Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion college acceptance rates

I did a search on this topic before I started another one since we kind of beat this to death but I just read the NY Times articles
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/u...-acceptance-rates-hit-new-lows.html?_r=0

And Stanford's acceptance rates dropped to 5%, Harvard, Yale 6%. And they just keep dropping. It makes you wonder what the student body is made of when you get to these levels. Who are these kids?

Good artilce about some of the issues at hand.

“Kids see that the admit rates are brutal and dropping, and it looks more like a crapshoot,” he said. “So they send more apps, which forces the colleges to lower their admit rates, which spurs the kids next year to send even more apps.”

As to who are these kids? They are the compliant ones. The kids who have learned to dot every I, cross every T, and spend their H.S. years studying and doing extracurricular activities. I've seen complaints from professors that the students they are getting aren't critically thinking the way students have in the past. And despite the students sky high 4.35 GPA's and 10 AP's, many of these students seems less ready for college than in years past.

One reason they have dropped so low is because of the Common Application. But basically they are the same kids they have always been -- top scores, top grades, excelling at unusual ECs, fantastic recommendations. Some are athletes, URMs, and legacies. They get far more qualified applicants than they can accept, so they can really pick and choose based on the finest detail.

If anyone is interested in seeing more detail on admissions breakdowns, looking at the Common Data Set for a college is a good way to do that. Google " Common Data Set" to find them. Almost every college has this available.

We just didn't stress over this during our 2nd kid's recent college search (PG). We picked some elite colleges where she thought she would be happy, but also a range downward in both academics and cost/possible merit aid. She got in everyplace and had her choice. She didn't think Stanford or the Ivies would be a fit for her, so didn't actually apply to any (but did to some top LACs and research universities).

Perhaps, but average college GPAs have continued to increase at the most selective schools, and graduation rates are very high. Since the BA is a less well defined credential than an MD, schools can define the level and quality of work that most students actually do as A-level college work.

Dean Says Median Grade at Harvard College Is A-, Most Common Grade Is A
By MATTHEW Q. CLARIDA and NICHOLAS P. FANDOS
Harvard Crimson
December 4, 2013

Not sure what you're trying to say here. The higher grades are due to grade inflation; this process has been documented pretty thoroughly.

But...but...if you are only selecting the very highest quality student, they should all have higher grades!

I mean, if there is a deep pool of Top Shelf students, manufactured using the highest quality craftsmanship, coupled with modern technology and quality control procedures, who is capable of getting an A+ in all classes...and you fill your university with only this Top Shelf student, then the average grade will, by definition, be an A+.

What am I missing?

You forgot to put garlands on the A+s. Shame! The students will cry.

Shouldn't there be trophies? Stickers, at the very least.

Shiny iridescent stickers!

Because college is exactly like high school! Just more of it!

My D attends a STEM college (Harvey Mudd) where the average GPA at the middle of sophomore year (when they pretty much finish the technical core courses) is 2.8. Kids with GPAs in the higher 3s (eg, maybe 3.5 or higher? Not sure, my D's grades weren't high enough to get one...) actually get a letter from the college president they call a "get a life letter" that says it is great that they are doing so well, but make sure they are enjoying college and having a little bit of fun. GPAs go up to about a 3.3 average by graduation, but compared to most other top schools there isn't much grade inflation. They have had only 7 students (maybe 8 as of this last graduation) graduate with a 4.0 average in the history of the school. So... not every college is giving in to that level of grade inflation.

Efforts to reduce grade inflation are often unpopular with college students, who say their chances to get good jobs and especially to gain admission to graduate programs will be hurt.
Yet Harvey Mudd graduates earn more on average than those from any other college, according to Payscale, $143K at mid careeer. Schools with large engineering programs and a preponderance of men do tend to have alumni with higher average earnings.

FYI, in 2014 Mudd had more women graduate with engineering majors than men.

That is really interesting. It was 4% in my class. Back in the olden times.

Are you basing this on first-hand knowledge, or is this just what you are assuming?

My nephew graduated from Yale a few years ago. He is anything but a conformist, and for his application, he wrote his essays in about an hour.

My children are too young for college, but our high school routinely sends dozens of kids to the Ivys and other selective schools. Through family friends we know lots of them, and they run the gamut from shy introverted kids to the leader that everyone gravitates towards.

Grade inflation is real at some of these places though. My nephew said it was hard to get an "A" at Yale, but it was much *harder* to get a "C".

First hand knowledge, my DS15 is is H.S. My older DD is at university. My kids attend/ed at a top "highly ranked" public high school that sends kids to Ivy's and top schools. The pressure at our H.S. in these top schools is intense. I know kids who gets these top scores, I see what it takes out of them and how hard they work. And what the teachers expect and how they grade.

My husband is a professor & many of my friends are also professors at a large public university. I hear frequently about how while the GPA to get into the school is getting higher and higher, the kids are less and less repaired for college level work despite taking oodles of AP's.

"Hard" can mean
(1) Few people do it.
(2) Doing it takes a lot of effort.

By the first standard, it is not difficult for Yale students to get an A at Yale, where the average grade is estimated to be an A-. And why should we need to rely on an outsider's estimate? Why doesn't Yale publish this data? Academics are supposed to disseminate knowledge, but they are not forthcoming about what their institutions do.

Faculty scrutinize grading trends
BY JANE DARBY MENTON
Yale Daily News
October 11, 2012

Bostonian,

I have no basis to dispute the researcher's assertion about the grades given at Yale, but from what I read, the caliber of the average Yale student is very different now than it was 50 years ago. While there have always been some with an easier path to admission (legacy, famous, and/or rich), the rest are highly talented these days. Charles Murray discusses this in some detail in one of his books.

bluemagic,

It's interesting because my DD is also 15, and in a similar type of high achieving public high school. Granted, she is only starting her sophomore year, but in a school with 1800 students, DD is near the top (possibly at the top) of her grade . This was quite frankly a pleasant surprise for us.

Her friends include most of the top performers. They are busy, but I wouldn't call them stressed. I know several of the kids' families share our philosophy that if the child puts forth the effort, they will do fine when it comes to college admissions, even though no specific college is a guaranteed admit. We are also confident they will do fine in the college they are admitted too. Our friends with children in college uniformly report that college is easier than our high school, regardless of whether the child is attending Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, etc.

Where I see the stress is in the kids that are not in the top 5%, and where the parents are pressuring the kids to perform at a level that they cannot. These parents force the kids to take the honors classes when they should not, and the emphasis is on grades, not effort. These are the girls that I see suffering from eating disorders, or worse.

Isn't this stress talked about in David and Goliath, where you get a really hardworking MG, is top of her class at highly ranked high school, gets to Princeton and then has a breakdown.

If you have more of these than the PG student, like the nephew above who went to Yale. Compliant generally means MG, doesn't it? I thought MG were usually identified because they were really hardworking, teacher pleasing etc while the PG was bored and staring out the window.
In that other topic with the article about types of intelligence. Maybe in the next decade they do away with interviews and have you figure out a strategic puzzle. If you can think out of the box, you get in.

I think these are stereotypes. LOG does not determine desire to please, nor is it required to be PG to make it through a demanding undergrad program successfully.

I have no doubt that the characterization above represents (often untrue) stereotypes which have more to do with personality than LOG.

However, the point IS well-made that statistics alone dictate that there are many, many more MG people applying to colleges than PG ones. Period.

Naturally, the elite institutions should (hypothetically) be much more interested in PG applicants (who have extraordinary potential) rather than MG ones (who have "merely" great potential-- poor choice of words, perhaps, but you all know what I mean there, I hope).

Since there is a perception of scarcity (slots available at top institutions) and value (that a seat at HYPS is very much better than one at Sacramento State), what's a MG student to do?

That's right-- work hard enough to at least appear plausibly HG+ on paper, and therefore... more RARE... and desirable.

Truly EG/PG students, I think, are not really the ones suffering for this development. I think it is MG students, for whom the bar of "acceptable" has been moved into HG performance territory, causing them and their parents anxiety and terror.

As someone else noted above-- it's not the students in the top whatever-it-is percent (locally, I'd estimate top 2%) who are panicking and running like caffeinated hamsters for all of high school-- it's the top 8-10% who are.

Of course, as I've stated before, the only (selfish) objection that I have to that is probably blatantly elitist on the face of it-- I don't think that the kids in the top 10%ile belong in some of the coursework that my kid (top percentile) belongs in and NEEDS-- and putting them there just means that my kid gets LESS of what she needs, because what she needs is incompatible with what the top tenth is capable of doing.

I think the "bored PG student" problem is a real problem in some school settings, but much less so in high achieving school systems. Our school system is fairly easy through 8th grade, and becomes much harder in high school. I don't think my daughter is PG, but some of her friends clearly are. But everyone is challenged in high school.

Off topic, but Google's power can be a bit unnerving at times. I looked up "David and Goliath Princeton breakdown" on Google, and the sixth entry was Wren's post, and this was just 20 minutes after he posted it.

What about the mad scramble within the top <0.5% for the elusive label of valedictorian?

I've made it clear to my daughter that we don't care, even though she is likely in that group. Put in the effort, and let the results happen as they may.

This assumes ability maps more or less directly to potential. Potential is arguably a cocktail of personality traits, chance, connections, ability, and other factors.

Perhaps a better question is: potential for what? If the goal is an Earth-shattering new physics theorem, then E[PG]-E[MG] is probably > 0, with sigma[PG] > sigma[MG] to reflect the potentially deleterious impact of OEs, PG polymath indecision, etc. The university's admissions motive will reflect its risk tolerance wrt sigma.

However, let's not forget that the primary MO of universities is self-preservation, not novel scholarship. Novel scholarship is certainly an input into institutional longevity, but it is a bought resource and is probably only reputationally important below a critical level. If MG candidates are, on average, more financially successful in industry, then favoring MG over PG candidates is rational from an endowment management perspective.

And the PGs with the optimal combination of soft skills and temperament/character traits to produce institutionally-beneficial outcomes are also probably the most likely to make it through undergrad without TLC. Then you can purchase them at the post-graduate/post-doctorate/post-professional level, when they are already beginning to be proven commodities.

Bingo.

The results you get depend on your viewing habits.

Way to diminish opportunity costs, by the way. Elegant solution.

Really you think everyone iin H.S. is challeged? What gives you that idea? H.S. performance, grades and challenge are three different things that don't necessary correlate. My DS goes to a top rated H.S. and there are many kids who are not really challenged for one reason or another. This year my son was just dropped from the "gifted" class because of grades. (It's complex looks like we have a 2E situation.) He is certainly not going to be challenged this year. I know of kids who don't like the pressure and intensity of the AP classes and stress for top grades and give up trying. It's complicated.

Yeah-- I have to say, "challenge" is a relative term there. My DD certainly experienced very little in the way of academic challenges in high school. Organizational and executive challenge? Definitely.

I should stop posting while at work as I don't fully collect my thoughts there. All I meant to say is that at our high school, everyone at the top puts in significant effort (i.e. nobody coasts and stays at the top). The classes are reasonably hard even for the PG kids, and there is a good deal of homework. Other schools will of course vary.

Why, thank you! They're an especially good deal if you collect them at the post-doc level, as you can acquire quality post-docs for right around federal poverty level wages, and then keep them on a trial basis as non-tenured faculty or research associates until they do something patentable.

Was this different in the past? In other words, are PhD students interested in academia knowingly entering a lottery system with well understood low odds in the hopes of eventually getting tenure? Or has the situation dramatically changed in the last 5-10 years?

Yes, it's changed in the last decade or so. Getting a permanent position as a Ph.D.-level scientist has been tough for a while, but it's much harder now for different reasons. First, the colleges and universities have moved to the adjunct model. They hire part-timers who get no benefits, and they save money. So this means there are fewer tenure-track positions available.

Second, complicating things is that the current tenure-track model evaluates two primary metrics: how much grant money you bring in, and how many publications you have in high-profile/elite journals. Funding levels are at historical lows (<20% of received applications) in most departments at the NIH and NSF. Some are way below that level, as in, below 10%. In the 1970s and 80s, success rates were around a third or more. These days, the average age for getting your first R01 from the NIH (their most important grant) is 42,and the average age of all R01 holders is 51. Compare to 35 for first-timers in 1980, and probably younger than that before then. There's a nascent backlash against the elite journals forming these days. The argument is that they encourage irresponsible behavior and sensationalism.

A third problem is that we're turning out too many people with doctorates --- we tell them that there are lots of STEM jobs out there. Well --- there are if you want to be a technician. Not so many if you want to run a research group.

All this means that scientists get stuck on a postdoc treadmill. They work for low wages for many years (~$55K is the maximum NIH postdoc salary; $42K is the minimum) and have slim chances of getting a meaningful academic job. If they're lucky, they get a job in industry for decent pay. A lot of them end up doing technical writing or working in areas that don't truly require the level of education they have.

But the situation in science is better than the humanities, where there is effectively almost no chance of getting an academic job. At least technical writing at a biotech company is in your field. Humanities grads with doctorates often end up doing jobs that don't require their level of education. Some of them keep their doctorate off their resumes to avoid being labelled as overqualified for a job. Yet the schools encourage humanities undergrads to pursue doctorates, and they mislead them about job prospects. This is something of a scandal right now.

Thanks Val for the detailed explanation. I understand much better now.

Note to self: If kids want to enter academia, suggest they have a backup plan or two.

Exactly. Mostly, "academia" doesn't mean authentic employment right now. I suspect that eventually, this will morph again once it becomes clearer what it means to turn higher ed over to an army of adjuncts living as gypsy nomads moving from one ivory tower to another... but in my DD's generation, a career as a professor is a non-starter. I'm so incredibly sad for her over that. She'd be a natural-- and probably GREAT at every aspect of that job. But it's probably not to be.

That's another good point about adjuncts. Their schedules look something like this: teach class at school at from 9-11 MW. Drive 20 miles to college B to teach class from 12:30 to 1:30 MW and teach lab from 2-5 TTh. Drive 15 miles east to college to teach evening class from 6-9 TTh and try to survive on vending machine food until 10 on those nights. . We're destroying education in this country is a myriad of ways.

I had a good friend who was a history professor when I was a grad student in the very early 90s. He used to talk about how good he had it in academia: he got to do research, publish papers on ideas that he found interesting, and discuss his field at conferences. He would write/grade questions for the A-levels, and his questions always asked the students to think. It was the same when he taught. He told me recently that a lot of that has changed. In particular, industrial metrics are taking over in many areas.

This sounds like an opportunity to differentiate themselves: Come to college ABC where you will be taught by full professors rather than adjuncts.

Or would students ignore that and be enticed by shiny new dorms and gyms instead?

Some research has found that adjuncts are better teachers:

The Adjunct Advantage
By Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Education
September 9, 2013


Here is the abstract of the paper:

Are Tenure Track Professors Better Teachers?
David N. Figlio, Morton O. Schapiro, Kevin B. Soter
NBER Working Paper No. 19406
Issued in September 2013
This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus non-tenure line faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student’s first term at Northwestern, and employ a unique identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which non-tenure line faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from non-tenure line professors in their introductory courses. These differences are present across a wide variety of subject areas, and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern’s average students and less-qualified students.

Mostly, at 17-19yo, they ARE impressed with all of those shiny things.

This particular line of reasoning was TOTALLY lost on DD's friends, and mostly upon their parents as well. {shrug}

I'm also thinking, no disrespect intended to the authors of that study, that this is a pretty isolated and narrow examination of the problem presented by adjuncts, taken in full context.

Adjuncts do NOT add the same value to an institution in the context of: expert student advising via established network of local public/private sector ties, knowledge of a variety of graduate and professional school requirements/preferences/etc, service within the academic community over a long period of time (cross-disciplinary ties forged via committee work, research, etc), and finally-- a stable lab/office where faculty are AVAILABLE to students who walk in looking for answers or help.

I know all of that to be so. Period, full stop. It's also true that the impact of adjunct vs. non-adjunct is MOSTLY felt at the sophomore level and beyond-- and quite probably (IMO) in retention rates. I notice that retention rates didn't make that study.

How do I explain that study? Simple-- fixed term and adjunct faculty are often younger, more energetic, and more experimental than their older colleagues with tenure. They take more risks pedagogically-- and they WORK in a more labor-intensive fashion, at least at first. It's a more useful comparison to look at adjuncts in their first 3-5 years in the classroom with tenure-track (but obviously UNTENURED) faculty at a variety of institutions during that same time-frame in their careers. I'm guessing that the classroom experiences are roughly equivalent there. What differs is the stuff OUTSIDE of class.

It's a problem that the unwary observers may not fully appreciate, but not having those fresh young faces on university committees and in labs and offices-- as residents, not nomads-- profoundly changes a university. It does. Faculty know it-- and have been fighting this sea change for over a decade, but they are losing the war.

To add to HK's analysis of that study, it would also seem to me that the study is more revealing of the flaws of heaping research responsibilities on tenured professors on top of their full-time gigs, if the poverty-waged temp (with its own obvious flaws) is performing better in entry level classes. Certainly, there's room for improvement on the tenured model, as full-time, properly-compensated, tenured professors can do a far better job of teaching if they're allowed to concentrate on that in lieu of chasing scarce research dollars.

Conclusion: the adjunct model is suitable for colleges that cater to average students and less-qualified students.

I don't even believe that. Seriously. Students who need a bit of hand-holding are simply falling through the cracks with an adjunct model. Adjuncts can't afford the extra time, and students often can't track them down outside of class at all.

That does not characterize Northwestern, where the study was done:

Test Scores -- 25th / 75th Percentile
SAT Critical Reading: 680 / 760
SAT Math: 700 / 780
SAT Writing: 680 / 770

Hmmm...because there are tons of students at Northwestern who have weak academic preparation. I think this study needs to be extended to more "average" colleges to make any conclusions. A school that accepts only 15% of applicants, and has many more qualified applicants than seats - don't see how they can draw that conclusion (though I did not read the entire study).

I think adjuncts are often better teachers than professors in areas that need real world experience. Some guy who has spent all of his time in academia is better qualified to speak about the business world than a former CEO - I don't think so.

Students don't track down teachers outside of class at all any more. They email, but that's all.

The problem with adjuncts is that with crap pay and no job security, they teach to the lowest possible standard. They need students to pass, so they need to pass students. The stories I could share of incredibly low standards could make your hair stand on end. If universities want to save money they should stick to having a huge lecture, then small tutorial/recitation groups to discuss assigned and spontaneous questions. By having actual discussions they reduce the time needed for endless quizzes and grading, by having one lecturer they reduce the amount of duplicated paid work in writing the lectures.

I can see that adjuncts could offer an advantage to students because their job is to teach. Ergo, they presumably devote their work-related thinking to teaching. Tenure-track faculty sometimes see teaching as a necessary evil and so don't necessarily put a lot of effort into it. However, the second part of my statement isn't always the case and the first part can be offset by the exhaustion incurred by commuting two or three times a day and the stress of not having a real job.

I was an adjunct for 2-3 years at a community college. It started as a favor for a tenured friend there. Some of the adjuncts were teaching because their kids had started school and they wanted to get back into the labor market. Others were on the adjunct treadmill, and things were hard for them. One member of the former group refused to be on campus if she wasn't actively teaching, meaning next to no office hours. Another one didn't have much time because he taught at three colleges (that I knew of). There were also faculty members who were unenthusiastic about working with students outside of class, but their job descriptions mandated office hours, so they had no choice.

Regardless of what happens to the students, the adjunct model is a raw deal for the adjuncts themselves. HK made a good point about them also not knowing the college and therefore not being able to advise students. And Dude is right about the research responsibilities. I agree with the people who say the two jobs should be separated. These days, though, with universities being run like businesses, that won't happen (unless the people writing checks to the universities start opting out).

ETA: Yes, students absolutely track down their professors after class. The people like my friend, who would spend time helping them, were ALWAYS surrounded by students. If students know they're available, they go to them. Which brings us back to the adjunct treadmill....

TBH, I'm not sure what "less-qualified" means.

Sure, it's easy to make an assumption that students with sky-high GPAs and lots of extracurricular activities are "more qualified," but I'm not so sure that's true. Personally, I don't think that industrial metrics apply well in this situation. Granted, it's more likely that someone with a C- average and SAT scores <500 won't be prepared, but given that one wrong question can knock an SAT score down by 20 or 30 points, and given that you can only get something like 4 wrong on the math section to get a 700, it isn't clear to me that we can honestly discriminate between high scores (say, 650+). The same can be said for grades, given how inflated they are. So even if you trust the industrial metrics, their distribution seems to have been squished, making it difficult to tease out much meaningful information from the top chunk.

Then there is the helicoptering and and the hyper-prepping. By "prepping," I mean forced extracurriculars and forced, well, everything. Prepping may get students lots of iridescent Great job! stickers, but if it's thrust upon them, much of it means nothing. IMO, if the desire isn't coming from WITHIN the student, the student is at high risk of falling apart when he decides he's had enough.

Certainly, I've been hearing and reading a lot of complaints from professors about the A+++ students with garlands and iridescent stickers on their diplomas. Specifically, they're characterized as being LESS prepared than students of previous years who had lower (but still solidly high) GPAs --- but perhaps more internal motivation.

Just pointing out I was playing with their own words. It was not a serious comment.

The amounts charged by some college consultants are astonishing.

How to Get Into an Ivy League College—Guaranteed
By Peter Waldman
Businessweek
September 03, 2014

Wow! There is one just down the street where I work. Never knew that this was such big business.

This was hilarious! So Ma can basically provide a money back guarantee to just about anyone, do no work whatsoever, and then get paid because some kids will get into the schools without any help anyway. And to make it sound like he is doing some work, he can be demanding and pushy of the kids.

Why didn't I think of this first?