We should probably get this sorted out before 2023 when it will be important for most people again.

Stupid phone.

I think it's a disastrous policy that will sharply increase inequality in educational outcomes. As a teenager, I would have definitely been fucked over by the change. I was poor, I didn't have parents who could help me with homework or be role models for how to be a student. I didn't know how to make myself appealing as a candidate on paper or how to maximize the admissions process. (I didn't do "optional" interviews, because I was nervous, and I was told later I didn't get into at least one school because they regarded this as a negative sign.) What I did have was the SAT. My home life was chaos, and I sometimes didn't have enough to eat (I grew an inch in college because the meal plan food was more regular than what I got at home). But put me in a room where I all I have to do is think for a couple of hours, and I can stand out.

I suspect what we are going to see is first-generation students disappear from colleges, particularly Asian immigrants (since they will know even less than I did about how the game was played). The middle class will do great whose parents went to college will do great, because now the college admissions process can rely 100% on cultural capital.

When I was first a teacher as a grad student, the local school let some Asian kids sit in on my calculus class. One of them was extraordinary -- she was the best student in the class. It wasn't until 2/3 of the way through the semester when I called on her in class that I found out she didn't speak English very well, and was getting by just looking at the symbols. At the time, she wasn't even planning on going to college. I convinced her to apply, and then wrote a recommendation letter that got her admitted to the school I was at, which she attended the next year. I graduated, so I lost contact with her after that.

She lucked out, because she met me and could serve as the source of an inspiring anecdote I tell years later. But there are going to be thousands and thousands of other kids, who don't get that lucky break, who at least had the SATs. Now that the SATs are gone, what's left? Plucky high school teachers standing up for one kid a year? Janitors solving problems on the blackboard?

I'm someone who would somewhat benefit from a system that relied on cultural capital.

That said, there was somebody who got into grad school in Chemistry in my husband's lab despite having poor marks as an undergraduate, because she was not good at exams. The university rejected her initially, but then the big name professor advocated pretty hard. They made her take certain classes over and get a specific grade, and the. They let her in. MSc and PhD admissions are different in Canada, but she did well, published some work and works in industry now. The most brilliant person ever, maybe not, but she loves being a chemist and she found a way to do it despite not being good at tests.

I think the bigger issue is the problem with not having enough 2nd option routes to get to where you want to go if the first one does not work out.

3: There's that concern about the extraordinary students who can be detected by a mass exam like that, but there's an overwhelming pool of talent that is not detected by these tests and needs relationships and nurturing to come out and thrive. Basically there are a ton of students who need resource intensive time and caring, and they may get plenty of love and support at home (or they may not) but it's not geared towards academic performance.

There's no real shortcut besides investing time and energy, so removing standardized tests is probably neutral. BUT, investing time and energy into these students will surely capture and identify the brilliant students of Walt's ilk.

But, this being America, time and attention will realistically not be invested except in those who need it least. And those who could have cleared the SAT without the attention will be that much more fuked.

But since we're clearly not going to do that, what good does getting rid of tests do?

They might even forget how to spell swears.

Best case scenario, this benefits hardworking 4.0 students from school districts that are delivering a terrible education. My understanding is these students have a mixed track record at college: some of them have good enough habits/discipline/talent to overcome the underpreparation, and others flounder and fail out, saddled with debt. But it's a highly sympathetic group of young adults, and I suspect this is the group that colleges want to benefit by killing the SAT.

But they could just admit those students now. It doesn't require getting rid of a different piece of evidence.

So, only use the SAT in the case where it's an extreme positive aberration compared to the rest of the student's performance? I guess that's fine? What about using the 10th grade PSAT scores to detect that, since it's also a mostly universal test, and wouldn't require quite the massive infrastructure and leaching of the SAT/ACT?

I got free college just for my contribution to the average SAT score of the school, but obviously I'm great to that was justice.

Anyway, I should have taken a prep course but they didn't exist in my town.

I took a prep course but I resented it.

I bought a prep book (at Waldenbooks) and practiced on my own.

I think my parents bought me a prep book and I ignored it.

My closest homeland equivalent was the school-leaving exams. Past papers were published as free supplements in the newspaper. I picked up the free newspapers on my own, then didn't practice.

I took it 3 times, because that's what my school had us do. We normally had classes Saturday mornings and we all shuffled in and took the SAT. I did so much better more easily on the achievement tests. I also should have taken a test prep class. But without much studying, my scores went up quite a bit each time I took it which makes me think that the idea that this measures pure aptitude is bull shit.

I read prep books from our local public library, most of them were worthless but the Princeton Review one was really essential (for stuff like when you should guess, and how to use whether the question is early or late in the section to inform which answer to guess).

The strong signature for math majors is very high scores on *both* sections of the SAT combined with relatively low GPAs, so this may have a big impact specifically on math. (There was a study out of Oregon and the only major with higher verbal SAT scores than math majors was Spanish majors.)

There needs to be ways for kids with bad grades to get into good colleges, and SAT scores help with that. Some us us were plenty smart but didn't have very many fucks to give in high school.

True love waits.

19: My verbal was always higher than math.

20: what if you took time off, got a job, went to community college for a bit and then went to 4year institution, like Sifu did?

The penalty for guessing wrong was lame. It also gives a weird message. Don't even try if you aren't sure.

I still think checking for minimum qualification (standardized tests or coursework or both) and then doing an affirmative-action lottery of everyone qualified would be better than any system now or soon to be in existence.

I thought the SAT "penalty" for guessing was at a level of "if you guess randomly, your score will on average be unchanged" (as opposed to, e.g. the AMC math competition exams, where guessing randomly would genuinely drop your score). Did this change at some point?

Student grades are largely a factor of parent involvement -- the more motivated the parent (and parental motivation is in turn highly correlated with the parents' socioeconomic status, job, and own educational background), the better the student grades. So, focusing on grades to the exclusion of SAT/ACTs will advantage students who are privileged in a slightly different way -- more zip-code-diverse, but the ones with the benefit of savvy parents. The losers will be those kids like Walt, or a lot of my friends in high school, who tended to come from immigrant families and/or had parents who had not themselves gone to college. A couple of my best friends were ESL and therefore had shitty grades, but their test scores enabled them to get into pretty good schools.

23 is the best answer.

24 is right, 5 answers and -1/4 point for each wrong so that if you guess randomly you average out to 0. The advice was if you can eliminate just one answer statistically you'd come out ahead from guessing among the remaining. Although if you have to guess enough to sufficiently reduce your variance to have that come into play in any robust manner you're probably not doing great anyway.
I got identical scores on PSAT and SAT.
Oldest kid takes PSAT this fall and we got him a practice book because he's smart but doesn't do well in test situations due to OCD. He has accommodation of extra time on most tests but not sure he gets it for SAT- he doesn't get it for AP.

Looks like they eliminated the guessing penalty in 2016 on the general test but still have it for subject tests. Pampered kids these days. I took it pre-recentering which no one even knows about any more.

This would have screwed me, but tests are my strength. I suspect it will be bad for my students, who can use a stellar GRE to get a second look from grad schools who would overlook them otherwise. But I don't have a sense of whether it's a good change overall with respect to equity.

20: that route works for some but mostly means six years and no degree.

Also, I'm reminded of an area charter school that allegedly prohibited its teachers from giving grades lower than a B (or maybe even lower than an A? I can't remember for certain), because it wanted to get all of its graduates into four-year institutions. So, look out for more of that, from charters and private schools.

11: You'd have to offer the PSAT universally--I know that I skipped it because it said "practice" right in the title, and I didn't want to take a test to practice taking a test a year later. I was uninformed about scholarships, etc. tied to the PSAT. My grandmother gave me an SAT book to read -- it did a good job of identifying the elements noted in 19, and had a bunch of vocabulary drills, etc. I read it through, but didn't study it -- and even though I went to the wealthy school in town, SAT prep wasn't a thing that anyone I knew talked about, or that kept them from gaming on weekends.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of elite institutions have school-specific acceptable grades. Basically, Harvard thinks a 93 average from Andover is worth more than a 5.0 from a lot of other places, where a 5.0 is achievable because they took extra classes or something.

I suppose that people could voluntarily take the tests if they are extra good a5 them.

32 is right, for somewhere like Harvard and somewhere like Andover (or TJ or Maimonides or Bronx Science etc.) they're just going off class rank and letters anyway. I'd guess the same thing is true for state flagships and many in-state schools.

What's less clear to me is how they make decisions for situations where a given high school gets one acceptance every 5 years, or for out-of-state applicants. For Harvard in the former case maybe they're just going off stuff like "Westinghouse science talent search semifinalist" anyway, but for slightly less selective schools I just don't know how they'll make that kind of decision. For example, my whole county usually got around 1 Harvard acceptance per year. I'm not sure how much of a role SAT scores played in that.

I'm completely skeptical that this will do anything at all in terms of equity. Yes SAT scores reflect privileged upbringings, but I'm not aware of anything saying that they do so *more* than other measurements, it's just that it's easier to quantify the effect for SAT scores.

27.1: Right, your goal is to eliminate one or two answers and then guess. Often there's easy ways to rule out an answer (say the sign is wrong, or it's not the right part of speech, or it's an offensive stereotype). If you can't rule out answers then you need to remember that questions early in the section are "easy" and questions late in the section are "hard" measured by how many people got them (many of whom have no idea what's going on!). So, for example, early in a math section the answer is likely to be the sum, product, or difference of two obvious numbers in the question, while late in the section you can immediately rule out any answer that's the sum of two numbers in the question.

This is a topic I know a fair amount about. I want to associate myself with just about everything Heebie has said in this thread.

In particular, this: "Best case scenario, this benefits hardworking 4.0 students from school districts that are delivering a terrible education. My understanding is these students have a mixed track record at college: some of them have good enough habits/discipline/talent to overcome the underpreparation, and others flounder and fail out, saddled with debt. But it's a highly sympathetic group of young adults, and I suspect this is the group that colleges want to benefit by killing the SAT." The thing is, all students from quote-unquote non-traditional backgrounds have mixed track records in college, on average. But the hardworking 4.0 students have better records than do the students from the same schools with worse grades but higher SATs.

And to Walt's example: Yes, there are some students who obtain access due to the SAT who wouldn't otherwise. But there are also students on the other side, the hardworking 4.0 students who don't have great SAT scores. They would benefit from individualized nurturing, but in many cases even without it they have teachers and counselors who would help them get into good schools if they had a shot. But under the current system those teachers and counselors know that they don't have a shot and we never hear about them. That group outnumbers the high-SAT one-offs, and as above does better in college.

A couple of useful links: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~jrothst/otherwriting/UC_regents_testimony_05212020.pdf, https://edpolicyinca.org/newsroom/uc-regents-should-consider-all-evidence-and-options-decision-admissions-policy

SATs are deeply flawed measures of merit, but so are grades. Everything sucks. There is no hope.

Nonsense. Charles Grodin knows the answer. We just have to ask him.

35: If you're not giving them a shot now, I predict you won't give them a shot later, either. Literally nothing is stopping you from giving them a shot now.

Real question: why do we assume that college grades are a valid indicator of which kids deserved to get into colleges? If the key problem is "both grades and standardized tests in high school are problematic metrics", do we have evidence that college magically resolves it? What if my grades kinda sucked but I aced the GREs?

You can go to Cornell, but only in the lesser ranked areas.

32: Yes, did not mean to leave off elite public schools.

But I think there is a difference between public institutions and private ones. Getting into Cal Berkeley for law school depends almost entirely on LSAT and GPA. Maybe in the middle, they might look at SES or race, but Yale and Harvard and NYU are less wedded to the numbers.

This is good for people who work for a few years and take the LSAT and have a reason to go to Yale and get in. Less good when the intangibles like "leadership material" is strongly correlated with extra-curricular activities and not needing to work during school or upper middle class norms.

34: I deeply resent the need to play those kinds of games on standardized tests. My arbitrary authority issues, let me show them to you.

I did have a classmate whose father was head of research at Bell labs. My classmate was a good student I. High school, debate team, studied Japanese, summa cum lauds and went to law school. Couldn't do math or science to save his life. His brother was a goof off in school and never had great grades. He went to the University of Washington and did math or physics and did great. I guess he just wasn't willing to deal with high school bill shit.

I'm sure everyone here knows this well, but the underlying problem here is the wildly inegalitarian nature of the US higher education system combined with its societal function as a gatekeeper to the middle class. Given that context, which would be really hard to change, any system of further gatekeeping for entrance is going to be both necessary and problematic.

The whole system is fucked but you can't not play the game. Although we try to avoid the most egregious behaviors like college admissions consultants or moving to the suburbs "for the schools" and other things for which Loomis often calls out middle class whites who think of themselves as liberal.

Real question: why do we assume that college grades are a valid indicator of which kids deserved to get into colleges? If the key problem is "both grades and standardized tests in high school are problematic metrics", do we have evidence that college magically resolves it? What if my grades kinda sucked but I aced the GREs?

Probably there's nothing that happens in a person's life that isn't affected by their upbringing and socioeconomic status, so in that sense even if you were to look at a person's college grades, grad school performance if any, and their entire career, it would still be problematic to say in hindsight whether they deserved to be admitted to a highly selective college.

Arguably, a person's college grades at least tell you something about whether they were able to get some value out of being in college, and thus whether admitting them was a productive use of the college's resources. At least if they flunked out, perhaps admitting them wasn't the best decision. But even that is deeply problematic, because maybe they just needed some type of support that the institution they were attending didn't provide.

The more I think about this, the more I find myself agreeing with 23.

Maybe we should try something wild, like improving the quality the schools most kids attend so that maybe we don't have to fight so hard over scarce spots in a relative handful of schools. (Yes, I know a lot of it is about elite credentialing rather than actual quality, but a lot isn't, too.)

Or increasing the number of opportunities - good universities and jobs paying reasonably well without a college degree.

Or compressing wealth and power to such a narrow elite that to secure food, children will fight other children to the death to amuse the wealthy.

The true Hunger Games were the friends we met along the way.

49 is completely right.

49.last: Call me an idealist, but I still believe that education is about more than getting a decent job. That doesn't have to include college, and lord knows we do a shit job of educating weak students at all levels, but we really ought to try harder than we do.

One alternative approach, which Arizona State takes, is to just accept everybody (as long as their check clears).

53: Absolutely. But if getting a decent job wasn't so completely dependent on a college education, then there might be more time and space for people who wanted the education and not just a job to avail themselves of the opportunities in for a academic settings.

29 I suspect it will be bad for my students, who can use a stellar GRE to get a second look from grad schools who would overlook them otherwise.

I think this is right. Unfortunately, a lot of people have decided that "the data proves" that the GRE is racist and sexist and has to be abandoned in favor of recommendation letters, which are somehow supposed to be magically free of human bias.

56: But there's also a movement to get rid of recommendation letters too! Of course they are racist and sexist, but everything is racist and sexist and you need to make decisions somehow.

I feel like there's a tendency among the "I just learned about racism two years ago I tweet about it a lot and have a BLM sign but have never been in a Black majority space for an hour of my life"-types to glibly decide that there's a racist and non-racist answer to each question, when really racism is everywhere and all decisions have problems.

There's also a lot of "when all you have is a hammer" thinking where getting rid of GREs is something visible that higher levels can decide on. Who cares if it actually does anything, it looks like it's doing something. The actual work that makes a difference (eg successfully advising minority phd students) isn't easily done by chairs and deans.

Have you tried talking to graduate students? So stressful.

57: In my department, recommendation letters are the gold standard for admissions, hiring, and promotion, and student evaluations are the gold standard for judging teaching quality. It would be nice if the movement to get rid of them reached us, but so far those are sacred (despite overwhelming evidence that asking students to judge the quality of teaching is a terrible idea).

People are really enthusiastic about the importance of the lack of correlation between GRE scores and graduate school success, despite the fact that "graduate school success" is pretty hard to quantify and that looking for correlations in a sample of students who were selected on the basis of GRE scores is unambiguously bad science. But it's "data" and we are supposed to be data-driven people, so it can't be questioned.

I thought they were just looking for a way to admit more black students and fewer Asian students without saying so much.

There's a very close parallel in the move to get rid of student evaluations of teaching in making promotion and tenure (and performance evaluation) decisions. Yes, they're clearly biased against women and people of color. But that's not a reason to get rid of them if they're going to be replaced by something else (like, say, teaching evaluations by senior faculty) that is also biased!

At my institution, anyway, student evaluations have the benefit of being carried out by a group that is much less white and male than any other group of people in the university likely to do the job.

I have very strong feelings about student evaluations. Much of this was shaped by being on Rank & Tenure and realizing how worthless most forms of teaching assessment are. Many times, students wrote insightful comments that helped us get a better idea of what was going on - especially praise! It's hard to tell sometimes whether a teacher is basically clicking or not.

Bottom line: Student evaluations of instruction do not indicate the quality of instruction and do not measure student learning. They do an excellent job of measuring the student experience, and they need to be used strictly in that realm. Faculty members should use student evaluations as a springboard in their teaching statement, and say things like, "The student experience is X. However, I have Y pedagogical foundation for continuing to do things this way. I measure their learning by Z."

The other thing that I strongly believe is that a good teacher can have classroom problems, but it is mandatory that they be reflective and experimental in how they improve their classroom. If an instructor writes the following in their teaching statement, "I have a persistent problem with X in the classroom. I think the reasons are Y and Z. I've tried these things: A, B, C, and learned these things: D, E, and F. I continue to talk to colleagues and seek ideas to try, to continue to improve," then that is an A+ teacher! That is great.

The GRE always struck me the most ridiculous thing. A person has graduated from college, and chosen a particular field of study, and they are still being evaluated on the basis of a standardized test that measures a certain kind of general intelligence or maybe just skill at test-taking.

Of course I'm biased because test-taking is probably the one thing I am best at, and my GRE scores were the only reason I got into the University of Chicago graduate program.

I was absolutely slaughtered by the math subject GRE. I just hadn't had classes that covered the material, and I never explored math from books that I hadn't been taught in a class. Like, I might have gotten the 15% percentile or something tragically demoralizing.

Fortunately, I just used that to eliminate schools from my application list and there were still some leftover, and it all worked out fine. Aside from the fact that I was disastrously behind in graduate school for the same reasons and had to work extra hard to catch up, and felt extremely sad and isolated, and boy do I wish I could go back and give myself some advice about how to best to handle all that stuff. Sometimes I amuse myself by thinking how I would kill at grad school now. I'd knock everyone's socks off!

65.2 Starting law school just before I turned 30 did that for me. If I'd somehow been a diligent enough undergrad to finish in 4 years (assuming that magic wand from the other thread), and gone to law school at 21, I'd have floundered my way out of it sooner rather than later.

63: I don't have strong views about student evaluations. The comments are definitely useful, but at my institution they don't play any role in tenure, promotion, or performance evaluation, because they're not sent to the Chair/Dean.

What I do have strong views about is this: we've decided as an institution that we need to assess teaching for tenure, promotion, and performance evaluation (which at my institution matters in the sense that it strongly affects your annual pay increase). So we need a method for assessing teaching. Student evaluations aren't great as a tool, but the alternatives aren't great either, and I think the alternatives are likely particularly bad from the perspective of 'reducing bias', which is the single most common objection to student evaluations. (One extra worry is that I teach in a discipline that is very unlike math, and where what 'teaching effectiveness' even means is effectively impossible to operationalize without everyone hating everyone else.)

One solution would be to just stop assessing teaching for purpose tenure, promotion, and pay. I think that some of my colleagues would welcome this. But I hate the message that would send to our students about the value we place on teaching, and the incentives it would create. And it wouldn't reduce bias in T&P decisions-- how research is valued is also subject to bias. This is a hard problem to solve!

(62 was me. Being Prime Ministerial out of an overabundance of caution.)

Minivet's 23 for minimum-qualifications-plus-random-selection is, of course, exactly right.

Avoiding the college admissions & financing nightmare for the Infanta is a big reason why I have no desire to return to America. Everything about the way that elite colleges select students -- the curation of a cohort of excellence -- fills me with bitterness and resentful rage.

68: Yep. Funny to read about this as a non-American. We just got into schools based on our marks (apparently Canadian 80=A so I feel better now). And you applied to the local school. Sometimes people went to other provinces but your marks didn't matter, just how many loans you could get/how much your parents chipped it. I def could have gotten into any school in the country but choose maybe the worst? Because it was cheap and far from my parents. Turns out it was perfect for me - paying the last of the loans off this month!

I was resentful as hell about writing the GREs for my PhD when I already had a MSc and the score pretty much didn't matter. And I had to do a ton of classes.

Imagine you are you, you're 18, you enter the lottery, and it comes back "You don't get to go to college." What would you have done? Been fine with it?

Ever? or not the following fall? Is it a referendum on me in some way, or is it a random lottery?

My understanding of the lottery was that each college that a student wants to attend holds a lottery. The outcome wouldn't be "you don't get to go to college", but "you don't get to go to this college". Which is an outcome most people currently consider valid. For that matter, that's how my kid's elementary school did it: screening, then lottery (which we initially didn't get into but then got in when COVID scrambled everything and probably a lot of parents homeschooled but they're not getting that spot back).

Seems like a student who applied broadly should lottery in somewhere.

It's like rushing fraternities or sororities. Or when med students get placed in residencies. You get to say what you hope, and then you get what you get.

There are two different rhyming ends that I've heard to "you get what you get", for small children:

1. You get what you get, and you don't get upset.
2. You get what you get, and you don't throw a fit.

I think it's funny because one of them only rhymes if you have a southern accent. Both got used at the kids' daycare when they were little.

Drunk?

One set of my cousins had California ties which allowed them to be residents for college admissions purposes. Their Mom worked for USAID so they lived all over the world. Back when they were applying in the 80's you didn't apply to a specific UC campus, you just applied to the University of California, and then you were told which one you were going to.

I'm on the committee to assign faculty members to committees, and I sure as hell could use a good sorting algorithm right about now.

You're a commisar.

Don't turn around.

You know, Bright Eyes, the 80s were really into turning around. Right round, like a record player.

Someone could make a playlist of Turning Around songs, but I can't say whether it'd be worth it.

77: There are Sorting Hats available on Amazon.

74: The version locally is "You get what you get and you don't fuss a bit." Though I should note, my children grew up hearing that at daycare and "you get what you get and I don't give a shit" at home.

76 - ??? campuses have had separate admission decisions since forever, absolutely in the 1980s. there's a common app form, but you have to (and had to in the 80s) specify which campus(es) you are applying to. anyways i got in via the oddball program for local high school students to start early/concurrently enroll while serving out the last year of their hs sentence. my hs principal was tired of watching me dive off various disruptive rebellious cliffs out of sheer boredom. it worked reasonably well! the commuting time alone really cut into my time for dissolution & agitation!

You only get what you give.

It occurs to me that I do pronounce "get" as "git", but had to consciously retrain my self in college not to pronounce "milk" as "melk".

77. hungarian bipartite graph algorithm is evergreen

Don't you just put people you don't like on the shitty committees and people you do on the ones with power?

But I feel neutral-to-mildly-positive about nearly everyone!

When I applied to Cal in 1975, one submitted a single application but listed 3 preferences. Same for CSU, I think. It's a long time ago, and I'm really not sure, but I think I got accepted at Cal before the deadline for applying to CSU, so never did no.

(AIPMNB, I got accepted at Cal even before the end of the first semester of senior year, with a crappy GPA that would only get worse. Not even on SAT scores which were good but not stellar compared to you people, but because I apparently hit the automatic accept threshold with the SAT IIs [or whatever they're called]. The Great Straight Upward Path, as they put in in the Bardo. I was a shit student at Cal, and not a net addition to the community by any measure. I'm not saying I'm the best argument for getting rid of the policy, but I'm sure no argument for keeping it.)

65- No one at our school even pretended that the chemistry GRE mattered or that you needed to know what was on it. There were entire sections like analytical chemistry that weren't even offered in classes. I think I did about average and it had no effect on admissions anywhere. I don't even remember taking the general GRE or what score I got but I must have taken it at some point.

"the ones with power" ???
Have you ever met an academic committee?

I've been avoiding crowds.

Then you'll feel right at home at the meetings where there's no free food.

Boston temporarily changed the admission criteria for its magnet schools (aka exam schools) to allocate seats by zip code, resulting in more diversity but different thresholds for acceptance depending where you live. Of course the wealthy neighborhoods are pissed: "But many families, particularly those skilled at navigating the admissions process, are fuming."
Naturally, being Boston, there are already racist assholes calling this the "zip code class" and predicting that standards at the schools will be lowered to make sure minorities won't look bad. As usual don't read the comments.

96: I think their mental calculation is: can my kid get into Boston Latin or am I going to be paying for private school? Can I afford that or should we have moved to the suburbs? When I was a kid Boston Latin Academy wasn't really considered good. Is that desirable now? Because, basically people feel Boston English or whatever is beyond the pale."

84: Maybe what I was hearing third-hand was that the system had changed from what Charley knew.

When I was a kid Boston Latin Academy wasn't really considered good.

Because, basically people feel Boston English or whatever is beyond the pale.

I think the people you're talking about here were likely sending their kids to private school in any case.

But many families, particularly those skilled at navigating the admissions process

I've basically been doing just this for the past several months and it is HARD. Hard for me, who has the time and the doggedness. I feel like I am barely managing it and I can't imagine how any household without a person with the skills and time does it. A zip code based lottery would definitely be fairer.

I mostly hate talking to the other parents because I can't stand the striving mentality, but if you aren't obsessed and in frequent conversation with the parents a year or two above, it is super hard to figure out how to get your kid into a non-default school from scratch.

I know I must look exactly the same from the outside, but my motivations are different! I'm not motivated by his life achievement. I just want him not to be soul-crushingly bored.

***
I was part of a changed admissions process, for law school. They changed the admissions for my year (probably why I got in) and it was pretty clear. We even looked different in the halls: less well dressed and less put together. Apparently my year's first finals were so bad that they scrapped the new criteria by January and went back to their old. The teachers called us the "gentle" class, which, my friend pointed out, is how you talk about people with Down's Syndrome. I would be highly curious about some sort of longitudinal follow up. How did that class turn out as grown-up lawyers?

98: I had a comment that got deleted, but I think ithe attitude may have stemmed from Boston Latin being the historically girls school.

Also, a I knew some families where the bright but less brilliant went to private schools, and the ones who were ultimately more academically successful kids were sent to Boston Latin.

I've got a story about test scores and my son's application to college that I've wanted to share here for a while, and this seems like a good opportunity. It doesn't bother him when we've discussed it, but it's one I've felt guilty about for years. It's also one that says something about the contingent nature of academic success.

My son is a lot like me in many ways, a bright kid with a good memory who tests well, but who struggled with essay writing in high school. But we faced very different academic environments approaching college. Homework for me was almost entirely optional, and I mostly blew it off for all but one class where the teacher made it part of the grade. As soon as I got electives in high school, I stayed away from any English class with a heavy writing requirement, concentrating instead on literature classes where I could just read. And the SATs in my day were entirely multiple choice, with no essay section. As a result, I had a good high school GPA, and excellent SAT results, and got to go to an Ivy League college whose reputation has benefited me all my working life.

My son's academic experience was very different. Daily homework was an important part of the grade from an early age, and a constant struggle for our family. He was diagnosed with ADHD in second grade, and responded well to medication, but by the evening time when we had family time together, the medications were wearing off and needed to be out of his system before bed time so he could sleep. That made it hard for him to focus on homework during our time together. We insisted he do his own work. But nearly every evening, and at least one day per weekend during the school term, was spent with my wife or I sitting with him trying to keep him on task as he finished his homework. I feel like there wasn't a lot of time for him to just play and be a kid, and that so much of his childhood and our family time together was sacrificed to the Great God Homework. When I tried to push back against the amount of homework with his teachers, I kept getting told that this was all necessary to prepare him for the greater homework requirements at the next level, which in turn were justified by the even greater requirements of the level beyond that, a never-ending cycle of justification.

Another difference between our experiences was that my teachers were generally happy to let me blow off homework and read ahead in the book during class time as long as I demonstrated through exams and term papers that I understood the material of the class. His teachers were more often guided by fairly rigid syllabuses and grading rubrics, which seem to be more common these days, perhaps as a defensive measure against parents pressuring teachers to change a grade. But the results were sometimes ludicrous if you believe, as I do, that grades should reflect the student's understanding of the material.

One example was one of his high school math classes where he was maintaining an A average on the exams. But he mixed up the due dates of two major assignments, and his teacher had a policy that all late work was at least 50% off the grade. As a result, he got a C in the class. No doubt that policy made the teacher's job easier, in not having to deal with much late work. But it broke the link between the student's mastery of the material and the grade received. Months later, that teacher mentioned to me that my son "should have gotten an A." It was all I could do to refrain from replying "Well, if you thought that was the grade he deserved, why didn't you give it to him?"

Another example, with far reaching consequences that we didn't fully understand at the time, was his high school Biology class. His teacher told us that he had the highest exam scores of either of the two sections she taught, and that when they played "Biology Jeopardy" in class, the other students always wanted him on their team to help them score. But he didn't turn in some of the required assignments, and he lost points for class participation by reading ahead in the textbook instead of sharing in the discussion. As a result, he got a D in the class, which under school policy, meant he had to repeat the class. That seemed like a complete waste of time to me, given what the teacher was telling us about his performance, so instead we enrolled him in a Biology class at the local community college. That class was graded entirely on in-class exams, and he got the second-highest grade in the class.

There were, unfortunately, a number of other classes with issues that dragged down his high school GPA by the time he was applying for college. Although I had a tutoring business at the time and was helping other students with SAT prep, my son chose to prepare mostly on his own with a quick run through of a single practice test before taking the SAT. His results were fairly good, but the essay section was his weakest score, dragging down his overall writing score by about 70 points. His guidance counselor suggested that we plan on sending him to the local community college, which he thought would offer more support for students with disabilities (both the ADHD, and being on the autism spectrum). But we were also applying to Cal State, and my son was also interested in the University of California. His guidance counselor said we could apply there, and also encouraged him to sign up for the ACT exam (an alternative to the SAT) in his one remaining time slot before college applications were due, for the experience.

On the last day before the UC application was due, I reviewed my son's application. He had been working on his admission essay for the previous four weeks, and had just finished it. In reviewing the UC admission requirements, which were based on a combination of high school GPA and test scores, it became clear that with a sub-3.0 GPA, he could not qualify for regular admission at all (a point his guidance counselor had glossed over). There were two other possibilities. As a student with a disability, he might have qualified for a special admission. But that would have required that he describe his experience with the disability in his admission essay, which he had not done. There was no time for him to rewrite the essay before the deadline. However, there was one other possibility - at the time, UC offered an option to apply for admission based on test scores alone, using either the SAT or the ACT. But the criteria were quite stringent. To use the SAT required three subject achievement tests in addition to the basic SAT, none of which could be in an area in which you had taken a course for college credit. My son had taken three achievement tests, but one of them was in Biology, which was ineligible because of that college class. There was no time to sign up for another session of the SAT. The only possibility was the ACT, that he was still scheduled to take in December.

The ACT is an exam focused more on high school knowledge gained in four areas (English, Math, Reading, and Science), rather than the "aptitude" focus of the SAT. Each area is graded with a score from 1-36. And you could sign up for the test either with or without an essay section as part of your English score. Now I had gone over the ACT prep materials I had for tutoring when my son signed up for the ACT, and it seemed clear to me that the ACT essay was graded even more strictly than the SAT one. Accordingly, I had suggested that he sign up for the version without the essay, since at the time we thought it was mostly for practice, and I thought he would get a better score without it. But the UC requirements for admission required the version of the ACT with the essay to qualify. The ACT version he was currently signed up for wouldn't qualify.

I looked to see if there was any way we could get him into the version with the essay. There was one way, but it was a bit of a shot. So with only about 3 hours to go before the midnight application deadline, I sat my son down to tell him what he would need to do if he still wanted to apply to UC.

He would have to show up early on the day of the exam, and apply for a waiting list to take the other version of the exam. If they had enough extra materials, they would allow him to take the other version. And then, he would have to average at least a 31 in order to qualify, with the essay score almost certainly dragging down his average. Looking at his SAT scores, and using the conversion table that UC used, that seemed possible, but by no means certain. If he could do all that, then he might be able to get in based on the test score alone.

After I laid it out for him like that, he thought for a moment, and then decided not to complete his UC application and walk away from the application he had spent the previous four weeks working on. The only remaining four-year colleges he was applying for were two Cal State campuses, which didn't require test scores at all. Come December, he went and took the ACT without the essay section, which was no longer relevant to any college he was applying to. And a few weeks later, we got his results. On this test of what he had learned in high school, he had averaged just short of a 34 on that 1-36 scale. Even with an essay dragging his scores down, he would have gotten into UC, if he could have just gotten to take the right version of the test. It wouldn't necessarily have been Berkeley, but he would have had the choice of some UC. And I had talked him out of it.

I've lived with that knowledge for years now. The one consolation is that at Cal State, he was able to be part of the first year of an experimental program to support students on the autism spectrum. He was one of the first to graduate from that program. Under their guidance, he had become a lot more disciplined about his work, making the Dean's list a few times. And for a kid who struggled with essay writing in high school, he chose writing-heavy majors, starting as an English major and then switching to Communications. He chose to challenge his weakness directly, instead of running away from it as I did, and his writing improved a lot over his time in college, as he contributed some really thoughtful essays to the school paper. I respect the hell out of him for that. So maybe it was for the best. I still would have liked for him to have had the choice of school.

I'm still a bit annoyed with his high school guidance counselor. I should have looked up the UC admission requirements earlier and learned about the testing option (which no longer seems to be available there). If I had done that weeks earlier, we would have signed up for the right version of the ACT in the first place. But it was really his guidance counselor's job to know all the admission options for the flagship state university in the area, not just the most common ones that applied to most students, and to advise us accordingly when he had a student that didn't fit the usual mold.

In benighted mossheimat application was trivial. The entrance criteria (except for medicine) were simply your grades on the national school-leaving exams (standardized by province). The form was maybe 8 pages. Granted, I wasn't applying for bursaries and stuff, and privileged, but still.

Bursaries?

101 I will never forgive the school system for the whole modern homework thing. Not ever.

As you know, the choice of college is hugely consequential, but not in a way that is even remotely predictable. I, like my parents, met my spouse in college. Way more important that the difference between school X and school Y. Sounds like your kid thrived (throve?) at Cal State, and really, what more can we want?

Money.

101 is a discouraging story.

I do find myself exasperated when students can't complete the homework. But the vast majority are not then getting A's on the exam. (If a student really got all A's on the exam and had spotty homeworks, I would probably bend them up to a B.)

It's also totally gendered. If you do the work, you'll master the material. If you basically don't, you basically won't. That often has a gender component.

And I still like them fine as people! They're just not necessarily learning the material.

The insane homework load is such a problem. I don't feel like I understand at all how it happened. A major upshot seems to be that it has widely normalized cheating on everything, because that's the only way to keep up with it in a reasonable amount of time.

101 filled me with incredible anxiety because my daughter is exactly the same (she's still in high school). She keeps getting paralyzed under the work load, and not finishing things. She's in an IB school, which has an admissions process for the ifnal two years, and she keeps fucking up the requirements.

My experience with my daughter shows the difference parental involvement makes. My wife and I spend a bunch of time checking up on my daughter's homework and nagging her to finish things. My wife is also good at dealing with the school, because she grew up upper middle class and knows how to navigate bureaucracy (I'm still bad at this). My parents had zero involvement in school -- my dad was gone and my mom was drunk all the time. I could hit deadlines on my own as a kid, so it wasn't as bad for me as it is for my daughter. My wife and I have a tremendous impact on my daughter's grades, even though it's not like we actually do her homework for her. (Though sometimes when I'm in the middle of leaning on her to finish an essay, I'm surely tempted.)

101 Also rings a bell with me, with my son, who is 8. He is conversationally very bright, quite good at maths, and an excellent reader who takes pleasure in reading, but hates homework, and has issues with attention span and with writing in particular, and this is a trigger for tantrums. He may or may not be on the ADHD spectrum. The school have never raised concerns, but it feels to us that there might be something there.

Homeschooling during lockdown has been a relentless nightmare for this reason. It was OK when my wife* was primarily designing his curriculum during the first lockdown in the UK, because our school totally dropped the ball. She was able to tailor what he was doing to things he was interested in, but also cover the key things he was supposed to cover on the syllabus. He wrote multipage essays on the Shang dynasty and Jewish theology and the like. Second lockdown, however, the school went into over-compensation mode and it was relentless mind-numbing pre-set work, which was just a trigger for all of his homework related issues, and just getting him to write a paragraph of text was an exercise in tears and anger.

The whole gradgrindian nature of modern education, which is very much a deliberate product of right-wing know-nothing fucks, drives me crazy.

I grew up with parents who were not middle class, and who had zero involvement in my homework, and it was up to me to just get on with it. I used to have very bad procrastinatory tendencies* and always did everything at the last minute, but I'm also lucky enough to be able to concentrate with extreme focus when deadlines are looming, and I'm really quick.*** So I never had issues with work not getting done. I know my son will never be able to do that. Or at least it seems like the possibility of being able to do that is something that might take years of practice.

* because I was working 10 hour days
** one of the amazing things about becoming a parent and moving to an insanely busy job is that I seem to have cured myself of this. I never thought that could happen, but it's really not a thing for me anymore.
*** this is a super common personality trait among a certain kind of person, I think, and common here (Unfogged).

Stories like 101 are infuriating. Especially as I just finished getting a plan with the school for my 7-year old that involved a lot of "modified work requirements" so he could avoid repetition so long as he showed understanding. And was just told by his teacher to ignore his reading test results because she wasn't able to pick a different passage that he'd be interested in so he blew off the comprehension questions. And we don't even have homework yet.

(And as a college professor I resent getting the blame from high school teachers; I work hard to make sure that students who demonstrate understanding can get good grades.)

gradgrindian

This is a new word for me! What a great word.

Two daycare teachers we had are retiring - one beloved, one not-very-beloved. I was reminiscing about the latter. The most prominent memory is that she was constantly harping on the four year olds to be more disciplined, etc, because next year they'd be in kindergarten where things are very strict. (Also she would escalate these epically terrible power struggles with Pokey. One time he destroyed a classroom's worth of little potted flowers Mother's Day presents.)

Anyway: she is right that kindergarten is absolutely exhausting for kids. She is wrong and silly about needing to drive them extra hard to prepare them for it.

Just sort of reminds me of the constant treadmill that the next level of education always looms in fantasy larger than it ends up being. (Until grad school. That exceeded the size of the loom.)

I'm despairing of what to do with the Calabat, who is brilliant and motivated and bound to be disappointed when we won't be able to afford a competitive college for him even if our crappy public system manages to prepare him for one. Sorry, kiddo.

I'm despairing of what to do with the Calabat, who is brilliant and motivated and bound to be disappointed when we won't be able to afford a competitive college for him even if our crappy public system manages to prepare him for one. Sorry, kiddo.

I'm despairing of what to do with the Calabat, who is brilliant and motivated and bound to be disappointed when we won't be able to afford a competitive college for him even if our crappy public system manages to prepare him for one. Sorry, kiddo.

See, I find myself on the opposite side of that. There are so few Ivy League schools and so many brilliant kids that every state school has a quite astonishing and talented top 10%. So go to any college, and take the challenging classes, and you'll be surrounded with bright, interesting peers who study hard enough to keep you on your toes.

117: I go back and forth between thinking that's reasonable and then thinking that I never hear that from people who aren't doing everything they can to avoid sending their kid to directional state.

My kids have been very happy at competitive, expensive (for me, given that I am neither Californian nor Canadian) state schools, which doesn't tell you anything. Definitely no one needs an Ivy League or equivalent private education to be challenged, but I don't know about genuinely non-competitive schools.

113: Tim's niece who is a bright, well-behaved, self organizing and disciplined kid always complains about how strict her 2nd grade teacher is/was. Her great aunt was trying to tell her there was a reason for it. I told her that that sounded frustrating, but sometimes you have to jump through hoops to get to where you want to go.

I don't know how well that answer was received by her great aunt or even her grandmother.

119: my experience teaching at a noncompetitive school is that one can get a fantastic education but the peer group is harder. E.g. shiv finished his degree with high honors in three years, and five years later some of the students on his project team haven't graduated.

My wife and I went to the same fourth-tier* public university. (I just checked; it's significantly further down on the US News list than Cal State.) We got very good educations. My experience there was as heebie describes in 117. My son is at a much better state school -- about the best he was able to be accepted at, but still well below what I take to be the Unfogged norm. My genius daughter, on the other hand, is going to present the same sort of problem that Cala describes in 114, except I don't think my daughter has the sort of expectations in life that would lead her to significant disappointment.

It's all good, is what I'm saying. Educational elitism is fine -- I have a sister who went Ivy for grad school and has had a brilliant career -- but my parents' eight children** all did well enough, including the sister who didn't go to college at all. There is only a modest correlation between my siblings' educational accomplishments and their professional accomplishments, and no correlation whatsoever between those accomplishments and their personal awfulness.

*Many years ago, my wife used to work on the US News college rankings.*** Her prestigious-university colleagues used to rib her about her attendance at a fourth-tier university. I told her to tell them that this was big talk coming from the employees of a fourth-tier newsmagazine.
**Yes, we were Catholic, but it's rude to ask.
***She was aware when she took the job that this made her the rough equivalent of a war criminal.

I really think there's something grand to be said for not being the most ambitious kid on the block. Being very smart and low-to-medium ambitious and going to a mid-to-strong state university seems like an excellent combination for many Unsprogged.

Unsprogged who are extremely smart and very ambitious would probably be served better by going Ivy League, but if they're all that ambitious, they can probably milk a state school for prestigious summer internships, etc, to compensate.

It could even be said that being extremely smart is just plain a nice place to operate from.

Hawaii is in a murder-mystery dinner theater play tonight at school, and I signed up
to bring 2 lasagna. So we bought some Stouffers frozen lasagna.

The instructions say to cook it in the oven with the plastic film on and not to vent it. This is grossing me out a little. I stopped microwaving plastic a long time ago and putting it in the oven seems even weirder.

You can, if you want, buy plastic bag to roast a turkey in. It's probably that plastic.

Anyway, I tested better than any of my siblings but I'm the least educated person in my family.

My mom has two masters and everyone else has a professional degree.

Since this is the higher education thread, I was just disappointed to see some pretty appalling behavior from some graduates from our medical school (I recognized them from the robes).

I was in the park and a group of young women were posing for a bunch of graduation photos. There's a particular spot with a good view of the harbor in the background. Although there were some people sitting there eating lunch, they (the graduates) just sort of stood on top of them in a very "we're going to act like you don't exist" way. They then took a Champaign bottle and sprayed Champaign from it for one of the pictures. Since there was a breeze, this sprayed onto the people who were sitting there eating. Instead of abjectly apologizing, they did it again because apparently the first picture wasn't just right, in the process spraying the people there a second time.

I got to hear about this from the people who had been eating because they, obviously pissed, got up and left and as they passed where I and few other were sitting stopped and vented "Did you f*cking just see that!?" We all agreed it was astonishingly entitled and rude.

If you're wondering, the people eating were black and the graduates were white.

It was amazing we're aristocrats-the-little-people-don't-matter behavior. And they're going to be doctors.

Oh well.

"My mom has two masters"
I make no judgment about personal consensual choices.

She's also in a hospice now.

I'm so sorry to hear that. At least you're vaccinated so travel is possible for you and your siblings.

I'm just pointing out the dangers of getting an MLS.

Also, thanks. And yes we've all been flying lots. I just got home.

Oldest kid has expressed some interest in rigorous top tier tech school and I'm not sure it would be good for him mentally. He could maybe get in there, but he'd do very well at flagship state school so not sure which way to push him if he really does want to go the harder route.

If it's CMU, I can tell him which local bars didn't card in 1989.

130. That's really tough, Moby

123: it's not like I told him to be ambitious. He just wants to be the best at whatever he does but the system here I don't think can prepare him to be competitive against the Boston Latins of the world (so no scholarship money), and in-state isn't mid-to-strong. And it's not like the bifurcation between elite education and the rest isn't going to get worse post-pandemic as the leg races to make sure the options for the proles are microcertificates and banning critical race theory.

Also, Moby, I'm really sorry. Thinking of you and your mom.

I'm so sorry, Mobes.

I'm really sorry too, Moby.

137: there was an article in the Globe today about parents who want their kid to repeat the year - you know because they weren't good at ZOOM. It's a fairly large number, but the schools don't want to and cite stigma. And I think the parents feel that the normal stigma is not likely to apply if enough people decide the year was a wash due to a once-in-a-century pandemic and want their kids to repeat.

So, then the article says at the end that the objection may be as much due to logistics and cost as much as anything else.

Thinking about this now for my oldest kid, who is a very, very good straight A student at a "good"
school, decent athlete, some activities but of the kind that top colleges see tons of ... ie all around very good at a lot of stuff but not plausibly or obviously one of the top 100 kids in the US in any one niche area. What we've been told, plausibly, is that in this position (what I thought of as basically pole position for college acceptance) is that your chances of getting into an ivy league are real but basically a crapshoot and the odds are low. If you want to maximize your shot you've got to pick some niche area to be the best at, which could be some academic niche in which you're a genius, but more commonly now is something like starting some successful nonprofit at age 14 or whatever, having a youth startup, something like that. Specialize and be the best so that you are piquing the admission officer's yearn to pick "the best." The pressures for hyper-specialization and winner-take-all are common features of life -- but I didn't really understand until now that it permeates college admissions; I'd thought that colleges were trying to select the *generally* smart which it turns out at the top level they largely aren't.

With that said it is weird to me that undergraduate college admission is so much more competitive when as far as I can tell the value of going to a particular *undergrad* college is less. Feels like there are maybe 2-4 colleges (Harvard, Stanford, maybe Yale and Princeton) you can get in and come out with a good job just by virtue of having gotten in. And I guess there are a very few prestige companies like McKinsey that hire only out of a few colleges. But mostly the location of your undergrad degree doesn't seem like that big a deal. Everywhere you're basically fighting to be at the top of your class to get the grad school admissions or internships or whatever that matter -- sure the relevant "top" might be 25% at Penn and 2% at the University of Utah to compete for roughly the same jobs, but you still have to work your ass off, the education is basically the same or similar, and the University of Utah competition is probably more tolerable and life is more pleasant. At the end of the day since pure undergrad education is a gateway to not that much for most it seems like 95% is who you are and the work you put in at whatever undergrad college you go to. In that way "good" colleges feel more like "good" high schools. Grad and professional schools are different.

Is it just me or does specialization at age 18 seem like a bad thing to encourage?

Should say that I don't work in a technical field - maybe it's different if you're an engineer because good jobs come more directly from undergrad?? But engineering seems more vaguely "objective" and I thought was largely about particular specialties. Anyhow who knows.

142 - that's what I'd think! But it doesn't seem to be what college admissions officers think, and you see why - they want the "best" in something, picking from the pool of the generally very good is more random.

That was roughly my kids, and I was quite surprised at the schools they didn't get into -- not just no Ivy Leagues or comparable, but also not into schools at a solid level of competitiveness below that. Where they ended up was, as I said, terrific for them, but my sense of how tight admissions are was way off. I knew it was more competitive than it was for me in the late 80s, but not how wildly more competitive it was. (E.g., Newt, with all-but-perfect SATs and a high school transcript including A's in multiple upper-level math classes at Columbia, didn't get into University of Georgia.)

If he had got in, he'd be able to legally cough on his maskless professors in during office hours.

Mine's at Penn, interested in something interdisciplinary so wants collaborative interactions with professors. Their responsiveness is a crapshoot, making the advantage of being at this reputable and expensive U also a crapshoot. It's an unusual year, but a bunch of them advertise opportunities and then don't respond to email.

E.g., Newt, with all-but-perfect SATs and a high school transcript including A's in multiple upper-level math classes at Columbia, didn't get into University of Georgia.)

I'm assuming he applied because of his nom de Unfogged.

But that does sound crazy that he didn't get in. Do they get a lot of out-of-state applications? Are they prejudiced against Yankees?

I have also been stunned at the competitive nature of college admissions these days. My son -- with better credentials than I had -- was probably on the lower end of admissions at his school. In my day, they would have admitted me without a second thought.

141: I'm guessing the specialization thing is a function of the inability to distinguish between candidates at the absolute top level. Everybody is a valedictorian. What else ya got?

I can't spell it, but I was second.

Keegan was a two-sport athlete and valedictorian graduating with three entire semesters worth of AP credit. He did get in at UNC, but not to any of the other schools to which he applied. My other kids are not going to have that kind of transcript (solid students with good grades, but not curve-busters), and Chapel Hill will not be a lock.

You need to be a racist to get tenure there anyway.

Man, the eighties were easy. I had spectacular standardized tests, but meh grades and no extracurriculars (I had important moping to do) and I got in everyplace I wanted except Stanford.

so sorry mobes 💔

It's difficult to overstate just how badly the state GOP has fucked things up here over the past decade plus, but what they've done to the university system is particularly egregious.

Thanks all.

Sorry Moby.

148 Just uppity Yankees.

E.g., Newt, with all-but-perfect SATs and a high school transcript including A's in multiple upper-level math classes at Columbia, didn't get into University of Georgia.)

I agree that this is truly weird. A's in upper level math classes at Columbia? That's outstanding and unusual by any metric.

(Besides Ivy League metrics, that is. Or math grad school metrics.)

Both my sisters went to an Ivy (where my dad had gone, too). I, the slacker, with great test scores and I'm sure substantially meh-er grades than LB, went first to an expensive but not that selective private college (which sucked - prioritizing rich over studious in admissions is not a recipe for a good college atmosphere for someone who wants to learn, which I was). Then I transferred over to state flagship school in the same town, which was generally great for me. Forty years later, one sister burned out in the bank job she got out of college, eventually went back to school for nursing and is a nurse. The other never did too much with her Ivy degree and is a bit down on her luck now, working restaurant jobs in middle age. Aside from the older sister being briefly wealthy enough to have a second house in Maine (lost it all when her husband's alcoholism led to business failures and divorce and debt), I don't know that the Ivy degree did much for either of them compared to my middle of the road public college.

Both my sisters went to an Ivy (where my dad had gone, too). I, the slacker, with great test scores and I'm sure substantially meh-er grades than LB, went first to an expensive but not that selective private college (which sucked - prioritizing rich over studious in admissions is not a recipe for a good college atmosphere for someone who wants to learn, which I was). Then I transferred over to state flagship school in the same town, which was generally great for me. Forty years later, one sister burned out in the bank job she got out of college, eventually went back to school for nursing and is a nurse. The other never did too much with her Ivy degree and is a bit down on her luck now, working restaurant jobs in middle age. Aside from the older sister being briefly wealthy enough to have a second house in Maine (lost it all when her husband's alcoholism led to business failures and divorce and debt), I don't know that the Ivy degree did much for either of them compared to my middle of the road public college.

So sorry about your mom, Moby. It has been such a tough year.

Sorry Moby. I try not to make mom jokes about people in hospice.

AIMHB I had a friend in high school that was determined to go to Harvard, and his strategy was to participate in a wide variety of extracurricular activities - wrestling, chess, Student Council, the high school literary magazine, and probably a few others that I've forgotten about or maybe never knew about. It worked! He got into Harvard! And he hated it there. But he did become very successful.

My dad was mad I didn't go there but I greatly preferred where I went, based on what I later saw of Harvard undergrad life.

(He went to HLS so was shocked anyone would choose not to go to Harvard.)

164 - I'd sort of thought (never put too much thought into it, I got into a good college in the early 90s just by virtue of having pretty good grades and pretty good test scores at a pretty good high school, worked pretty hard in college and now have a pretty good life) that this was how it works, but the college advice people now say it's basically the opposite -- spending your time on a bunch of diverse activities where you aren't the best squanders your chance to do something really noticeable in any one area.

Anyhow, nobody's going to Harvard around here, so I hope I'm right about the gradations of undergrad colleges not mattering very much.

167: Yes, I think that was the strategy from a more innocent time. Anybody can participate in a lot of different activities. Also, I'm not sure if that's really what got my friend in -- his father was quasi-famous,and he had an exotic background having lived in Israel and Australia.

My general sense is that some people don't like their college and may transfer or drop out, but that very few people regret where they ended up because it wasn't "prestigious" enough.

163: No problem. I should have mentioned it earlier.

When I was applying to schools (almost 20 years ago now!), people would say it was pointless to apply to the University of California from out of state because they reserved the vast majority of their small number of out-of-state admissions spots for overseas students who pay full tuition. I don't actually know if this was true, but it makes sense that it would be and that the same phenomenon would have since spread to other cash-strapped state universities.

Wait, but is there actually an "overseas student tuition" rate vs an "out of state US student tuition" rate?

https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/tuition-financial-aid/tuition-cost-of-attendance/

I, and quite a few other people I knew, got into a UC as out-of-state applicants in the mid 90s. If UC preferred overseas applicants later, it probably wasn't because of money. It may be that overseas applicants were disproportionally able to afford it, though. (I've told the story before of how my family could not.)

Moby, I'm really sorry to hear that. It's a bastard, it really is.

172: It's the same rate, but US students usually get some sort of financial aid with the accompanying bureaucratic complications whereas foreign students just write a check. Again, I don't know if this was actually true then (early aughts) or is now, it's just what people said.

America students need parking and drive like assholes.

Sorry, Moby.

On the topic of getting or not getting into elite colleges, I recall to your memory "brand ambassadors".

174: Interesting. I think the understanding when my friends and I applied was that there was no financial aid for out-of-state students; I certainly didn't get offered anything, nor did anyone else. At that time the full cost compared favorably to, say, Ivy League tuition with all applicable aid for a middle-class family, but in my case that wasn't sufficient. One friend attended for a couple of years, then transferred back to UW-Madison to finish his degree; I wonder if that was because of money?

And Moby, sorry about your mom, but I'm glad you got to see her.

Sally got a merit scholarship at UCSC -- not enough to make much of a difference, but aid to out-of-staters exists.

I think the international tuition thing is huge for US students going abroad who get fleeced.

It's a great school, but I'd worry that the weather doesn't impose enough pain for proper growth as a curmudgeon.

Anyhow. I'm being silly. The Calabat is young and has announced both his intention to be 'a doctor who pops out the babies' and a ski instructor (obviously the coolest job ever), and has declared that he always wants to be able to ski whenever he wants, so there better be a med school at Arapahoe Basin. I guess.

LB, just out of curiousity -- why UofT? It's a very good school, but not one that's usually on the radar of American kids.

Random chance. A good friend of Newt's who's a year older toured it and loved it, and there's a particular hardcore engineering program (Engineering Science, which sounds dumb to me, but it's what they called it) that appealed to him once his attention was attracted to it. And then it was one of the very few schools he got into (maybe the only non-SUNY? I don't remember), which made decision-making easier.

126: Anyway, I tested better than any of my siblings but I'm the least educated person in my family.

I first read this as "I tasted better than any of my siblings" and found this raised quite a number of questions, none of which I was sure I wanted answered.

178: Someone I knew went to University of Texas from out of state. She won a small merit scholarship, and in Te as that qualifies you for in-state tuition.

Mine is looking at University of Maryland because they have a partnership with the NSA and he's very into cyber security. He saw me posting something here and threatened to trace my packets to figure out my pseud when I wouldn't tell him.

141: I don't know what kind of grad school you have in mind when you talk about grad school admissions--I'm sure things are wildly different for professional schools--but having done graduate admissions several times for a PhD program in a physical science department at a well-known top-tier university, it's pretty uncommon for people who didn't go to top undergrad schools to get in. It's possible for students who can get good research experience in summer programs or something. It's much easier for someone who goes to a big flagship state school with lots of top researchers than someone who goes to a first-rate liberal arts college that doesn't have PhD programs or much research. (The places LB's kids went are definitely in the category we sometimes admit students from, but lots of directional state universities aren't.)

I really had no idea about this kind of thing when I was a kid choosing colleges--the advice I got in high school wasn't great, and no one in my family ever went to college, so I completely lucked out by going to the school I applied to that was the best choice for getting me into good graduate programs.

In math I think there's already a big difference between the "large" top grad schools (most notably Chicago, Berkeley, Michigan) and the "small" top grad schools (Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, etc.) in terms of the breadth of schools that they take people from. So maybe picking the wrong college is going to harm you in terms of getting into the latter group, but it ultimately doesn't matter that much because you can go to the former group and still be fine. But this might be different in math where you have larger programs because of the enormous amount of service teaching.

I wonder how much being from NYC plays into LB's kids situation? I think it's much much more competitive to get in to college if you're from NYC (or Chicago, or SF).

The middle school jazz band is playing 25 or 6 to 4!!!

a kid with good grades & test scores from mission high in sf stood a better chance getting into what this crowd would agree is a good to great school over a kid with same transcript & test results from old style lowell. never understood why the families desperate to retain lowell as a selective admission school/cream the top off stress inducing dysfunctional hell pit didn't get this. the amount of care & attention the mission faculty put into their kids vs the free form dystopian nightmare at lowell - no comparison. always will treasure the amazing defense atty we had one year & her chill-inducing extemporaneous closing & her getting a full ride to princeton, three years from a refugee camp in pakistan by way of guam. but my fave will always be a lovely sardonic whip smart pre trialer from vietnam, living in a sro across the street from the tenderloin police station with her (difficult) mom, she spent a god bit of her sophomore year couch surfing so gad some gnarly bits on her transcript. but so smart, so lovely. i ran into her once on a summer weekend at the main library, she was so surprised! ms queen, what are you doing here?!?! looking for books ms pham, looking for books. oh! she said, it's my favorite thing to do, come here and look through the books. can't be beat, ms pham, i agree.

she ended up at ucsc, go banana slugs. ❤️

Very sorry to hear that Moby.

A good friend of mine here has a daughter nearing college age who is dead set on going to college in the US preferably in NYC (or the UK as a fall back). She has good international experience being South African and having lived here as well as Singapore and Kazakhstan but her grades are less than stellar. She hasn't taken any of the standardized tests yet but should be doing that soon. She's interested in engineering and veterinary medicine. She did some volunteer work at some big horse clinic here and my friend read me the letter from the supervisory vet. I had to tell him the letter was not great, actually fairly terrible, along the lines of "I can confirm that Ms. X was at the clinic from date to date and did Y and Z. Please contact me if you require any further information" and told him not to use it. I suspect her supervisor really didn't get what was being asked of them rather than deliberately trying to torpedo her admission to college but the effect is the same. She's also dead set on getting her own place in NYC her first year and I talked him out of allowing her to do that, assuming she can get into a college in NYC (and I told him about CUNY) I told him she should live with other students her first year or two then she'll have a set of friends she can room with off campus in her junior and senior year. If anyone has any advice I can pass along it would be appreciated.

I wouldn't send a kid to CUNY unless they could get into the Macaulay Honors Program. I hate saying that, but it's so underfunded that you just can't get into the classes you need to graduate -- kids I know make it sound miserable. The honors program, on the other hand, is fine from what I hear.

If she's interested in engineering, has she considered Manhattan College (actually in the Bronx)? It's not very competitive -- it's a commuter school, mostly -- and it's pretty far from the fun, downtown bits of the city, but it's a good school that turns out construction engineers, and she would really end up knowing actual New Yorkers rather than other kids who thought it would be fun to be an undergrad in NY.

The whole thing sounds potentially awkward and problematic. Just say that HIPPA won't let you disclose information about veterinary schools.

Thanks LB! I hadn't thought of that.

Also she's very sporty and plays on a lot of different teams including rugby and soccer.

Across the river, but Stevens Institute of Technology might be an option. Engineering is its best known field and I believe has a fair number of international students. Probably expensive.

Decent access to Manhattan via PATH.

it's a good school that turns out construction engineers, and she would really end up knowing actual New Yorkers

So their edge over other schools is that they introduce you to the people you'll need to bribe if you want to build something in NYC?

Sorry about your mother, Moby.