Meh. The "rules" were not being kept secret, nor were they changed or applied differently based on an applicant's ability to pay. They were the same for everyone.
You say rich kids had an easier time following the rules than poor kids? I am shocked — shocked!
Anyway, under the new system, rich kids will still do better than poor kids. They'll just stress out for a longer period.
The "rules" were not being kept secret, nor were they changed or applied differently based on an applicant's ability to pay. They were the same for everyone.
I would say that the rules, in fact, were being kept secret. And still are, of course.
Or when Trudeau came back, briefly, after the first Joe Clark fiasco. Interesting how in our system a former great president simply cannot play this role. Historically, they've all been dead or incapacitated, a telling detail, but now, of course, they're constitutionally prohibited.
Agree with some combination of 3 & 4. This is nice from a PR standpoint, but I suspect nothing about the demographic makeup of the place will change. But I'm inclined to like Bok, so good for him.
I think this is a good move for in terms of starting a trend that other schools may follow.
However, it is worth pointing out that Harvard's early action program was nonbinding. Hence the financial aid criticism of early decision doesn't apply to Harvard. Take me for example. My family's income was smaller than the cost of a year at Harvard. I applied early, got in, and waited to hear on financial aid offers from the schools that I applied to later before making a final decision. As it was Harvard came through with the best offer. My parents paid $1,000 total over 4 years. I worked for my spending money and came out with under $7,000 in student loans.
Now, it's also true that I'm not really a great example of someone of a different class, because my parents (who are missionaries) are educated essentially voluntary poor, so we were able to learn the system. But Harvard's version of early action was not problematic the way that the whole system is problematic.
Posted by
Unfoggetarian: "Pause endlessly, then go in." (9) |
Link to this comment |
09-12-06 10:21 AM
12
The rules were being kept secret. Selective colleges had to be sued (by Asian-Americans) before any light was thrown on their admissions process, and before then they deliberately gave the wrong impression. I remember being told that being a child of an alumnus would break ties; actually children of alumni were admitted from a completely separate pool.
Also, early action disadvantages poor kids even if they know that applying early boosts your chances; see LB's paragraph 1. Maybe they should've applied early to Harvard anyway, because Harvard's early action was non-binding [as a couple of people have pointed out on preview], so they could sit on their admission and see if they got better aid packages elsewhere. But at the least Harvard may encourage other schools to drop this pernicious practice; I've seen articles about early admit where people say "Harvard can lead the way here, because everywhere else would be afraid of losing competitive advantage to Harvard."
And saying "Meh" to this? You say rich kids had an easier time following the rules than poor kids? I am shocked — shocked! Gosh, weren't you arguing elsewhere about America's awesome social mobility? The thing is, poor and middle class kids won't have guidance counselors who are going to know the real admissions rates for early vs. normal applications. So how are they supposed to find out the rules? The rules are basically locked in a cabinet in a basement that has no stairs and a sign saying "Beware of the Lion" on it. Throwing up extra barriers to kids who aren't already in: not good.
#8: You clean my clock if I knock Bok, and I'll pull my Glock like 2pac, smack you like Doc Ock, pinch you like Spock and fry you in my wok like a shock jock with one sock.
13: Around 1990. Remember, I'm old. (The point was more that colleges are secretive about admissions and even when the data was released they sure don't publicize it.)
Posted by
Unfoggetarian: "Pause endlessly, then go in." (9) |
Link to this comment |
09-12-06 10:36 AM
17
#12: Gosh, weren't you arguing elsewhere about America's awesome social mobility?
If the biggest obstacle to social mobility in America is the challenge of getting, reading, and understanding a college admissions pamplet, I'm okay with that.
At any rate, the "secret" admissions process you decry also works in favor of poor kids. Harvard doesn't want a class full of bluenosed Thurston Howell III's. They also want interesting, smart people who happen to be less well-off financially, like, it seems, #11.
#12, 13, 15: A similar thing happened at Harvard with Jews decades before. But subjectivity in the admissions process is unavoidable unless you admit applicants based solely on standardized test scores, which will never happen.
Now, it's also true that I'm not really a great example of someone of a different class, because my parents (who are missionaries) are educated essentially voluntary poor, so we were able to learn the system.
This sort of procedural obstacle isn't much for someone whose family knows about it. It's huge for someone who hasn't got support from people familiar with the process.
That's where the proposal to demolish Arthur Dent's house was displayed to the public, right?
Actually thinking it over it may have been "Beware of the Leopard."
19, there was an actual quota on the number of Jews that are admitted, 17, if the admissions pamphlet says "Your chances are much much higher if you apply early" I'll eat it with barbecue sauce. (Offer not valid in Texas.)
#20: As I said, I don't think it's asking too much for someone who wants to apply to Harvard to actually find out what the rules for applying are, and follow them.
But is it fine to create the rules in such a way that some people will predictably hear about them easily for reasons exogenous to their "objective quality," while other people will predictably not hear about them easily, again for reasons having nothing to do with their fitness for admission?
GB, why would anyone assume that they needed to go through all this bother? Once you know that there are different admission rates for early vs standard applications, it makes sense to find out what they are, but why would you, from a position of ignorance, suspect that?
After reading this story in the NY Times this morning, I wrote a personal letter to the dean of admissions applauding this decision (and the one from May expanding the financial aid program so that kids from families making less than $60k per year don't pay to go to Harvard). This guy was the dean of admissions back in the spring of 1988 when Harvard let me in, and I thanked him for that, too. William R. Fitzsimmons -- helluva guy!
Oh, and as for the merits, someone above nailed it -- this decision will encourage other universities to do the same, and some of them have binding early action programs. Only Harvard could afford to do this and not lose competitiveness (IMHO), and I'm glad they did. Okay, maybe they're one of the only schools that could have done it, not the only one. Still cool!
One more thing. Derek Bok was president of Harvard for most of my time as an undergraduate, and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for him. Hurray for Derek! bokbokbokbokbok
A lot of this seems slightly off-base to me. The people in Harvard's admissions department aren't morons. They're shooting for a class with certain characteristics, and scores and grades are only one set of such characteristics. If not-rich people are less likely to apply Early Action, and Harvard wants not-rich people, I'd bet that Harvard either limits the acceptances during Early Action or skews its later decisions toward the not-rich.
#28: How on earth could Harvard "create the rules" so that every high school student in America hears about them in exactly the same way? I submit that this is not in fact possible.
Yeah, the good this will do isn't at Harvard, but at other schools (ahem) where early admit is binding. (The other reason for binding early admit is that it increases yield, the ratio of matriculations to acceptances; this factors in rankings.) If early admit became "just not done," these schools would maybe take economic diversity a little more seriously. Of course, they could always privilege full-pays in other parts of the process, but at least it would create one applicant pool instead of two very unequal ones.
What I remember from 17 (was not a very good year): early admits committed you to attending, but you'd be committed before financial aid decisions came, so I just threw up my hands. Then my parents invited me to apply only to state schools.
Knowing what I know now, it would have been worth it to apply to a number of selective private schools, since those places often have a lot of financial support for students they want. Odds are I'd have gotten a pretty generous package from one of them. But no one told me that, and this was pre-internet.
#28: How on earth could Harvard "create the rules" so that every high school student in America hears about them in exactly the same way? I submit that this is not in fact possible.
You're right, that's probably not possible. So it makes sense for Harvard not to create even more complicated rules, doesn't it? It's possible that, even though the situation will never be perfect, it can in fact be good—you don't have to immediately conclude, well, anything goes!
By clearly stating what their procedures are on their admissions material and by ensuring that everyone's application is assessed in the same admissions process and according to the same clearly-stated criteria.
One thing that's bad about a lot of higher ed conversations is that they tend to focus on places like Harvard, which is a really atypical place (e.g., its endowment). Other highly selective colleges and universities are more pressured financially, so they need a bunch of students to pay full tuition, and more concerned with fluctuations in rankings, so really like the early commitment etc. to keep the numbers up. The amount of bullshit resulting from this is almost stunning.
Complicated rules not apparent unless you know that they exist and where you need to reasearch them, privilege applicants who have support from people who know about them already -- kids with educated parents who go to good high-schools with involved counsellors. They disadvantage kids trying to figure stuff out on their own. And they don't do anything at all to distinguish kids who deserve admission from those who don't -- the admissions process isn't supposed to be an additional intelligence or aptitude test.
37- There was an out clause for financial aid, if you were admitted ED but then couldn't afford it after getting your aid package, they weren't going to drag you off to school in chains and shake you upside down so all your money fell out of your pockets. However, you would have to wait until the next year to apply to other schools, so essentially you were screwed.
The admissions rules have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
Complicated rules not apparent unless you know that they exist and where you need to reasearch them, privilege applicants who have support from people who know about them already -- kids with educated parents who go to good high-schools with involved counsellors.
Social capital advantages would seem to be more pernicious than even that. Even if you don't know about the various tricks, and your guidence counselor is useless, if you belong to a certain class of people, there's a good chance someone in your circle knows the tricks, and that the information will be distributed shortly.
40: By clearly stating what their procedures are on their admissions material and by ensuring that everyone's application is assessed in the same admissions process and according to the same clearly-stated criteria.
Those are two different things. Harvard does in fact clearly state what its application procedures are, including the procedures for the early admissions system, which is what this post is about.
On the other hand, the actual decision-making process is horribly subjective and biased, but that's not what this post was about.
There are, of course, all kinds of other ways that social capital can be turned to one's advantage. 'Posh' schools, for example, do a pretty good job at coaching their kids for the interview process whereas other schools may not even be aware of what would count as a good or bad interview.
However, there's no point in designing in deliberately obfuscated procedures that can only be circumvented with a certain degree of social advantage or luck.
This lessens the expected value of pulling my children from public schools and placing them in connection-filled, expensive and exclusive private schools. What is the world coming to?
Hey, I'm class of '92, and I just realized that your name is familiar. I was in Mather and then Adams House. (There was another guy who played the bass who had the same name as me, but wasn't me.)
47: Yes. I applied to college pre-internets, but I clearly remember carefully reading through Harvard's admissions materials and concluding that there was no particular reason to apply early, since the standards were the same. I doubt that they've become a lot more candid since then.
One thing to keep in mind is that the admissions officers are not idiots. They can spot an over-coached rich kid a mile away. They assume kids from private high schools were tutored on their SAT's, and judge their test scores accordingly. And they know poor kids had less help along the way. The deck is not as badly stacked as you think.
I have a colleague who has argued that all selective private institutions should simply set a particular standardized bar (say, X scores on standardized tests plus Y GPA, maybe with some standardized scale of "adjusted" GPA in relation to how difficult or challenging the high school was) and then randomly admit from the people who meet the standard. If it's random, he notes, your admitted students will have distributions of students of color, etcetera, exactly matching their distributions in the total qualified applicant pool.
Now this would have an interesting impact on certain things--for example, the applicant pool is now disproportionately female, and a lot of institutions that are working to maintain a 48-52 male-to-female split would probably be more like 45-55 after this shift, if there was a random distribution of students choosing to matriculate from the admitted pool.
Now if you don't like this idea on the grounds that there are students below the cut-off who ought to be considered because they have some special individual talents, character, or outlook, or because standardized measures aren't a good indicator of inner potential and academic ability, or because you don't trust this system to produce a demographically "proper" class, etcetera, I'm not sure you have much justification for complaining about the inequities of early admission, which is just one more tool that college admissions departments use to manipulate and construct their imagined "ideal class" of entering students.
Right now, admissions at selective institutions spend an enormous amount of time considering the fine-grained details of the individual lives of a very large group of applicants--their talents, their character, their potential, their life experience, their "diversity" in relation to the overall applicant pool. Mostly they're not supposed to talk about ability to pay, but I suspect it's hard not to think about that a little bit even when you can't do so "officially". (Classes at most such schools do mysteriously seem to come in at roughly the same costs in financial aid from year to year, with the same approximate balance of full-paying customers and people paying discounted rates).
All of this individual attention produces a lot of evaluations which are in some sense "secret" and in some sense "inequitable"--they may end up valuing a pleasant and bright woman from rural Kansas who went to a mediocre public school who may struggle at the institution over a student from New York who went to Phillips Exeter who will be bored with and easily ace all of his classes in English literature, for example. But on the other hand, most selective institutions work very hard to get *more* than a random distribution of students of color, first-generation students from working-class families, and so on, and in that way, try to compensate for general social inequality in a way that a random admission system probably wouldn't.
The internal considerations of current admissions systems (and financial aid systems that come with them) are in many ways unbelievably precious, often arcane, frequently secretive. I'm just not clear why getting rid of early admissions per se is striking a blow against the Man as if that system is distinctively different than the larger system which uses it.
Nor am I clear that a lot of the critics of selective admissions to selective, wealthy institutions have any clear alternative system which would produce social justice in some greater measure.
#47: Acceptance rate is not an application procedure.
But since you brought it up, one reason the acceptance rate is higher for early admission programs is that the applicant pool is stronger. The early decision pool draws top students who have Harvard as their #1 choice, while the general application pool contains applicants who apply to Harvard as a "reach" school along with several more realistic choices.
One thing to keep in mind is that the admissions officers are not idiots. They can spot an over-coached rich kid a mile away. They assume kids from private high schools were tutored on their SAT's, and judge their test scores accordingly. And they know poor kids had less help along the way. The deck is not as badly stacked as you think.
I think you're the one misguided here. I really don't think that they are as immune to the charms of a well-coached and well-spoken kid, or as likely to want to redress the balance as you think.
#59: The vast majority of rich kids who apply to Harvard are rejected. A rich kid who gets in has something else going for him besides being rich, well-coached, or even well-spoken.
And as #57 correctly noted, Harvard and other colleges work hard to achieve a "diverse" student body along many axes, including affluence.
58- Let's say there were a box that said "check here and we'll add 100 points to your SAT score." Hot dog, let's do it! Now imagine there's a box but no instructions as to why you should check it, only guidance counsellors at upper middle class schools know the secret. Early admissions has the same effect- only good high schools know why it benefits you. It's something you could do in the application procedure (postmark by Nov 1 and check the appropriate box) but you're not told why you might benefit from doing so.
As for stronger applicant pool, as I remember, it makes more sense to apply early to your reach- that way if you get it you don't have to worry about other applications. If you apply early to a mid-level school, you don't have a reach by definition since you're committed if you get in.
One thing to keep in mind is that the admissions officers are not idiots. They can spot an over-coached rich kid a mile away. They assume kids from private high schools were tutored on their SAT's, and judge their test scores accordingly. And they know poor kids had less help along the way. The deck is not as badly stacked as you think.
Why do you think this? Did you read it in their admissions materials?
When Harvard recently decided to waive tuition for students whose parents made less than $40,000 per year, they were lauded. It affected, however, only 10% of their students.
So I'm thinking that somehow the admissions process isn't really about finding the best and the brightest, and does sort for social class.
The problem isn't that the information is unavailable, it's just that having it occur to the seventeen-year-old and her parents that there might be a reason to go digging more deeply than what the application packet says.
When I applied to college, early decision wasn't an option because I couldn't commit to a school that wasn't willing to fund me. This meant, by and large, no big-name schools. I'm not exactly dumb, and my high school wasn't bad, and my parents were well-intentioned if clueless, and my guidance counselor told me not to apply to the school which eventually admitted me on full scholarship. Think I was getting lots of useful advice on the merits of early action from her? She was telling me I couldn't get in!
Re: 57, it's perhaps that due to the correlation of early action/decision with economic background (especially the latter), and economic background seems to be a less worthy candidate than academic prowess or interesting talent.. Also, 'prestige' is in part measured by the numbers of admitted students that accept an admission offer, and that influences rankings of the schools; that puts more pressure to admit students who can commit to being there.
#63: Indeed. So let's not pretend that you get a free pass because you're rich.
#62: Your argument is logical, but it doesn't work out that way in practice. Here is QuestBridge, which, ironically, is "a program that links bright, motivated low-income students with educational and scholarship opportunities at some of the nation's best colleges":
Because only top students are encouraged to apply early, it is likely that the pool of early admission applicants is stronger than the regular applicant pool.
#65: I have heard such things from various informed sources over the years, including guidance counselors, test-prep companies, actual admissions officers, college professors, etc.
Now if you don't like this idea on the grounds that there are students below the cut-off who ought to be considered because they have some special individual talents, character, or outlook, or because standardized measures aren't a good indicator of inner potential and academic ability, or because you don't trust this system to produce a demographically "proper" class, etcetera, I'm not sure you have much justification for complaining about the inequities of early admission, which is just one more tool that college admissions departments use to manipulate and construct their imagined "ideal class" of entering students.
Unless, of course, one thought that the qualities that lead to one applying early, and the qualities that wouldn't be accounted for by the procedure you describe, aren't the same, or that, while there might be some overlap, the early-application method selects them in the wrong (eg, secretive) way.
70: But Wolfson, you're not taking into account the awareness of the admissions dept. of the yield of the early-admit process. If it skews the entire admit process a certain way, I suspect it's because they want it to skew a certain way.
71: Well, at least according to the folks at Harvard, it does have these unintended effects. In light of that estimation, I'm not sure of your basis for being certain that it doesn't.
All I know that 'early decision' was a huge factor for me in not applying to several schools. Nonbinding was less of a problem, and I did apply to schools that had early action, but for no reason other than 'won't it be nice to know early?' I had no idea in 1996 that it meant it was a secret signal that I was the right sort of person, because the conventional wisdom was 'only do early decision if you can afford it, otherwise, it doesn't matter, you can always go regular admission.'
71: why make it more complicated than necessary? If they admit all the X people they want in the first pass, so they don't need to admit any more in the second, all they've done is made the second pass more complicated and screwed over the X people who apply "late" (where "late" is "on time"). What's the reason for doing it in a more complicated fashion, especially given that each step increases the room for error, unintended consequences, ect ect ect?
I agree with #73. I would also like to point out that during my college admissions adventure (occupying much of 1999), "early decision" meant binding, and "early action" meant non-binding.
73- Indeed, this is the only reason I did it- I got into an early action school, then stupidly decided to apply to the other four schools I was looking at anyway and spent all of christmas day 1995 finishing those applications; in the end I went to the place I got in early. Now, in 250 words or less, tell us what you learned from this experience. (A: I'm bas at committing to a big decision.)
Yes, that was the terminology I used, too. 'Early decision' meant 'don't apply, we need to wait on financial aid' and 'Early action' meant 'why not, you'll know sooner, you aren't committed.'
72: Because I don't particularly believe them. I know they have pretty good information about what sort of class their present system yields, a pretty good idea about the sort of class they are trying to construct, and pretty smart people in various relevant positions. If the want to get to X, they can get to X.
I'll be interested to see if, at the margins, this change has the perverse effect of slightly decreasing the number of not-rich students initially.
GB assures us that the admissions departments do all kinds of things to make the admissions process fair. However, Harvard's admissions department just now did an additional thing, with the intention of making the admissions process more fair, and somehow he doesn't like that.
Sometimes I think that boy just likes to argue. (That, or he just lost his shirt on the spot EA futures exchange.)
Selective admissions policies are never fair, in many ways. If we were to do a one-to-one comparison of any individual admitted student with any individual unadmitted student at almost any selective college or university, we'd find that many such match-ups offend our personal judgement of merit, quality, inner potential, what have you. Some admissions are made because a single admissions officer constructs a private narrative about how a particular candidate is really the right (or wrong) person for the particular perceived "personality" of the college or university. Or even worse, you've got a situation like ours where to some extent the administration would like to change the perceived personality of the institution (they're worried that Swarthmore is perceived as being too dour, self-punishing, masochistic, etc.) and so maybe some admits are made in an effort to reach out to different personality "types" of people, with all the precision of 19th Century phrenology.
But that's the price of having a system which is in any way individuated, which tries to evaluate the inner worth of applicants, of a system which is highly selective (e.g., rejects most applicants), and of a system that tries hard to produce certain kinds of measurable diversity (racial, gender, geographic, social class) in the overall population of admits.
If highly qualified low-income students, especially students of color coming from weak public schools, are in any way not sufficiently coached about the system, it's not really early decision that's the problem. What someone really needs to tell them is that they are by the standards of virtually every highly selective college or university the most desirable and demanded group of applicants, because their presence in the overall applicant pool is numerically well below the desired target level of most such institutions. Students in this group possessing strong academic credentials can indeed court the best possible financial offer; moreover, they don't need early decision in order to help secure their admission. So the only bad thing about early decision in this sense is that they may come to the mistaken impression that they *need* to do it in order to secure an admit.
But for kids who don't possess a desirable diversity attribute--say a white woman from a professional-class family who is an academically strong candidate from a good public high school in Massachusetts--early decision is a way for that person to express a very strong preference for a single institution that they have researched and decided is the most desirable place for them to be. Any pool of admitted students at any of these institutions is going to have a very significant number of these kinds of students, whether or not you have early decision. Why? Because there are way more of them in the applicant pool than academically strong students from poor families who attended a failing inner-city high school. So why not let an academic institution go ahead and load up on a sufficient number of students of one type, knowing that they're going to get that number anyway, and then wait for the spring to really pursue the kinds of students that are in short supply? It helps an admission officer a lot to know which admits are secured and which are competitive when the final round of selection begins. That's a win-win situation EXCEPT in those cases where a highly desirable kid from a poor family somehow is fooled into thinking he must apply early decision or have no chance of admission.
That's a win-win situation EXCEPT in those cases where a highly desirable kid from a poor family somehow is fooled into thinking he must apply early decision or have no chance of admission.
Or for a kid who comes from a disadvantaged background in a manner that doesn't show up well in terms of 'diversity' -- a bright poor white or asian kid.
But that's framing the decision process wrong for deciding to apply early decision in the minds of most students. It doesn't occur to most of them that it has anything to do with admissions except as a way to show that you're serious about the school.
But early decision (not early action) does put you at the mercy of the school's financial aid office, and for all but the very top poor minority students, that means regular pool and no admission. There's more to the problem than just early decision, of course, but I don't see it helping.
But surely the fact that school A has a 22.5% yield and spends $35,603 per student means it is objectively better than school B, which only has a 22.2% yield even though it spend $35,820 per student. Why don't you want people to have this information?
Or for a kid who comes from a disadvantaged background in a manner that doesn't show up well in terms of 'diversity' -- a bright poor white or asian kid.
But that kid (wrongly) wasn't going to get in under a diversity program, anyway. My own suspicion is that early-action admits might be admitted at a higher rate because the talent pool is, on average, better, the commitment is higher, and also because admissions officers know that the vast majority of those admits will be self-funded. NCP might have had a better shot under early-admit because the admissions committee wrongly assumed he was rich. ("Assumed" meaning really that the assumption is baked into the number of early-action approvals they hand out.) That's the possibly perverse effect that I'm wondering about.
85: You can start defining 'bright but poor' somewhere around $60K per year, given where Harvard waives tuition. It's not just a small number of kids we're talking about. This is quite a large number of potential applicants that don't apply early decision (early action is less of a problem) simply because they can't commit anywhere without seeing a financial aid lever.
A financial aid letter, that is. The expectation that the kids will be self-funded is quite a big problem with early decision, and one that could, perhaps, have more of an impact on turning away lower-income kids from applying.
Cala, if you're not going to be eligible for financial aid anyway, who cares if you're at the mercy of the financial aid office? So a kid who really, really knows where they want to go, who has strong academic credentials but is otherwise indistinguishable from many many other extremely qualified candidates, and who knows that there is one and only one place that they really want to be at, and who is not going to be eligible for financial aid. Any selective institution will have some of those; they're a significant presence in the applicant pool. Why not lock down some of the uncertainty in the admissions process by just going ahead and admitting your quotient of them early on?
White and Asian applicants from poor families, who are first-generation applicants, and who come from high schools that aren't commonly represented in the applicant pool, and who are strongly academically qualified will show up quite well under the heading of "diversity"--most admissions offices will be quite interested in them. Many selective institutions would love to have more white first-generation applicants from poorer families in rural or semi-rural areas of the country, especially the less well-known institutions like Swarthmore, Amherst, Williams and so on. It's just that most selective institutions can't afford to send out admissions officers to most such rural areas to talk up their institutions--the yield of qualified applicants from such visits is way too low to justify the huge expense of sending people to all those areas. They can at least visit some of the major inner-city school districts because of proximity to their own institutions and because of concentration of population, even if those schools don't produce a huge number of qualified applicants.
But that kid (wrongly) wasn't going to get in under a diversity program, anyway.
Sure. Burke was saying that this sort of thing doesn't matter because disadvantaged students are wildly desirable whenever they apply for diversity reasons. I was referring to the point Cala actually sucessfully made in 91; that there a hell of a lot of kids between where most of Harvard's student body comes from economically, and the kind of disadvantaged that's going to make you a prize for admissions.
Re. rich v. poor kids and early admission: I got in under early admission to Brown, but couldn't go because my National Merit scholarship was pinned to my safety school. I figured it was way too long a shot to tie it to Brown.
Cala, if you're not going to be eligible for financial aid anyway, who cares if you're at the mercy of the financial aid office? So a kid who really, really knows where they want to go, who has strong academic credentials but is otherwise indistinguishable from many many other extremely qualified candidates, and who knows that there is one and only one place that they really want to be at, and who is not going to be eligible for financial aid. Any selective institution will have some of those; they're a significant presence in the applicant pool. Why not lock down some of the uncertainty in the admissions process by just going ahead and admitting your quotient of them early on?
What? I guess I'm not being clear. The reason some people don't commit to early decision results from worries that in April, four months after they've committed, they will get no financial aid and won't be able to go to college at all. I wasn't talking about the merits of early decision for people who knew it was their first choice and that they could pay for it, but for the kid that wasn't going to get any diversity points but still didn't have the financial security to gamble on early decision.
Why not lock it down early if you are one of the fortunate ones to know that the check is written? You should be. But here's the worry: if you're not a special diversity interest -- poor, rural, black, etc -- but not quite rich enough to commit to a $50K tuition bill, you're applying to an admissions process that isn't looking for people like you any longer. You might indeed be more qualified than people in the first pool, but you didn't compete against them, because they had the money to commit early. You aren't more qualified, given that there's a preference for minorities, rural, etc. in the second pool.
51: The undergraduate admissions interviews in the US are worse than useless. A load of alumni going out there, asking stupid questions, and then sending in their widely-varying but uniformly useless opinions. I sincerely hope they're ignored by the admissions staff.
On the other hand, I found the Cambridge interview process to be great. They got technical and in-depth and really seemed to get a good idea of an applicant's knowledge of and intuition for a subject. I think more US universities would be helped by professors doing the interviewing, even if it means doing an initial sieve of the applications before the interview process. How do you feel about this, McG? Aren't there questions you can ask that will allow you to get around coaching, to see how someone interacts with an entirely new idea and get a better grasp of their ability?
Matt, NCProsecutor, did you both go to Harvard for undergrad? How did you like it?
It's always amazed me that it remains such a huge, popular place when really everything I've heard about their undergrad and law programs from students and alums sounded fairly unpleasant. Plus the MIT kids just wouldn't stop talking shit, ya know?
The Early-Decision Racket, by James Fallows. We're talking twice as high an admission rate of early as regular applicants. I'm skeptical that this is just strength of the pool. The Avery study estimates that early application is worth 100 points on the SAT, excluding legacies, athletes, and affirmative action.
SCMT at 71 and 80, I don't buy that. First off, there's some evidence in the article that schools are under pressure to expand early admissions regardless of what other effects it has. Second, I think these people probably have shame; they'd be less willing to explicitly formulate a 'more rich kids' policy to replace one that looks neutral but has that effect.
98: That's a fair point. Assuming the second pool breaks down the way you believe, I wholeheartedly throw my support to the Cala-LB-Wolfson-Everyone-Else faction, and against Burke.
(Though I still think the admissions committees know all of this, and just don't care.)
I should point out, before 98 gets misread, that I'm fine with minority & poverty preferential treatment. I just want, as a white chick, when I beat another white kid by 200 points on the S.A.T., to get his spot and make the university pay my tuition. Is that soo, soo much to ask?
Also, it's worth pointing out that what we're complaining about isn't "Rich kids all get a free ride" but "Kinda smart rich or well connected kids get a boost over smarter poor/middle-middle class kids and kids with dubious guidance counselors." Cala is an academic success because she did everything right, whereas better-off kids didn't have to jump through all the same hoops to get to the same place. The end result is a perpetuation of our class structures, and that's bad.
If you are a kid who is not going to get very much financial aid, has some kind of minor diversity attraction but you're not one of the super-rare folks that every school will knock themselves out for, is someone with a desirable diversity asset but marginal academic credentials, etcetera--if in short you are a borderline candidate for the level of selectivity that you would very much like to be accepted by, then yes, early admissions screws you potentially. But so does the entire admissions system at selective institutions. So does the basic institution of selectivity.
On the flip side, while I think the outcomes between small liberal arts colleges and large research institutions are notably divergent for some kind of students, and therefore worth considering, the outcomes between some perceived levels of selectivity are not that notably divergent. Yes, there's a difference between Swarthmore and Skidmore, but really not so much of one. There's a difference between Harvard and UMich, but not so much. For candidates who are in one or all of those ways borderline, they *should* be counseled to think pragmatically about cost and outcomes. If you're a borderline candidate who will get a poor financial aid offer from Williams, maybe Franklin and Marshall will give you a much better offer. etc.
There's no question that there could be better counseling to applicants on how to work the system to their advantage, and especially to students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. But I don't think we should confuse the lack of good counseling with a critique of the system itself, as if the fact that it *can* be gamed or the fact that it *is* selective and individuated is the problem that needs serious attention. In this respect, I think early decision is kind of a red herring: what I'd rather get clear on is whether we think the system itself is fundamentally corrupt and should be changed (and how so) or whether we just think there needs to be a better distribution of advice on how to gain maximum personal advantage from the system.
In this respect, I think early decision is kind of a red herring: what I'd rather get clear on is whether we think the system itself is fundamentally corrupt and should be changed (and how so) or whether we just think there needs to be a better distribution of advice on how to gain maximum personal advantage from the system.
This is an excellent question. I think this is a good, but you're right, not a terribly important decision by Harvard. One the larger question, I'm down with "the system itself is fundamentally corrupt and should be changed".
TB, how does the basic institution of selectivity screw over kids who need financial aid if admissions are theoretically need-blind? I can see how that happens with an admissions system that lets schools separate out a pool of kids that certainly won't need aid, and admit them at a much higher rate, but I don't see how selectivity itself does that.
Perhaps another way of putting this is "In talking about borderline cases and selectivity, please address the evidence from the Avery study that early decision application is worth 100 SAT points."
I just want, as a white chick, when I beat another white kid by 200 points on the S.A.T., to get his spot and make the university pay my tuition. Is that soo, soo much to ask?
It'd be great if it was purely meritocratic, but I think Burke has a point in that someone has to pay tuition. If you're really a stellarly high candidate sompared to some rich mediocrity who gets in, yes, that's terrible. However, there are plenty of smart rich kids who may be slightly worse candidates but will do just fine at the school while paying for all the true prodigies and diversity cases that the school chooses to take. I can see why it's a really tricky balancing act.
That said, it's one that I think most schools do somewhat well (except, oddly enough, Harvard).
If for some reason, you really want to go to school X more than equally selective school Y, the availability of some form of commitment mechanism (early decision or not). The school values your enthusiasm. You want to signal it in a credible way (i.e., not with a letter that says "X is my firstest, mostest choice" because that's not credible). Early admit is one such signalling mechanism. I would be surprised if any such mechanism would not more substantially advatange the savvy and well-connected. (It may be that schools should not value enthusiam, of course.)
There are people in the world who must say, "No, no, you're thinking of *Skidmore*, the women's college in upstate New York. *Swarthmore* has always been co-ed. Yes, it's in Pennsyvania. Actually, since I attended, I am quite sure."
Clearly what we need is increased, rather than decreased, public funding of public schools, with a greater tax burden on the wealthy and no limit on the amount of income that can be taxed.
Timothy Burke, it's excellent practical advice, but there is something a little weird about one's financial situation in and of itself, in addition to providing opportunities (problematic in other ways), as making one a better candidate for a university. I wasn't borderline in anyway except not having the financial assets to apply early decision.
Early decision in particular seems to weight financial security. It's not the intent of the program, but that's certainly the result. And it's not the only thing wrong with the admissions process, but it's an easier one to fix than most.
Wolfson, are you confused by me? I am making a trifling, bourgie joke on a thread about the underprivileged. Don't mind me. I'll be on Standpipe's joke explaining blog.
That said, it's one that I think most schools do somewhat well
This doesn't seem obvious to me; IIRC most selective colleges are crap at economic diversity. Yglesias says the same but he doesn't cite his sources, but the percentage of students at these schools with family incomes in the bottom half is appallingly small.
Hey, Timothy Burke--I can't log in to leave this comment on your site, but for your Anglo-American Conservatism class, you might fill in some of those 1950-70 gaps by looking at Gertrude Himmelfarb's stuff. She wrote (perfectly respectable) intellectual history on Burke, Mill, and dudes like that. Oh, and that's Gertrude "Mrs. Irving Kristol" Himmelfarb.
112- Actually, Harvard could easily afford to charge $1 per year for tuition- the annual income from their endowment is far more than annual tuition receipts (need to check those numbers, but I remember hearing that annual tuition collected is
(Just eyeballing the numbers- say 1500 students in a class, 6000 undergrads, if they all pay $40k, that's $240 million. Endowment is $26 billion as of FY2005.)
Speaking of students, I want to report something sweet that just happened to me. Usually the students here are totally obnoxious and entitlled. Many of them will make life difficult for you, and then nag you and snipe at you to deal with their procrastination. But one of them, realizing he had made a mistake that had cost me hours of work, just stopped by to give me a twenty dollar Starbucks card, which I appreciated greatly, just for the gesture that indicated he noticed me and hadn't meant to be a pain in the butt.
Fucking html- I heard that annual tuition is less than 1% of the endowment, and ROI on the endowment was ~20% last year.
123- Are you sure it wasn't a bribe?
122: But how much are their expenditures? Just because the amount they can sustainably pull out of their endowment looks to be approximately triple their potential tuition doesn't mean they can cut their tuition without substantial sacrifices. Plus, aside from Yale (and to a lesser extent, Princeton and Stanford), other schools don't have the luxury of an endowment that I can only assume looks something like Scrooge McDuck's gigantic swimming pool of money (Summers probably took a daily swim just for the hell of it, I know I would).
And I generally agree with the economic diversity point, but the problem is that the median family only earns as much as annual tuition at these schools. Their tuition is free. Who's to say how many of those people should be taken before it's an undue burden on the university? I agree more than are taken now, but I'm certainly not going to say how many. I also think the actual poor, as opposed to the educated middle-class, would benefit far more from better public school education than a sympathy acceptance to a top university from a crap district. Sure, there are some brilliant kids who will do fine anyway, but many who are merely bright have a tough time overcoming the education deficit that's built up by the time college rolls around.
They don't have to pull from the endowment at all- the return on the endowment is enough to keep the endowment growing (I refuse to use grow as a transitive verb) and pay tuition as well. In fact, it's almost noise- if Harvard had not charged tuition last year, the endowment would have grown by 19% instead of 20%.
And yes, only a few schools can do this- the very ones we're describing as highly selective. I guess they wouldn't want to deal with the resulting 10^6 applications if they were tuition-free.
126: On the flip side, if they can sustainably do away with tuition entirely and go purely merit for admittance (and optimal class sizes, etc), should they? Amongst other changes, presumeably `rich kids' would begin to trend towards a small minority in that case ....
Undergrad ed is a lesser function in most universities. Grad school, research institutes, etc. are more important. Some schools have considered eliminating it.
129: But can you leave aside legacies and athletics? How about the question of how many people don't apply because they don't think (rightly or wrongly) they have a shot at a tuition waver or scholarship, but know they can't afford tuition. What if we changed the question from $0 tuition to active support? Ok, clearly this is venturing away from Harvard policy and towards the purpose of a university, etc. Still, it's interesting to think about. I certainly believe they (Harvard and others) have made strides toward a more merit based system, but wonder how effective it is...
But you can only consistantly pull about 3-5% of assets from an investment each year while still allowing them to keep up with inflation. Harvard had an extremely good run under their old asset manager, and their new guy is a smart bastard from PIMCO, but they still can't rely on superbly above-average returns to pay for everything.
Now that facts have been pulled into this damn discussion: here's Harvard's 2004-2005 financial report. They had student revenue of $586.5 million and total expenses of $2.7573 billion. They pulled $23.5 million out of their endowment during the year to help cover expenses. By increasing their annual draw on the endowment to about 3% per year, they should be able to continue into perpetuity with roughly the same inflation-adjusted budget without charging any tuition to any of their graduate, undergrad, or professional school students.
Of course, they are the richest school on the planet by a considerable margin, but it still surprises the hell out of me that anyone could do this.
They'd probably also get more donations if they were free- right now they have the schtick about how tuition only covered half of your expenses when you were in school, which doesn't go over too well for people still paying student loans. Heck, I might start picking up the phone when caller ID says it's Harvard calling for their annual piece of flesh.
I'm not sure why the dropping of a non-binding EA program (instead of a binding ED program) is such an advantage to the non-rich. I wasn't able to apply to my first choice ED because of the financial aid bind, but I did apply to MIT using EA, and once I knew I was in, I could limit my remaining applications to those schools that I would conceivably choose over MIT. That saved both time and money. (I also got a kick out of telling people that MIT was my safety school.)
I don't recall any problem figuring out the EA/ED distinction on my own - it was spelled out pretty clearly in each school's application packet. The only kids I can imagine having a problem are those who don't request applications or info soon enough to meet the early deadline. I suppose if a kid comes from a school where few kids go on to college, they might not know about the possibility of early applications ahead of time.
Re SP's 62: I'm not sure that the SAT difference still exists if you have other ways to let the school know they are your first choice. It's pretty clear to me that genuine enthusiasm for the school is valuable. I let my first choice know that they were clearly my first choice during my interview, and made it clear that I would have applied ED except for the aid issue. I suspect that didn't hurt.
re: 99 [posting mildly Becks-style and with caveats that this is all just my own experience]
I'm afraid I really don't know. I'm only a grad student/adjunct teacher at Oxford so I've never been directly involved in interviewing. At some colleges people in my position do get involved in the interviewing process, but I haven't. On the other hand, I have been a marker for PPE admissions exams for a few years so I do have a good sense of the expectations my college has on entrance exams.
I'd love to think that coached but not especially able kids from well-off backgrounds do less well than able but not well coached kids from less well-off backgrounds but my (anecdotal) experience suggests that's not the case. Not, I stress, because of any intention on the part of the interviewers to prevent those latter kids getting in, I'm sure that's not the case. However, for whatever reason,* I meet very very few kids in the course of my teaching who don't come from moderately well-off backgrounds.
Lots of them aren't rich by any standard, of course, but there are very few from 'council estate' backgrounds as far as I can tell and that's not the case at, say, Glasgow, where a signficant percentage of the students are from poor or working class backgrounds.
I have been involved in mentoring type programs to encourage kids from inner cities and poor backgrounds to apply and my (admittedly very limited) experience of that was pretty negative. These are bright kids but they've just never been asked the kind of questions they are likely to get at interview and they don't generally, in my experience, have the self-confidence to do well in that context. That's an area where the schools could do a lot better.
Philosophy may be a little wierd, however, in the sense that it's quite alien to anything these kids will have experienced at school and the skills required are something that the kids from more privileged backgrounds have perhaps been encouraged to develop more. It's quite possible they, the less well-off kids, would have been much better performers in science interviews.
* A lot of it may well be self-selection, of course. Bright working class kids may just not apply in significant numbers.
Actually, a friend of mine does interviews for Chicago (as does my father—in fact, my father interviewed me for Chicago). Chicago's interviews are optional, though, and apparently are supposed to be mostly informational for the students applying. (One hopes, anyway, that they're pretty uninfluential when it comes down to the actual admissions process, because otherwise I'd have had a bit of an unfair advantage, huh?) Anyway, this friend of mine seems to think they're not entirely useless, and he's a smart guy who wants to keep Santa CruzChicago eccentric, so he might know whereof he speaks.
Well, I'll take a shot at answering DaveW's intial question. I think the problem is that less privileged kids are not as likely to apply early. First, because they are less likely to know that there is an advantage conferred by applying early, even if they know the option exists (when I was applying to schools, the admissions officers told us the exact opposite in their public talks). The second reason, and I think this is critical when it comes to non-binding programs, is because less privileged kids are less likely to be able to have their application together early, whether it’s because of an unsettled home life, or because they have to work, or because it takes them hours of research to learn what most other applicants are simply told by their guidance counselor/ admissions consultant/ parent. In these cases, rewarding kids who apply early is, in effect, rewarding them for having an easier (note: not easy!) application process to begin with.
I think there is a definite advantage to applying early; whether that advantage is equivalent to 100 points on the SAT or just the generally favorable impression that the candidate is organized, on top of things, and more committed to the school. The kids who are most likely to apply early- the smart, relatively well off kids of educated parents- already have the upperhand when it comes to the admissions process; to the extent that this Harvard decision influences other selective colleges to get rid of them, than that is one less advantage these kids have over their less privileged co-applicants. Obviously it’s not the most important one, and it’s not going to single-handedly cure our social mobility problems. But most less-privileged kids are fighting an uphill battle anyway; anything that contributes to making it the smallest bit more level is a good thing.
I believe, perhaps without good reason, that "Keep Austin weird" was first. Wikipedia has an alleged origin story. Data point: someone trademarked the phrase in 2003.
Himmelfarb is a good idea. Though she once wrote an op-ed piece that really amused me after I'd been working through Edwardian manuals on hygiene about how the problem with people these days is that they're really filthy compared to the Edwardians...
Anyway, um, on admissions, let's see. Yes, all these places are need-blind. Yes, that really means, as far as I can tell, that they don't talk about income during the admissions process. Yglesias is right that none of them educate a large number of people in the lower half of the income distribution, but that's largely because people in that group don't appear in their applicant pools at all, not because they fail to game the system to their advantage. Whaddya know, poverty appears to be structural. So then the question is, where do you interrupt it? I'm pretty sure that it is not an optimal strategy to preferentially seek out students whose academic preparation is very weak and then watch them flounder; probably just as problematic to admit them into a "second-string" curriculum-within-the-curriculum and mark them off as remedial charity cases. The intervention needs to be elsewhere and earlier, I think.
BTW, if the whole system is corrupt (in a way distinct from social hierarchy in general), what would work better? Anybody want to put in for my colleague's proposal to just make admissions random if you make a minimal standard set of selective measurements?
Anybody want to put in for my colleague's proposal to just make admissions random if you make a minimal standard set of selective measurements?
I think this would be a great model for certain institutions. It clearly would not result in anything like the undergraduate classes of Harvard, Caltech, or the other super-elite schools, and I don't see why, absent egalitarianism of the most misguided kind, we would want to spoil that vibe. As per usual, there's a great advantage in institutional diversity. MIT clearly works as MIT, and it doesn't seem to make much sense to risk that by turning it into a place that takes anyone with >700 on SAT math.
it is not an optimal strategy to preferentially seek out students whose academic preparation is very weak and then watch them flounder; probably just as problematic to admit them into a "second-string" curriculum-within-the-curriculum and mark them off as remedial charity cases.
*ding* Strawman! Has anyone in the thread suggested anything remotely resembling this? All I, at least, am saying is that it would be good if selective schools STOPPED THROWING UP ARTIFICIAL OBSTACLES to academically qualified students who aren't upper-middle or upper class. And that throwing up such artificial obstacles is not, in fact, inherent to being selective.
Nor are those artificial obstacles inherent to selecting the kind of entering class you want to have, as you describe in 57, unless you specifically want to have an entering class without any economic diversity. In which case shame on you.
As for not appearing in the applicant pools, perhaps a bit of this is due to factors such as those described in Cala's 66, which is not an academic charity case situation? I'm not saying that if admissions were done right the income makeup of these schools would exactly mirror that of America, but it might be closer.
I also favor intervention elsewhere and earlier. That doesn't mean that college admissions are hunkadory.
Maybe this is just because I sort of hate my school's vibe (to the extent that there is one), but I think "vibe" is highly overrated when it comes to elite colleges.
I take baa--who is, after all, a conservative--to be making the point that MIT seems to be working pretty well as a foundry of all civilization worth having, so let it be. But I think that everyone else is denying that (a) it's clearly working optimally, or (b) it couldn't be changed without harm to its present success.
Also, Weiner needs to stop commenting Kotsko-style.
Doesn't the rest of the comment make it clear that the "vibe" is the character of the institution? That seems important, doesn't it?
It depends on the character of the institution. I don't see the point in changing admissions practices "for the better" if it results in zero net change in the vibe. (Assuming demographics significantly affect vibe.) If a purported benefit of institutional diversity is that the children of elites will always have a place where they can go to just be themselves before taking the reins from mom and pop, I say "meh".
Of course not all institutions have vibes or vibes worth preserving. But I would be saddened if the current powers succeeded in their scheme to render my alma mater Just Another Expensive School, vibewise.
Let me make a prediction. Ending early decision will not result in a notable or measurable increase in students from lower-income families in the applicant pool of most highly selective colleges or universities. I'm not saying that anyone is saying, "Let's admit everybody". I am saying that the relative absence of those students from the applicant pools has vastly more to do with the systematic disadvantages they face prior to the decision to apply to college than it does with any of the arcana of the application process itself.
I think I'm slightly more sympathetic to baa's point than you, sb. I'm wary of meritocratic claims, generally, and I suspect that, sadly, a part of the value of going to Harvard is acculturation. If that's true, then vibe is going to matter, and you're going to need a certain seed of "Our Kind" of people to help the acculturation along.
166: The claim that I took Cala to be making is that the change might help people at the lower-end of the middle-income band.
I'm pretty sure that it is not an optimal strategy to preferentially seek out students whose academic preparation is very weak and then watch them flounder; probably just as problematic to admit them into a "second-string" curriculum-within-the-curriculum and mark them off as remedial charity cases.
Oh, for the love of little apples. No one's suggesting this. In fact, and here's perhaps the crux of the entire point, you could make Harvard's entering class look a lot more like middle America without sacrificing a whit of academic integrity. Believe it or not, you can make the academic selection process much less about who can commit to a $47K tuition bill by dumping early decision and still have a whole boatload of talented students.
There's some middle ground between poor remedial charity cases and the upper-class prep school types and I can't believe I'm actually having to type this sentence. It is disturbing that a university that claims to admit people need-blind and draws the best of the best of the best from all over the nation has less than ten percent of its class in the middle quintile or below of income. It makes me think that we're missing some bright and talented people, and that maybe you're not an academic charity case because you have to wait for the FAFSA forms.
Early action isn't as problematic, but according to Harvard's own data it seems to be functioning as a class and race sorter. I wouldn't have expected it to be, but there's a variety of explanations that seem to be plausible. Most likely I'd guess that there's a whole culture of planning the college experience from preschool that doesn't exist outside a certain socioeconomic set, and that a bright junior in high school just may not get his act together in time if he hasn't been coached since the previous fall.
Enthusiasm I think is a lousy sorter, too. It's easy to develop Harvard dreams and make it your favoritest of favorite schools when you know that when you get in, you won't have to pretend not to care so much so it doesn't break your parents' heart if it turns out the FAFSA fairy doesn't give you money in April.
TB, basically what Cala says, viz.: Apparently people who can apply early decision are people who do not need to be concerned overmuch about financial aid. That makes people who can't apply early decision, I don't know the numbers, but a pretty whopping percentage of the country I'd guess. And the lack of economic diversity has to do with the whole bottom half of the economic distribution, and probably more (the figures I've seen were broken down by quartiles [on preview: quintiles, maybe]). Talk about lower-income students let alone structural kotsking poverty is kind of beside the point here.
As for ending early decision, this seems like a plausible hypothesis: Adding 100 points to the SAT scores of a group of people who don't need to apply for financial aid decreases economic diversity by harming genuine middle-class applicants. What do you think?
And baa: I think this would be a great model for certain institutions.
Ah, I'm a dunce. I thought he meant other kinds of (non-academic) institutions. But I still don't see why Harvard couldn't be one of those institutions. It wouldn't be the Harvard he went to, but it wouldn't turn into a cultureless selective univerity clone, either; and while I completely sympathize with feelings of nostalgic attachment, I don't think they do much work in an argument against egalitarianism.
Wolfson is a lovely fellow, and I agree with him in all things when he is not being, well, you know.
As for the character of the institution/vibe issue, SCMT has me more or less right. MIT works. Harvard works. Excellence has value, and Cal Tech would not be the same nerd hot house if it just was a bunch of kids who got 5s on their BC calc AP. So what is to be gained by doing admissions as randomization past the post? Maybe that benefit can be cashed out in terms of a superior character, a different character, or less stress on super-achieving high schoolers (perhaps a consititutionally stressed group). These are fine discussions to have. By contrast, deploying minima + randomization at the Ivies as a tool for *egalitarianism* just seems daft. At the upper levels of ability, I think the American meritocracy is humming along pretty well. If there are 500 high school seniors annually who could do the work at Harvard but instead end up in a coal mine, I would be amazed. Maybe they end up at some other school. So what. These kids are going to be OK. Maybe they don't end up at the pinnacle of the ultimate status-conscious fields, but they will have fine, prosperous lives. If someone wants to set up a randomization after the post school, great. That will have a different character, which may be good too; but I doubt it will emerge as a particulr force for social justice.
Am so not going to read this thread, but surely the people who (according to the lats few comments) seem to be arguing against lower standards/changing an institution's charcter have, in fact, read Bok's book The Shape of the River? It goes a pretty long way towards proving that SAT scores and the like are a pretty loose indicator of merit (and everyone knows they're affected by social class). Students with "low" scores seem to do just as well as students with "high" scores once given the attention and mentoring that elite institutions are supposed to give all their students. And nontraditional students are more likely to use their Harvard or Yale degrees towards things like providing legal or medical services for the poor, which is surely a social net gain.
I mention from time to time that the discussion of education in this country is strictly insane. What Harvard is about includes education, but a lot of it is class. People who come out of Harvard or an equivalent school are, in most cases, in a higher class than they otherwise would have been. (Even if they're a slacker working in restaurants, they will at least work in gourmet restaurants). So yay class! Yay Harvard! Harvard gives people class!
On the other hand, we don't want class to be self-perpetuating. So theoretically we want smart poor people replacing rich dumb people in the upper class. Though frankly, I can't really see that happening.
But on the third hand, to the extent we have any power or wealth at all we want to do everything for our own kids, even if they are only average. We don't want them driving truck for a living.
On the fourth hand, there will always be people born in the bottom half who stay there. Who are those people.
I think I'm slightly more sympathetic to baa's point than you, sb. I'm wary of meritocratic claims, generally, and I suspect that, sadly, a part of the value of going to Harvard is acculturation. If that's true, then vibe is going to matter, and you're going to need a certain seed of "Our Kind" of people to help the acculturation along.
I think the name does more work than any Kind at this point, and you could graduate a bunch of gerbils from Harvard and witness a sizeable proportion waltz into cushy jobs.
I think I'm slightly more sympathetic to baa's point than you, sb. I'm wary of meritocratic claims, generally, and I suspect that, sadly, a part of the value of going to Harvard is acculturation. If that's true, then vibe is going to matter, and you're going to need a certain seed of "Our Kind" of people to help the acculturation along.
I think the name does more work than any Kind at this point, and you could graduate a bunch of gerbils from Harvard and witness a sizeable proportion waltz into cushy jobs.
True, but this wouldn't work to the benefit of their employers, whom I'd think would have an interest in hiring employees they didn't have to light a fire under to get the job done.
I am in substantial agreement with SB's 170. It would be fine by me if 50% of the Ivies decided to go to randomization past the post system. I am, of course, reluctant to give up a known good for an uncertain benefit, and I do think there are true benefits to congregating a bunch of real outlier types, as the elite schools do.
As for Cala's comment, I guess I am not sure what the evidence is that Harvard could look much more like middle america without changing its commitment to excellence. Harvard is now need blind, and provides substantial financial aid to families which are by no means poor. It would be great if all the Ivies were free, or had yet more substantial aid packages. The idea that cost is the main barrier keeping the Ivies from looking like Middle America, however, seems to me to understates the social challenges of meritocracy. It seems very likely that a child of two elite college grads just is going to have a disproportionate chance of being elite college competent. I suspect that, and not cost pressure, accounts for much of the skew we see.
If I understand Cala's point properly, she's not saying that Harvard would look a lot more like America, but that getting rid of ED and the like will make it marginally more fair for people who are not properly accounted for when we look at demographics: the not-rich-not-poor smart white kid. I have to say that it sounds reasonable.
cost is the main barrier keeping the Ivies from looking like Middle America
I believe that that is not the whole claim, that the claim is that some of the barrier is that Our Kind, Dear know how to navigate the admissions system and Not Our Kind, Dear don't.
The idea that cost is the main barrier keeping the Ivies from looking like Middle America, however, seems to me to understates the social challenges of meritocracy.
The idea that it doesn't seems to me to be willfully blind. Surely I'm not the only one who knows someone who didn't attend a top university solely because of financial considerations. Harvard is as generous as your federally calculated need says it should be, and that's fine for Harvard, but that doesn't mean the family making $50K a year doesn't have a $15K tuition bill to pay. This is not pocket change for most people.
That's just the kids who are admitted who can't attend due to finances; kids who are not academic charity cases, since they got in, who can't make it. If by calamagic they can all accept Harvard's offer, Harvard looks like middle America more already and it hasn't had to admit a single different underprepared student! So it seems the talent isn't limited to those with the right pedigree. So why insist on another financial barrier -- having to commit early?
It seems very likely that a child of two elite college grads just is going to have a disproportionate chance of being elite college competent.
This seems to be true, but largely irrelevant, unless you want to make the further claim that everyone at Harvard who just happens to be from the right schools with the right parental financial backing is there because they and their parents are elite. It's plausible, and I'd be willing to accept it up to a point, but when it's such a high proportion of the student body, I'm beginning to suspect that Harvard isn't after academic talent or talent at all.
It just occurred to me that here I am agreeing with baa and I didn't go to my first choice school, despite being accepted, because I couldn't afford it.
I guess my disdain for the uppity trumps my sense of fairness and personal grievance. But now that I'm back in Cali, baa, I'm going to revert to barely tolerating your kind.
187: the claim is that some of the barrier is that Our Kind, Dear know how to navigate the admissions system and Not Our Kind, Dear don't.
Well, this is absolutely true. Whenver we complicate a process, we have created a force multiplier for IQ, connections, experience, and savvy. Unfortunately, adding complexity to a process often brings other benefits; in the case of early admit, Tim Burke references some of those possible benefits. The question is the balance. On early admit, I wouldn't consider myself a particularly impassioned supporter. Or really even a supporter at all. My interest was more peaked by Burke's colleagues 'randomization + minima" plan.
189: We all agree that the Ivies are disproportionately upper middle class and upper class. Is this difference from the class demographic of middle america because of the cost of tuition? I really don't think denying this is willfully blind at all. Just as a for instance, middle america is not 20% Jewish, nor is it 20% Asian. Clearly these are cases where the characteristics and culture of these groups have an enormous effect on producing "elite college competent" 18-year-olds. Jews and Asians may also be wealthier than average, but it seems to me deeply implausible that the disproportionate representation of these groups is a wealth effect. So too, I think two elite college educated parents are disproportionately likely to produce elite collge competent kids. They are also doubtless disproportionately middle/upper class. The question is what is more powerful, an 'acculturation' effect or a wealth effect. You don't have to believe the wealth effect (or the connections effect) is zero to believe the acculturation effect is larger. On the early admit point, I doubt anyone would advocate needless barriers to the matriculation of middle and lower class kids. The question is when the same policy has a useful function and also serves as a barrier, how you weigh those costs and benefits. And again, I'm by no means a big supporter of early admit. I just am not sure that a) it doesn't have some uses *for students*, and b) removing it would do much to change the class composition elite colleges. If it does, great.
Whenver we complicate a process, we have created a force multiplier for IQ, connections, experience, and savvy.
The reference to IQ sounds kind of like a return to 17 and 25, which because it's late I uncharitably gloss as "stupid proles can't figure out an application form," rather than "Colleges set rules that they don't tell the poor proles about." And experience and savvy are other words for 'connections' here; being around people who know how the game works.
If there were huge benefits to early admit, that might be a great thing, but Burke's 84 doesn't convince me that there are any benefits at all over and above gaming the U.S. News rankings. I think Cala took care of that in 98.
Jessica, did you guys draw straws for the accent each character would have in your most recently released film? I can't figure how else they were determined.
200: You seem to think you're denying something that baa's claiming. If it's true, you're denying a pretty weak claim. He's already said he's happy to give up EA. See, e.g., If it does, great.
It also seems worth pointing out that whatever the failings of the US primary/secondary education system, and the failing of the elite US colleges to spread their educational wealth amongst the population at large, particularly the poorer half, the elite US colleges are indeed amazingly good, even by developed world standards. It doesn't have to be that way, and it's worth thinking hard about if potential changes will have negative affects.
Conservative, sure, but at least there's something that might be worth conserving.
(Oh. I also think that in general, schools that do the most gaming of the US News rankings, and also schools that cost the most money and have the most people not going because they can't afford it, are not the top 10 or 20 Harvard/Yale/MIT/Stanford/UMich/Berkeleys, but the 20-100 mid-tier private schools.)
Several of the comments on this thread remind me of Galbraith's comments about conservatism being about the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
Only with 'privilege' and the 'status quo' replacing selfishness.
On balance, admissions at Harvard (and US colleges in general) over the past several decades has, through affirmative action and financial aid packages, been a force for changing the status quo, not preserving it. The impact of admitting rich kids who would be rich anyway without a Harvard degree is vastly outweighed by the impact of admitting poor and middle-class kids who wouldn't.
205: This is all true, GB, but I don't see why you object so much to an attempted additional step in that direction. By now, after Burke and Tim, I wonder how effective it would actually be, but your objection seems to be different, including a stern attitude towards those applicants who are not fully aware of how the process works. You don't happened to be in colleg counseling biz by any chance?
Check back to my initial comment in #3 and you'll see that I'm not objecting to the elimination of early admissions, I'm saying that it will not make a difference.
And no, I am not in the "college counselling biz".
But in your later comments you seemed to think that it might make a difference, but if it did, it was the badly-counseled applicant's own damn fault. you also initially seemed sarcastic about the idea that anyone should care.
baa, most of what I was responding to was the sentiment that Harvard won't be Harvard if it tries to be more egalitarian because admitting anyone poorer would necessarily lower the academic standards (and Burke, whose response was 'Harvard shouldn't have to provide remedial education to unprepared students.' to 'Early decision has turned out to be another barrier for a middle-middle class kid.' )
I guess I am not sure what the evidence is that Harvard could look much more like middle america without changing its commitment to excellence.
I think that claim is pretty wrong. For example, Harvard could, say, offer me admission! And then both their average scores would go up and their average income plummet. I'm not the child of elite parents; bright parents who cared about education, certainly, but I'm the first woman in my family to graduate from college. And I don't believe I'm unique.
There's a lot of room between 'underprepared for college' and 'children of elites.'
So maybe that's why I think that cost is a bigger factor. Acculturation is a big factor, too, of course. All early decision does is throw up another barrier because like I said way back in 98, it does mean that you have to be confident of where the money is coming from. How 98 got construed as 'I want Harvard to lower its admissions standards' baffles me, unless people are assuming not-paying-out-of-pocket equals remedial.
What will the end result be? I'm not certain. Harvard started meeting full financial need right around the time it implemented early action. I expect that there's a few kids who would have applied later that will now compete against the whole applicant pool and will turn out to be better than elite children of elites without a standard dropping a whit. Probably not very large, but makes a difference to those kids.
I think the key word in the claim is much (which is what is meant to make it a weaker claim). Doubtless, were the Ivies free, they would look more like middle America. The question is how much more like. If the barrier is *mainly* cost, then the answer is lots, if the answer is not mainly cost, the answer will be not as much as we would like. In the case of Harvard, where there is a great deal of aid already, I suspect the effect would be muted.
On the topic at hand, early admit, again I fear that removing early admit won't have much of an effect on the class composition of Harvard. If it does, as I say, great. Most of my comments really, arose out of Tim Burke's colleagues suggestion of a randomization after a minima standard admission. This is an interesting approach, but would, I think at least *alter* standards substantially. And once again, I fear the gains in social diversity would be minimal. Meritocracy is just a hard problem.
Last, just to clarify, no one, I hope, is denying that cost is a barrier. Nor is anyone, I hope, suggesting lowered standards are synonymous with efforts to increase equality of opportunity. At least, I do not take myslef to be doing either of those things.
Off topic (and not arising from you comments, Cala), I do find the responses of Matt W and ttaM a little disquieting. It's a sad state of affairs if we can't discuss the cost/benefits of early admission without invoking "you're selfish and think the proles are stupid" rhetoric.
202: I was mostly objecting to the idea that EA could be described as "adding another level of complication to the process," as if it were just another essay. Anyway, 206, 208, and 209 speak for me.
211: Oh really. I was somewhat grumpy in comment 12 because GB was saying, falsely, that the problem was that poor kids were having trouble following the rules. I was very grumpy in comment 156 because Tim Burke was, at length, turning "let's not throw up additional obstacles to kids who can't pay their whole tuition" to "let's abolish selectivity and let in a bunch of unprepared kids." I'll refrain from "you think the proles are stupid" rhetoric if other people refrain from "the proles are stupid" rhetoric. Next: accusations of class warfare!
How 98 got construed as 'I want Harvard to lower its admissions standards' baffles me, unless people are assuming not-paying-out-of-pocket equals remedial.
It's not clear to me that anyone is saying that. Baa certainly isn't: past-post randomization would hold standards pretty constant, and he's about half-for that (half the Ivies). Burke is answering a slightly different, but not well-defined, question. I'm in favor of these changes. But I think none of the three of us believe they will have much effect on the demographics of the entering classes. It's worth noting that (a) the admissions committee has a lot of information available to it, (b) this seems like an area that is very susceptible to demographic gaming, and (c) all of us are arguing on the basis of half-data, at best.
The impression I get about college admissions is that there are two pools. One is a sort of genius pool, and schools fight bitterly to get them. But the average Harvard student is diligent and bright-to-bright-normal, and a lot of them slack quite a bit (because of the USN&WP ratings, top schools are reluctant to flunk anybody). So I think that there could be a lot of room for bright, motivated poor students whose preparation wasn't quite up to snuff.
One admissions guy at a top place gave numbers like 10/80/10. 10% of the applicants were automatic and could go anywhere. 10% really shouldn't have applied. The bulk of the class is chosen from the 80%. YMMV.
If an early admissions system is set up such that it requires a certain level of inside knowledge to adequately exploit that system and that inside knowledge is generally restricted to those from a (relatively) privileged background then it seems to me that those who are justifying that early admission system are in fact engaged in the justification of a discriminatory process that favours those from that privileged background. I don't see any way round that.
That is not to say that absent such a system that everything will be miraculously OK with the admissions sytem or to say that designing an admissions scheme that is both socially just and academically strong isn't a hard thing to do.
218- I believe the saying is, "The hardest thing about Harvard is getting in." That seems to be the case with the Ivies, certainly not with technology schools (MIT, CalTech, and lower tier like WPI and RPI)- which may explain why they're usually lower in USNWP.
216: This is what I took to be, incidentally, the first mention of academic preparedness.
. Yglesias is right that none of them educate a large number of people in the lower half of the income distribution, but that's largely because people in that group don't appear in their applicant pools at all, not because they fail to game the system to their advantage. Whaddya know, poverty appears to be structural. So then the question is, where do you interrupt it? I'm pretty sure that it is not an optimal strategy to preferentially seek out students whose academic preparation is very weak and then watch them flounder; probably just as problematic to admit them into a "second-string" curriculum-within-the-curriculum and mark them off as remedial charity cases.
That seems to me to equate "lower half of income distribution" with "poor academic preparation and 'second string.' " This seems to me to be misinformed.
baa, I think the effect is greater, just because of the bright kids I knew in high school who simply didn't apply to places because of cost. Can a kid get into the Ivies with a 1500 on his S.A.T. score without them lowering the standards? He's not a shoo-in given that there's 20,000 other applicants, but he's not obviously second-string. But I know kids with those credentials that didn't apply because they couldn't afford to be in the middle of Harvard; they needed to be the top of somewhere else where the scholarship money was.
I think we agree that the EA effect is limited, but christ, let's not make it harder for a kid without a sob story or gobs of cash than we have to.
You're not supposed to see a way around that. But that something has pernicious class effects doesn't mean it can't be justified on other grounds. You see this in cases like, say, capitalism. Or as during the discussion here. Baa's explicitly wondered whether there are benefits, conceded that there might not be, and said maybe we should use the "pure merit" methodology in half of the Ivies in either case.
"But that something has pernicious class effects doesn't mean it can't be justified on other grounds."
Of course that's true. However, it doesn't seem like there's even the most basic prima facie justification in this case without the direct conflation of '"lower half of income distribution" with "poor academic preparation and 'second string.' " that Cala talks about in 220.
I think that one of the strengths of the American system is the fact that it gives people a second chance -- both those who developed late (screwed off in HS) and those who went to inferior schools. In much of the world your fate is settled at age 16 or even younger.
I think that, despite serious efforts to allay the problem, this is becoming less true. There's been studies showing that the kids from the best pre-schools do best in primary school, all the way up. the scale. Sometimes this is the result of more talent, harder work, and parental encouragement, but people also advance by networking, schmoozing, ass kissing, name-dropping, and old-boy networks. This is least true in sciences, I imagine.
A good program for encouraging bottom-half students would require some remedial education plus work on motivation and study habits. If the motivation and study habits show up, the academic deficiencies can be brought up to par.
However, this might be best done at a school which is not dominated by the upper middle class. My sone hated being the poorest kid in any social group he was in. ("Tufts isn't all white, but it might as well be".)
In one sense, the empirical question might be, "How many people in the lower half of the income distribution at age 18 have sufficient academic preparation to do well at highly selective universities and colleges without any special or remedial support beyond what those institutions already provision, and yet do not appear in the applicant pools for those institutions?" Cala and others seem to think the answer is, "Quite a few."
I really don't know what the answer is. At the least, I suspect the answer is complicatedly dependent on what the potential applicants might want to study at those institutions. If it's science, engineering or math as they are taught at highly selective institutions, I'm pretty confident that there is not a large untapped pool of potential applicants in the lower half of the income distribution who could readily succeed in that curriculum as it stands. At almost all of those institutions, science and math are intensely sequential in their curricular design and have high initial barriers to entry that are relatively uncompromising--if you don't have the requisite competencies at the outset, you don't really get a second chance; if you fail upon entry, there isn't time to make up for whatever you don't have.
In the humanities, with some scattered examples, yes, I would strongly suspect that there are plenty of natively smart, capable or imaginative prospective students in the lower half of the American income distribution who could "catch up" if they applied and were admitted. Those curricula tend to be much more horizontal, much more negotiable, much more open to multiple preparations and skill sets.
The extra headache on top of this problem, though, is that a lot of first-generation college students are pushed, understandably, by their families to study science or technical areas because of the (accurately, imho) perceived greater payoff to having qualifications in those areas.
-----------
On a separate question, what's your objection to random admission past a required minimal qualification, Cala? If you individuate admissions, aren't there always going to be lots of ways for people who are Our Kind to slant it against Not Our Kind? Lots of weird arcane local rules that make the system mysterious and confusing?
Also, it seems to me that people are doubting that there is a connection between "lower half of the income distribution" and "weak academic preparation". If you understand "weak academic preparation" as "those people are stupid", then of course that's wrong--but you're not getting that from me, for god's sake. But I think it's pretty established that concentrations of (both urban and rural) poverty in the US correlate really strongly with underfunded, badly administered, low-quality public education. The reason that such disparities in educational quality are a bad thing is precisely because they tend, on average, to leave students far less academically prepared to succeed in any higher education, let alone in highly selective institutions. This is not to preclude that even the worst public school has a few students who excel utterly, and overcome all obstacles--and they're ardently pursued by selective universities. But on average, bad public schools (and even some parochial ones) leave most students less prepared for further education.
Is that a controversial claim here, or in dispute? It seems kind of obvious to me.
225: I'm not sure I buy that. I haven't taught at Harvard or any other equivalent US school. I have, however, taught at one of (if not the) top math/cs/engg schools in Canada. The applicant pool was very restricted. In some of the engineering classes, for example, *everybody* in the room would have at least near perfect high school record (say, >= 96 or 97 %), for whatever that is worth. Demographics are different, because there are no significant purely private schools in Canada. Tuition will be less than $10k/year for most programs, even at the top schools.
Even with this sort of incoming background, we had to repeat much of the core mathematics and science fundamentals because high schools are uneven, and high school curriculum are, to be frank, fairly weak. Even many of the `best' ones.
If you take a bright but underprepared and underpriveleged kid and stick them in this environment, they'll do just fine so long as they aren't afraid of work.
The real difference here is more subtle. As far as I can see, the main difference is in whether or not the student has to (or chooses to) work an outside job. Even a very bright kid will have difficulty keeping up in this case. If you are doing a serious (hence honors, at most schools) technical undergraduate program in math, science, or engineering (I can't speak to other areas), unless you are incredibly bright or well prepared or both you should probably be looking at something like 100+ hr/week average workload. More for some terms, certainly. Trying to fit this in on top of a full time job? Madness. The main thing that privilege seems to gain the `rich kids' is not a better high school education, it is the time to devote to undergraduate studies, and freedom from debt afterwards. Of course, they can also coast through an easy degree if they choose, and not worry too much about the future. The same isn't true of an underpriveleged student.
Burke's gesturing at well-known arguments, not making a formal presentation. Are people arguing that there isn't a correlation between income and educational preparation, causes unspecified? Are people saying that admissions committees aren't aware of the various disputes regarding this and other descriptions of the purported pool for highly selective institutions? Or are we saying that the committees know that they're working with a bad description, don't care, but feel obligated to pretend to care? Per above comments, I'm fairly willing to believe the last.
I grew up small town upper middle class with a weak public school. I had lots and lots of supplements and enrichment but was weak in foreign languages and science, and it hurt my school career.
A big problem is that kids from elite HSs tend to work very hard in HS and then party more in college. Kids trying to catch up couldn't do the partying, partly because they're already behind and partly because one reason they're behind might be the habit of partying. And on top of theis, as in my son's case, there'd be a problem because the other kids have cars, more pocket money, etc.
So in many ways it would be best to have a quality upward-mobile second-chance school with mostly sharp upward-mobile second-chance kids.
I dug up some numbers (HTML display of long pdf, pdf here). At the top tier of selectivity, 3% of students came from the bottom quartile of socio-economic status, and they may be affected by concentrated poverty. 6% of students came from the second quartile of socio-economic status, and I'm doubting that concentrated poverty explains much of that.
That's table 1.1 on p. 69. Tim at 230, I doubt that those effects are enough to explain the 6% number, as opposed to kids not being able to afford the school or getting shunted out in some other way. And if that's the argument Burke is gesturing at, then talking about concentrated poverty and charity cases confuses the issue.
230: I think there is a lot of pressure to pay lip service to meritocratic methods.
One of the purposes of many `elite' high schools is to get less fundamentally capable (intelligent/industrious/whatever) students from priveleged backgrounds into top schools. One way to do this is to give them a very good education. Perhaps an easier way to do this is to train them to test well.
I guess at the bottom of this is the role the university sees for itself. How well served would the university be for a serious search for only the `best' , scholastically, potential students?
JE makes a good point that for many less priveleged (than the norm at whatever school) students, problems are less likely to be scholastic than social. This may not matter to you much if you are earnestly trying to bootstrap a family out of poverty, but it isn't going to be an easy ride.
I was suprised to learn that my college Johns Hopkins preferablly admits people who can pay the full tuition. There is a pool of admittees who they don't look at ability to pay but when they run low on aid money they just start admitting rich kids.
233: I'm not sure how well the paper you reference speaks to the issues here: "There are 146 four-year colleges in [the top-tier] category and approximately 170,000 students enroll as freshmen at these institutions each year." If Cala, for example, was shut out of the top 146 schools in the country, I'll give you a sexual experience the likes of which you can only just barely imagine.
Are people arguing that there isn't a correlation between income and educational preparation, causes unspecified?
Not at all. It's just that when we talk about the sort that might be put off by early decision or the high cost of college education, we're not necessarily talking about problematic districts or the bottom quartile. We're talking about anyone whose college decision might depend on the financial aid package. Anyone who can't pay the sticker price of roughly $50K, or can't be confident that they can pay.
And that doesn't imply that the student in question is underprepared, or at a poor district, or can't do well in math and science. It just means that their parents make $40K a year instead of $130K a year. In many areas of the country you can be at a reasonably decent public school and in an area with a reasonably low cost of living. You won't be comfortable checking a box that says 'I want to go to Brown and pay my own way', but your kid might be prepared just fine.
So what I'm rejecting is not the link between poverty and school performance, but that not having $50K on hand to pay for college means that you're automatically in an impoverished district.
---
TB, I haven't addressed your minimal qualification scheme at all, so nothing I've said objects to it. I do think the system would be hard to implement without a national way of gauging a high school student's preparation; an A average from one school isn't the same as an A from another.
I don't agree with much of what Burke has written here, but I do agree with his point about the damage that admitting students who are significantly underqualified but for their diversity hook can do. I had a classmate who was American Indian and whose mother was on welfare. He got into a lot of trouble both non-academic and academic. I do not think he was well served by going to Harvard, but Harvard got to increase its minority quota.
I definitely believe that Early Action affects the process in ways that are pernicious, and it isn't just poor kids who are affected. Exeter and other selective prep schools encourage their kids to make decisions earlier, because they want to maximize the total number fo Ivy admits that they get.
Because of yield considerations, Harvard's Early Action can effectively be binding. Other Ivies knew that you had been admitted to Harvard and were often less likely to admit you for that reason.
Prep school college counselors can tell you that it really does matter if you have an on-campus interview with an admissions officer in addition to your alum interview.
I considered 6 schools, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Bryn Mawr, Smith and Wellesley. I'm sure that early action affected me. I was number 1 in my class in a lower-tier St. Grotelsex school in a weak year, but my SATs were not particularly good. I applied early to Yale and got in. I had a very good interview at Yale and talked about my friend who had just finished her Freshman year and how much she enjoyed directed studies with an admissions officer who remembered my friend. (She had also gotten into Harvard. Her numbers were superb, and her father was an alum of both the college and GSAS.) The alumnus who interviewed me was a professor at U Mass Lowell, and he was pretty clear that he was going to recommend me, snd the secretary in the college counseling office told me how glad he was when he was told that I'd been admitted. He also mentioned that only once had someone he had panned been admitted, and that was because the kid was a hockey player.
My Harvard alum interview was awful, because the interview belittled my interests, e.g., historic preservation. He also said taht it was much harder for someone from Massachusetts to get in. My parenst were living in upstate New York, but they don't need more applicants from New York to improve their geographic diversity. My on-campus interview was a fiasco. I actually said something about wanting to take real science classes rather than Core courses. Harvard also asked what you wanted to concentrate in and how you thought that related to your career plans. I said that I was considering Economics and thought that might suit me for a career on Wall Street and that I was also interested in Classics and thought that that might prepare me for teaching, but mostly I wanted to write, "I'm 17; why do you expect me to know what career I want to pursue?" I was woefully naive about how an admissions officer might view those answers.
At boarding schools they make sure that you get your applications into the college counseling office at least a month before they're due. If you get them in even earlier than the internal deadline, the secretary checks them for typos. Once I got into Yale, I phoned the office, and I was encouraged to consider whether I wanted to apply to other schools. My parents didn't have much money, but I didn't have to worry about financial aid for the first couple of years, because I had a small trust fund.
I chose to apply to Harvard, Princeton and Wellesley. Sometime in January or February we were asked to rank our schools so that our counselor could stress how enthusiastic we were about a particular school.
I was accepted by Wellesley and rejected by Princeton. I'm pretty sure that my college counselor told Princeton to reject me so that another kid would have a better shot at admission. One guy who went to Brown was wait-listed. I was waitlisted at Harvard. I'm pretty sure that my early-admit to Yale to harmed my chances. Taht and the fact, that Harvard was basing its decision on my first set of SAT scores which were considerably lower than my final set.
I did not, in any meaningful sense, deserve to get into Harvard. The waitlist is where most of the gaming of the system occurs--even more than in the earl-action process. Having already handed out all of their aid packages, schools want to admit only those students who can pay full freight. They also want to increase their yields, so they only admit people who promise that they will come. I'm pretty sure that they use those people in their yield numbers but don't include their SAT scores in their average SAT listing. There are also things that a good college counselor can tell you, like, for example, that you should get someone like a coach or a chaplain to write an extra recommendation, testifying to your intangible qualities and that you should write a letter expressing your interest. You should also plan to make an extra trip to the school. I did all those things.
Most school cousnelros deal with specific admissions officers, although I believe that Boston Latin's counselors deals with Dean Fitz/sim/mons.
I was a legacy at Harvard. This did not show up on my application, because neither of my parents went there, but my maternal grandfather did. So did hsi father and father-in-law and six previous generations did going back to Nicholas Sever in 1701. They were, however, I am sure, made aware of this when my grandmother's lawyer who had given a couple of million dollars to Harvard Law School and raised a ton of money for the place, phoned Dean Fitz/sim/mons and asked him to look at my application again. (He loves Harvard and thinks it got him, a poor Irish Catholic, everything he has today.) My father asked him to do that. I didn't know that he was planning to do that. I don't think I would have wanted to know that.
I also arranged to meet with a couple of members of teh Classics department, G. Na/gy and a Junior professor and to attend a Greek class. The Junior professor also wrote a letter on my behalf. That admissions committee was hit with a sledgehammer.
I used to feel really guilty about this. I still feel somewhat guilty. I felt really guilty when I applied to study Renaissance History and Literature, because I felt that I had been admitted as a Classics concentrator and owed it to the department to concentrate in Classics. It turned out that that's what I wanted to do anyway, but there was a time when I felt that I was morally obligated to do it.
I feel less guilty about all of this than I used to, because, at some point I realized that, despite having a rather privileged background in a lot of ways, having a mother who was as mentally ill as mine was meant that I did have a lot to overcome. I also realized that I provided a certain sort of diversity. I'm genuinely humble, and, I think, rather more decent than a lot of people admitted to Harvard. I may even have put somethign along those lines in my letter. I wrote it rather quickly and was passionate when I wrote it. My father thought that it was over the top, but my college counselor thought it was who I really was and that I shoudl send it. I talked about my love of languages and literature, and then I said that I recognized that I was basically just a bright, diligent kid. My final line was pretty obnoxious in its phrasing, though not untrue and not materially different from what I just wrote above: "By admitting me Harvard does not gain a star pianist or a football player, but I do care deeply about humanity and want to give something back to it, and that seems to me to be an icnreasingly rare characteristic.
I think my experiences allowed me to be more compassionate, and none of that stuff would have been obvious from my application. In fact, the family history of mental illness might actually have hurt me, sicne Harvard used to screen its applications to try to weed out fragile people who might need mental health care. I think that's wrong, and I think that my presence there and my degree from them may some day make humane tratment of students and applicants with psychiatric illnesses more likely. But it would be a real stretch to say that I deserved to be there over thousands of applicants who got rejected.
I'm not a natural gamer. I've never done it succesfully since. In a weird way i wonder whether Harvard doesn't want to select for gamers, despite its protestations to the contrary. People who know how to game the college admissions process may be very good at gaming the rest of life and turn out to be succesful graduates who will make Harvard look good and give it lots of money.
232: the real numbers are almost certainly worse. My bet is that a fair proportion of the 9% in the bottom half have some elite connections (like the missionary family mentioned above). When my son started looking at colleges, I was economically toward the bottom, but I knew a few people and generally had an understanding of how the game was played.
So what I'm rejecting is not the link between poverty and school performance, but that not having $50K on hand to pay for college means that you're automatically in an impoverished district.
I think Burke's suggesting that the correlation is not limited to impoverished districts. If he's not, I am. None of which speaks to any individual case, or even clusters of individuals within a school or system. And, of course, he's quite explicit that this isn't a function of some lack of intelligence on the part of the students at issue. It's not clear to me that Burke's arguing in favor or ED or even EA anymore; if he is, I don't really get that.
I really think that Burke is arguing something slightly different than everyone else here.
I do think the system would be hard to implement without a national way of gauging a high school student's preparation; an A average from one school isn't the same as an A from another.
Have a much more difficult, less ludicrous, SAT, and base it purely on that. I'm pretty sure that there are many countries that structure educational opportunities in just this way.
Switching from Classics to Renaissance seems unproblematic. The Renaissance people should be delighted, and the Classics people have to be used to rejection by now.
Cala, most selective admissions offices have a really deep institutional knowledge of the relative difficulty or quality of a very large number of high schools, so I think if we charged them with the task of formally standardizing the relative value of a 4.0 average at different schools, with some kind of sliding scale, they could probably do so. At least that's what my colleague who advocates the random admission scheme observes, and I think he's largely right that it's possible.
Matt, I'll completely accept the greater precision of your point, that there's a difference between the lowest quartile and the middle quartile on these issues, and that the small percentage of students in that middle quartile in the applicant pool is not just or even primarily explicable due to access to poor academic preparation.
BTW, I am really just gesturing to discussions that I feel like I've been having pretty much for the last twelve years here that do run somewhat deeper, so I apologize if I am sometimes cutting to the chase in terms of where conversations about the inequity of admissions and selectivity tend to eventually head in their implications.
If I can compound that failing on my part, I'll throw in yet another perennial discussion that tends to come up in this kind of terrain, one that I think John Emerson is pointing to, which is: are some of the kids who are not in that selective applicant pool doing a really smart thing by avoiding it that has nothing to do with either a cost barrier or a mystique that keeps them from applying? Are they potentially going to gain a bigger economic payoff from being a top student at a school which is much more consciously and narrowly pre-professional as opposed to a relatively obscure if highly selective private college or university where a lot of the students are the bohemian children of professionals intent on smashing the state and confronting upper-middle-class privilege while studying critical theory, etc.? I know that the economic value of the word "Harvard " on your degree is substantial whether you're Einstein or the village idiot, but I'm less clear that "Amherst" or "Johns Hopkins" or "Oberlin" or "Brown" necessarily translate consistently to bucks regardless of what you actually did as a student.
238: That's a fascinating story. And I think your last sentence is spot on. It seems like a large part of the difference between Harvard and (say) Swarthmore must be that the rich connected kids go to Harvard while the crazy-smart kids go to Swarthmore. At least in terms of walking on to I-banking jobs or good law schools or what have you.
231: So in many ways it would be best to have a quality upward-mobile second-chance school with mostly sharp upward-mobile second-chance kids.
Surely there is one of these out there? The really good state schools, maybe? UMD/UW/UC Berkeley/UMich/UT?
In 1996, when I applied to schools, most of the top-tier did not meet 100% of students' financial need. I did not therefore apply anywhere with an early decision program that did not promise to meet 100% of students financial need. This excluded, in 1996, most of the Ivy League.
I ended up at a top-tier school on academic scholarship. And yes, I did just fine. But there's a sense in which I was extraordinarily lucky. I could have gotten into my school, probably, with a lower S.A.T. score and lower grades; my best friends at college did. But then I wouldn't have received funding as they didn't go need-based until 1998. For me, that would have meant not a choice among top schools, but probably commuting to Pitt, since going into $100K in debt wouldn't make sense. I'm very aware of how close it all came to not happening for me and that kids with more money were in much better shape to the tune of 200 SAT points wriggle room.
Now, most schools meet 100% of need now. But '100% of need' doesn't mean 'college is affordable.' Still not enough for my sisters, going through it now, to check the early decision box. And if admission is skewed that way (since checking the box means you're more enthusiastic, a real Harvard man), then you're potentially ignoring a kid with top scores and adequate preparation simply because he can't commit to a large tuition bill. This seems to be deeply fucked up for a school that is purporting to be more than a finishing school.
My point is that you don't have to go as far as 'these kids wouldn't survive at an elite school anyway' in order to see problems with it. Imagine the fun a talented kid with a truly problematic district has.
Reading about the college admissions process sometimes makes me astonished that I did as well as I did in it, considering that my parents did not understand it at all, my custodial parent had an income of 12k to report on his taxes my senior year, and I was flaky and didn't really treat it seriously. I'm lucky, as I said before, that I had a college counselor who understood how things worked and expected me to go somewhere 1337, because if I hadn't moved into that school district, I never would have known the money was there for me.
I seriously think I got into college by including in my admissions packet a story I wrote for my high school newspaper about homophobia at my high school and some poems I wrote about sex and literature. I am quirky and sensitive, I advertised, love me. And I happened to apply to some schools that would, indeed, love me for that. But it seems odd to me somehow that I managed to pull it off by being quirky and sensitive.
There's a good book, btw, about the interior of the admissions process at Wesleyan: The Gatekeepers. Among other things, it would confirm Bostoniangirl's suspicions that counselors at prep schools coordinate their admits to selective institutions. So yes, this is a corrupt process that favors the elite in many ways. I guess I just think that even if you somehow got rid of a lot of the clubby arcana including EA/ED, the basic distributions of income-to-applicant pool in the US are going to stay somewhat the same, for a lot of complex reasons. Price is one of them, but that has its most devastating impact on qualified students of middling means rather than people below or near the poverty line, for whom almost all of these institutions will pick up the tab. Sending a kid to a selective institution if you're a lower middle-class to middle-class family, in contrast, makes a huge difference in the ability of parents to accumulate in the second half of their working lives.
I haven't read the whole thread but I just wanted to comment on Cala's: "For me, that would have meant not a choice among top schools, but probably commuting to Pitt"
But is commuting to Pitt a bad thing? I thought we decided on the elementary school thread the other day that it wasn't. ("Commuting to Pitt" is, metaphorically speaking, exactly what I did. I'm still unclear whether or not it hurt me.)
I should probably mention that I was rejected from Harvard, and after reading 238, I'm certain that it was because I was underprepared and an academic charity case. (The snark is directed at Harvard, not at BG.) I hadn't prepared a cadre of grandmothers at all.
Matt, I'll completely accept the greater precision of your point, that there's a difference between the lowest quartile and the middle quartile on these issues, and that the small percentage of students in that middle quartile in the applicant pool is not just or even primarily explicable due to access to poor academic preparation.
This was pretty much my only point about 'making Harvard look like middle America.' We seemed to jump from 'might have problems paying' to 'underprepared' and that didn't seem like the right explanation for the entire middle class.
TB, SCMTim, if they find a way to standardize it, I'd be all for it. Schools do something similar for medical school and/or residency entrances where everyone is 'matched' to where they will go. Seems to work there.
Reed is somewhat like Swarthmore, and I think that both places would be hellholes for anyone who did not have a pretty good grounding AND a fierce committment to begin with. In fact, Reed had about a freshman 40% graduation rate when I was there, and was proud of it. (I did not graduate from there).
If I personally knew a very bright kid with a bad foundation who was capable of committment, I'd encourage him to start at a junior college, move to a state school, and aim for the best grad school possible.
In fact, that actually happened. The kid did well in JC and then went to Israel where he's in the army after some time in college there. The army part wasn't my idea, but success in the JC was very good for him.
If I were trying to educate more lower-half kids, I'd be looking for people about 25-30 he were ready to "get serious". The system is keyed to 18-year-olds, and while well-off families can give a kid a second chance, poorer families usually can't.
247: Discussions about this tend towards floppiness because no one is quite clear on most of the terms or goals being discussed. Did you hurt yourself? Doubt it, particularly if you went on to grad school (which, for some reason, I thought you did). Perhaps more accurately, I'm not sure there's any easy-peasy way to determine the answer.
Brock, I likely wouldn't be in my graduate program, since I relied on a contact that I met in undergrad to get here. I probably also would be the bitterest person in the world since it would have meant, for all intents and purposes, that I could have had fun in high school, slacked, made friends, been allowed to talk on the phone and not been an outcast with exactly the same payoff as busting my ass.
Oh, and because of Pitt's lack of financial aid, I would be in greater debt than I am now.
Are there worse things that not being an academic? Of course. Would I be okay? Probably. Might even be happier.
Should it be the decision of someone else to decide that I really don't need to go to their school because I'm not Their Kind? Fair enough; just give up the pretense that they're educating the superbright and talented then and call themselves the Finishing School for Twats. Then I can get hired by top jobs because their degree will say Twat.
Hmm, I'm not sure where my HS fits in after reading 238 and others- wealthy suburban NY public school, which is supposed to be a disadvantage in terms of diversity points. However, our guidance department was nothing like what BG described- they were entirely clueless, I doubt they even knew the phone number of various admissions departments. I think this combination worked out well in the end- most of the people from my school would have been the slacker rich kids at a lot of Ivies, so it's a good thing they were a) were harmed by what HS they went to but b) did not have the connections or "sledgehammer" capabilities of private prep schools.
Indeed. Ten years too late.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:48 AM
w00t!
I didn't know Bok was the interim president. Kind of a Frank Lautenberg thing.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:59 AM
Meh. The "rules" were not being kept secret, nor were they changed or applied differently based on an applicant's ability to pay. They were the same for everyone.
You say rich kids had an easier time following the rules than poor kids? I am shocked — shocked!
Anyway, under the new system, rich kids will still do better than poor kids. They'll just stress out for a longer period.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:01 AM
The "rules" were not being kept secret, nor were they changed or applied differently based on an applicant's ability to pay. They were the same for everyone.
I would say that the rules, in fact, were being kept secret. And still are, of course.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:03 AM
Or when Trudeau came back, briefly, after the first Joe Clark fiasco. Interesting how in our system a former great president simply cannot play this role. Historically, they've all been dead or incapacitated, a telling detail, but now, of course, they're constitutionally prohibited.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:05 AM
Agree with some combination of 3 & 4. This is nice from a PR standpoint, but I suspect nothing about the demographic makeup of the place will change. But I'm inclined to like Bok, so good for him.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:08 AM
Is he related to Hilzoy?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:13 AM
I just like saying "Bok". Bok bok bok bok.
Maybe I can get a crimson shirt that says "Don't knock my Bok, or I'll clean your clock".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:13 AM
Get Rid of Slimy W0lfson...
Posted by arthegall | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:16 AM
"but were stuck committing to a school before they heard about financial aid awards"
IIRC, Harvard was early action, which is not binding.
Posted by Glenn | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:20 AM
I think this is a good move for in terms of starting a trend that other schools may follow.
However, it is worth pointing out that Harvard's early action program was nonbinding. Hence the financial aid criticism of early decision doesn't apply to Harvard. Take me for example. My family's income was smaller than the cost of a year at Harvard. I applied early, got in, and waited to hear on financial aid offers from the schools that I applied to later before making a final decision. As it was Harvard came through with the best offer. My parents paid $1,000 total over 4 years. I worked for my spending money and came out with under $7,000 in student loans.
Now, it's also true that I'm not really a great example of someone of a different class, because my parents (who are missionaries) are educated essentially voluntary poor, so we were able to learn the system. But Harvard's version of early action was not problematic the way that the whole system is problematic.
Posted by Unfoggetarian: "Pause endlessly, then go in." (9) | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:21 AM
The rules were being kept secret. Selective colleges had to be sued (by Asian-Americans) before any light was thrown on their admissions process, and before then they deliberately gave the wrong impression. I remember being told that being a child of an alumnus would break ties; actually children of alumni were admitted from a completely separate pool.
Also, early action disadvantages poor kids even if they know that applying early boosts your chances; see LB's paragraph 1. Maybe they should've applied early to Harvard anyway, because Harvard's early action was non-binding [as a couple of people have pointed out on preview], so they could sit on their admission and see if they got better aid packages elsewhere. But at the least Harvard may encourage other schools to drop this pernicious practice; I've seen articles about early admit where people say "Harvard can lead the way here, because everywhere else would be afraid of losing competitive advantage to Harvard."
And saying "Meh" to this? You say rich kids had an easier time following the rules than poor kids? I am shocked — shocked! Gosh, weren't you arguing elsewhere about America's awesome social mobility? The thing is, poor and middle class kids won't have guidance counselors who are going to know the real admissions rates for early vs. normal applications. So how are they supposed to find out the rules? The rules are basically locked in a cabinet in a basement that has no stairs and a sign saying "Beware of the Lion" on it. Throwing up extra barriers to kids who aren't already in: not good.
[7: Yes, her dad.]
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:23 AM
Selective colleges had to be sued (by Asian-Americans) before any light was thrown on their admissions process
When did this happen? Never knew about it—something online?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:27 AM
#8: You clean my clock if I knock Bok, and I'll pull my Glock like 2pac, smack you like Doc Ock, pinch you like Spock and fry you in my wok like a shock jock with one sock.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:29 AM
13: Around 1990. Remember, I'm old. (The point was more that colleges are secretive about admissions and even when the data was released they sure don't publicize it.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:32 AM
12: Don't you mean "Beware of the Leopord"?
Posted by Unfoggetarian: "Pause endlessly, then go in." (9) | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:36 AM
#12: Gosh, weren't you arguing elsewhere about America's awesome social mobility?
If the biggest obstacle to social mobility in America is the challenge of getting, reading, and understanding a college admissions pamplet, I'm okay with that.
At any rate, the "secret" admissions process you decry also works in favor of poor kids. Harvard doesn't want a class full of bluenosed Thurston Howell III's. They also want interesting, smart people who happen to be less well-off financially, like, it seems, #11.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:38 AM
The rules are basically locked in a cabinet in a basement that has no stairs and a sign saying "Beware of the Lion" on it.
That's where the proposal to demolish Arthur Dent's house was displayed to the public, right? Convenient to have them in one place like that.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:39 AM
#12, 13, 15: A similar thing happened at Harvard with Jews decades before. But subjectivity in the admissions process is unavoidable unless you admit applicants based solely on standardized test scores, which will never happen.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:41 AM
GB, to your citing of 11:
Now, it's also true that I'm not really a great example of someone of a different class, because my parents (who are missionaries) are educated essentially voluntary poor, so we were able to learn the system.
This sort of procedural obstacle isn't much for someone whose family knows about it. It's huge for someone who hasn't got support from people familiar with the process.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:42 AM
That's where the proposal to demolish Arthur Dent's house was displayed to the public, right?
Actually thinking it over it may have been "Beware of the Leopard."
19, there was an actual quota on the number of Jews that are admitted, 17, if the admissions pamphlet says "Your chances are much much higher if you apply early" I'll eat it with barbecue sauce. (Offer not valid in Texas.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:44 AM
'are' s/b 'were'. And I don't decry the whole admissions process, just some aspects of it.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:45 AM
it was the leopard.
Do legacies represent an entirely different sort of problem with admissions?
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:46 AM
A real problem, but I think a different kind.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:49 AM
#20: As I said, I don't think it's asking too much for someone who wants to apply to Harvard to actually find out what the rules for applying are, and follow them.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:51 AM
re: 25
Again, assuming that there's somewhere they can find that information, if they don't already have the sort of informal contacts that can tell them.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:52 AM
I'm not sure that limiting the number of Jews admitted to a class is "subjectivity".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:53 AM
But is it fine to create the rules in such a way that some people will predictably hear about them easily for reasons exogenous to their "objective quality," while other people will predictably not hear about them easily, again for reasons having nothing to do with their fitness for admission?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:54 AM
#26: How about the Internet? If they're too poor to have a computer at home, then they can go online in a school library or public library.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:54 AM
GB, why would anyone assume that they needed to go through all this bother? Once you know that there are different admission rates for early vs standard applications, it makes sense to find out what they are, but why would you, from a position of ignorance, suspect that?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:56 AM
After reading this story in the NY Times this morning, I wrote a personal letter to the dean of admissions applauding this decision (and the one from May expanding the financial aid program so that kids from families making less than $60k per year don't pay to go to Harvard). This guy was the dean of admissions back in the spring of 1988 when Harvard let me in, and I thanked him for that, too. William R. Fitzsimmons -- helluva guy!
Oh, and as for the merits, someone above nailed it -- this decision will encourage other universities to do the same, and some of them have binding early action programs. Only Harvard could afford to do this and not lose competitiveness (IMHO), and I'm glad they did. Okay, maybe they're one of the only schools that could have done it, not the only one. Still cool!
One more thing. Derek Bok was president of Harvard for most of my time as an undergraduate, and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for him. Hurray for Derek! bokbokbokbokbok
Posted by NCProsecutor | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:56 AM
Also, let them eat cake.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:56 AM
32 to 29.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:57 AM
GB, as Wolfson says, you need to be in a certain position of privilege to even know that information is required.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:57 AM
A lot of this seems slightly off-base to me. The people in Harvard's admissions department aren't morons. They're shooting for a class with certain characteristics, and scores and grades are only one set of such characteristics. If not-rich people are less likely to apply Early Action, and Harvard wants not-rich people, I'd bet that Harvard either limits the acceptances during Early Action or skews its later decisions toward the not-rich.
I think this is mostly PR.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:57 AM
#28: How on earth could Harvard "create the rules" so that every high school student in America hears about them in exactly the same way? I submit that this is not in fact possible.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:58 AM
Yeah, the good this will do isn't at Harvard, but at other schools (ahem) where early admit is binding. (The other reason for binding early admit is that it increases yield, the ratio of matriculations to acceptances; this factors in rankings.) If early admit became "just not done," these schools would maybe take economic diversity a little more seriously. Of course, they could always privilege full-pays in other parts of the process, but at least it would create one applicant pool instead of two very unequal ones.
What I remember from 17 (was not a very good year): early admits committed you to attending, but you'd be committed before financial aid decisions came, so I just threw up my hands. Then my parents invited me to apply only to state schools.
Knowing what I know now, it would have been worth it to apply to a number of selective private schools, since those places often have a lot of financial support for students they want. Odds are I'd have gotten a pretty generous package from one of them. But no one told me that, and this was pre-internet.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:58 AM
#35 wins.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:00 AM
#28: How on earth could Harvard "create the rules" so that every high school student in America hears about them in exactly the same way? I submit that this is not in fact possible.
You're right, that's probably not possible. So it makes sense for Harvard not to create even more complicated rules, doesn't it? It's possible that, even though the situation will never be perfect, it can in fact be good—you don't have to immediately conclude, well, anything goes!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:01 AM
re: 36
You're taking the piss, yeah?
By clearly stating what their procedures are on their admissions material and by ensuring that everyone's application is assessed in the same admissions process and according to the same clearly-stated criteria.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:01 AM
One thing that's bad about a lot of higher ed conversations is that they tend to focus on places like Harvard, which is a really atypical place (e.g., its endowment). Other highly selective colleges and universities are more pressured financially, so they need a bunch of students to pay full tuition, and more concerned with fluctuations in rankings, so really like the early commitment etc. to keep the numbers up. The amount of bullshit resulting from this is almost stunning.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:06 AM
39, 40: Um, yeah.
Complicated rules not apparent unless you know that they exist and where you need to reasearch them, privilege applicants who have support from people who know about them already -- kids with educated parents who go to good high-schools with involved counsellors. They disadvantage kids trying to figure stuff out on their own. And they don't do anything at all to distinguish kids who deserve admission from those who don't -- the admissions process isn't supposed to be an additional intelligence or aptitude test.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:06 AM
37- There was an out clause for financial aid, if you were admitted ED but then couldn't afford it after getting your aid package, they weren't going to drag you off to school in chains and shake you upside down so all your money fell out of your pockets. However, you would have to wait until the next year to apply to other schools, so essentially you were screwed.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:07 AM
The admissions rules have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:09 AM
Complicated rules not apparent unless you know that they exist and where you need to reasearch them, privilege applicants who have support from people who know about them already -- kids with educated parents who go to good high-schools with involved counsellors.
Social capital advantages would seem to be more pernicious than even that. Even if you don't know about the various tricks, and your guidence counselor is useless, if you belong to a certain class of people, there's a good chance someone in your circle knows the tricks, and that the information will be distributed shortly.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:09 AM
40: By clearly stating what their procedures are on their admissions material and by ensuring that everyone's application is assessed in the same admissions process and according to the same clearly-stated criteria.
Those are two different things. Harvard does in fact clearly state what its application procedures are, including the procedures for the early admissions system, which is what this post is about.
On the other hand, the actual decision-making process is horribly subjective and biased, but that's not what this post was about.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:11 AM
clearly state what its application procedures are, including the procedures for the early admissions system, which is what this post is about.
Not so much the varying acceptance rate.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:13 AM
There are, of course, all kinds of other ways that social capital can be turned to one's advantage. 'Posh' schools, for example, do a pretty good job at coaching their kids for the interview process whereas other schools may not even be aware of what would count as a good or bad interview.
However, there's no point in designing in deliberately obfuscated procedures that can only be circumvented with a certain degree of social advantage or luck.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:13 AM
This lessens the expected value of pulling my children from public schools and placing them in connection-filled, expensive and exclusive private schools. What is the world coming to?
Posted by bill | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:14 AM
31: spring of 1988
Hey, I'm class of '92, and I just realized that your name is familiar. I was in Mather and then Adams House. (There was another guy who played the bass who had the same name as me, but wasn't me.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:14 AM
Admissions interviews are, of course, purposeless, and I suspect arose as a means of finding out who the wrong sort were.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:17 AM
47: Yes. I applied to college pre-internets, but I clearly remember carefully reading through Harvard's admissions materials and concluding that there was no particular reason to apply early, since the standards were the same. I doubt that they've become a lot more candid since then.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:17 AM
Fuck you, Harvard alums.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:17 AM
re: 53
Upstart declassé proles, the lot of 'em.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:22 AM
One thing to keep in mind is that the admissions officers are not idiots. They can spot an over-coached rich kid a mile away. They assume kids from private high schools were tutored on their SAT's, and judge their test scores accordingly. And they know poor kids had less help along the way. The deck is not as badly stacked as you think.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:23 AM
Only the undergrads.
And the law school students.
And some of the med students.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:24 AM
I have a colleague who has argued that all selective private institutions should simply set a particular standardized bar (say, X scores on standardized tests plus Y GPA, maybe with some standardized scale of "adjusted" GPA in relation to how difficult or challenging the high school was) and then randomly admit from the people who meet the standard. If it's random, he notes, your admitted students will have distributions of students of color, etcetera, exactly matching their distributions in the total qualified applicant pool.
Now this would have an interesting impact on certain things--for example, the applicant pool is now disproportionately female, and a lot of institutions that are working to maintain a 48-52 male-to-female split would probably be more like 45-55 after this shift, if there was a random distribution of students choosing to matriculate from the admitted pool.
Now if you don't like this idea on the grounds that there are students below the cut-off who ought to be considered because they have some special individual talents, character, or outlook, or because standardized measures aren't a good indicator of inner potential and academic ability, or because you don't trust this system to produce a demographically "proper" class, etcetera, I'm not sure you have much justification for complaining about the inequities of early admission, which is just one more tool that college admissions departments use to manipulate and construct their imagined "ideal class" of entering students.
Right now, admissions at selective institutions spend an enormous amount of time considering the fine-grained details of the individual lives of a very large group of applicants--their talents, their character, their potential, their life experience, their "diversity" in relation to the overall applicant pool. Mostly they're not supposed to talk about ability to pay, but I suspect it's hard not to think about that a little bit even when you can't do so "officially". (Classes at most such schools do mysteriously seem to come in at roughly the same costs in financial aid from year to year, with the same approximate balance of full-paying customers and people paying discounted rates).
All of this individual attention produces a lot of evaluations which are in some sense "secret" and in some sense "inequitable"--they may end up valuing a pleasant and bright woman from rural Kansas who went to a mediocre public school who may struggle at the institution over a student from New York who went to Phillips Exeter who will be bored with and easily ace all of his classes in English literature, for example. But on the other hand, most selective institutions work very hard to get *more* than a random distribution of students of color, first-generation students from working-class families, and so on, and in that way, try to compensate for general social inequality in a way that a random admission system probably wouldn't.
The internal considerations of current admissions systems (and financial aid systems that come with them) are in many ways unbelievably precious, often arcane, frequently secretive. I'm just not clear why getting rid of early admissions per se is striking a blow against the Man as if that system is distinctively different than the larger system which uses it.
Nor am I clear that a lot of the critics of selective admissions to selective, wealthy institutions have any clear alternative system which would produce social justice in some greater measure.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:24 AM
#47: Acceptance rate is not an application procedure.
But since you brought it up, one reason the acceptance rate is higher for early admission programs is that the applicant pool is stronger. The early decision pool draws top students who have Harvard as their #1 choice, while the general application pool contains applicants who apply to Harvard as a "reach" school along with several more realistic choices.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:28 AM
re: 55
One thing to keep in mind is that the admissions officers are not idiots. They can spot an over-coached rich kid a mile away. They assume kids from private high schools were tutored on their SAT's, and judge their test scores accordingly. And they know poor kids had less help along the way. The deck is not as badly stacked as you think.
I think you're the one misguided here. I really don't think that they are as immune to the charms of a well-coached and well-spoken kid, or as likely to want to redress the balance as you think.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:30 AM
#59: The vast majority of rich kids who apply to Harvard are rejected. A rich kid who gets in has something else going for him besides being rich, well-coached, or even well-spoken.
And as #57 correctly noted, Harvard and other colleges work hard to achieve a "diverse" student body along many axes, including affluence.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:36 AM
Agree with Burke (and, therefore, if he's lucky, future-Kotsko).
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:36 AM
58- Let's say there were a box that said "check here and we'll add 100 points to your SAT score." Hot dog, let's do it! Now imagine there's a box but no instructions as to why you should check it, only guidance counsellors at upper middle class schools know the secret. Early admissions has the same effect- only good high schools know why it benefits you. It's something you could do in the application procedure (postmark by Nov 1 and check the appropriate box) but you're not told why you might benefit from doing so.
As for stronger applicant pool, as I remember, it makes more sense to apply early to your reach- that way if you get it you don't have to worry about other applications. If you apply early to a mid-level school, you don't have a reach by definition since you're committed if you get in.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:38 AM
60- The vast majority of all kids who apply to Harvard are rejected.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:39 AM
re: 63
Exactly.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:43 AM
One thing to keep in mind is that the admissions officers are not idiots. They can spot an over-coached rich kid a mile away. They assume kids from private high schools were tutored on their SAT's, and judge their test scores accordingly. And they know poor kids had less help along the way. The deck is not as badly stacked as you think.
Why do you think this? Did you read it in their admissions materials?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:43 AM
When Harvard recently decided to waive tuition for students whose parents made less than $40,000 per year, they were lauded. It affected, however, only 10% of their students.
So I'm thinking that somehow the admissions process isn't really about finding the best and the brightest, and does sort for social class.
The problem isn't that the information is unavailable, it's just that having it occur to the seventeen-year-old and her parents that there might be a reason to go digging more deeply than what the application packet says.
When I applied to college, early decision wasn't an option because I couldn't commit to a school that wasn't willing to fund me. This meant, by and large, no big-name schools. I'm not exactly dumb, and my high school wasn't bad, and my parents were well-intentioned if clueless, and my guidance counselor told me not to apply to the school which eventually admitted me on full scholarship. Think I was getting lots of useful advice on the merits of early action from her? She was telling me I couldn't get in!
Re: 57, it's perhaps that due to the correlation of early action/decision with economic background (especially the latter), and economic background seems to be a less worthy candidate than academic prowess or interesting talent.. Also, 'prestige' is in part measured by the numbers of admitted students that accept an admission offer, and that influences rankings of the schools; that puts more pressure to admit students who can commit to being there.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:50 AM
#63: Indeed. So let's not pretend that you get a free pass because you're rich.
#62: Your argument is logical, but it doesn't work out that way in practice. Here is QuestBridge, which, ironically, is "a program that links bright, motivated low-income students with educational and scholarship opportunities at some of the nation's best colleges":
Because only top students are encouraged to apply early, it is likely that the pool of early admission applicants is stronger than the regular applicant pool.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:51 AM
#65: I have heard such things from various informed sources over the years, including guidance counselors, test-prep companies, actual admissions officers, college professors, etc.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:53 AM
68: Of course, they were screaming them out in the throes of passionate climax, so grains of salt and all that.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:55 AM
Now if you don't like this idea on the grounds that there are students below the cut-off who ought to be considered because they have some special individual talents, character, or outlook, or because standardized measures aren't a good indicator of inner potential and academic ability, or because you don't trust this system to produce a demographically "proper" class, etcetera, I'm not sure you have much justification for complaining about the inequities of early admission, which is just one more tool that college admissions departments use to manipulate and construct their imagined "ideal class" of entering students.
Unless, of course, one thought that the qualities that lead to one applying early, and the qualities that wouldn't be accounted for by the procedure you describe, aren't the same, or that, while there might be some overlap, the early-application method selects them in the wrong (eg, secretive) way.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:56 AM
70: But Wolfson, you're not taking into account the awareness of the admissions dept. of the yield of the early-admit process. If it skews the entire admit process a certain way, I suspect it's because they want it to skew a certain way.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:00 PM
71: Well, at least according to the folks at Harvard, it does have these unintended effects. In light of that estimation, I'm not sure of your basis for being certain that it doesn't.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:05 PM
All I know that 'early decision' was a huge factor for me in not applying to several schools. Nonbinding was less of a problem, and I did apply to schools that had early action, but for no reason other than 'won't it be nice to know early?' I had no idea in 1996 that it meant it was a secret signal that I was the right sort of person, because the conventional wisdom was 'only do early decision if you can afford it, otherwise, it doesn't matter, you can always go regular admission.'
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:07 PM
71: why make it more complicated than necessary? If they admit all the X people they want in the first pass, so they don't need to admit any more in the second, all they've done is made the second pass more complicated and screwed over the X people who apply "late" (where "late" is "on time"). What's the reason for doing it in a more complicated fashion, especially given that each step increases the room for error, unintended consequences, ect ect ect?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:08 PM
I agree with #73. I would also like to point out that during my college admissions adventure (occupying much of 1999), "early decision" meant binding, and "early action" meant non-binding.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:08 PM
I'm just bitter because I applied early to Harvard and the fuckers didn't accept me.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:11 PM
73- Indeed, this is the only reason I did it- I got into an early action school, then stupidly decided to apply to the other four schools I was looking at anyway and spent all of christmas day 1995 finishing those applications; in the end I went to the place I got in early. Now, in 250 words or less, tell us what you learned from this experience. (A: I'm bas at committing to a big decision.)
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:12 PM
Yes, that was the terminology I used, too. 'Early decision' meant 'don't apply, we need to wait on financial aid' and 'Early action' meant 'why not, you'll know sooner, you aren't committed.'
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:12 PM
bas, or bad- it also taught me to proofread.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:13 PM
72: Because I don't particularly believe them. I know they have pretty good information about what sort of class their present system yields, a pretty good idea about the sort of class they are trying to construct, and pretty smart people in various relevant positions. If the want to get to X, they can get to X.
I'll be interested to see if, at the margins, this change has the perverse effect of slightly decreasing the number of not-rich students initially.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:19 PM
GB assures us that the admissions departments do all kinds of things to make the admissions process fair. However, Harvard's admissions department just now did an additional thing, with the intention of making the admissions process more fair, and somehow he doesn't like that.
Sometimes I think that boy just likes to argue. (That, or he just lost his shirt on the spot EA futures exchange.)
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:19 PM
Ha! Ten years too late indeed. Though I'm rather glad it worked out that way.
Posted by Saheli | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:19 PM
I just want to point out that "Ten Years Too Late" is the name of my band. Thank you.
(Also, it seems clear to me that this is a good thing, and I hope other schools follow suit. Well played, Harvard.)
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:31 PM
Selective admissions policies are never fair, in many ways. If we were to do a one-to-one comparison of any individual admitted student with any individual unadmitted student at almost any selective college or university, we'd find that many such match-ups offend our personal judgement of merit, quality, inner potential, what have you. Some admissions are made because a single admissions officer constructs a private narrative about how a particular candidate is really the right (or wrong) person for the particular perceived "personality" of the college or university. Or even worse, you've got a situation like ours where to some extent the administration would like to change the perceived personality of the institution (they're worried that Swarthmore is perceived as being too dour, self-punishing, masochistic, etc.) and so maybe some admits are made in an effort to reach out to different personality "types" of people, with all the precision of 19th Century phrenology.
But that's the price of having a system which is in any way individuated, which tries to evaluate the inner worth of applicants, of a system which is highly selective (e.g., rejects most applicants), and of a system that tries hard to produce certain kinds of measurable diversity (racial, gender, geographic, social class) in the overall population of admits.
If highly qualified low-income students, especially students of color coming from weak public schools, are in any way not sufficiently coached about the system, it's not really early decision that's the problem. What someone really needs to tell them is that they are by the standards of virtually every highly selective college or university the most desirable and demanded group of applicants, because their presence in the overall applicant pool is numerically well below the desired target level of most such institutions. Students in this group possessing strong academic credentials can indeed court the best possible financial offer; moreover, they don't need early decision in order to help secure their admission. So the only bad thing about early decision in this sense is that they may come to the mistaken impression that they *need* to do it in order to secure an admit.
But for kids who don't possess a desirable diversity attribute--say a white woman from a professional-class family who is an academically strong candidate from a good public high school in Massachusetts--early decision is a way for that person to express a very strong preference for a single institution that they have researched and decided is the most desirable place for them to be. Any pool of admitted students at any of these institutions is going to have a very significant number of these kinds of students, whether or not you have early decision. Why? Because there are way more of them in the applicant pool than academically strong students from poor families who attended a failing inner-city high school. So why not let an academic institution go ahead and load up on a sufficient number of students of one type, knowing that they're going to get that number anyway, and then wait for the spring to really pursue the kinds of students that are in short supply? It helps an admission officer a lot to know which admits are secured and which are competitive when the final round of selection begins. That's a win-win situation EXCEPT in those cases where a highly desirable kid from a poor family somehow is fooled into thinking he must apply early decision or have no chance of admission.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:39 PM
That's a win-win situation EXCEPT in those cases where a highly desirable kid from a poor family somehow is fooled into thinking he must apply early decision or have no chance of admission.
Or for a kid who comes from a disadvantaged background in a manner that doesn't show up well in terms of 'diversity' -- a bright poor white or asian kid.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:48 PM
You know what I'd really like? For US News and World Report to stop fucking ranking colleges already. God, that would be so awesome.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:51 PM
But that's framing the decision process wrong for deciding to apply early decision in the minds of most students. It doesn't occur to most of them that it has anything to do with admissions except as a way to show that you're serious about the school.
But early decision (not early action) does put you at the mercy of the school's financial aid office, and for all but the very top poor minority students, that means regular pool and no admission. There's more to the problem than just early decision, of course, but I don't see it helping.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:53 PM
But surely the fact that school A has a 22.5% yield and spends $35,603 per student means it is objectively better than school B, which only has a 22.2% yield even though it spend $35,820 per student. Why don't you want people to have this information?
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:54 PM
Or for a kid who comes from a disadvantaged background in a manner that doesn't show up well in terms of 'diversity' -- a bright poor white or asian kid.
But that kid (wrongly) wasn't going to get in under a diversity program, anyway. My own suspicion is that early-action admits might be admitted at a higher rate because the talent pool is, on average, better, the commitment is higher, and also because admissions officers know that the vast majority of those admits will be self-funded. NCP might have had a better shot under early-admit because the admissions committee wrongly assumed he was rich. ("Assumed" meaning really that the assumption is baked into the number of early-action approvals they hand out.) That's the possibly perverse effect that I'm wondering about.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:57 PM
86- I love how Princeton showed up as a top law school in their rankings, when Princeton doesn't have a law school.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:57 PM
85: You can start defining 'bright but poor' somewhere around $60K per year, given where Harvard waives tuition. It's not just a small number of kids we're talking about. This is quite a large number of potential applicants that don't apply early decision (early action is less of a problem) simply because they can't commit anywhere without seeing a financial aid lever.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:58 PM
86 gets it exactly right.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 12:59 PM
A financial aid letter, that is. The expectation that the kids will be self-funded is quite a big problem with early decision, and one that could, perhaps, have more of an impact on turning away lower-income kids from applying.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:00 PM
Cala, if you're not going to be eligible for financial aid anyway, who cares if you're at the mercy of the financial aid office? So a kid who really, really knows where they want to go, who has strong academic credentials but is otherwise indistinguishable from many many other extremely qualified candidates, and who knows that there is one and only one place that they really want to be at, and who is not going to be eligible for financial aid. Any selective institution will have some of those; they're a significant presence in the applicant pool. Why not lock down some of the uncertainty in the admissions process by just going ahead and admitting your quotient of them early on?
White and Asian applicants from poor families, who are first-generation applicants, and who come from high schools that aren't commonly represented in the applicant pool, and who are strongly academically qualified will show up quite well under the heading of "diversity"--most admissions offices will be quite interested in them. Many selective institutions would love to have more white first-generation applicants from poorer families in rural or semi-rural areas of the country, especially the less well-known institutions like Swarthmore, Amherst, Williams and so on. It's just that most selective institutions can't afford to send out admissions officers to most such rural areas to talk up their institutions--the yield of qualified applicants from such visits is way too low to justify the huge expense of sending people to all those areas. They can at least visit some of the major inner-city school districts because of proximity to their own institutions and because of concentration of population, even if those schools don't produce a huge number of qualified applicants.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:02 PM
But that kid (wrongly) wasn't going to get in under a diversity program, anyway.
Sure. Burke was saying that this sort of thing doesn't matter because disadvantaged students are wildly desirable whenever they apply for diversity reasons. I was referring to the point Cala actually sucessfully made in 91; that there a hell of a lot of kids between where most of Harvard's student body comes from economically, and the kind of disadvantaged that's going to make you a prize for admissions.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:04 PM
Bok rocks.
Re. rich v. poor kids and early admission: I got in under early admission to Brown, but couldn't go because my National Merit scholarship was pinned to my safety school. I figured it was way too long a shot to tie it to Brown.
Oh well. Just *think* how much smarter I'd be.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:07 PM
51: Short with big ears.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:08 PM
Cala, if you're not going to be eligible for financial aid anyway, who cares if you're at the mercy of the financial aid office? So a kid who really, really knows where they want to go, who has strong academic credentials but is otherwise indistinguishable from many many other extremely qualified candidates, and who knows that there is one and only one place that they really want to be at, and who is not going to be eligible for financial aid. Any selective institution will have some of those; they're a significant presence in the applicant pool. Why not lock down some of the uncertainty in the admissions process by just going ahead and admitting your quotient of them early on?
What? I guess I'm not being clear. The reason some people don't commit to early decision results from worries that in April, four months after they've committed, they will get no financial aid and won't be able to go to college at all. I wasn't talking about the merits of early decision for people who knew it was their first choice and that they could pay for it, but for the kid that wasn't going to get any diversity points but still didn't have the financial security to gamble on early decision.
Why not lock it down early if you are one of the fortunate ones to know that the check is written? You should be. But here's the worry: if you're not a special diversity interest -- poor, rural, black, etc -- but not quite rich enough to commit to a $50K tuition bill, you're applying to an admissions process that isn't looking for people like you any longer. You might indeed be more qualified than people in the first pool, but you didn't compete against them, because they had the money to commit early. You aren't more qualified, given that there's a preference for minorities, rural, etc. in the second pool.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:19 PM
51: The undergraduate admissions interviews in the US are worse than useless. A load of alumni going out there, asking stupid questions, and then sending in their widely-varying but uniformly useless opinions. I sincerely hope they're ignored by the admissions staff.
On the other hand, I found the Cambridge interview process to be great. They got technical and in-depth and really seemed to get a good idea of an applicant's knowledge of and intuition for a subject. I think more US universities would be helped by professors doing the interviewing, even if it means doing an initial sieve of the applications before the interview process. How do you feel about this, McG? Aren't there questions you can ask that will allow you to get around coaching, to see how someone interacts with an entirely new idea and get a better grasp of their ability?
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:24 PM
Matt, NCProsecutor, did you both go to Harvard for undergrad? How did you like it?
It's always amazed me that it remains such a huge, popular place when really everything I've heard about their undergrad and law programs from students and alums sounded fairly unpleasant. Plus the MIT kids just wouldn't stop talking shit, ya know?
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:26 PM
86: My alma mater agrees.
Posted by Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:26 PM
The Early-Decision Racket, by James Fallows. We're talking twice as high an admission rate of early as regular applicants. I'm skeptical that this is just strength of the pool. The Avery study estimates that early application is worth 100 points on the SAT, excluding legacies, athletes, and affirmative action.
SCMT at 71 and 80, I don't buy that. First off, there's some evidence in the article that schools are under pressure to expand early admissions regardless of what other effects it has. Second, I think these people probably have shame; they'd be less willing to explicitly formulate a 'more rich kids' policy to replace one that looks neutral but has that effect.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:30 PM
98: That's a fair point. Assuming the second pool breaks down the way you believe, I wholeheartedly throw my support to the Cala-LB-Wolfson-Everyone-Else faction, and against Burke.
(Though I still think the admissions committees know all of this, and just don't care.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:31 PM
14- Blogging schlock will slap you with his cock.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:36 PM
I should point out, before 98 gets misread, that I'm fine with minority & poverty preferential treatment. I just want, as a white chick, when I beat another white kid by 200 points on the S.A.T., to get his spot and make the university pay my tuition. Is that soo, soo much to ask?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:37 PM
Also, it's worth pointing out that what we're complaining about isn't "Rich kids all get a free ride" but "Kinda smart rich or well connected kids get a boost over smarter poor/middle-middle class kids and kids with dubious guidance counselors." Cala is an academic success because she did everything right, whereas better-off kids didn't have to jump through all the same hoops to get to the same place. The end result is a perpetuation of our class structures, and that's bad.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:48 PM
If you are a kid who is not going to get very much financial aid, has some kind of minor diversity attraction but you're not one of the super-rare folks that every school will knock themselves out for, is someone with a desirable diversity asset but marginal academic credentials, etcetera--if in short you are a borderline candidate for the level of selectivity that you would very much like to be accepted by, then yes, early admissions screws you potentially. But so does the entire admissions system at selective institutions. So does the basic institution of selectivity.
On the flip side, while I think the outcomes between small liberal arts colleges and large research institutions are notably divergent for some kind of students, and therefore worth considering, the outcomes between some perceived levels of selectivity are not that notably divergent. Yes, there's a difference between Swarthmore and Skidmore, but really not so much of one. There's a difference between Harvard and UMich, but not so much. For candidates who are in one or all of those ways borderline, they *should* be counseled to think pragmatically about cost and outcomes. If you're a borderline candidate who will get a poor financial aid offer from Williams, maybe Franklin and Marshall will give you a much better offer. etc.
There's no question that there could be better counseling to applicants on how to work the system to their advantage, and especially to students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. But I don't think we should confuse the lack of good counseling with a critique of the system itself, as if the fact that it *can* be gamed or the fact that it *is* selective and individuated is the problem that needs serious attention. In this respect, I think early decision is kind of a red herring: what I'd rather get clear on is whether we think the system itself is fundamentally corrupt and should be changed (and how so) or whether we just think there needs to be a better distribution of advice on how to gain maximum personal advantage from the system.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:53 PM
Yes, there's a difference between Swarthmore and Skidmore, but really not so much of one.
DON'T SAY THAT.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 1:55 PM
Care to expand, Tia?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:01 PM
In this respect, I think early decision is kind of a red herring: what I'd rather get clear on is whether we think the system itself is fundamentally corrupt and should be changed (and how so) or whether we just think there needs to be a better distribution of advice on how to gain maximum personal advantage from the system.
This is an excellent question. I think this is a good, but you're right, not a terribly important decision by Harvard. One the larger question, I'm down with "the system itself is fundamentally corrupt and should be changed".
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:01 PM
TB, how does the basic institution of selectivity screw over kids who need financial aid if admissions are theoretically need-blind? I can see how that happens with an admissions system that lets schools separate out a pool of kids that certainly won't need aid, and admit them at a much higher rate, but I don't see how selectivity itself does that.
Perhaps another way of putting this is "In talking about borderline cases and selectivity, please address the evidence from the Avery study that early decision application is worth 100 SAT points."
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:02 PM
I just want, as a white chick, when I beat another white kid by 200 points on the S.A.T., to get his spot and make the university pay my tuition. Is that soo, soo much to ask?
It'd be great if it was purely meritocratic, but I think Burke has a point in that someone has to pay tuition. If you're really a stellarly high candidate sompared to some rich mediocrity who gets in, yes, that's terrible. However, there are plenty of smart rich kids who may be slightly worse candidates but will do just fine at the school while paying for all the true prodigies and diversity cases that the school chooses to take. I can see why it's a really tricky balancing act.
That said, it's one that I think most schools do somewhat well (except, oddly enough, Harvard).
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:02 PM
If for some reason, you really want to go to school X more than equally selective school Y, the availability of some form of commitment mechanism (early decision or not). The school values your enthusiasm. You want to signal it in a credible way (i.e., not with a letter that says "X is my firstest, mostest choice" because that's not credible). Early admit is one such signalling mechanism. I would be surprised if any such mechanism would not more substantially advatange the savvy and well-connected. (It may be that schools should not value enthusiam, of course.)
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:04 PM
There are people in the world who must say, "No, no, you're thinking of *Skidmore*, the women's college in upstate New York. *Swarthmore* has always been co-ed. Yes, it's in Pennsyvania. Actually, since I attended, I am quite sure."
I have compassion for these people.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:04 PM
Clearly what we need is increased, rather than decreased, public funding of public schools, with a greater tax burden on the wealthy and no limit on the amount of income that can be taxed.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:07 PM
Timothy Burke, it's excellent practical advice, but there is something a little weird about one's financial situation in and of itself, in addition to providing opportunities (problematic in other ways), as making one a better candidate for a university. I wasn't borderline in anyway except not having the financial assets to apply early decision.
Early decision in particular seems to weight financial security. It's not the intent of the program, but that's certainly the result. And it's not the only thing wrong with the admissions process, but it's an easier one to fix than most.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:08 PM
Is anyone else still confused?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:08 PM
Wolfson, are you confused by me? I am making a trifling, bourgie joke on a thread about the underprivileged. Don't mind me. I'll be on Standpipe's joke explaining blog.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:13 PM
That said, it's one that I think most schools do somewhat well
This doesn't seem obvious to me; IIRC most selective colleges are crap at economic diversity. Yglesias says the same but he doesn't cite his sources, but the percentage of students at these schools with family incomes in the bottom half is appallingly small.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:13 PM
Hey, Timothy Burke--I can't log in to leave this comment on your site, but for your Anglo-American Conservatism class, you might fill in some of those 1950-70 gaps by looking at Gertrude Himmelfarb's stuff. She wrote (perfectly respectable) intellectual history on Burke, Mill, and dudes like that. Oh, and that's Gertrude "Mrs. Irving Kristol" Himmelfarb.
/hijack
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:14 PM
The point in 119 having been previously made by some commenter on some stupid site.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:18 PM
112- Actually, Harvard could easily afford to charge $1 per year for tuition- the annual income from their endowment is far more than annual tuition receipts (need to check those numbers, but I remember hearing that annual tuition collected is (Just eyeballing the numbers- say 1500 students in a class, 6000 undergrads, if they all pay $40k, that's $240 million. Endowment is $26 billion as of FY2005.)
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:18 PM
Speaking of students, I want to report something sweet that just happened to me. Usually the students here are totally obnoxious and entitlled. Many of them will make life difficult for you, and then nag you and snipe at you to deal with their procrastination. But one of them, realizing he had made a mistake that had cost me hours of work, just stopped by to give me a twenty dollar Starbucks card, which I appreciated greatly, just for the gesture that indicated he noticed me and hadn't meant to be a pain in the butt.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:19 PM
Fucking html- I heard that annual tuition is less than 1% of the endowment, and ROI on the endowment was ~20% last year.
123- Are you sure it wasn't a bribe?
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:23 PM
SP, to get <, type <
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:26 PM
122: But how much are their expenditures? Just because the amount they can sustainably pull out of their endowment looks to be approximately triple their potential tuition doesn't mean they can cut their tuition without substantial sacrifices. Plus, aside from Yale (and to a lesser extent, Princeton and Stanford), other schools don't have the luxury of an endowment that I can only assume looks something like Scrooge McDuck's gigantic swimming pool of money (Summers probably took a daily swim just for the hell of it, I know I would).
And I generally agree with the economic diversity point, but the problem is that the median family only earns as much as annual tuition at these schools. Their tuition is free. Who's to say how many of those people should be taken before it's an undue burden on the university? I agree more than are taken now, but I'm certainly not going to say how many. I also think the actual poor, as opposed to the educated middle-class, would benefit far more from better public school education than a sympathy acceptance to a top university from a crap district. Sure, there are some brilliant kids who will do fine anyway, but many who are merely bright have a tough time overcoming the education deficit that's built up by the time college rolls around.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:32 PM
They don't have to pull from the endowment at all- the return on the endowment is enough to keep the endowment growing (I refuse to use grow as a transitive verb) and pay tuition as well. In fact, it's almost noise- if Harvard had not charged tuition last year, the endowment would have grown by 19% instead of 20%.
And yes, only a few schools can do this- the very ones we're describing as highly selective. I guess they wouldn't want to deal with the resulting 10^6 applications if they were tuition-free.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:40 PM
126: On the flip side, if they can sustainably do away with tuition entirely and go purely merit for admittance (and optimal class sizes, etc), should they? Amongst other changes, presumeably `rich kids' would begin to trend towards a small minority in that case ....
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:42 PM
128- They claim that this is already the case- "need-blind admissions" etc. (Leaving aside the influence of legacies and athletics.)
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:45 PM
Undergrad ed is a lesser function in most universities. Grad school, research institutes, etc. are more important. Some schools have considered eliminating it.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:51 PM
129: But can you leave aside legacies and athletics? How about the question of how many people don't apply because they don't think (rightly or wrongly) they have a shot at a tuition waver or scholarship, but know they can't afford tuition. What if we changed the question from $0 tuition to active support? Ok, clearly this is venturing away from Harvard policy and towards the purpose of a university, etc. Still, it's interesting to think about. I certainly believe they (Harvard and others) have made strides toward a more merit based system, but wonder how effective it is...
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:51 PM
But you can only consistantly pull about 3-5% of assets from an investment each year while still allowing them to keep up with inflation. Harvard had an extremely good run under their old asset manager, and their new guy is a smart bastard from PIMCO, but they still can't rely on superbly above-average returns to pay for everything.
Now that facts have been pulled into this damn discussion: here's Harvard's 2004-2005 financial report. They had student revenue of $586.5 million and total expenses of $2.7573 billion. They pulled $23.5 million out of their endowment during the year to help cover expenses. By increasing their annual draw on the endowment to about 3% per year, they should be able to continue into perpetuity with roughly the same inflation-adjusted budget without charging any tuition to any of their graduate, undergrad, or professional school students.
Of course, they are the richest school on the planet by a considerable margin, but it still surprises the hell out of me that anyone could do this.
Posted by JAC | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 2:57 PM
Also: why, if that's the case, do they still take contributions?
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 3:05 PM
Capital expenses. They're building a whole new campus across the river, that's one of the main fundraising drives right now.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 3:33 PM
They'd probably also get more donations if they were free- right now they have the schtick about how tuition only covered half of your expenses when you were in school, which doesn't go over too well for people still paying student loans. Heck, I might start picking up the phone when caller ID says it's Harvard calling for their annual piece of flesh.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 3:40 PM
"Also: why, if that's the case, do they still take contributions?"
Because the want all the money in the world. Duh.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 3:41 PM
I'm not sure why the dropping of a non-binding EA program (instead of a binding ED program) is such an advantage to the non-rich. I wasn't able to apply to my first choice ED because of the financial aid bind, but I did apply to MIT using EA, and once I knew I was in, I could limit my remaining applications to those schools that I would conceivably choose over MIT. That saved both time and money. (I also got a kick out of telling people that MIT was my safety school.)
I don't recall any problem figuring out the EA/ED distinction on my own - it was spelled out pretty clearly in each school's application packet. The only kids I can imagine having a problem are those who don't request applications or info soon enough to meet the early deadline. I suppose if a kid comes from a school where few kids go on to college, they might not know about the possibility of early applications ahead of time.
Re SP's 62: I'm not sure that the SAT difference still exists if you have other ways to let the school know they are your first choice. It's pretty clear to me that genuine enthusiasm for the school is valuable. I let my first choice know that they were clearly my first choice during my interview, and made it clear that I would have applied ED except for the aid issue. I suspect that didn't hurt.
Posted by DaveW | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 4:08 PM
re: 99 [posting mildly Becks-style and with caveats that this is all just my own experience]
I'm afraid I really don't know. I'm only a grad student/adjunct teacher at Oxford so I've never been directly involved in interviewing. At some colleges people in my position do get involved in the interviewing process, but I haven't. On the other hand, I have been a marker for PPE admissions exams for a few years so I do have a good sense of the expectations my college has on entrance exams.
I'd love to think that coached but not especially able kids from well-off backgrounds do less well than able but not well coached kids from less well-off backgrounds but my (anecdotal) experience suggests that's not the case. Not, I stress, because of any intention on the part of the interviewers to prevent those latter kids getting in, I'm sure that's not the case. However, for whatever reason,* I meet very very few kids in the course of my teaching who don't come from moderately well-off backgrounds.
Lots of them aren't rich by any standard, of course, but there are very few from 'council estate' backgrounds as far as I can tell and that's not the case at, say, Glasgow, where a signficant percentage of the students are from poor or working class backgrounds.
I have been involved in mentoring type programs to encourage kids from inner cities and poor backgrounds to apply and my (admittedly very limited) experience of that was pretty negative. These are bright kids but they've just never been asked the kind of questions they are likely to get at interview and they don't generally, in my experience, have the self-confidence to do well in that context. That's an area where the schools could do a lot better.
Philosophy may be a little wierd, however, in the sense that it's quite alien to anything these kids will have experienced at school and the skills required are something that the kids from more privileged backgrounds have perhaps been encouraged to develop more. It's quite possible they, the less well-off kids, would have been much better performers in science interviews.
* A lot of it may well be self-selection, of course. Bright working class kids may just not apply in significant numbers.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 6:24 PM
Actually, a friend of mine does interviews for Chicago (as does my father—in fact, my father interviewed me for Chicago). Chicago's interviews are optional, though, and apparently are supposed to be mostly informational for the students applying. (One hopes, anyway, that they're pretty uninfluential when it comes down to the actual admissions process, because otherwise I'd have had a bit of an unfair advantage, huh?) Anyway, this friend of mine seems to think they're not entirely useless, and he's a smart guy who wants to keep
Santa CruzChicago eccentric, so he might know whereof he speaks.Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 6:38 PM
Well, I'll take a shot at answering DaveW's intial question. I think the problem is that less privileged kids are not as likely to apply early. First, because they are less likely to know that there is an advantage conferred by applying early, even if they know the option exists (when I was applying to schools, the admissions officers told us the exact opposite in their public talks). The second reason, and I think this is critical when it comes to non-binding programs, is because less privileged kids are less likely to be able to have their application together early, whether it’s because of an unsettled home life, or because they have to work, or because it takes them hours of research to learn what most other applicants are simply told by their guidance counselor/ admissions consultant/ parent. In these cases, rewarding kids who apply early is, in effect, rewarding them for having an easier (note: not easy!) application process to begin with.
I think there is a definite advantage to applying early; whether that advantage is equivalent to 100 points on the SAT or just the generally favorable impression that the candidate is organized, on top of things, and more committed to the school. The kids who are most likely to apply early- the smart, relatively well off kids of educated parents- already have the upperhand when it comes to the admissions process; to the extent that this Harvard decision influences other selective colleges to get rid of them, than that is one less advantage these kids have over their less privileged co-applicants. Obviously it’s not the most important one, and it’s not going to single-handedly cure our social mobility problems. But most less-privileged kids are fighting an uphill battle anyway; anything that contributes to making it the smallest bit more level is a good thing.
Posted by Ivyleaguelurker | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 6:57 PM
in fact, my father interviewed me for Chicago
This alone should demonstrate how worthless college interviews are in the US.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:03 PM
Or how impeccably, irreproachably honorable and trusted Wolfson's dad is. But probably what you said.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:14 PM
139: Where'd Santa Cruz come from?
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:19 PM
Wolfson never has gotten over Chicago's rejection, which came in the form of a snarky handwritten letter -- written in a hand he knew all too well.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:22 PM
This is probably the place to mention that I'm still bitter about not getting into Chicago, for which I will henceforth blame Wolfson's dad.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:27 PM
139: Where'd Santa Cruz come from?
Keep Santa Cruz weird!
Honestly, I doubt it made any difference in the decision.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:29 PM
145: Consider yourself lucky. Santa Cruz is a much better type of eccentric.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:32 PM
I'm sure it is.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:40 PM
Keep Lubbock Flat!
I believe, perhaps without good reason, that "Keep Austin weird" was first. Wikipedia has an alleged origin story. Data point: someone trademarked the phrase in 2003.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:43 PM
Nobody ever said anything about keeping Santa Cruz original.
Posted by neil | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:50 PM
Himmelfarb is a good idea. Though she once wrote an op-ed piece that really amused me after I'd been working through Edwardian manuals on hygiene about how the problem with people these days is that they're really filthy compared to the Edwardians...
Anyway, um, on admissions, let's see. Yes, all these places are need-blind. Yes, that really means, as far as I can tell, that they don't talk about income during the admissions process. Yglesias is right that none of them educate a large number of people in the lower half of the income distribution, but that's largely because people in that group don't appear in their applicant pools at all, not because they fail to game the system to their advantage. Whaddya know, poverty appears to be structural. So then the question is, where do you interrupt it? I'm pretty sure that it is not an optimal strategy to preferentially seek out students whose academic preparation is very weak and then watch them flounder; probably just as problematic to admit them into a "second-string" curriculum-within-the-curriculum and mark them off as remedial charity cases. The intervention needs to be elsewhere and earlier, I think.
BTW, if the whole system is corrupt (in a way distinct from social hierarchy in general), what would work better? Anybody want to put in for my colleague's proposal to just make admissions random if you make a minimal standard set of selective measurements?
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:51 PM
Slightly relevant.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:56 PM
Also, I find the idea (but perhaps not implementation) of a group called "Make Austin Normal" much weirder than anything going by "Keep Austin Weird".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 7:59 PM
Anybody want to put in for my colleague's proposal to just make admissions random if you make a minimal standard set of selective measurements?
I think this would be a great model for certain institutions. It clearly would not result in anything like the undergraduate classes of Harvard, Caltech, or the other super-elite schools, and I don't see why, absent egalitarianism of the most misguided kind, we would want to spoil that vibe. As per usual, there's a great advantage in institutional diversity. MIT clearly works as MIT, and it doesn't seem to make much sense to risk that by turning it into a place that takes anyone with >700 on SAT math.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:01 PM
I don't see why, absent egalitarianism of the most misguided kind, we would want to spoil that vibe.
There has to be something more important to argue for than a vibe, right?
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:04 PM
it is not an optimal strategy to preferentially seek out students whose academic preparation is very weak and then watch them flounder; probably just as problematic to admit them into a "second-string" curriculum-within-the-curriculum and mark them off as remedial charity cases.
*ding* Strawman! Has anyone in the thread suggested anything remotely resembling this? All I, at least, am saying is that it would be good if selective schools STOPPED THROWING UP ARTIFICIAL OBSTACLES to academically qualified students who aren't upper-middle or upper class. And that throwing up such artificial obstacles is not, in fact, inherent to being selective.
Nor are those artificial obstacles inherent to selecting the kind of entering class you want to have, as you describe in 57, unless you specifically want to have an entering class without any economic diversity. In which case shame on you.
As for not appearing in the applicant pools, perhaps a bit of this is due to factors such as those described in Cala's 66, which is not an academic charity case situation? I'm not saying that if admissions were done right the income makeup of these schools would exactly mirror that of America, but it might be closer.
I also favor intervention elsewhere and earlier. That doesn't mean that college admissions are hunkadory.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:05 PM
The phrase actually refers to particularly attractive, manly fish, Weiner.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:08 PM
I didn't want to give the impression that I was denying a connection between your proposal in 115 and a David Bowie album.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:13 PM
There has to be something more important to argue for than a vibe, right?
Doesn't the rest of the comment make it clear that the "vibe" is the character of the institution? That seems important, doesn't it?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:14 PM
Maybe this is just because I sort of hate my school's vibe (to the extent that there is one), but I think "vibe" is highly overrated when it comes to elite colleges.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:28 PM
I take baa--who is, after all, a conservative--to be making the point that MIT seems to be working pretty well as a foundry of all civilization worth having, so let it be. But I think that everyone else is denying that (a) it's clearly working optimally, or (b) it couldn't be changed without harm to its present success.
Also, Weiner needs to stop commenting Kotsko-style.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:30 PM
Doesn't the rest of the comment make it clear that the "vibe" is the character of the institution? That seems important, doesn't it?
It depends on the character of the institution. I don't see the point in changing admissions practices "for the better" if it results in zero net change in the vibe. (Assuming demographics significantly affect vibe.) If a purported benefit of institutional diversity is that the children of elites will always have a place where they can go to just be themselves before taking the reins from mom and pop, I say "meh".
On preview, teo and SCMTim beat me to it.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:35 PM
161: "all civilization worth having" s/b "LB"
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:38 PM
Of course not all institutions have vibes or vibes worth preserving. But I would be saddened if the current powers succeeded in their scheme to render my alma mater Just Another Expensive School, vibewise.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:53 PM
It depends on the character of the institution.
And baa: I think this would be a great model for certain institutions.
So I don't really see the disagreement, unless you really do want to break Wolfson's heart.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 8:58 PM
Let me make a prediction. Ending early decision will not result in a notable or measurable increase in students from lower-income families in the applicant pool of most highly selective colleges or universities. I'm not saying that anyone is saying, "Let's admit everybody". I am saying that the relative absence of those students from the applicant pools has vastly more to do with the systematic disadvantages they face prior to the decision to apply to college than it does with any of the arcana of the application process itself.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:05 PM
I think I'm slightly more sympathetic to baa's point than you, sb. I'm wary of meritocratic claims, generally, and I suspect that, sadly, a part of the value of going to Harvard is acculturation. If that's true, then vibe is going to matter, and you're going to need a certain seed of "Our Kind" of people to help the acculturation along.
166: The claim that I took Cala to be making is that the change might help people at the lower-end of the middle-income band.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:08 PM
I'm pretty sure that it is not an optimal strategy to preferentially seek out students whose academic preparation is very weak and then watch them flounder; probably just as problematic to admit them into a "second-string" curriculum-within-the-curriculum and mark them off as remedial charity cases.
Oh, for the love of little apples. No one's suggesting this. In fact, and here's perhaps the crux of the entire point, you could make Harvard's entering class look a lot more like middle America without sacrificing a whit of academic integrity. Believe it or not, you can make the academic selection process much less about who can commit to a $47K tuition bill by dumping early decision and still have a whole boatload of talented students.
There's some middle ground between poor remedial charity cases and the upper-class prep school types and I can't believe I'm actually having to type this sentence. It is disturbing that a university that claims to admit people need-blind and draws the best of the best of the best from all over the nation has less than ten percent of its class in the middle quintile or below of income. It makes me think that we're missing some bright and talented people, and that maybe you're not an academic charity case because you have to wait for the FAFSA forms.
Early action isn't as problematic, but according to Harvard's own data it seems to be functioning as a class and race sorter. I wouldn't have expected it to be, but there's a variety of explanations that seem to be plausible. Most likely I'd guess that there's a whole culture of planning the college experience from preschool that doesn't exist outside a certain socioeconomic set, and that a bright junior in high school just may not get his act together in time if he hasn't been coached since the previous fall.
Enthusiasm I think is a lousy sorter, too. It's easy to develop Harvard dreams and make it your favoritest of favorite schools when you know that when you get in, you won't have to pretend not to care so much so it doesn't break your parents' heart if it turns out the FAFSA fairy doesn't give you money in April.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:09 PM
TB, basically what Cala says, viz.: Apparently people who can apply early decision are people who do not need to be concerned overmuch about financial aid. That makes people who can't apply early decision, I don't know the numbers, but a pretty whopping percentage of the country I'd guess. And the lack of economic diversity has to do with the whole bottom half of the economic distribution, and probably more (the figures I've seen were broken down by quartiles [on preview: quintiles, maybe]). Talk about lower-income students let alone structural kotsking poverty is kind of beside the point here.
As for ending early decision, this seems like a plausible hypothesis: Adding 100 points to the SAT scores of a group of people who don't need to apply for financial aid decreases economic diversity by harming genuine middle-class applicants. What do you think?
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:18 PM
And baa: I think this would be a great model for certain institutions.
Ah, I'm a dunce. I thought he meant other kinds of (non-academic) institutions. But I still don't see why Harvard couldn't be one of those institutions. It wouldn't be the Harvard he went to, but it wouldn't turn into a cultureless selective univerity clone, either; and while I completely sympathize with feelings of nostalgic attachment, I don't think they do much work in an argument against egalitarianism.
I am thinking, perhaps I am not a conservative.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:19 PM
169 was me.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:19 PM
Wolfson is a lovely fellow, and I agree with him in all things when he is not being, well, you know.
As for the character of the institution/vibe issue, SCMT has me more or less right. MIT works. Harvard works. Excellence has value, and Cal Tech would not be the same nerd hot house if it just was a bunch of kids who got 5s on their BC calc AP. So what is to be gained by doing admissions as randomization past the post? Maybe that benefit can be cashed out in terms of a superior character, a different character, or less stress on super-achieving high schoolers (perhaps a consititutionally stressed group). These are fine discussions to have. By contrast, deploying minima + randomization at the Ivies as a tool for *egalitarianism* just seems daft. At the upper levels of ability, I think the American meritocracy is humming along pretty well. If there are 500 high school seniors annually who could do the work at Harvard but instead end up in a coal mine, I would be amazed. Maybe they end up at some other school. So what. These kids are going to be OK. Maybe they don't end up at the pinnacle of the ultimate status-conscious fields, but they will have fine, prosperous lives. If someone wants to set up a randomization after the post school, great. That will have a different character, which may be good too; but I doubt it will emerge as a particulr force for social justice.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:27 PM
Am so not going to read this thread, but surely the people who (according to the lats few comments) seem to be arguing against lower standards/changing an institution's charcter have, in fact, read Bok's book The Shape of the River? It goes a pretty long way towards proving that SAT scores and the like are a pretty loose indicator of merit (and everyone knows they're affected by social class). Students with "low" scores seem to do just as well as students with "high" scores once given the attention and mentoring that elite institutions are supposed to give all their students. And nontraditional students are more likely to use their Harvard or Yale degrees towards things like providing legal or medical services for the poor, which is surely a social net gain.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:30 PM
Excellence has value
baa is banned! Holy moly.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:34 PM
I mention from time to time that the discussion of education in this country is strictly insane. What Harvard is about includes education, but a lot of it is class. People who come out of Harvard or an equivalent school are, in most cases, in a higher class than they otherwise would have been. (Even if they're a slacker working in restaurants, they will at least work in gourmet restaurants). So yay class! Yay Harvard! Harvard gives people class!
On the other hand, we don't want class to be self-perpetuating. So theoretically we want smart poor people replacing rich dumb people in the upper class. Though frankly, I can't really see that happening.
But on the third hand, to the extent we have any power or wealth at all we want to do everything for our own kids, even if they are only average. We don't want them driving truck for a living.
On the fourth hand, there will always be people born in the bottom half who stay there. Who are those people.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:38 PM
I think I'm slightly more sympathetic to baa's point than you, sb. I'm wary of meritocratic claims, generally, and I suspect that, sadly, a part of the value of going to Harvard is acculturation. If that's true, then vibe is going to matter, and you're going to need a certain seed of "Our Kind" of people to help the acculturation along.
I think the name does more work than any Kind at this point, and you could graduate a bunch of gerbils from Harvard and witness a sizeable proportion waltz into cushy jobs.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:42 PM
"jobs" s/b "buttocks"
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:43 PM
Thank you for making that explicit.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:45 PM
Well, fuck.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:46 PM
Let's start over again.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:47 PM
I think I'm slightly more sympathetic to baa's point than you, sb. I'm wary of meritocratic claims, generally, and I suspect that, sadly, a part of the value of going to Harvard is acculturation. If that's true, then vibe is going to matter, and you're going to need a certain seed of "Our Kind" of people to help the acculturation along.
I think the name does more work than any Kind at this point, and you could graduate a bunch of gerbils from Harvard and witness a sizeable proportion waltz into cushy jobs.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:47 PM
buttholes!!
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:50 PM
True, but this wouldn't work to the benefit of their employers, whom I'd think would have an interest in hiring employees they didn't have to light a fire under to get the job done.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:52 PM
Thanks for ruining everything, ogged.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:53 PM
You butthole.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 9:55 PM
I am in substantial agreement with SB's 170. It would be fine by me if 50% of the Ivies decided to go to randomization past the post system. I am, of course, reluctant to give up a known good for an uncertain benefit, and I do think there are true benefits to congregating a bunch of real outlier types, as the elite schools do.
As for Cala's comment, I guess I am not sure what the evidence is that Harvard could look much more like middle america without changing its commitment to excellence. Harvard is now need blind, and provides substantial financial aid to families which are by no means poor. It would be great if all the Ivies were free, or had yet more substantial aid packages. The idea that cost is the main barrier keeping the Ivies from looking like Middle America, however, seems to me to understates the social challenges of meritocracy. It seems very likely that a child of two elite college grads just is going to have a disproportionate chance of being elite college competent. I suspect that, and not cost pressure, accounts for much of the skew we see.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:05 PM
If I understand Cala's point properly, she's not saying that Harvard would look a lot more like America, but that getting rid of ED and the like will make it marginally more fair for people who are not properly accounted for when we look at demographics: the not-rich-not-poor smart white kid. I have to say that it sounds reasonable.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:28 PM
cost is the main barrier keeping the Ivies from looking like Middle America
I believe that that is not the whole claim, that the claim is that some of the barrier is that Our Kind, Dear know how to navigate the admissions system and Not Our Kind, Dear don't.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:29 PM
The idea that cost is the main barrier keeping the Ivies from looking like Middle America, however, seems to me to understates the social challenges of meritocracy.
The idea that it doesn't seems to me to be willfully blind. Surely I'm not the only one who knows someone who didn't attend a top university solely because of financial considerations. Harvard is as generous as your federally calculated need says it should be, and that's fine for Harvard, but that doesn't mean the family making $50K a year doesn't have a $15K tuition bill to pay. This is not pocket change for most people.
That's just the kids who are admitted who can't attend due to finances; kids who are not academic charity cases, since they got in, who can't make it. If by calamagic they can all accept Harvard's offer, Harvard looks like middle America more already and it hasn't had to admit a single different underprepared student! So it seems the talent isn't limited to those with the right pedigree. So why insist on another financial barrier -- having to commit early?
It seems very likely that a child of two elite college grads just is going to have a disproportionate chance of being elite college competent.
This seems to be true, but largely irrelevant, unless you want to make the further claim that everyone at Harvard who just happens to be from the right schools with the right parental financial backing is there because they and their parents are elite. It's plausible, and I'd be willing to accept it up to a point, but when it's such a high proportion of the student body, I'm beginning to suspect that Harvard isn't after academic talent or talent at all.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:30 PM
Oh, for the love of little apples.
This is an awesome expression. Although if I tried to use it, I'm pretty sure people would think I was talking about teen boobs or something.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:35 PM
people would think I was talking about teen boobs
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:43 PM
Here we go again...
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:45 PM
I have a fantastic ass.
Posted by Jessica Biel | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 10:52 PM
Fantastic, but not amazing.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:00 PM
It just occurred to me that here I am agreeing with baa and I didn't go to my first choice school, despite being accepted, because I couldn't afford it.
I guess my disdain for the uppity trumps my sense of fairness and personal grievance. But now that I'm back in Cali, baa, I'm going to revert to barely tolerating your kind.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:11 PM
187: the claim is that some of the barrier is that Our Kind, Dear know how to navigate the admissions system and Not Our Kind, Dear don't.
Well, this is absolutely true. Whenver we complicate a process, we have created a force multiplier for IQ, connections, experience, and savvy. Unfortunately, adding complexity to a process often brings other benefits; in the case of early admit, Tim Burke references some of those possible benefits. The question is the balance. On early admit, I wouldn't consider myself a particularly impassioned supporter. Or really even a supporter at all. My interest was more peaked by Burke's colleagues 'randomization + minima" plan.
189: We all agree that the Ivies are disproportionately upper middle class and upper class. Is this difference from the class demographic of middle america because of the cost of tuition? I really don't think denying this is willfully blind at all. Just as a for instance, middle america is not 20% Jewish, nor is it 20% Asian. Clearly these are cases where the characteristics and culture of these groups have an enormous effect on producing "elite college competent" 18-year-olds. Jews and Asians may also be wealthier than average, but it seems to me deeply implausible that the disproportionate representation of these groups is a wealth effect. So too, I think two elite college educated parents are disproportionately likely to produce elite collge competent kids. They are also doubtless disproportionately middle/upper class. The question is what is more powerful, an 'acculturation' effect or a wealth effect. You don't have to believe the wealth effect (or the connections effect) is zero to believe the acculturation effect is larger. On the early admit point, I doubt anyone would advocate needless barriers to the matriculation of middle and lower class kids. The question is when the same policy has a useful function and also serves as a barrier, how you weigh those costs and benefits. And again, I'm by no means a big supporter of early admit. I just am not sure that a) it doesn't have some uses *for students*, and b) removing it would do much to change the class composition elite colleges. If it does, great.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:14 PM
What was your first choice, ogged?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:16 PM
Mystery is the key to seduction, baa.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:17 PM
Thunderbird University, naturally.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:24 PM
Whenver we complicate a process, we have created a force multiplier for IQ, connections, experience, and savvy.
The reference to IQ sounds kind of like a return to 17 and 25, which because it's late I uncharitably gloss as "stupid proles can't figure out an application form," rather than "Colleges set rules that they don't tell the poor proles about." And experience and savvy are other words for 'connections' here; being around people who know how the game works.
If there were huge benefits to early admit, that might be a great thing, but Burke's 84 doesn't convince me that there are any benefits at all over and above gaming the U.S. News rankings. I think Cala took care of that in 98.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:27 PM
Jessica, did you guys draw straws for the accent each character would have in your most recently released film? I can't figure how else they were determined.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:41 PM
200: You seem to think you're denying something that baa's claiming. If it's true, you're denying a pretty weak claim. He's already said he's happy to give up EA. See, e.g., If it does, great.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-12-06 11:55 PM
It also seems worth pointing out that whatever the failings of the US primary/secondary education system, and the failing of the elite US colleges to spread their educational wealth amongst the population at large, particularly the poorer half, the elite US colleges are indeed amazingly good, even by developed world standards. It doesn't have to be that way, and it's worth thinking hard about if potential changes will have negative affects.
Conservative, sure, but at least there's something that might be worth conserving.
(Oh. I also think that in general, schools that do the most gaming of the US News rankings, and also schools that cost the most money and have the most people not going because they can't afford it, are not the top 10 or 20 Harvard/Yale/MIT/Stanford/UMich/Berkeleys, but the 20-100 mid-tier private schools.)
Posted by Jake | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 1:47 AM
[drowing comity in the bath ...]
Several of the comments on this thread remind me of Galbraith's comments about conservatism being about the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
Only with 'privilege' and the 'status quo' replacing selfishness.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 2:50 AM
On balance, admissions at Harvard (and US colleges in general) over the past several decades has, through affirmative action and financial aid packages, been a force for changing the status quo, not preserving it. The impact of admitting rich kids who would be rich anyway without a Harvard degree is vastly outweighed by the impact of admitting poor and middle-class kids who wouldn't.
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 3:56 AM
205: This is all true, GB, but I don't see why you object so much to an attempted additional step in that direction. By now, after Burke and Tim, I wonder how effective it would actually be, but your objection seems to be different, including a stern attitude towards those applicants who are not fully aware of how the process works. You don't happened to be in colleg counseling biz by any chance?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 5:39 AM
Check back to my initial comment in #3 and you'll see that I'm not objecting to the elimination of early admissions, I'm saying that it will not make a difference.
And no, I am not in the "college counselling biz".
Posted by Gaijin Biker | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 5:42 AM
But in your later comments you seemed to think that it might make a difference, but if it did, it was the badly-counseled applicant's own damn fault. you also initially seemed sarcastic about the idea that anyone should care.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 5:57 AM
baa, most of what I was responding to was the sentiment that Harvard won't be Harvard if it tries to be more egalitarian because admitting anyone poorer would necessarily lower the academic standards (and Burke, whose response was 'Harvard shouldn't have to provide remedial education to unprepared students.' to 'Early decision has turned out to be another barrier for a middle-middle class kid.' )
I guess I am not sure what the evidence is that Harvard could look much more like middle america without changing its commitment to excellence.
I think that claim is pretty wrong. For example, Harvard could, say, offer me admission! And then both their average scores would go up and their average income plummet. I'm not the child of elite parents; bright parents who cared about education, certainly, but I'm the first woman in my family to graduate from college. And I don't believe I'm unique.
There's a lot of room between 'underprepared for college' and 'children of elites.'
So maybe that's why I think that cost is a bigger factor. Acculturation is a big factor, too, of course. All early decision does is throw up another barrier because like I said way back in 98, it does mean that you have to be confident of where the money is coming from. How 98 got construed as 'I want Harvard to lower its admissions standards' baffles me, unless people are assuming not-paying-out-of-pocket equals remedial.
What will the end result be? I'm not certain. Harvard started meeting full financial need right around the time it implemented early action. I expect that there's a few kids who would have applied later that will now compete against the whole applicant pool and will turn out to be better than elite children of elites without a standard dropping a whit. Probably not very large, but makes a difference to those kids.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 7:19 AM
Yes, to all of 209.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 7:23 AM
Cala,
I think the key word in the claim is much (which is what is meant to make it a weaker claim). Doubtless, were the Ivies free, they would look more like middle America. The question is how much more like. If the barrier is *mainly* cost, then the answer is lots, if the answer is not mainly cost, the answer will be not as much as we would like. In the case of Harvard, where there is a great deal of aid already, I suspect the effect would be muted.
On the topic at hand, early admit, again I fear that removing early admit won't have much of an effect on the class composition of Harvard. If it does, as I say, great. Most of my comments really, arose out of Tim Burke's colleagues suggestion of a randomization after a minima standard admission. This is an interesting approach, but would, I think at least *alter* standards substantially. And once again, I fear the gains in social diversity would be minimal. Meritocracy is just a hard problem.
Last, just to clarify, no one, I hope, is denying that cost is a barrier. Nor is anyone, I hope, suggesting lowered standards are synonymous with efforts to increase equality of opportunity. At least, I do not take myslef to be doing either of those things.
Off topic (and not arising from you comments, Cala), I do find the responses of Matt W and ttaM a little disquieting. It's a sad state of affairs if we can't discuss the cost/benefits of early admission without invoking "you're selfish and think the proles are stupid" rhetoric.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 7:43 AM
202: I was mostly objecting to the idea that EA could be described as "adding another level of complication to the process," as if it were just another essay. Anyway, 206, 208, and 209 speak for me.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 7:54 AM
211: Oh really. I was somewhat grumpy in comment 12 because GB was saying, falsely, that the problem was that poor kids were having trouble following the rules. I was very grumpy in comment 156 because Tim Burke was, at length, turning "let's not throw up additional obstacles to kids who can't pay their whole tuition" to "let's abolish selectivity and let in a bunch of unprepared kids." I'll refrain from "you think the proles are stupid" rhetoric if other people refrain from "the proles are stupid" rhetoric. Next: accusations of class warfare!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 7:59 AM
Why must you engage in class warfare, Matt?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 8:04 AM
Because I hate America, duh.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 8:10 AM
How 98 got construed as 'I want Harvard to lower its admissions standards' baffles me, unless people are assuming not-paying-out-of-pocket equals remedial.
It's not clear to me that anyone is saying that. Baa certainly isn't: past-post randomization would hold standards pretty constant, and he's about half-for that (half the Ivies). Burke is answering a slightly different, but not well-defined, question. I'm in favor of these changes. But I think none of the three of us believe they will have much effect on the demographics of the entering classes. It's worth noting that (a) the admissions committee has a lot of information available to it, (b) this seems like an area that is very susceptible to demographic gaming, and (c) all of us are arguing on the basis of half-data, at best.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 8:14 AM
Again, yes, to 213.
And, of course, while I don't really think I *have* been engaged in class war rhetoric, I am quite happy to do so.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 8:16 AM
The impression I get about college admissions is that there are two pools. One is a sort of genius pool, and schools fight bitterly to get them. But the average Harvard student is diligent and bright-to-bright-normal, and a lot of them slack quite a bit (because of the USN&WP ratings, top schools are reluctant to flunk anybody). So I think that there could be a lot of room for bright, motivated poor students whose preparation wasn't quite up to snuff.
One admissions guy at a top place gave numbers like 10/80/10. 10% of the applicants were automatic and could go anywhere. 10% really shouldn't have applied. The bulk of the class is chosen from the 80%. YMMV.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 8:22 AM
If an early admissions system is set up such that it requires a certain level of inside knowledge to adequately exploit that system and that inside knowledge is generally restricted to those from a (relatively) privileged background then it seems to me that those who are justifying that early admission system are in fact engaged in the justification of a discriminatory process that favours those from that privileged background. I don't see any way round that.
That is not to say that absent such a system that everything will be miraculously OK with the admissions sytem or to say that designing an admissions scheme that is both socially just and academically strong isn't a hard thing to do.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 8:23 AM
218- I believe the saying is, "The hardest thing about Harvard is getting in." That seems to be the case with the Ivies, certainly not with technology schools (MIT, CalTech, and lower tier like WPI and RPI)- which may explain why they're usually lower in USNWP.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 8:31 AM
216: This is what I took to be, incidentally, the first mention of academic preparedness.
. Yglesias is right that none of them educate a large number of people in the lower half of the income distribution, but that's largely because people in that group don't appear in their applicant pools at all, not because they fail to game the system to their advantage. Whaddya know, poverty appears to be structural. So then the question is, where do you interrupt it? I'm pretty sure that it is not an optimal strategy to preferentially seek out students whose academic preparation is very weak and then watch them flounder; probably just as problematic to admit them into a "second-string" curriculum-within-the-curriculum and mark them off as remedial charity cases.
That seems to me to equate "lower half of income distribution" with "poor academic preparation and 'second string.' " This seems to me to be misinformed.
baa, I think the effect is greater, just because of the bright kids I knew in high school who simply didn't apply to places because of cost. Can a kid get into the Ivies with a 1500 on his S.A.T. score without them lowering the standards? He's not a shoo-in given that there's 20,000 other applicants, but he's not obviously second-string. But I know kids with those credentials that didn't apply because they couldn't afford to be in the middle of Harvard; they needed to be the top of somewhere else where the scholarship money was.
I think we agree that the EA effect is limited, but christ, let's not make it harder for a kid without a sob story or gobs of cash than we have to.
I don't think randomization is the answer,
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 8:35 AM
I don't see any way round that.
You're not supposed to see a way around that. But that something has pernicious class effects doesn't mean it can't be justified on other grounds. You see this in cases like, say, capitalism. Or as during the discussion here. Baa's explicitly wondered whether there are benefits, conceded that there might not be, and said maybe we should use the "pure merit" methodology in half of the Ivies in either case.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 8:37 AM
"But that something has pernicious class effects doesn't mean it can't be justified on other grounds."
Of course that's true. However, it doesn't seem like there's even the most basic prima facie justification in this case without the direct conflation of '"lower half of income distribution" with "poor academic preparation and 'second string.' " that Cala talks about in 220.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 8:44 AM
I think that one of the strengths of the American system is the fact that it gives people a second chance -- both those who developed late (screwed off in HS) and those who went to inferior schools. In much of the world your fate is settled at age 16 or even younger.
I think that, despite serious efforts to allay the problem, this is becoming less true. There's been studies showing that the kids from the best pre-schools do best in primary school, all the way up. the scale. Sometimes this is the result of more talent, harder work, and parental encouragement, but people also advance by networking, schmoozing, ass kissing, name-dropping, and old-boy networks. This is least true in sciences, I imagine.
A good program for encouraging bottom-half students would require some remedial education plus work on motivation and study habits. If the motivation and study habits show up, the academic deficiencies can be brought up to par.
However, this might be best done at a school which is not dominated by the upper middle class. My sone hated being the poorest kid in any social group he was in. ("Tufts isn't all white, but it might as well be".)
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 8:55 AM
In one sense, the empirical question might be, "How many people in the lower half of the income distribution at age 18 have sufficient academic preparation to do well at highly selective universities and colleges without any special or remedial support beyond what those institutions already provision, and yet do not appear in the applicant pools for those institutions?" Cala and others seem to think the answer is, "Quite a few."
I really don't know what the answer is. At the least, I suspect the answer is complicatedly dependent on what the potential applicants might want to study at those institutions. If it's science, engineering or math as they are taught at highly selective institutions, I'm pretty confident that there is not a large untapped pool of potential applicants in the lower half of the income distribution who could readily succeed in that curriculum as it stands. At almost all of those institutions, science and math are intensely sequential in their curricular design and have high initial barriers to entry that are relatively uncompromising--if you don't have the requisite competencies at the outset, you don't really get a second chance; if you fail upon entry, there isn't time to make up for whatever you don't have.
In the humanities, with some scattered examples, yes, I would strongly suspect that there are plenty of natively smart, capable or imaginative prospective students in the lower half of the American income distribution who could "catch up" if they applied and were admitted. Those curricula tend to be much more horizontal, much more negotiable, much more open to multiple preparations and skill sets.
The extra headache on top of this problem, though, is that a lot of first-generation college students are pushed, understandably, by their families to study science or technical areas because of the (accurately, imho) perceived greater payoff to having qualifications in those areas.
-----------
On a separate question, what's your objection to random admission past a required minimal qualification, Cala? If you individuate admissions, aren't there always going to be lots of ways for people who are Our Kind to slant it against Not Our Kind? Lots of weird arcane local rules that make the system mysterious and confusing?
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 9:41 AM
Also, it seems to me that people are doubting that there is a connection between "lower half of the income distribution" and "weak academic preparation". If you understand "weak academic preparation" as "those people are stupid", then of course that's wrong--but you're not getting that from me, for god's sake. But I think it's pretty established that concentrations of (both urban and rural) poverty in the US correlate really strongly with underfunded, badly administered, low-quality public education. The reason that such disparities in educational quality are a bad thing is precisely because they tend, on average, to leave students far less academically prepared to succeed in any higher education, let alone in highly selective institutions. This is not to preclude that even the worst public school has a few students who excel utterly, and overcome all obstacles--and they're ardently pursued by selective universities. But on average, bad public schools (and even some parochial ones) leave most students less prepared for further education.
Is that a controversial claim here, or in dispute? It seems kind of obvious to me.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 9:52 AM
lower half of the income distribution
concentrations of (both urban and rural) poverty
If nowhere else, I see a gap in your argument here.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:07 AM
`lower half' is problematic in several ways --- in the US income distribution isn't even remotely close to normal.
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:18 AM
225: I'm not sure I buy that. I haven't taught at Harvard or any other equivalent US school. I have, however, taught at one of (if not the) top math/cs/engg schools in Canada. The applicant pool was very restricted. In some of the engineering classes, for example, *everybody* in the room would have at least near perfect high school record (say, >= 96 or 97 %), for whatever that is worth. Demographics are different, because there are no significant purely private schools in Canada. Tuition will be less than $10k/year for most programs, even at the top schools.
Even with this sort of incoming background, we had to repeat much of the core mathematics and science fundamentals because high schools are uneven, and high school curriculum are, to be frank, fairly weak. Even many of the `best' ones.
If you take a bright but underprepared and underpriveleged kid and stick them in this environment, they'll do just fine so long as they aren't afraid of work.
The real difference here is more subtle. As far as I can see, the main difference is in whether or not the student has to (or chooses to) work an outside job. Even a very bright kid will have difficulty keeping up in this case. If you are doing a serious (hence honors, at most schools) technical undergraduate program in math, science, or engineering (I can't speak to other areas), unless you are incredibly bright or well prepared or both you should probably be looking at something like 100+ hr/week average workload. More for some terms, certainly. Trying to fit this in on top of a full time job? Madness. The main thing that privilege seems to gain the `rich kids' is not a better high school education, it is the time to devote to undergraduate studies, and freedom from debt afterwards. Of course, they can also coast through an easy degree if they choose, and not worry too much about the future. The same isn't true of an underpriveleged student.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:34 AM
Burke's gesturing at well-known arguments, not making a formal presentation. Are people arguing that there isn't a correlation between income and educational preparation, causes unspecified? Are people saying that admissions committees aren't aware of the various disputes regarding this and other descriptions of the purported pool for highly selective institutions? Or are we saying that the committees know that they're working with a bad description, don't care, but feel obligated to pretend to care? Per above comments, I'm fairly willing to believe the last.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:36 AM
I grew up small town upper middle class with a weak public school. I had lots and lots of supplements and enrichment but was weak in foreign languages and science, and it hurt my school career.
A big problem is that kids from elite HSs tend to work very hard in HS and then party more in college. Kids trying to catch up couldn't do the partying, partly because they're already behind and partly because one reason they're behind might be the habit of partying. And on top of theis, as in my son's case, there'd be a problem because the other kids have cars, more pocket money, etc.
So in many ways it would be best to have a quality upward-mobile second-chance school with mostly sharp upward-mobile second-chance kids.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:37 AM
I dug up some numbers (HTML display of long pdf, pdf here). At the top tier of selectivity, 3% of students came from the bottom quartile of socio-economic status, and they may be affected by concentrated poverty. 6% of students came from the second quartile of socio-economic status, and I'm doubting that concentrated poverty explains much of that.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:38 AM
That's table 1.1 on p. 69. Tim at 230, I doubt that those effects are enough to explain the 6% number, as opposed to kids not being able to afford the school or getting shunted out in some other way. And if that's the argument Burke is gesturing at, then talking about concentrated poverty and charity cases confuses the issue.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:44 AM
230: I think there is a lot of pressure to pay lip service to meritocratic methods.
One of the purposes of many `elite' high schools is to get less fundamentally capable (intelligent/industrious/whatever) students from priveleged backgrounds into top schools. One way to do this is to give them a very good education. Perhaps an easier way to do this is to train them to test well.
I guess at the bottom of this is the role the university sees for itself. How well served would the university be for a serious search for only the `best' , scholastically, potential students?
JE makes a good point that for many less priveleged (than the norm at whatever school) students, problems are less likely to be scholastic than social. This may not matter to you much if you are earnestly trying to bootstrap a family out of poverty, but it isn't going to be an easy ride.
Posted by soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:49 AM
RE 41
I was suprised to learn that my college Johns Hopkins preferablly admits people who can pay the full tuition. There is a pool of admittees who they don't look at ability to pay but when they run low on aid money they just start admitting rich kids.
Posted by joe o | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:51 AM
233: I'm not sure how well the paper you reference speaks to the issues here: "There are 146 four-year colleges in [the top-tier] category and approximately 170,000 students enroll as freshmen at these institutions each year." If Cala, for example, was shut out of the top 146 schools in the country, I'll give you a sexual experience the likes of which you can only just barely imagine.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:52 AM
Are people arguing that there isn't a correlation between income and educational preparation, causes unspecified?
Not at all. It's just that when we talk about the sort that might be put off by early decision or the high cost of college education, we're not necessarily talking about problematic districts or the bottom quartile. We're talking about anyone whose college decision might depend on the financial aid package. Anyone who can't pay the sticker price of roughly $50K, or can't be confident that they can pay.
And that doesn't imply that the student in question is underprepared, or at a poor district, or can't do well in math and science. It just means that their parents make $40K a year instead of $130K a year. In many areas of the country you can be at a reasonably decent public school and in an area with a reasonably low cost of living. You won't be comfortable checking a box that says 'I want to go to Brown and pay my own way', but your kid might be prepared just fine.
So what I'm rejecting is not the link between poverty and school performance, but that not having $50K on hand to pay for college means that you're automatically in an impoverished district.
---
TB, I haven't addressed your minimal qualification scheme at all, so nothing I've said objects to it. I do think the system would be hard to implement without a national way of gauging a high school student's preparation; an A average from one school isn't the same as an A from another.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:53 AM
I don't agree with much of what Burke has written here, but I do agree with his point about the damage that admitting students who are significantly underqualified but for their diversity hook can do. I had a classmate who was American Indian and whose mother was on welfare. He got into a lot of trouble both non-academic and academic. I do not think he was well served by going to Harvard, but Harvard got to increase its minority quota.
I definitely believe that Early Action affects the process in ways that are pernicious, and it isn't just poor kids who are affected. Exeter and other selective prep schools encourage their kids to make decisions earlier, because they want to maximize the total number fo Ivy admits that they get.
Because of yield considerations, Harvard's Early Action can effectively be binding. Other Ivies knew that you had been admitted to Harvard and were often less likely to admit you for that reason.
Prep school college counselors can tell you that it really does matter if you have an on-campus interview with an admissions officer in addition to your alum interview.
I considered 6 schools, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Bryn Mawr, Smith and Wellesley. I'm sure that early action affected me. I was number 1 in my class in a lower-tier St. Grotelsex school in a weak year, but my SATs were not particularly good. I applied early to Yale and got in. I had a very good interview at Yale and talked about my friend who had just finished her Freshman year and how much she enjoyed directed studies with an admissions officer who remembered my friend. (She had also gotten into Harvard. Her numbers were superb, and her father was an alum of both the college and GSAS.) The alumnus who interviewed me was a professor at U Mass Lowell, and he was pretty clear that he was going to recommend me, snd the secretary in the college counseling office told me how glad he was when he was told that I'd been admitted. He also mentioned that only once had someone he had panned been admitted, and that was because the kid was a hockey player.
My Harvard alum interview was awful, because the interview belittled my interests, e.g., historic preservation. He also said taht it was much harder for someone from Massachusetts to get in. My parenst were living in upstate New York, but they don't need more applicants from New York to improve their geographic diversity. My on-campus interview was a fiasco. I actually said something about wanting to take real science classes rather than Core courses. Harvard also asked what you wanted to concentrate in and how you thought that related to your career plans. I said that I was considering Economics and thought that might suit me for a career on Wall Street and that I was also interested in Classics and thought that that might prepare me for teaching, but mostly I wanted to write, "I'm 17; why do you expect me to know what career I want to pursue?" I was woefully naive about how an admissions officer might view those answers.
At boarding schools they make sure that you get your applications into the college counseling office at least a month before they're due. If you get them in even earlier than the internal deadline, the secretary checks them for typos. Once I got into Yale, I phoned the office, and I was encouraged to consider whether I wanted to apply to other schools. My parents didn't have much money, but I didn't have to worry about financial aid for the first couple of years, because I had a small trust fund.
I chose to apply to Harvard, Princeton and Wellesley. Sometime in January or February we were asked to rank our schools so that our counselor could stress how enthusiastic we were about a particular school.
I was accepted by Wellesley and rejected by Princeton. I'm pretty sure that my college counselor told Princeton to reject me so that another kid would have a better shot at admission. One guy who went to Brown was wait-listed. I was waitlisted at Harvard. I'm pretty sure that my early-admit to Yale to harmed my chances. Taht and the fact, that Harvard was basing its decision on my first set of SAT scores which were considerably lower than my final set.
I did not, in any meaningful sense, deserve to get into Harvard. The waitlist is where most of the gaming of the system occurs--even more than in the earl-action process. Having already handed out all of their aid packages, schools want to admit only those students who can pay full freight. They also want to increase their yields, so they only admit people who promise that they will come. I'm pretty sure that they use those people in their yield numbers but don't include their SAT scores in their average SAT listing. There are also things that a good college counselor can tell you, like, for example, that you should get someone like a coach or a chaplain to write an extra recommendation, testifying to your intangible qualities and that you should write a letter expressing your interest. You should also plan to make an extra trip to the school. I did all those things.
Most school cousnelros deal with specific admissions officers, although I believe that Boston Latin's counselors deals with Dean Fitz/sim/mons.
I was a legacy at Harvard. This did not show up on my application, because neither of my parents went there, but my maternal grandfather did. So did hsi father and father-in-law and six previous generations did going back to Nicholas Sever in 1701. They were, however, I am sure, made aware of this when my grandmother's lawyer who had given a couple of million dollars to Harvard Law School and raised a ton of money for the place, phoned Dean Fitz/sim/mons and asked him to look at my application again. (He loves Harvard and thinks it got him, a poor Irish Catholic, everything he has today.) My father asked him to do that. I didn't know that he was planning to do that. I don't think I would have wanted to know that.
I also arranged to meet with a couple of members of teh Classics department, G. Na/gy and a Junior professor and to attend a Greek class. The Junior professor also wrote a letter on my behalf. That admissions committee was hit with a sledgehammer.
I used to feel really guilty about this. I still feel somewhat guilty. I felt really guilty when I applied to study Renaissance History and Literature, because I felt that I had been admitted as a Classics concentrator and owed it to the department to concentrate in Classics. It turned out that that's what I wanted to do anyway, but there was a time when I felt that I was morally obligated to do it.
I feel less guilty about all of this than I used to, because, at some point I realized that, despite having a rather privileged background in a lot of ways, having a mother who was as mentally ill as mine was meant that I did have a lot to overcome. I also realized that I provided a certain sort of diversity. I'm genuinely humble, and, I think, rather more decent than a lot of people admitted to Harvard. I may even have put somethign along those lines in my letter. I wrote it rather quickly and was passionate when I wrote it. My father thought that it was over the top, but my college counselor thought it was who I really was and that I shoudl send it. I talked about my love of languages and literature, and then I said that I recognized that I was basically just a bright, diligent kid. My final line was pretty obnoxious in its phrasing, though not untrue and not materially different from what I just wrote above: "By admitting me Harvard does not gain a star pianist or a football player, but I do care deeply about humanity and want to give something back to it, and that seems to me to be an icnreasingly rare characteristic.
I think my experiences allowed me to be more compassionate, and none of that stuff would have been obvious from my application. In fact, the family history of mental illness might actually have hurt me, sicne Harvard used to screen its applications to try to weed out fragile people who might need mental health care. I think that's wrong, and I think that my presence there and my degree from them may some day make humane tratment of students and applicants with psychiatric illnesses more likely. But it would be a real stretch to say that I deserved to be there over thousands of applicants who got rejected.
I'm not a natural gamer. I've never done it succesfully since. In a weird way i wonder whether Harvard doesn't want to select for gamers, despite its protestations to the contrary. People who know how to game the college admissions process may be very good at gaming the rest of life and turn out to be succesful graduates who will make Harvard look good and give it lots of money.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:58 AM
232: the real numbers are almost certainly worse. My bet is that a fair proportion of the 9% in the bottom half have some elite connections (like the missionary family mentioned above). When my son started looking at colleges, I was economically toward the bottom, but I knew a few people and generally had an understanding of how the game was played.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 10:59 AM
So what I'm rejecting is not the link between poverty and school performance, but that not having $50K on hand to pay for college means that you're automatically in an impoverished district.
I think Burke's suggesting that the correlation is not limited to impoverished districts. If he's not, I am. None of which speaks to any individual case, or even clusters of individuals within a school or system. And, of course, he's quite explicit that this isn't a function of some lack of intelligence on the part of the students at issue. It's not clear to me that Burke's arguing in favor or ED or even EA anymore; if he is, I don't really get that.
I really think that Burke is arguing something slightly different than everyone else here.
I do think the system would be hard to implement without a national way of gauging a high school student's preparation; an A average from one school isn't the same as an A from another.
Have a much more difficult, less ludicrous, SAT, and base it purely on that. I'm pretty sure that there are many countries that structure educational opportunities in just this way.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:01 AM
Switching from Classics to Renaissance seems unproblematic. The Renaissance people should be delighted, and the Classics people have to be used to rejection by now.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:04 AM
Cala, most selective admissions offices have a really deep institutional knowledge of the relative difficulty or quality of a very large number of high schools, so I think if we charged them with the task of formally standardizing the relative value of a 4.0 average at different schools, with some kind of sliding scale, they could probably do so. At least that's what my colleague who advocates the random admission scheme observes, and I think he's largely right that it's possible.
Matt, I'll completely accept the greater precision of your point, that there's a difference between the lowest quartile and the middle quartile on these issues, and that the small percentage of students in that middle quartile in the applicant pool is not just or even primarily explicable due to access to poor academic preparation.
BTW, I am really just gesturing to discussions that I feel like I've been having pretty much for the last twelve years here that do run somewhat deeper, so I apologize if I am sometimes cutting to the chase in terms of where conversations about the inequity of admissions and selectivity tend to eventually head in their implications.
If I can compound that failing on my part, I'll throw in yet another perennial discussion that tends to come up in this kind of terrain, one that I think John Emerson is pointing to, which is: are some of the kids who are not in that selective applicant pool doing a really smart thing by avoiding it that has nothing to do with either a cost barrier or a mystique that keeps them from applying? Are they potentially going to gain a bigger economic payoff from being a top student at a school which is much more consciously and narrowly pre-professional as opposed to a relatively obscure if highly selective private college or university where a lot of the students are the bohemian children of professionals intent on smashing the state and confronting upper-middle-class privilege while studying critical theory, etc.? I know that the economic value of the word "Harvard " on your degree is substantial whether you're Einstein or the village idiot, but I'm less clear that "Amherst" or "Johns Hopkins" or "Oberlin" or "Brown" necessarily translate consistently to bucks regardless of what you actually did as a student.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:10 AM
238: That's a fascinating story. And I think your last sentence is spot on. It seems like a large part of the difference between Harvard and (say) Swarthmore must be that the rich connected kids go to Harvard while the crazy-smart kids go to Swarthmore. At least in terms of walking on to I-banking jobs or good law schools or what have you.
231: So in many ways it would be best to have a quality upward-mobile second-chance school with mostly sharp upward-mobile second-chance kids.
Surely there is one of these out there? The really good state schools, maybe? UMD/UW/UC Berkeley/UMich/UT?
Posted by Jake | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:10 AM
In 1996, when I applied to schools, most of the top-tier did not meet 100% of students' financial need. I did not therefore apply anywhere with an early decision program that did not promise to meet 100% of students financial need. This excluded, in 1996, most of the Ivy League.
I ended up at a top-tier school on academic scholarship. And yes, I did just fine. But there's a sense in which I was extraordinarily lucky. I could have gotten into my school, probably, with a lower S.A.T. score and lower grades; my best friends at college did. But then I wouldn't have received funding as they didn't go need-based until 1998. For me, that would have meant not a choice among top schools, but probably commuting to Pitt, since going into $100K in debt wouldn't make sense. I'm very aware of how close it all came to not happening for me and that kids with more money were in much better shape to the tune of 200 SAT points wriggle room.
Now, most schools meet 100% of need now. But '100% of need' doesn't mean 'college is affordable.' Still not enough for my sisters, going through it now, to check the early decision box. And if admission is skewed that way (since checking the box means you're more enthusiastic, a real Harvard man), then you're potentially ignoring a kid with top scores and adequate preparation simply because he can't commit to a large tuition bill. This seems to be deeply fucked up for a school that is purporting to be more than a finishing school.
My point is that you don't have to go as far as 'these kids wouldn't survive at an elite school anyway' in order to see problems with it. Imagine the fun a talented kid with a truly problematic district has.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:11 AM
Reading about the college admissions process sometimes makes me astonished that I did as well as I did in it, considering that my parents did not understand it at all, my custodial parent had an income of 12k to report on his taxes my senior year, and I was flaky and didn't really treat it seriously. I'm lucky, as I said before, that I had a college counselor who understood how things worked and expected me to go somewhere 1337, because if I hadn't moved into that school district, I never would have known the money was there for me.
I seriously think I got into college by including in my admissions packet a story I wrote for my high school newspaper about homophobia at my high school and some poems I wrote about sex and literature. I am quirky and sensitive, I advertised, love me. And I happened to apply to some schools that would, indeed, love me for that. But it seems odd to me somehow that I managed to pull it off by being quirky and sensitive.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:16 AM
There's a good book, btw, about the interior of the admissions process at Wesleyan: The Gatekeepers. Among other things, it would confirm Bostoniangirl's suspicions that counselors at prep schools coordinate their admits to selective institutions. So yes, this is a corrupt process that favors the elite in many ways. I guess I just think that even if you somehow got rid of a lot of the clubby arcana including EA/ED, the basic distributions of income-to-applicant pool in the US are going to stay somewhat the same, for a lot of complex reasons. Price is one of them, but that has its most devastating impact on qualified students of middling means rather than people below or near the poverty line, for whom almost all of these institutions will pick up the tab. Sending a kid to a selective institution if you're a lower middle-class to middle-class family, in contrast, makes a huge difference in the ability of parents to accumulate in the second half of their working lives.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:17 AM
I haven't read the whole thread but I just wanted to comment on Cala's: "For me, that would have meant not a choice among top schools, but probably commuting to Pitt"
But is commuting to Pitt a bad thing? I thought we decided on the elementary school thread the other day that it wasn't. ("Commuting to Pitt" is, metaphorically speaking, exactly what I did. I'm still unclear whether or not it hurt me.)
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:20 AM
I should probably mention that I was rejected from Harvard, and after reading 238, I'm certain that it was because I was underprepared and an academic charity case. (The snark is directed at Harvard, not at BG.) I hadn't prepared a cadre of grandmothers at all.
Matt, I'll completely accept the greater precision of your point, that there's a difference between the lowest quartile and the middle quartile on these issues, and that the small percentage of students in that middle quartile in the applicant pool is not just or even primarily explicable due to access to poor academic preparation.
This was pretty much my only point about 'making Harvard look like middle America.' We seemed to jump from 'might have problems paying' to 'underprepared' and that didn't seem like the right explanation for the entire middle class.
TB, SCMTim, if they find a way to standardize it, I'd be all for it. Schools do something similar for medical school and/or residency entrances where everyone is 'matched' to where they will go. Seems to work there.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:25 AM
Reed is somewhat like Swarthmore, and I think that both places would be hellholes for anyone who did not have a pretty good grounding AND a fierce committment to begin with. In fact, Reed had about a freshman 40% graduation rate when I was there, and was proud of it. (I did not graduate from there).
If I personally knew a very bright kid with a bad foundation who was capable of committment, I'd encourage him to start at a junior college, move to a state school, and aim for the best grad school possible.
In fact, that actually happened. The kid did well in JC and then went to Israel where he's in the army after some time in college there. The army part wasn't my idea, but success in the JC was very good for him.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:25 AM
If I were trying to educate more lower-half kids, I'd be looking for people about 25-30 he were ready to "get serious". The system is keyed to 18-year-olds, and while well-off families can give a kid a second chance, poorer families usually can't.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:28 AM
247: Discussions about this tend towards floppiness because no one is quite clear on most of the terms or goals being discussed. Did you hurt yourself? Doubt it, particularly if you went on to grad school (which, for some reason, I thought you did). Perhaps more accurately, I'm not sure there's any easy-peasy way to determine the answer.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:31 AM
Brock, I likely wouldn't be in my graduate program, since I relied on a contact that I met in undergrad to get here. I probably also would be the bitterest person in the world since it would have meant, for all intents and purposes, that I could have had fun in high school, slacked, made friends, been allowed to talk on the phone and not been an outcast with exactly the same payoff as busting my ass.
Oh, and because of Pitt's lack of financial aid, I would be in greater debt than I am now.
Are there worse things that not being an academic? Of course. Would I be okay? Probably. Might even be happier.
Should it be the decision of someone else to decide that I really don't need to go to their school because I'm not Their Kind? Fair enough; just give up the pretense that they're educating the superbright and talented then and call themselves the Finishing School for Twats. Then I can get hired by top jobs because their degree will say Twat.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-13-06 11:34 AM
Hmm, I'm not sure where my HS fits in after reading 238 and others- wealthy suburban NY public school, which is supposed to be a disadvantage in terms of diversity points. However, our guidance department was nothing like what BG described- they were entirely clueless, I doubt they even knew the phone number of various admissions departments. I think this combination worked out well in the end- most of the people from my school would have been the slacker rich kids at a lot of Ivies, so it's a good thing they were a) were harmed by what HS they went to but b) did not have the connections or "sledgehammer" capabilities of private prep schools.