Some judgment is necessary, regardless of what we might think. Even if you limited admissions criteria to gpa/test scores/rigor and omitted LOR/EC/Essays there would still be too many qualified applicants for the number of spots. Some people have suggested a lottery system where all students who meet a certain threshold are entered and selected randomly, maybe that would be more fair.
Predicting American exceptionalism is very hard. There is no perfect way to do it. That is what these elite schools are trying to do.
I am thankful because our kids can choose what they want to study, how they want to do it and how much to pay for it. That is not the case in most countries. I would much rather have this versus being told that my kid is not good enough at 13 and therefore not worthy of loftier pursuits.
There is a reason Americans are often more successful at creating wealth and equity versus other nations.
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If an employer, whether private, public, or non-profit, renders judgement on our characters based on not much more than our appearances, would we be okay with that? Why should colleges be treated any differently?
Rather than randomly, I would go by height.
If you were putting together a new NBA team, would you prefer:
A) Your team is determined by a lottery drawing of all students registering for the draft that year
B) You get to pick any 15 players of your choice
It was revealed in the Harvard lawsuit that Harvard assigned a “personal quality” rating to each applicant and it had an impact on admissions.
I’m not one who bought into the “Top X or bust” myth, so you’re addressing the wrong person. People don’t have to believe in that to find faults with our current college admission practices. The two are completely separate. I had repetively told my S that he could be picking garbages and he’d do just fine as long as he is the best (or among the best) at it. He did end up at a tippy-top college, however, so I don’t have an ax to grind either.
Honestly, I think that the schools who are using this “holistic” model of admissions in order to preferentially admit students who are athletes, legacies, URMs, first gen to college, or have a non-academic spike are making a serious error.
Over the years, I’ve seen many students who were just fantastic NOT get into the the top schools, and wind up at their flagship state U’s. Surprise. They did incredibly well there, and will be leaders in academia, tech, business, etc. While the kids who got into the top schools because they were anything other than tops in academics, peaked on the day they were admitted to that top school.
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Having done a lot of interviewing lately because we are short staffed, much of the process amounts to something very similar to judging on appearances (with pretty limited information). But no one is rendering judgments on characters in that process. Just deciding who gets job offers. Colleges are also not rendering judgments on applicants; just deciding who should be in their respective classes that year.
How do you think the process for colleges should be run?
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There is indeed a way to predict it. The cake is baked by the time students graduate from HS. Their HS rigor and GPA predict their success, no matter where they go. It’s simply that too few recognize this. They believe, errantly, that it’s the next step that determines success. Thus, far too many, nearly all qualified, are applying to far too few schools. Parents and students want a “fair” way to determine who gets in, but there simply isn’t one. Schools have to make subjective decisions based on non-publicly facing criteria to narrow down to the number of students they can accommodate. That in no way means the students they didn’t choose won’t absolutely be successful, even at Podunk U. There is a slight caveat here. FGLI students do get a little boost at more selective schools.
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Or verifying claims about easily verifiable things like college degrees or professional licenses earned or dates and employers of previous employment.
One more caveat. Two industries in particular, finance and consulting, do their onsite recruiting at a limited set of elite public and private universities and LACs. Outside of engineering and CS, these are typically some of the highest paid positions available for undergrads.
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You would get neither. You would have to compete with other teams for 15 free agents, probably ending up with a team that loses enough to end up in the lottery for the draft picks among non-playoff teams.
Of course, professional sports is much more of an elite-or-bust profession, so it would be analogous to aiming for a top-xx-or-bust among colleges.
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But does your company advertise your criteria widely and expect applicants to spend four years preparing to apply? Maybe that is the situation for graduate jobs at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, but it is also clear that those firms spend a great deal more time than the average college admissions committee on deciding who to offer a job to.
However, it’s not the case for most companies. And likewise I have a bigger problem with applying these holistic criteria at colleges that are further down the pecking order than HYPSM, because many more high school students then feel they have to jump through these EC and “character” based hoops.
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In terms of admissions to “elite” colleges, nothing is perfect but Oxbridge has the best process, IMO, with their faculty involvement and in-depth intervews. It isn’t possible in the US becasue the colleges here set themselves up for different goals (including going after more applications). The rankings, the binding and restrictive admissions, the Common App, the constant HS grade inflations, the gradual process of making standardized tests irrelevant, etc. all contribute to the creation of this college admissions monster we have now. And it will only get worse.
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That process can work well for students that know what they want to do. How do Oxford and Cambridge handle students that want to change their major?
You don’t, you are admitted for a specific major and you just study that, no general eds at all.
But note that UK students choose their path at 16 for the last two years of high school when they select 3-4 A levels. So only modest tweaks happen after that, eg you could still decide between math or engineering or CS, but liberal arts are already off the table.
As I said, nothing is perfect. We choose to treat college students like their HS counterparts, at least in their first couple of years. In most other countries, students need to figure it out while they’re still in HS. Why couldn’t the US students do the same? Besides, spending a year or two of one’s college life and up to $80k a year is an awfully expensive way to figure out what one wants to do.
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The UK system has the advantage that it is much more meritocratic. Is it still true that even the royals cannot get admitted without the grades? How much pushback is there, if any, that the admitted students do not represent the makeup of the country as a whole (pick whatever criteria you want: SES, race, public vs private schools, etc.).
But would earlier specialization and tracking result in less informed and less optimal choices, and perhaps greater dependence on parental social and SES capital in the student knowing what college and career paths are possible and realistic?
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I’m not from UK and I don’t live there, so I’m not the best person to address this question. Ultimately, it depends how we think the priority of an “elite” college should be. Should it still be to educate and produce the best graduates it can in various fields the college is involved in? IMO, the fairness and equity issues should be addressed in K-12, which, BTW, is among the most unequal in the developed world.