someone they’d apply, help accomplish unique long term goals, reputation as generally being a good college, offers a particularly unique major or program, located in SV, etc. Some students talk at length listing a large number of influential factors. However, I’ve yet to have anyone mention Stanford offering especially rigorous/accelerated courses even being a factor in applying.
The argument that applicants today aren’t concerned about Harvard and Stanford is irrelevant, because both of these schools have been able to meet their students’ needs. The issue will arise if they don’t in the future.
You’ve set up the wrong version of the argument. People don’t normally just say GPA; rather, they say GPA + rigor is a strong predictor, and from what I’ve gathered, there is a good correlation there. At least the colleges seem to think so.
I also don’t think most people think the SATs are meaningless. Clearly if a kid pounds the living daylights out of the SAT or ACT, there’s academic ability there and, if he/she has a low GPA, it’s worth investigating what’s going on.
But your version of it seems to imply that it’s the GPA that doesn’t matter. I disagree. If a kid has a high GPA with a rigorous curriculum, I’m going to assume there’s academic ability there.
This business we hear about watered down curricula and grade inflation all seems to come from anecdote land. If a kid takes a lot of AP or IB courses, including challenging bio, chem, math, physics, foreign language, etc. and they have a high GPA, the burden is on the skeptic to make the case that someone is just ‘giving’ that kid the grades.
I think inflated GPAs combined with test optional has really affected admissions and led to the huge application surges. High GPA does not correlate well with rigor at the schools I am most familiar with in my area, and I would bet it there are other regions with a similar issue, based on cousins across the country who all have “4.0”. The vast majority of teens I talk to have “all As” but take very different classes depending on their school track.
For example, in one school, honors is weighted the same as AP, but there are much lower means in the hardest group of APs ( taken by less than 10% of school). There are kids every year who are in the top 20% for GPA who have taken more than half regular classes, meaning based on the math they would have to have essentially all A/A+ to get that particular gpa from the school. Whereas kids who took all honors available and every rigorous AP available would have the same GPA with a couple of B+ and some A-. Some of those courses give half the class Bs. Regular classes and other honors can easily be 2/3 of the class getting A range. This particular school and others commonly have kids deep into the top half of rank who have “4.0” uw. Guess who does better in admissions? The high rigor kids, even without 4.0 uw. Test optional last year just led to a lot of kids aiming “higher” with their “top” gpas—despite below average (for the school ) SAT. Naviance data from last year looked different for sure—but somehow the colleges in general sorted out who was prepared based on transcript.
