Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion college admissions

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/04/who-got-in-to-the-country-s-top-colleges.html
Who Got Into the Country’s Top Colleges?
The Daily Beast
by Steve Cohen
Apr 4, 2012 4:01 PM EDT

It’s that time of year again. The fat (and thin) envelopes have begun to land, as high-school seniors’ fates take shape. So just how insanely competitive were this year’s college admissions?


According to many colleges’ self-reported statistics for the class of 2016: the results aren’t encouraging for most ambitious seniors, and they’re especially dismal for “unhooked white girls.”

That’s the euphemism for smart girls with really good grades and solid SAT scores, but who lack some special “hook” or positioning—for example, being a star athlete, concert pianist or first generation to go to college. They experienced a particularly tough time getting into most of the nation’s most competitive colleges. But they may enjoy a bit of peace of mind knowing everyone else did as well.

************************************************************

I think intelligence and academic achievement are not getting as much weight in college admissions as they should. In many other countries the process is less opaque. This article was discussed in the NYT "Give a Girl a ‘Hook,’ Get Her Into College" http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/give-a-girl-a-hook-get-her-into-college/ .

The number of places at the most prestigious schools has not kept up with the number of qualified applicants as the U.S. population increases, and maybe it cannot, since prestige is largely depends on selectivity and scarcity value, in the absence of data on how much college students learn. I hope that alternative ways of educating and certifying people such as EdX and Coursera catch on quickly.

I think there are two different things to take from the OP:

1) a notification/reminder that the most prestigious US colleges are looking for such a "hook". T

2) a pointer to a recommendation for one particular course of action; in the case of the mother in the article, for keeping your child unswervingly to the path to excellence in just one unusual field, as their "hook".

(1) is surely useful if you didn't know this already, as if you don't know you don't have the option of reacting to it. (2) is more interesting. While I agree that perseverance is an important skill and would certainly encourage DS not to fritter all his time, the riding example seems to me to go too far. If a hobby seems like a good idea when your child is 10, and you make them stick to it to the exclusion of almost all else until they're 18, you risk never letting them meet the thing they'd otherwise have discovered at 12 that would have been their real passion. A certain amount of experimentation is surely necessary.

Even if things like Coursera don't catch on (if I had to guess, I'd guess that they will, but I don't know although I'm well placed to), education is increasingly international, and even increasingly carried out in English. I know (not least because someone pointed it out last time we had this conversation ;-) that for certain vocational courses like medicine and law it may be essential to attend university in the country where you want to work, but for most people it increasingly isn't.

This makes a difference: e.g. if you were priming your children to go to one of the most prestigious universities in the UK, you'd be telling them not to waste their time on anything not related to the subject they wanted to study, but instead to read around that in the greatest possible depth, do activities relating to it etc.

I think there will always be good courses at good universities for clever, well educated, hard working young people who have their own opinions and interests and the initiative to follow them, even if one has to be a bit canny about looking at more than the obvious options. I propose just to do my best to help DS become one of those desirable students, and we'll see what university options fit when the time comes.

I don't think you should group law and medicine together. In both the U.S. and the U.K., there are many doctors who obtained their undergraduate and medical degrees from foreign countries, in which the cost of getting those degrees is vastly less. Meanwhile, some Americans are graduating from medical school with $400,000 of debt, as described in an article

"The next crisis to avoid is in student loans"
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/03/06/student-loan-crisis/ .

And the one after that will be the severe shortage of primary care physicians, as potential medical students start doing the math of expected salaries vs. student loan payments.

It is true that there are alot of foreign medical graduates in the USA. Probably up to 50% of doctors in many Cardiology Fellowships (as one example, since I am a cardiologist) graduated from foreign medical schools. Many graduated in India, Pakistan, and other third world countries and came to the USA for a much higher living standard.
On the other hand, very few Americans who grew up here will go that route, since many foreign medical schools would not be acknowledged in the same way as an American medical school.