<p>@ucbalumnus: “Perhaps members of today’s SES elite are dismayed that their children face much stiffer competition than they did (despite legacy preferences and the like) to enter the ranks of those with educationally elite diplomas, from which entering the SES elite (through investment banking and management consulting) is easier than through other routes. So they may prefer that the elite universities expand enough to let their children in, but not so much that they lose their educational elite status and place in recruiting for the traditional jobs leading to SES eliteness.”</p>
<p>The idea that Junior or Muffy might not be quite up to Daddy’s academic calibre is, IMHO, part of the driving force behind “holistic” admissions. Send the kid on a pricy tropical island summer charity adventure, then give them fodder for essays! Leverage connections to get Junior into an interesting think tank position! Either way, don’t let an outdated test like the SAT matter so gosh darn much!</p>
<p>(Nothing against holistic admissions, but it should still reflect excellence - the best bass player, the best shortstop, the best dancer, not the person with the most interesting story.)</p>
<p>Ironically, elite private college admissions since the mid-late '60s have been much more about academic merit than before. Before that, it could be outweighed by the wealth and/or prominence of one’s family background and whether they were from a “desirable” group or not.</p>
<p>As for “holistic admissions”, they actually go back to the 1920s when Ivy colleges got together to deal with the problem of being “flooded by too many undesirables*” because they worked hard, highly intelligent, and came from families/cultures which valued education. In fact, this was one of the factors for the creation of the modern college application as we know it and the origin of the request for a face photo in Columbia’s application. If you look like you don’t come from a preferred group(Preferably WASP), that photo may be enough to reject your application altogether. </p>
<p>Though requests for face photos now are optional**/no longer made, they were mandatory due to the popularity of the pseudoscience of Physiogamy from the late 19th-mid-20th centuries. Fortunately, this practice was discredited after WWII due to its widespread use by the Nazis and other Fascist groups to justify war crimes and genocidal policies. </p>
<ul>
<li>Mainly Jewish and Southern/Eastern European Immigrants/sons of immigrants.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>** Columbia College’s application still asked for an optional photo when I was applying for colleges in the mid-'90s.</p>
<p>The above link has this reader comment from a Radcliffe '65 alum: “This is why I don’t donate. I live in a house owned by a university, and so I have considerable experience of the tendency of universities to gobble up their neighbourhoods, and the effects thereof.”</p>
<p>My university actually is increasing its enrollment. We’ve increased our undergraduate enrollment by about 50 students in the last few years. But one of the reasons is that they also want to increase offerings and other things for students. First of all, acquiring extra housing is extraordinarily expensive in New York; we’ve had to place some of our undergrads in grad/non-trad housing. We did just get a new residence hall though! At a school where we guarantee housing for all incoming students and pretty much anyone else who wants to stay on campus and doesn’t move off, we have to ensure that we have a bed for everyone.</p>
<p>There’s also the talk of expansion or addition of current academic offerings - for example, we want to offer a public health major for undergrads, using our top 10 school of public health (excited about that!). We’re also expanding our campus into Manhattanville for additional academic and research reasons - there’s going to be a new center of research into neuroscience and brain studies there, as well as a new business school I think.</p>
<p>So our money has to go in a lot of different ways, and not just towards undergrad education. Undergraduate education is actually just one small part of our mission as a university, and that’s the way it is at all Ivy League and top universities. We have a lot of stakeholders to please!</p>
<p>And even beyond that, even if undergrad education was our only concern, perhaps these schools don’t want to expand. Columbia is actually a pretty small undergrad community; we have something like 6,000 or 7,000 undergraduates, which is small-to-medium. It’s a more intimate experience; some of the classes here are big (I TAed an intro psychology lecture that was 180 students). But do we want to get to the point where we have 500 people in intro bio? No. They’re holding class size relatively steady because there’s a certain kind of undergraduate experience they want to offer, and if they are going to continue to offer that while expanding the class size, they also need to expand other things - the size of the faculty, the number of advising deans, the number of classrooms on campus (space is already tight!), etc. Those all cost money, too, and take time.</p>
<p>two things , you do not change your culture and grow simply because of population growth.
2nd all the schools like harvard which are over run with liberals who like taxing others should be forced to open up their endowment to the tax man. fair is fair!</p>
<p>I will also say that I’m a bit irked by the implication that all universities can/should be alike. Students are better served when universities are different from each other in size, research v. teaching opportunities, location, cost, course offerings, religious life, focus on sports, and, yes, academic rigour. Aside from excellent points already made about admitting students to “Princeton in name only” if one were to radically change the school, I do not think we serve students well by turning colleges into copies of each other. Implying that Harvard or Princeton or Amherst should double their class sizes is turning schools into copies of each other.</p>
<p>cobrat: I didn’t say that there was some golden age of college admission, just that there ware always ways to tilt the admissions process in favour of those whom powerful groups want to see admitted. I would argue that some of today’s admissions practices favour the upper-middle class children of smart parents who aren’t all that themselves. One way this happens is to focus on exciting summer experiences while turning up one’s nose at the middle-class kids who scoop ice cream for pocket money. Another way is to raise the price of tuition so that Muffy’s dad can send her there, huge scholarships are given out to minority kids, but middle-class families pay about 90% of sticker price. It’s a fairly straightforward way to weed out kids who were born super-smart but not wealthy.</p>
<p>Seems like a current practice. I’m grateful for the variety of schools available. Contrary to popular belief, one school cannot be everything to everyone. Not even HPYS.</p>
<p>Nobody in the admissions office of an elite college turns up his/her nose at someone who scoops ice cream. If you don’t believe me, read Michelle Hernandez or Rachel Toors. On the contrary, the usual admissions advice is to hide an affluent background to the extent you can. If dad is a partner at Price Waterhouse, write “accountant.” If dad is president of a major corporation write “businessman.” (My kid had a classmate who attended an Ancient 8 boarding school and whose family home was in one of the richest communities in the US. Her college adviser’s advice? Get a summer job as a waitress.)</p>
<p>I don’t deny the deck is stacked in favor of the upper middle class but that is in large part because a lot of extracurriculars cost a small fortune. Not all, of course. However, kids who attend public schools in working class neighborhoods rarely have the chance to learn to play lacrosse, squash, water polo, golf or field hockey or how to sail or fence.Doing any of those well will help you get into an elite college. Being on a traveling team can be expensive.Sports like ice skating require lots of lessons and those cost money. Learning to play an instrument at a high level can also be costly. </p>
<p>More fundamentally, in most areas of the US the quality of the high school you attend is determine by the affluence of the community in which you live. (One of the major benefits of living somewhere like NYC is that the poorest kids at least have the chance to get into the top selective public schools.) </p>
<p>I don’t think elite college admissions officers let in more upper middle class kids than poor ones because they are biased in favor of the affluent. I think it’s because kids from affluent families are usually better prepared academically and are more likely to play the oboe or fence, etc. at a high enough level to make them attractive to top colleges.</p>
<p>Holistic admissions help the socioeconomically disadvantaged. Admissions offices are more likely to let in the kid with a 1360 (on M +CR) from a high school where that is a remarkably high score than one from Andover with that score–at least if the kid from Andover isn’t a recruited athlete.</p>
<p>Harvard has 14,000 graduate students. Another 14,000 students attend courses through the extension school. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, MIT all offer free online courses to anyone with internet access.</p>
<p>Checking out the US News and World Report rankings of “national universities,” universities ranked below #20 include Georgetown, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, UVa, University of Michigan, Tufts, UNC-Chapel Hill. As we’ve visited some of these colleges in our eldest kid’s college search, I’d say there’s nothing lost in attending Berkeley rather than Duke.</p>
<p>That’s only after the mid-1960’s when admission policies were changed to give greater emphasis on academic merit and to tailor holistic admissions to account for that. Before that, being socioeconomically disadvantaged or even slightly below what once prevailed was a great impediment.</p>
<p>Oh good lord, how outdated. Adcoms have seen right through the pircy topical island summer charity adventures for years now. </p>
<p>Anyway, I can’t figure out what the story is supposed to be on CC – it’s not fair that Richie Rich gets in due to lacrosse and water polo and a summer spent in Belize? It’s not fair that the poor minority students get in when they’ve done none of these things? It’s not fair that Harvard doesn’t want 2,000 math and science grinds with perfect scores?</p>
<p>I think we all need to make up our collective minds here about what we’re supposed to be “outraged” about. Personally, I think anyone who applies to a top school with ANY expectation or sense of entitlement about getting in needs to have his head examined.</p>
<p>Spot-on. Look, let’s face it - the top state schools such as Michigan or Berkeley are great places, and no one who goes there is “sacrificing” anything versus the top private schools, but it’s a different type of experience when you’ve got 20,000 or 30,000 kids. And if the top private schools don’t want to be that large, they’re under no obligation to do so. </p>
<p>I love all the people who on one hand are very libertarian and then on the other hand claim Harvard “ought” to do something. Harvard “ought” to stay within the law and then within that, they can run their university however the heck they want to. They can shrink it, expand it, increase tuition, decrease tuition, weight SAT scores more, weight SAT scores less, go after more minorities, athletes, legacies, tuba players, whatever. It’s laughable the amount of mind-space some of you give these universities, as if they “ought” to do what you suggest or that they “owe” you an explanation of their processes and spending. It’s as ludicrous as suggesting that Neiman-Marcus “ought” to do something with their stores to suit my preferences.</p>
<p>You ARE aware, of course, that the vast majority of legacy applicants to elite schools are still rejected? Don’t let the facts interfere with your opinion!</p>
<p>What do adcoms have against pirates, especially the charitable kind? </p>
<p>Their interesting characteristics can contribute to a more vibrant and interesting campus. Such as expanding “Talk Like A Pirate Day” to a campuswide weekly event! :D</p>
<p>I have several cookbooks in my kitchen, each used for different purposes. I have one that I go to when I want to bake my favorite deserts - brownies, cookies, cupcakes, etc. These are done in relatively small batches.</p>
<p>When I want to bake for a bake sale, or need to make large batches, i don’t just multiply the recipes - it won’t work. Instead, I look in a different book for recipes designed for larger batches. (By the same token, cutting those in hlf of quarter doesn’t always work well either).</p>
<p>Any of these schools could expend by a small amount, without major concern. But once you try to double or triple their size, they will no longer be recognizable. Size matters - look at the size of the honors programs at many state flagships - they are popular because they are smaller, and offer a shared experience with other top students. If they expend the honors programs to a larger percentage of students, they won’t work as well.</p>
<p>Also, correct me if my info’s off, but I recalled my GC telling us that legacy admissions only really come into play if your parents aren’t only alums, but also donate something like ten thousand dollars or more per month.* </p>
<p>An applicant with alum parents donating nominal to the college sums like $50 a year isn’t likely to be treated differently than applicants with parents who aren’t alums of a given selective private school. </p>
<ul>
<li>In short, the alum parents really need to have demonstrated a history of and the means to enable generous giving to their alma mater.</li>
</ul>