Agreed.
And in many households, the parents assume that because their child is a fantastic student…they should be able to go to (insert unreasonably selective college(s)). Maybe kids are looking for responses to give their parents, because they know kids who were just as smart (or smarter) in the prior year or two that failed to gain admission to school X.
As for blaming the schools, if you’re in admissions or leadership, how do you “stop the madness” and still compete? It is a business. Schools that add an essay to the application lose applicants. There are schools that have seen this in the past, but you have to be pretty confident in your job status to make those types of decisions. “We wanted fewer, better applications” takes guts.
There was a lot of discussion about A levels and the UK above. It’s brutal, but transparent and obvious. The US system is brutal from appearing to be fluid and nebulous outcomes (even if it’s not).
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Many people equate scarcity with desirability (falsely, I might add). If a college is more selective, it becomes more desirable (i.e. prestigious). As it becomes more desirable, it becomes even more selective the next time around. The competition among the selective colleges will perpetuate this cycle. How do we break the cycle? One way is to force colleges to be more transparent and disclose the profiles of their applicants and admits for each admission round (EA, SCEA/REA, ED, ED2, RD, etc.), not just the students who ultimately enroll.
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It circles back to the original post, which pointed out the admission officers are using unclear criteria which in turn prompts applicants to engage in a mad rush to complete activities which may or may not impact their likelihood of admission. It is at best disingenuous to say, do what you love, and we admit holistically, but then acknowledge, as we all have in a separate thread, that not starting FL by 9th grade will likely doom an applicant at T20 schools. If FL is required for 95% of successful applicants, colleges should disclose that, not leave it to a high school employee to persuade a kid to take it. If sports below a recruited level really don’t matter more than any other club, say that too. I know far too many kids in activities they hate because they think it might somehow help their chances.
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How is that the schools’ fault and not the parents who allow it?
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I could not agree more.
Perhaps there could be a simple approach that would allow applicants to make a more reasonable approximation of their chances based on quantifiable academic metrics. Simply display the admit rates by GPA/test score for each of the major “buckets” in admission. Separate breakouts by ED/EA/REA/SCEA/RD would also be valuable and perhaps necessary for certain institutions.
I would suggest that legacy, race, low-income, first generation, and “unhooked” would be enough buckets for a meaningful presentation. Perhaps disaggregated further by sex might be helpful, but l am not sure about that. No need to provide such data for athletes or donor/special interest applicants because there are so few (relatively), and those applicants who enjoy such preferences already have much better information on their chances.
Presented that way, as it was (partially) in the Harvard litigation for instance, would give the lie to claims by colleges that they view “80%” of applicants as squishy-termed “qualified” or other such nonsense. Clearly the colleges do not believe that.
But it would also reinforce the idea that “holistic” does in fact mean something. For instance, when an unhooked applicant sees that academically similar students as herself have historically been admitted at a 1-2% rate, she can then decide if her other more subjective “holistic” attributes are such that an application is warranted.
A simple academic grid of admissions by hook “bucket” would not be the whole answer of course to the insanity of the admissions rat race at the top. But it would redress a tiny bit of the asymmetrical information problem faced by applicants to holistic institutions that are being purposely cagey about what they are in fact looking for, and from which groups.
My guess is that if this information were required to be made available, we would see dramatic drops in the numbers of applications, with little to no effect on the quality of applicants ultimately accepted.
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Lack of transparency fuels the mad rush by parents and kids. If schools were more upfront about the levels of activities and courses they expect/choose, then kids could respond accordingly. For example, if a minimum of 2 years of a FL is recommended but 99% of admitted students have 4 years then just say 4 years. Likewise with minimum GPA, don’t claim there’s no minimum when again 90+% of admitted students have a 3.9 or higher. Yes maybe a few athletes or legacies or otherwise notable admit won’t have that GPA or the recommended courses but the vast vast majority do, so stop with all the coyness and state it outright.
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For many colleges, an important type of admission bucket is division or major.
With regard to hook characteristics at colleges that use them, the colleges generally resist transparency as much as possible.
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Greater transparency in admissions could be helpful for some, but my sense is that there are people who will always think their kid is the outlier…the unhooked applicant who will get in to a T20 with a low GPA, or low test score, or no FL.
Which schools do you want to report these ‘buckets’ of data?
USNWR data (for the ~1,400 schools they include) show an average acceptance rate of 68% (it’s higher if you include all 3,000 four year colleges). Do you want all schools to have to report this detailed data? Or only the ~250 colleges with acceptance rates below 50%? Or only those below 30%? Where is the line?
For the schools that you want to report this detailed data, what changes do you expect would happen at the individual school level, and/or in the greater scheme of admissions? The admissions craziness involved with those seeking T20 or T50 admission really isn’t an issue for the majority of college applicants.
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Personally, I think the parents of these kids should change schools. Life doesn’t have to be that way to succeed - esp at the high school level.
Kids who go to top places should be the drivers to get there, not pushed.
There are so many good colleges out there and “being yourself” will get you into at least one. If not, one should really consider options other than college that fit better.
Working in an average public school I’m thinking hard to come up with any student who wanted to go to college (before March of that year!) and was denied everywhere. I can’t think of a single one.
I can think of several who had financial difficulties affording college after getting in, but that’s a different issue.
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This. I interviewed for Brown (volunteer, not adcom) for years. At the time, Brown published admissions stats broken by % of admits who were Val, % who were Sal, % top 5% of their HS class, and an SAT grid which was about as specific as you could get. There were tables showing “Here’s what we look for if your HS doesn’t rank” (pro tip- having your GC check ANY box besides “most rigorous” is not a good sign).
Do you know how many kids I interviewed who were not at the top of their class academically, and who had “fine but not outstanding” scores? Lots and lots and lots.
How transparent does a school need to be? People see a 6% admissions rate and don’t understand that this means a 94% rejection rate. People believe what they want to believe, just like they do when they buy a Powerball ticket. Do you know how many kids I’d interview who believed that getting a poem published in their town’s annual literary publication would compensate for not taking AP English- at a HS which offered AP English? Or the kids who stated with great confidence “I’m a very Boho person and everyone knows that Brown loves Boho kids”.
I’m not buying the greater transparency argument. And frankly- if there is one or three “diamonds in the rough” each year who get into some mega competitive school with only one year of FL because that’s all their rural HS or their inner city Camden, NJ HS offers- I’m OK with colleges “suggesting” four years of FL. If a kid who goes to New Trier or Horace Greely or another HS with outstanding guidance counselors and abundant academic resources thinks that the “suggestions” are mere suggestions- well, that’s on them. I know kids who show up at MIT without having taken calculus- but these aren’t the kids from HS’s with outstanding math and science departments. These are kids whose HS math stops at trig because that’s the only math teacher they have.
If kids and parents can’t understand the distinction- I’m not sure more transparency can help these folks!
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Absolutely. Focusing on the 100 or so most selective schools, there are two problems:
1-all schools prioritize differently, so standard categorization in
School A may not be useful for school B
2-the smaller the school and the more granular the categories, the more likely the need to suppress data for privacy/lack of statistical significance.
Take even a relatively large private admitting 1800. Group into four buckets: legacy, URM, athletes/hooks, unhooked. Then break that down further by 5 general courses of studies/schools. You’re already up to 20 tables. Then show a GPA/SAT (and ACT equivalent). Do the same with only GPA for test optional. That’s probably another 2 tables with a 4x4 GPA/test score matrix covering the bulk of admits given selectivity of a particular school.
The average number of admits per discrete category would be 2.8. That’s not useful.
Schools would need to develop their own obvious category “breaks”. There is no incentive to do this. They are motivated to not reveal athletic/legacy pref. Or they’ll end up on an MSNBC segment. They don’t want to highlight different cutoffs for URM vs other because they’ll end up on a Fox News segment.
And even if the buckets were large enough to be published and the schools wanted to, it may not make sense. Two identical kids: 3.9uGPA and 1540 SAT. Same rigor, activities, race, intended major, gender, essay quality, EC quality. Both full pay (if admissions is not need blind). One went to a middle class public. One went to a prestigious prep school. I’ll take the former all day long because he/she was likely “coached up” far less.
There are so many factors here that each admissions committee would need to reveal its secret blend of 11 herbs and spices. Like KFC, they’re not going to do that. First, it reduces applicants. But more critically, the highest SES kids will be able to exploit that information far more than the rest. In turn, the school will likely recalibrate their considerations to reduce additional over representation by that group and the old rubrics/tables from a year earlier won’t apply.
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I agree with you- but I gotta say- the secret blend of 11 herbs and spices is only a secret to people who aren’t paying attention. If your kid is the next Yo-Yo Ma, the “secret blend” is that your kid will NOT need 1600 SAT scores to get admitted to Harvard. But many parents interpret this to mean that little Johnny who plays cello (badly) but loves music will get a pass on a not terribly rigorous HS curriculum if he sends in an arts supplement. (hey, the next logical step, right?) And that’s not true, but there is no table of published statistics that are going to convince these parents that Johnny is a mediocre musician. Loving music is not a hook.
That’s like saying the Colonel uses salt. Or chicken. That’s not the recipe.
It would be desirable if all state schools, from flagships to not-very-selective regional publics, were more transparent about their frosh and transfer admissions:
- If they have automatic admission or rejection criteria, publish these criteria.
- If they use some sort of stats-algorithm, publish it and previous thresholds (by whatever buckets are relevant, such as division or major).
- If they use a holistic review, publish a general description of the process and admission rates by GPA bands or GPA / test score matrix (for whatever buckets are relevant, such as division or major).
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Because the recipe involves a spice which is only harvested in the Himalayans one week a year and is carried on the back of a sherpa to the market where the entire annual supply is purchased by KFC?
The secret blend is such a secret?
If people can’t distinguish between national
class talent and 4H ribbons, you can’t help them. I do think there is some value for the middle class kid with no exceptional talent, but a rigorous course load, strong GPA and a 1560 to know his her rough chances at X. If schoolwide acceptance is 6% is he/she at 2% due to lack of hooks? Or is he/she at 15% or even 30% because 70% of the applicant pool is 100% delusional.
Even then, this does not distinguish between an app at a Vandy or WashU where it is obvious to the adcom the applicant is “going through the motions”/treating the school as plan G vs someone with a high level of obvious interest. Or applicants with strong vs weak essays. We see horror stories of students with great numbers getting rejected by a dozen reasonably comfortable target schools where their numbers are at the 75th percentile or greater who claim to have “good essays”. My first thought is always that their essays and interviews must have been well below average/disinterested. Otherwise they would have hit at at least 20% of these schools. This is much more likely than the applicants being the unluckiest applicants in the world.
Both legacy and race/ethnicity in college admissions are quite unpopular to the general public, according to 73% of Americans say race, ethnicity should not factor into college admissions | Pew Research Center
| Criterion | Major Factor | Minor Factor | Not a Factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| High school grades | 67% | 26% | 7% |
| Standardized test scores | 47% | 41% | 11% |
| Community service involvement | 21% | 48% | 30% |
| Being first person in family to go to college | 20% | 27% | 53% |
| Athletic ability | 8% | 34% | 57% |
| Whether a relative attended the school | 8% | 24% | 68% |
| Race or ethnicity | 7% | 19% | 73% |
| Gender | 5% | 14% | 81% |
This probably differs considerably from what many colleges (including and particularly highly selective ones) actually use. Colleges using the unpopular factors have more reason to avoid transparency in their admissions criteria.
(It is also interesting that most oppose use of athletic ability, even though lots of people want to see winning teams.)
Forum posters also appear to differ from this survey result in what “should” be considered.
This has always puzzled me. I know so many stellar legacies (top grades, top scores) who were rejected, and not a single legacy who wasn’t also accepted at equally hard to get into colleges and programs. (i.e. the Harvard legacy also got into Yale). Unless you are very, very rich, or very very talented athletically, you have to meet the academic standards.
At the most selective colleges, meeting academic standards (as in likelihood of being able to handle college work and graduate) is generally necessary, but not sufficient, for admission.
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