I disagree. The constant pressure from family, friends, and teachers about getting a good score in Asian countries like China, India, South Korea is way too high. Unlike our SAT/ACT the tests there cover a wide variety of topics, and there aren’t any retakes to get a higher score. The suicide rates in the countries I mentioned above are higher among students than any other age group.
Holistic admissions process is flawed but it’s much better than 1 singular test. We should prioritize students with high grades, not the students who hired a tutor to write their essay for them
But they’re only doing it for one year and it has no bearing on their college acceptance. There’s no pressure so they can truly enjoy what they choose to engage in without any strings attached so to speak. They might feel differently if they were participating to produce a better application.
I agree they are, but the stress levels simply aren’t comparable. Here there’s many safety nets (gap years, test retakes) that simply aren’t available there. Plus the population is very high in Asian countries which correlates to a lot of competition for the best seats, which creates more pressure on a single score.
This is just not true in my experience, URM being accepted to top schools have to be top students. Also, why do you jump to URM taking the spots for Asian students, what about legacy and athletes?
Legacy may be variable but athletes not so much. There are a specific number of needed/admitted athletes per team per year and you can’t as easily substitute one applicant for another as their skill set is specific and not academically or otherwise dependent. That’s not to say a URM tennis player can’t replace another non-URM tennis player but it’s more difficult/limited than just accepting more URMs overall.
Why do you think that employers conduct interviews? Medical School interviews? I read a story about firms that recruit at the top law schools. They only care if you have the social graces for a dinner meeting. They assume that the law school degree is sufficient credentials for the knowledge part. But they can’t risk a bad experience in front of the client. People underestimate the importance of charisma on success.
The Turning the Tide reports (there is a more recent one from 2019) are recommendations. Further, AOs are not making these ‘subjective’ evaluations in a vacuum, they are trained at each institution to focus on what is important to that institution.
Here are some of the changes that some schools made in response to the recommendations from the 2016 report:
Further, numerous college admissions offices made
concrete changes prompted at least in part by Turning
the Tide. These changes included:
• Application revisions, such as adding essay and
short-answer questions related to ethical character
and reducing the number of spaces for reporting
extracurricular activities to discourage students from
overloading on these activities.
• Revising admissions materials to emphasize the
importance of ethical engagement, providing new
scholarships focused on ethical character, and
shifting recruiting practices to focus on students with
ethical character.
• Improving assessment systems to better capture
ethical character and students’ family responsibilities.
• Becoming “test optional” in part as a result of Turning
the Tide.
• Reducing barriers to access, such as waiving
application fees.
“Best and brightest” can mean many things. Families/applicants who limit their definition to include only those with very high GPAs and/or test scores may be in for a rude awakening when college admissions results come out. As we know, some college enrollment management teams at institutions that undertake holistic admissions have a more broad definition of ‘best and brightest’.
“…in practice Americans don’t believe in meritocracy at all. A significant number of wealthy Americans have no problem at all with the idea of hereditary privilege, so long as they are spared the social obligations of traditional aristocracy. At the same time, a significant number of educated Americans explicitly support and practice systematic racial discrimination — even if they justify today’s “affirmative action” as a form of redress for past discrimination. The result is the present corrupt and inequitable system of undergraduate admissions at the elite universities.”
And with regard to academic comparisons to other countries:
“When I moved from teaching at Oxford to Harvard, I was puzzled. Based on my reading of midterm exam papers, a substantial proportion of my new students wouldn’t have got an interview at Oxford, never mind a place. It was explained to me that a substantial chunk of undergraduates were “legacies” — there because their parents were alumni, especially generous alumni — and another chunk were the beneficiaries of affirmative action or athletics programs.”
If the college was getting the same caliber of students without a hook, then it wouldn’t need the hook. This applies to all hooks (URM, legacy, athlete, etc).
This list supports both the point the OP was making in the opening post, as well as the observations shared by @parentologist.
All of these have to do with somehow proving your character and how “ethical” you are…whatever and however that’s done and it’s definitely more of a judgement call/passing judgement on the applicants. It also explains the explosion in ECs focused on non-profit, volunteering and the like, all of which are less expensive than sports and music over the long term.
This checklist also intentionally skews towards lower SES recruitment and admittance with more emphasis on fewer ECs, TO, family responsibilities and waiver of app fees, something all elite schools have been promoting for many years.
I don’t disagree…but at the highly rejective schools we are talking about, the ethical piece is just one part of the whole. There are many inputs into the admission decision.
Because of the non-transparent nature of admissions at these schools we don’t know how relatively important the ethical piece is (nor do we know how any of the other factors are weighted).
True, my point was that the fact that those specific items have been incorporated into the admissions application structure and review process at highly rejective schools supports the OPs premise, as well as the wider observation that students will tailor their behavior to meet the admissions criteria at those schools, to the extent they’re able to do so.
One thing to keep in mind . . . the goal of Ivy League schools (and others like them) is not to admit solely the academically most qualified. Athletes, musicians, legacies etc. are often admitted over equally or more academically qualified students every year. The kid from our school who went to Yale a couple of years back wasn’t even in the top 25% of the class - other athletes have gotten in to Brown with weighted GPAs of 3.5 and SAT scores below 1200 (and these kids aren’t URM). If you are looking for some type of measurable admission criteria that will ensure fairness you’ll be waiting a while because there isn’t anything particularly fair about elite college admissions.
Yes. There is. It was commonly known, because students could see that URM kids who had significantly lower GPAs, class standing, and standardized test scores were getting into the most competitive schools, while Asian (and White) students with significantly higher qualifications (first in class, perfect SATs, etc) were not. Several lawsuits have been brought in the past by White students who were rejected from various professional schools who had higher academic credentials than the accepted URM students. But the most recent one, the one brought by Asian students against Harvard, revealed that Harvard had a “personality” index, and that remarkably, not a single Asian student received a high score for personality, while remarkably, URM students often did.
What does this have to do with the premise of the article or the original post? The issue being discussed is whether AOs are shaping our children’s personalities. I don’t believe any students are feeling pressured to pass as URMs!
It has always been weird for me to see the stress that holistic admissions at elite universities seems to cause students, because I agree with @EconPop’s thought that it is manufactured internally within families and sometimes within entire subcultures (like CC posters).
My family has always treated my kid’s possible college choices with our own “holistic measures” so that my kids could find the best overall fit for them. I have always taught my kids to bring their own “prestige” to any program or opportunity that they are presented with and that not being selected for an opportunity is just fuel (more like an elite athlete’s mentality) in route to making a difference in the world. I would much rather have my kids get rejected after showing the best version of who they really are than to conform to what a school was looking for. It is okay to deal with disappointment or take a loss from time to time (even in college admissions) because the trait I wanted to instill in my kids more than any other (besides being kind) was perseverance. For my household, real stakes are things like not having enough food to eat, not a college admissions decision.