So many apply though because from the outside no one knows what the thing is that the school wants (above academic qualifications). Students and their parents think they might have it, but no one knows for sure.
50% strikes me as a pretty reasonable estimate for a lot of schools today. If 50 out of 100 are initial throwaways and adcom culls another third of what is left for lack of demonstrated interest, then an initial 10% acceptance rate swells to 30%.
Same school 25 years ago with a much higher stated acceptance rate of 50%: 20% throwaways and 10% of remaining apps lack demonstrated interest. 69% “true acceptance”.
It’s definitely more difficult (30% vs 69%) to gain acceptance to any one school today.
Admissions decisions have also more of a crapshoot because SAT scaling has become more generous, so scores are more bunched at the top.
I also think we have seen grade inflation at the HS level. A 4.0 UW GPA was not possible at my large, above average but not exceptional middle class HS. Brilliant gets tossed around too frequently, but of the handful of truly brilliant people I’ve ever known in my life, the absolute best I’ve had the pleasure of knowing was a guy two years ahead of me in HS. The kid went to a flagship public with a 4 year + 1 year abroad full ride. Intellectually and emotionally as bright as I’ve ever met. Harvard law Sears Prize winner both years. Professor of law, leadership positions and teaching awards at possibly the best law school in the country. Photographic memory and a beautiful writer. I believe he got a ~3.9UW GPA at my HS. Not a single person out of 3000 kids in the 7 graduating classes I shared the halls with at some point got a 4.0UW. My best friend growing up (1st in class at a respected medical school and top of his major at an Ivy Plus) got a 3.8UW. His older brother (Stanford grad, CV surgeon at a highly regarded hospital via top medical/residency/fellowship programs) got a 3.9UW. I could “only” pull a 3.7. If I graduated in the same class as the first guy, today I’d be in a 9 way tie for valedictorian. Nope. I’d like to think I’m a smart guy, but the academic difference between the two of us is about the same as me and the most average HS grad in the country.
So we have both test score bunching and GPA bunching. 1 in 50 or 100 kids look far too similar to 1 in 5000 kids today when you look at the “numbers”.
That’s where the “narrative”/“brand”/“character” cultivation aspect kicks in more today. The other data points have become a futile hairsplitting exercise.
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Agreed, but if you know you’re ranked 15th in your class and don’t have anything exceptional to add to your SAT score…you know the outcome.
The reality is that most truly believe they are going to get rejected. They know there are kids in town who are just better candidates…but having spent $3k on SAT prep, a few grand going to see schools, and $1,000 applying to other schools…why not throw $75 at Harvard and see if you can win the lottery?
I don’t blame the families for playing the game…the system doesn’t support a healthy process to help kids find the right place for them. The schools are as much to blame as anyone, because they pander to the rankings.
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I believe a large part of the problem is that we (as a generation) haven’t reinforced to our children that it’s OK to accept and appreciate the abilities of others. Someone else being brilliant doesn’t make them happy or you stupid…it just makes them different. Parents all want their kids to be the best, and that’s just not a mathematical possibility.
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I don’t think this is actually true. Some parents want that and to a certain degree more parents here want that (big factor in the Top X or bust mentality/myth). But what most parents want is what is best for their kids. Subtle but important distinction.
Trick with “best” is its subjective. Kids don’t come with control groups. Whatever decision you make for/with your kid that turns out great, there may well have been another option on the table that would have been better. And if a given decision turns out badly, every other option on the table at the time may have turned out worse. You don’t know. What you do know is that their experience would have been different with different choices.
Ultimately though what you really should want is your kid to be happy. Find the paths that take them there.
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This would be great for the students who really want to apply, but pretty harmful for the college. Harvard makes $2.9 million in college application fees alone. UC Berkeley makes $5.8M and UCLA makes the most in the nation, with an astonishing $6.7M each year.
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Ok, get this, but it begs the questions:
(1) is the Olympics really the goal? Take computer science- what is the Olympics, anyway? There is no 100M event equivalent. There is no objective measure of success.
(2) if the Olympics is the goal, and there are only a precious few spots on the team, is Olympic training the best model for building the fleet of the most optimal sprinters across all possible conditions people will be running?
(3) What happens when the Olympics events are over? Is sprinting 100M the fastest in the world a transferable skill?
@blossom has a very good point - the “soft skills” are super important to the actual competition that college graduates face. Could be that a few super elites don’t need to bother with anything other than their narrow topic, but that isn’t a way to build a workforce.
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Spot on! None of us, including our son were interested in any of the “elite” schools, even though he had the stats and background to at least be competitive.
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Maybe a subset of CC posters want their kids to be the “best” - that is if you define “best” by most academically brilliant or perhaps by “able to gain admission to HYPSM”. There are very few kids who are truly “the best” at anything - if you are “the best” at your high school, you are unlikely to be “the best” at college and so on. Personally, I’d like my kids to be good people and, most importantly, happy. What kind of kids we’re turning out doesn’t get mentioned very often here - instead, we are bombarded with a list of stats, activities and awards, as if our kids’ performance is what defines them.
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Or Option 3 is to pick the 5 who show the most potential to improve with the fine teaching/coaching at the school to become even better than the current fastest 5. It depends on when the race is, and the college race is 4 to 5 years away.
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My husband teaches physics at one of the best universities in the country. He recruits often for graduate programs. His impression is that local candidates either lack fundamental physics knowledge and cannot answer basic questions, or they are burnt out mentally, or both. Maybe because they needed to play the oboe to get into a good physics program 
The foreign candidates, Canadians, Brits, do know their fundamentals. He gets very strong physicists from St. Andrews undergraduate program, for instance.
The American candidates have impressive CVs and can talk endlessly about their accomplishments. They are, without a doubt, great team players, just not great physicists. You can be a mediocre physicist and still be a great engineer and build great bridges if you follow the process. You will not be doing ground-breaking research in college and beyond, though. Good that we still attract the best and brightest from around the world for that work.
Of course, this is all anecdotal but isn’t this site built on anecdotes and people’s subjective beliefs and experiences.
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Do they not have to submit Physics GRE scores?
In any case that’s good to know for my Canadian Physics undergraduate son (who plays 3 instruments but not the oboe, and for whom it was not a criteria for admission to his program) who may want to try getting admitted to some of those programs 
.
According to the evidence on CC, many parents/students don’t “think” they have it. They are 100% sure without a doubt that they have it, and when they are denied it must be because they were somehow cheated by the some policy.
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In that case they’re not selecting for transferable skills but the potential to be the best academic researcher in whatever subject, whether it’s Victorian literature or string theory. The measure is Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals, etc. or at a lower level, publications in the leading journals, professorships at top institutions, etc. That’s fairly objective. You wouldn’t ask Usain Bolt what transferable skills he learned running the 100M!
As @Mumfromca says, those (foreign) institutions are selecting for the students most capable of “doing ground-breaking research in college and beyond”.
I think the point is that these two definitions are in significant conflict with one another, and the latter has become based on factors like character (or playing the oboe!). It’s a lot easier to accept that X is more academically brilliant than you are, as opposed to X has superior “character” to you.
Well, there is the USA Computing Olympiad (USACO) to help select strong CS students.
What undergrad institution in the US is selecting students in terms of who can do ground- breaking research? Grad yes- undergrad?
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***oop
I think many of the top schools are selecting students who they believe will go on to do groundbreaking research, as evidenced by how many of the top science winners get into those schools. Harvard and MIT together can grab 50% in some years.
The statement was on engineers that graduate and go on to build bridges, not the ones admitted via a non-academic hook, which is a big difference.
“Being able to communicate, sublimate your own ego, understand when another engineers solution is safer or more cost-effective than yours, taking direction but pushing back when you have better data than someone else (i.e. teamwork) is ESSENTIAL. Not trivial- essential.”
Teamwork is important sure, but most engineers don’t have all of those skills, at the least the ones I’ve worked with in the east coast and Silicon Valley. Engineers that communicate well tend to go into management or sales. Not the sure about the ego-sublimating either, the humble engineers are tough to find too.
The number of these “top science winners” who actually go on to do research-ground-breaking or pedestrian- is small, and Harvard and MIT know it.
The prize is a signal-- not a commitment.
“Top science winners” go on to work in VC, Private Equity, working on road shows for a startup, investment banking, consulting- just like their non-winner friends at Harvard and MIT.
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