Not sure we follow. There are dozens of majors. Do you want one faculty from each to weigh in? Which faculty should review which kids? Then hold kids to those majors they thought they wanted, at 17?
And absolutely, adcoms, on behalf of the U, have a very vested interest in the success of the class. It’s part of their mission. At top schools, they are informed about the depts, expectations, results, as well as the track records of kids from various high schools and what patterns academically, in activities, and in thinking, yield success at their college. Not perfect, but it works.
If faculty wants to complain, they can. They will.
At highly selective schools, they have the luxury of a pool of applicants whose academic credentials all indicate a very high likelihood of success. So even any tipping of the scale for various non-academic reasons is unlikely to admit those who are unlikely to succeed.
At less selective schools, the admissions criteria are mainly or purely on academic credentials anyway (e.g. CSUs in California), even though they cannot be too choosy about whom they admit. Indeed, some may see it as their mission to help students with weaker previous academic credentials succeed, even with the realism that not all will succeed.
Not at all elites and even at ones where one can, switching because you just can’t keep up with the class in that major, is failure in my eyes, if that student would have graduated with the same major that they switched out of if they had gone to another school
Students change majors for various reasons other than doing poorly in the courses for that major. The wealthiest of the elites often do maintain enough reserve capacity in most or all departments to allow students to be admitted undeclared and freely choose or change to most or all majors without having capacity restrictions (although some have to get creative about handling the surge of interest in CS recently).
I concede that this is an issue, but not something that cannot be overcome. The faculty committee can consist of various broad areas: Humanities, Physical Sciences etc. There can be enough breath in an admission committee made of faculty to evaluate an applicant if a college decided to go that way.
Hmm, That depends if there are required core classes or not, but even if we assume there aren’t, I would still feel responsible if my decision put a weak student in my colleague’s class and he or she had to fail the student. Its like if you recommend a student for a job at your friends company and this friend fails spectacularly at the company. Your reputation kind of takes a beating. That is why a faculty member won’t just give great recommendations to every student right? Their credibility is also at stake? They value their brand
Your colleagues would come to know sooner or later, wouldn’t they about the quality of your picks?
There are cases for certain majors, though. Changing into CMU CS is very difficult. Changing into Penn Wharton may not be that easy. Changing divisions in Columbia or Cornell does not appear to be that difficult, but is not automatic either. Harvard is capacity-limited in visual and environmental studies and requires a 3.0 to declare that major.
In any case, if you want faculty admitting students and judging on academic prowess in a subject, you may always apply to Oxbridge and other English unis.
Also, Cornell admits by college and evidently faculty are involved in admissions there.
Don’t know how Caltech operates, but their core is so tough and they don’t look at a lot of other aspects (like race, legacy, or athletic prowess, though I believe gender matters), so admissions will come down in large part to academic prowess there as well.
So if you want to know what elites would look like if faculty were in charge of admissions, we already know: just look at Oxbridge, LSE, and Imperial (and Caltech).
I started out as an engineering major. I’m convinced that if I’d gone to one specific other school I was admitted to, I would still be an engineer. Instead, I became a linguist, and that’s my profession, and by all accounts I’m good at it.
So how is me becoming a linguist a failure? I really think you have a number of unwarranted beliefs about the way higher education actually works, or at least what the purpose of higher education is, and that’s feeding into some of the disagreement here.
Admission isn’t done blind. Even if a school doesn’t have, eg, a dedicated school of engineering, they can ask the probable interests, look at the leaning in the hs record, and/or weigh that. They need to balance majors. I don’t know where the info comes that some substantial number of kids apply undeclared.
Harvard also has faculty involved with admissions, but not leaving their specialties to become adcoms. Other tops consult faculty from depts with particular wants. But the great bulk of the process is the great weeding and boiling down.
Very true, but that is not the point that Malcolm Gladwell makes in his book and that was not my point in response to PurpleTitan. If you admit “weaker than average” students, which adcoms in today’s elite colleges do for various reasons, then those students may be forced to switch to less lucrative or even less desirable majors just because they are unable to cut it in an elite school, whereas they may have been able to do well in the the same major at a less prestigious school. For example, lets say a STEM degree at an elite university like MIT vs a local college.
The adcoms who made the decision to bring that student into the elite college, don’t have to stare that decision in the face as much as a faculty member would have to do. An adcom can shrug off a student’s failure easier than a faculty member can. That is my thought. Maybe faculty members don’t care either, in which case having them make admission decisions won’t matter either
More a sidebar than anything else, but I’ll just say that repeated references to Malcolm Gladwell raise a yellow flag for me. He tends to cherry-pick from studies to support a preconceived conclusion, and in some cases blatantly misrepresent what’s out there (10,000 hours, anyone?) to support those conclusions.
Gladwell is not some final authority. His thinking has been criticized.
“If you admit “weaker than average” students, which adcoms in today’s elite colleges do for various reasons, then those students may be forced to switch to less lucrative or even less desirable majors just because they are unable to cut it in an elite school, whereas they may have been able to do well in the the same major at a less prestigious school.”
Dangerous thinking from a man not involved in admissions. Who’s admitting “weaker than average?” And what’s behind the veil of a comment like that?
VeryLuckyParent, I used to mention a lesson I taught my girls: “Watch out for, ‘I think it, so it must be so.’ And it’s sister: ‘I read it somewhere, so it is.’”
Right, and it’s not at all clear that a kid who switches out of a tougher major at an elite would do better at a non-elite.
Engineering and pre-med courses at good publics which are far easier to enter than elite privates may be just as tough as at an elite (the difference is that they do their weeding out after kids enter rather than before) and at schools where the major isn’t as tough, employers and med schools will be aware of that.
Another thought: Having students switch majors is, I would argue, a very good thing, not least because one thing students discover in college is that there are more things out there than they were ever exposed to in high school. I mean, it’s kind of a running joke among linguists that nearly all of us started out as something else, because so few K–12 students have ever even heard of linguistics (aside, maybe, from military contexts, where it means something quite different). And there are lots of other fields where high school graduates haven’t heard of them, or that mean something quite different in colleges and careers than they do in high school.
So if nobody good ever changed majors, who would major in linguistics? or food science? or geography? or mortuary science? or informatics? or packaging design? or…
We are just having a conversation about two different approaches, disagreement is natural. One person’s reasoned belief is another person’s unwarranted belief
“Weaker than average” students at MIT are still extremely strong students with a very high likelihood of success, whether at MIT or elsewhere. Of course, half of the students at MIT are weaker than the median student at MIT, no matter how you handle the admission process (although they may be stronger in some areas than the median student). Note also that MIT does not admit by major; it also does not appear to have any restricted majors.
