A little anecdotal evidence on math competitions and MIT. My sister, who lives in a small European country, is good friends with a couple (both elementary school teachers) that have a son who is a mathoholic. Kid spends his free time reading math journals, working on problems etc. In high school his math teacher connected him with the country’s math Olympiad team and he represented said country in International Math Olympiads and won individual recognition. This kid was recruited and offered a free ride by MIT (I’m might be wrong about the school, it might have been another internationally well known school) but ended up studying math at the best math department in his country (the equivalent to a local flagship). My point being is that of course top math departments are looking for top talent to recruit. My kid also loves math but she doesn’t spend 90% of her waking hours thinking about it like this kid (who by the way is super personable and friendly, an asset to any learning community). Again of course top schools are going to be interested in such kids.
I think that colleges like MIT like competitions for two reasons. First it is easily quantifiable. Student did X number of competitions and got Y awards at competitions of Z prestige. Second, because high schools themselves like sending their best math students to these competitions.
However, the number of top awards are fewer than the number of kids that even MIT accepts, and I do not think that “also participated” provides a boost over a kid with a similar profile who did not participate in competitions.
That’s my observation as well. The ten kids I mentioned earlier who had won national recognition and were admitted to MIT were all ORM (mostly males, but a couple of females as well). Plenty of other kids (both ORM and non-ORM) without national recognition applied from our local school but were not admitted.
It’s not only math contests. I agree with @momprof9904 that there seem to be two predictable paths (by predictable I mean a high chance of admission, not guaranteed admission) to MIT, and to a lesser extent the remaining HYPS schools as well.
The first are are the national/international exam contests. Math is certainly the best known, but physics, chemistry, biology and computing are also given serious consideration.
The second is nationally recognized research. One way of demonstrating this is doing really well in a national science contest such as ISEF or STS (the later stages of these contests are evaluated by experts in the field so MIT is in effect trusting their vetting process). The second is to get published in a respected journal. Due to the lengthy journal review cycles of high-impact journals, it’s usually “easier” to win the national science contests than to get published before applications are due during senior year.
I posit that MIT does have some boxes, and they really aren’t that much of a secret to some. Given that the kids that excel in these areas seem to actually enjoy the subjects they study, I don’t see it as a problem. But excellence in these areas is not something that can just start in high school. The innate drive starts early and is then nurtured from middle school onwards.
To be clear, I agree that there are plenty of kids that get in without these awards. But I don’t know how to chance those kids, whereas I do with the award winners (I often get contacted privately on CC to do this).
Getting back to the OP’s point, I suspect that the most stress is felt by people who were unaware of just how competitive elite college admissions actually is until junior year of high school. In contrast, those who have the awards (and barring significant personality defects) are pretty much a lock for one or more top-20 schools, and the only question is which ones accept them.
I don’t think finding out elite college admissions is more competitive than you thought is inherently stressful. I think what’s stressful is having decided that going to Vanderbilt and not Princeton, or Muhlenberg and not Amherst, or Rice and not Penn means that your kid’s life is over and that you are a failure as a parent.
Plenty of people learn late in the game how competitive it is to get admitted to their own alma mater and they shrug and then help their kid find a solid match/good fit school. Plenty of people realize that their kid is a poor fit for whatever elite school the parent was gunning for and they pivot.
And then a small minority (or I guess a large majority in Silicon Valley/Southern Cal?) flips out? Hard to quantify how big a problem it is.
My kid had none of the things you guys are describing as a “box” for MIT. Even had a recommendation from a history teacher which said (according to the guidance counselor, which we found out at graduation) “I can’t believe he’s applying to MIT, I thought he should study history at (fill in the blank).”
So there’s also room for the contrarian admits. No medals, awards, olympiads, publication, research. None, zip zilch.
I agree with you that’s dysfunctional parenting.
Absolutely. I just don’t know how to predict their chance of admissions.
There’s a lot that’s unpredictable- why is that a problem?
No college admits just one type of students. All of them need a complimentary group of talents. Even for a STEM-focused school, there needs to be a balance of talents between different disciplines of STEM (or even within the same discipline). Admission of one group of students doesn’t mean other students are excluded. There’re different buckets for differently talented students.
It would be really interesting if somehow an application pool could run through the process many times to see just how random it is.
At ultra selective schools there is probably an element of chance when it comes to admissions once you account for prize winners, recruited athletes, kids of donors and other hooked applicants whose admissions odds are much, much higher than that of the general pool. For every accepted student there are many with very similar stats (including ECs/LOR etc) who are denied and we’ll never know why. That’s part of the reason it isn’t worth fretting over. It is what it is. Unless a kid is hooked in some way (and that includes being a prize winner or having some other unusual academic qualification) they should go into the process anticipating rejection - regardless of their grades & test scores. Unfortunately, a lot of high performing students can’t or won’t accept that and are, understandably, very disappointed when things don’t work out.
I’m buying a Powerball ticket for each application….I feel like it’s the same odds 
Deep thought of the day: Although it’s personally depressing that college admissions are super competitive for my kid, it is really great for my future and this country that teens are working super hard in STEM fields and achieving at high levels. Who said that Americans can’t do math and science? The numbers show that they can. Use this knowledge to buy an index fund of top American companies and reap the benefits of all these hardworking bright American kids and future citizens coming from abroad to study at the world’s best universities.
What numbers? Having some super talented and hardworking students in STEM doesn’t mean an average American student (or an average American for that matter) isn’t as uninterested and clueless about math and science. We do attract a lot of talents from abroad because of the qualities of our universities and the majority of our graduate students in STEM are often from abroad.
What can’t be ignored is that there is now a huge pay gap between most who work in the service industry and those who are in the creative class. Access to the creative class jobs most often requires a college degree and many times a graduate degree. There are also some trades that pay well but many of these business owners would also benefit from a business degree. Some tech jobs require post high school training.
In these times of economic uncertainty paired with a global economy, parents are doing their best to position their children for success. And, colleges are businesses and are working on their end to be successful feeding a somewhat unproductive cycle. Are parents participants in the cycle - yes. Are parents the primary driver of the cycle - no. Students and their families are participating in a process that no individual family influences. Parents can only help their kids play the game to their own benefit and limit the potential damage of the college application process.
Interesting survey published of admissions officers….some changes will remain.
Is there a way to “like” a post 100 times?
Great article, clickbaity title. The article does not show that the admissions were broken, but that they were too fragile to survive the pandemic.
The parts of higher-ed that are broken are not discussed in the article, like loss of shared governance, massive cuts in financial support of public universities, while, at the same time, there is an increase in demand for services, and the fact that, as state legislatures cut funding, they increase their attempts to control the universities. So as states cut the budgets of their universities, they also demand a bigger say as to the curriculum, the hiring processes, and the personal lives of the University employees.
As state demands for “accountability” and “transparency” increase the long list of requirements for universities to do anything from changing classroom capacity to hiring the administrative workers that are required to run multi-million and billion dollar institutions, public colleges have difficulty keeping up with basic demands for education. They do not have enough faculty, have more than half of their faculty being contingent adjuncts hired on a course-to-course basis. At the same time, colleges are demanding more research from faculty, eating up more of the research funds to supplement their administration, and the top echelons are increasingly filled with people who think that universities are “corporations”, and the students are “costumers”, and far worse, who think that the upper administration are “bosses”, of the faculty.
Since one of the main reasons that faculty take jobs at universities instead of higher paying corporate jobs is to get away from the corporate model. As a result, colleges which try and run like corporations are having an extremely difficult time in hiring and retaining faculty in fields where PhDs get more money in the real corporate world. Engineering, for example, especially CS, are desperate for more faculty, and they are all hemorrhaging faculty like crazy.
I mean, would you rather work 9 to 5, for a great salary, benefits, paid time off, or would you rather be required to work 60-80 hours a week since you are expected to be a full-time teacher, a full time researcher, and have all sorts of committee responsibilities. Oh, and you have to deal with BS from students and politicians about what you teach in class, you have to spend 1/2 of your time soliciting the millions in funding required to do the research, as the university breathes down your neck, demanding to know why you are you not getting more money for research and not publishing more research articles. At the same time, state legislatures are trying to tell you what you can or cannot research, how and what you can teach.
Oh, and, despite the fact the faculty are required to do two jobs at once, and are working 60+ hour weeks, they are the favorite punching bags for every populist politician who claim that all faculty at every university is making over $200,000 a year, and that universities should cut salaries to these slackers.
So yes, higher-ed is broken, but in large part because everybody thinks that the way to fix it is in changing admissions, while ignoring the fact that the teaching missions of public universities are being threatened because the public not only want easier access to universities, but also want to pay lower tuition AND lower state taxes, and are encouraging the administrative bloat at universities by demanding that more power be shifted from faculty to administration.
I agree with more of this than not, but…
(1) I would argue that a fundamental issue is that college costs are rising faster than inflation, and this is coincident with the growth of administration. The long-term trends of state legislatures are to increase the dollars per student, but increasing the dollars still leaves the fraction decreasing.
The increased use of adjuncts is a university reaction to increasing costs.
The loss of shared governance is a consequence of the increasing administrative load, or maybe vice versa.
The expectations on non-academic amenities have increased. Why on this very forum parents are complaining that their progeny in New England colleges have to endure dorms without air conditioning.
(2) There are some overgeneralizations in there. The colleges (and departments within colleges) that have large research budgets (and it’s the rare professor indeed who sees “millions”, and those are mostly in a single field) are not the ones relying on adjuncts. Why should they? They have graduate students.
(3) These problems have relatively little to do with admissions. It’s hard to get a crisp definition of “admissions going wrong”, but it seems to be related to lower acceptance rates of T20’s. That’s primarily arithmetic. Enrollment has roughly tripled in the last fifty years, but the T20’s are not 3x bigger. On top of that, students today apply to a dozen or more colleges, whereas in the past (as discussed upthread) a much smaller number was common.
The way “the system” has responded is by improving the quality of the T50 or 60’s that aren’t in the top 20. Carnegie Mellon. Texas. Rice. Michigan. Top HS students can and do go to an excellent college and get a terrific education. What won’t happen is that they all get this terrific education at a small number of colleges, famous for where they were a half-century or more ago.
Is this so terrible?
At my D’s high school, not only was service mandatory for various clubs and honor societies, the specific service was, too. Personally, I feel the connection to service is more meaningful when you do something because you truly care about it and not because your school’s NHS chapter requires supporting this cause over that one.
Remember that there are only around 200 or so research universities which have large numbers of those graduates students. The other 1,000 or so public colleges and universities teach have few or no graduate students.
However, even at research universities, graduate students are limited. They can only work 20 hours a week, maximum, and that includes prep and grading. They are TAs, but very rarely are instructors.
That is why:
At UNC, there were, in 2020, 1,875 tenured and tenure-track faculty, versus 2,228 “fixed-term” faculty
At U Michigan, in 2020, there were 2,858 tenured/tenure track faculty, 728 lecturers, and 2,979 clinical, research, and other faculty (which include a good number of teaching faculty).
In the UC system, in 2021, there are 11,704 tenure/tenure track faculty, versus 13,051, adjuncts, clinical faculty, lecturers, etc.
In Humanities departments in every one of those colleges, more than 1/2 of the faculty, and almost all faculty that are teaching the intro courses, are adjuncts of non-TT lecturers.
Those are the biggest, most “prestigious”, and wealthiest public universities.
U Arkansas had, in 2020, 827 tenure and TT faculty and 737 lecturers and instructors.
Of course, more than 1/2 of those tenured faculty were hired 20 years ago or longer. If we look at the hires of the past decade, 2/3 are non-TT.
Again, these are universities with graduates students who supplement the instruction as TAs, reducing the number of teaching faculty that are required. At universities and colleges without graduates students, the situation is much worse - you can find departments in the humanities that the only TT/tenured faculty member is the department chair.
It was a response to “broken higher ed”, but I guess I did go off on something of a rant…
So back to admissions.
The problem is that it is killing the colleges which are the “least prestigious”, as students go further into debt to attend the most prestigious colleges that will accept them.
Also, most of those T-50s are not really getting any better, they are simply getting more popular. In fact some are getting worse, as they increase enrollment, and the college hires more contingent faculty instead of TT faculty. Since contingent faculty are hired and fired “at will”, they need to keep students happy, which is rarely conducive with keeping high educational standards. See rant above.