A new high-profile analysis of the college admissions process makes a lot of healthy suggestions for change. It's discussed in today's New York Times.


It would be wonderful if the colleges implemented even these two suggestions. I'm not sitting on my hands waiting for it...but maybe, just maybe, they'll change to a system that won't be gamed in a way that puts too much stress on kids.

I saw this. It was heartening to see that people are thinking about it, but I don't envy those trying to figure out how to fix it. I have 5 years before my oldest applies...get on it, folks!

My son had one AP freshman year and two AP this year. They are his favorite classes because they are hard and have smart kids in them. He would take everything AP just for those reasons if there wasn't so much work involved. It looks like he will take two next year and two senior year for a total of 7.

But it still leaves you with the question of what should matter for admissions. How should a college select the best applicants, if they shouldn't look at test scores, number of APs, and extracurriculars?

It sounds ideal but not very practical.

That will reward the people who are best at faking sincerity. College admissions officers who spend about 15 minutes reading an application should not try to play God and peer into the applicant's soul.

No matter what admissions processes the most selective colleges use, a large ratio of applicants to seats will cause competition and stress.

Last weekend my middle school son participated in a 1-day math competition at Philips Exeter, in New Hampshire. Many of the winning teams for the last several years have been from Shanghai, China https://exeter-math.appspot.com/archive/2015results.html . If rich Chinese are willing to send their children around the world for a math contest, imagine what they will do to send their children to an Ivy.

I don't know what the answer actually is-- but I agree that the problem is real and that it needs to be a much higher priority to solve it.

When you have a college student, and you see the sheer scope of the mental health problems in that population (anxiety and depression, chiefly), and you know more parents than not who can name one or more of their own children's friends who have attempted suicide as college students...

yeah. Doing something that seems like a step in the right direction seems a LOT better than doing nothing because it's not enough to fix it all.

I doubt that it is a step in the right direction.

Some applicants will try to stand out through athletic accomplishments while taking a moderately demanding schedule. Other applicants, who are smart and studious but not athletic, will load up on AP courses. I don't see why the latter group should be singled out as problematic.

If there are many more applicants than seats, I can't think of a better way of admitting people than the quality and quantity of academic output. People are not forced to apply to the most selective colleges, and most colleges are not that selective.

If anything, I think they should stop looking for the so called wellroundedness. A lot of the students are anxious because they are not prepared academically for college. Nearly three quarter of college freshmen need remedial math. How many of the college students are going to focus on sports, music, or arts anyway. They should and do have special admission requirements. Why shouldn't the colleges pay more attention to academics? I can see the kids are stressed. But I am not sure they are stressed for the right reasons. I personally think this overemphasis on extracurricular as a reason why the kids are so over scheduled and stressed.

Luckily there is still graduate school, where they really only care about academic potentials.

I agree with Thomas Percy.


I agree. Unfortunately, admission is also helped by the following, none of which are academic criteria:

• Number of extracurricular activities (lots is better)
• Athletic ability
• Membership in a favored group (child of a graduate, minority status [depends on the minority], child of a big donor, child of a celebrity or celebrity applicant, etc.)
• Essay about amazing voluntourism trip to [insert exotic distant land]
• Being an out-of-state student who pays higher tuition

As for AP courses, I'm not convinced about them. Why should students have to teach themselves the first 15% of AP X during the summer, when they could be gaining work experience, pursuing another interest, etc.? Three AP courses turns into 6-10 hours of work per week and adds to stress levels while removing time available to work.

Colleges don't ask Calc 1 students to learn the first two chapter of the textbook in July and August, and colleges often go into more depth. Courses taken at a local college or university during high school are, IMO, much better predictors of ability to do college-level work. The student is offering proof of having succeeded in courses at an actual college (and tuition and books are usually free to high school students). Personally, I'd prefer this system, with AP left for places that don't have a local college.

Finally, when elite colleges pick 5 donor's kids, five other kids who were better qualified academically are rejected.

I agree with both Val and Thomas Percy. Academics should be the information in question, but too often a lot of other things wind up being considered that have little to no bearing on an applicant's success at an institution of higher learning.

The basic numeracy and literacy skills of a great many entering college students are quite bluntly dismal.

As long as you exclude law school from "graduate school", where they generally really only care about your access to student loans.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, are you saying that where you live college classes DON'T have tuition/book fees for high school students? Because around here, classes on a college campus are at least a few hundred dollars per credit hour, and possibly more -- whereas AP classes are free to take and $90 for the test.

At least LSAT and GPA are both very important too. And my friends told me their law school GPA/class rank determines where they get internships/jobs.Is that not the case?

At elite schools, well-rounded is not the way to gain admission. Doing something really unusual gets the attention of admissions folks. Lots of ECs is not the way to go - just a few and win some national/international awards in those few is the way to go.

The essay about the volunteer trip to Africa that cost the parents an arm and a leg is not a good idea. Just Google bad college essay topics and this one comes up every time (as does scoring the winning goal essay).

While the pressure to take AP courses is not good for some kids, for others the rigor of the AP is the only way to go, because the alternative course is not good. Val lives in CA, where there are actually good CCs (and DE might be free for HS students). We live in PA, and my 11 year old might be bored by the local CC courses (and not because she is bright - the courses are that bad). We have some great local colleges, but they are private schools and do not give HS kids a tuition break.

There is no perfect metric for college admissions. You can change the standards, but kids will just game the new standards.
Perhaps if you made kids rank their top 5-6 schools (other applications would not be ranked, so the college would know they were not a top choice for the kid), and colleges saw that rank, then you wouldn't get top HS students employing a shotgun approach to college applications. Schools would know which qualified applicants really want to attend their school, and they could give those applications more weight,

According to California law, high school students can take community college classes for free through dual enrollment. See this page for more information. I'm not sure what "minor cost" means on that page; it might refer to "you have to find a way to get to the college yourself."

One of my kids is enrolled in a program called Middle College (these programs exist all over the US). The first time he signed up for classes, I had to go with him. He took 3 classes and the "bill" the registrar gave me said $0.00. The high school pays for all his books, including expensive math and science textbooks. It pays for access to online homework systems. I can't remember if I had to buy safety goggles and a lab coat for chemistry, but I don't think I did.

Massachusetts has a similar policy, except that four-year-colleges are also included but books aren't always. New York also has one of these programs.

I found a link to information about dual enrollment in each state. This link includes information about homeschooler eligibility. I don't know how current the information is.

ETA: schools don't go out of their way to advertise these programs, at least not around here. If anyone is interested, I recommend doing a web search and then contacting the people in charge of the program directly (or better yet, have your high-schooler or 8th grader contact them). I got incorrect information from other people in the district.

Not sure how this works? So if 10,000 kids rank Yale 1st, Yale gives them more weight? And then the next choices drop them, since they are not first choice? There is a middle school situation in NYC and if you do not rank the one school 1st, you cannot go. It has become rank it first or you don't have a shot and so your second choice becomes your 5th, because the better school you ranked second, was ranked 1st by enough kids you don't have a shot.

I was referencing the fact that a number of law schools are essentially admitting anyone because they need the revenue to stay open.

Wren, I gave it about five seconds of thought - it will never happen. Besides, not all 10,000 ranking Yale first will be qualified applicants. So when you bring the top 20 or 30 schools into play, and there are only 30,000 kids at most with top 1% SAT and ACT scores, plus good GPAs, you won't have 10,000 "top" applicants at one college.

Won't happen though because colleges love to have tons of kids apply so they can be "selective" (single digit admission rate). There was an article recently about Duke's selection process. Half of applicants get tossed after the first read of the application. For kids without a major hook, the true admission rate of selective schools isn't 5-10%. It is more like 0% for half of the applicants, maybe 2-3% for some kids with slightly below average scores but something else special (great essay, really unique hobby, etc.) and somewhere in the 10-30% range for the top students.

Some of these top kids don't get into the top schools, because even 10-30% acceptance rates means admission is far from a given. So many resort to applying to 15-20 top schools in a shotgun approach. The result might be that some kids using this approach get into a number of the top schools. Some other kids don't want to use this shotgun approach, apply to maybe 3-5 top schools, and don't get into any.

The kid using the shotgun approach can't attend the 5 top schools to which they were admitted (and they may not even like the schools) - maybe they effectively "took" the top spots from some other kids who only applied to their true top choices. If there was a way to figure out the true top choices of the top applicants, perhaps there would be fewer disappointed kids come April 1st. Sure, there is ED at some schools, but family finances figure into this, so ED is not a good idea for all.

It's just as spaghetti describes here, too. We are lucky that our district offers DE classes from several local colleges and universities on the HS campus, but offerings are limited to specific classes, and one has to pay (typically about 300$ per class.) Agree about the AP courses as well; they are cheaper, and here are often the higher-level option (for example, my DD will earn a 200-level college credits for her junior year of foreign language, but the senior year is the AP year and more advanced material.)

Given the basic assumption that a college is an academic institution first and foremost - academics should carry more weight - for people 18/19 and younger.

To ask the most obvious question; why don't the elite colleges in the US offer their own entrance exams that have a much higher ceiling academically? Oxbridge colleges have alwas done this...

Oh, wait! That would mean more east Asians qualifying than the Ivies currently appear to find palatable.

I don't think of the busywork in today's AP classes as being particularly stringent academically - requiring deep analysis and novel insights, myself.

(Some from under privileged or abusive backgrounds that didn't have the chance to do particularly well when at high school age and may need some time to overcome the trauma of their childhoods so there should also be an alternative means for older students to apply using non-traditional metrics. They are not the majority of applicants and outside of the scope of what I am writing here)

It won't change anything. The real issue is that as many as 20 students are fighting for each seat at an elite university. No matter how you change the admissions criteria, people will come up with ways to game the system. The packaging has been and will still be exactly what the AOs look for.

Putting more focus on intangible criteria (essay, letters, volunteering work the nature and quality of which are hard to assess beyond what the students describe), instead of the tangibles (courses taken, test scores, etc), only means that colleges will have a much easier time defending their admissions decisions.

In terms of wellroundedness, I also agree with Thomas Percy. I think plenty of people have said that this is just a way to see which middle-class families have the means to help their kids jump through all hoops (the rich kids don't need to jump, they just walk right around the hoops).

Which is basically the definition of privilege, right?

But what good is being wealthy if you can't buy privilege?

Merit and Industriousness ------> Wealth and Capital ------> Privilege and Superiority

I am interested to hear what people think is "rich" enough to be able to waltz into a top 10 school without the requisite grades. The answers should be interesting--I will get popcorn ready.

I'll bite. "Rich enough" =

Mummy and Daddy donated $5 million for a new building. Yes, this happens. It's been documented.

The process isn't so crass as, "Will you admit my little snowflake if I make a big donation?" But it's still there.


Stanford

Ivies via hacked email at Sony

I could go on, but your popcorn is burning.

I guess "rich kids" are a politically correct group to slander. The fact some super-rich parents have gotten their children in through donations does not mean that most Ivy matriculants from rich families had parents who did so. As I have written before http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....ch_college_and_does_it_m.html#Post195611 :

Since income is positively correlated with IQ, and IQ is highly heritable, a disproportionate number of the smartest high school students come from rich families, who are paying full freight. That's why even though 29% of Harvard students came from families with incomes of $250K+, including 14% from families with incomes of $500K+, the richest kids had the highest SAT scores on average, according to a survey of Harvard freshman:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/9/4/freshman-survey-admissions-aid/
Freshman Survey Part II: An Uncommon App
The Crimson’s Survey of Freshmen Shines Light on Admissions, Financial Aid, and Recruiting
By LAYA ANASU and MICHAEL D. LEDECKY
September 4, 2013

Bostonian, if you read the articles I linked to, you'll see that they admit kids who had been rejected BEFORE the college considered the family's situation. No one is slandering anyone, unless the students they interviewed and the email writers were slandering themselves.

You've contradicted yourself:


Which one is it? Do you favor admitting kids because of academic success or because of donations? You've argued against affirmative action here in the past as a process that admits people who aren't capable. Isn't admitting donor kids doing the exact same thing?

You can't claim that they only take a tiny number of students whose parents bought the kid's way in. In the WSJ story I quoted, Duke admitted 125 wealthy students because of family connections. That's nearly 4% of total admits. All of them had been either rejected or wait-listed. That means that 125 academically more-deserving students were rejected outright or didn't get off the wait list because of donor admits.


A 3.2 high school GPA is not exactly the stuff of valedictorianship. How many valedictorians got rejected in favor of this young woman and her 1190 on the SAT?

I know 2 instances where $10 mil didn't get acceptance into Harvard. And the kids were decent, not stellar, but decent in grades.

But they are getting donations in the hundreds of millions, so it is all relative.

Aren't we on this forum because our kids have great scores and grades? And they can get some great options for college? If some rich kid got in because family donated 400 mil for a new research center, I am glad because there is a new research center for my kid at her school. Isn't that why Duke is taking the money. To be a top college you need whatever money you can generate. If your alumni isn't giving, take it from the front end.

Wren, your kid might get rejected because a donor kid got accepted. In fact, given how widespread the problem is, your kid likely WILL get rejected by at least one college for that very reason, unless you don't apply in the US.

Remember also that these colleges have endowments that run into the billions. How many more millions do they really need?

This is why US college admissions won't be primarily about academic ability anytime soon. It's a money game, and it's about greed. Financial greed at the college and status greed among the parents. I say this as someone who's seen this process. It's gross.

It's also playing a role in the deterioration of standards at US colleges.

That's easy. One, at most.

Is it unfair? Sure it is. But these days $1M only gets you consideration into lowly Brown. Duke might well be higher than that now, and the prices go up exponentially as school selectivity increases. Because the price is now so high, in the grand scheme of things, there aren't that many rich people that can buy their admission that it has a major effect. At most schools, the number of development cases is certainly less than the number of recruited athletes.

I live in a Boston suburb. I know plenty of families not in the top 1% whose kids got into Harvard and MIT on merit. Our high school sends between 5-10 kids to those schools each year (almost all non-legacy), and the activities my kids participate in expose us to many more such families outside of our town. On the flip side, I also know a 0.1% family with a double Harvard/Radcliffe legacy that has donated continuously to Harvard, and yet their kids didn't get in.

We face the college application gauntlet next year. I am confident that my daughter will get into a good school that will prepare her well for her future. But I don't have the foggiest idea which college it will be, and I am really not that stressed about it (yet anyway).

Okay, what about the other 124 donation admits? At Duke alone? Multiply that by 20, 30, or more top tier schools, and pretty soon you're into the thousands.

No one arguing that donation admissions are acceptable has commented on the large set of information I provided that shows pretty clearly that donation admissions are a significant phenomenon in college admissions. I find that interesting.

Mithawk, you asked for proof. I provided it, and you focused on a single point, ignoring all the other evidence. In my experience, this type of reaction is a sign of not wanting to acknowledge the facts.

I know of someone who is in the top most earning bracket in the US who made 2 phone calls to his connections and promised millions (don't know how many) and their special snowflake got into Stanford despite SAT scores that were not stellar - the child was told to apply for a different major because the popular one that she wanted was oversubscribed and it was suggested that she change majors in a few months to the one that she wanted. I am not well networked, am middle class and have a child in elementary school and don't really go looking for info like this - so, if even I heard about this, chances are that there are more of these things happening all around me!
Money speaks, sometimes crassly, sometimes subtly and meritocracy sometimes takes a backseat. But, I am an optimist and believe that there are enough good college seats for all of our kids!

No way that Duke or any other school has 125 seven figure donors each year. That means that they could cover the cost of attendance for every incoming freshman (for the first year anyway) with some money left over.

The 125 included others with connections. Connections/legacy are not always kids that could not get in on their own. I'll let you know how it goes for middle kid this year. Her legacy connection college isn't elite, but well known and fairly highly ranked. Mom, dad, aunt and uncle all attended the school, and the school heavily considers legacy. She is also above the 75th percentile test scores. So what if they let her in and that is in part due to her connections? I assure you it will not be because of a seven figure donation.

Colleges benefit from tax breaks (deductions for donationa, tax exemptions for endowment investment income) and subsidies (Pell grants, guaranteed student loans). It could be argued that government-subsidized institutions should not be nepotistic, but that ideal is often not met. There are foundations and churches that give jobs to relatives of the founder.

I would not mind if my alma mater abolished legacy preferences, but I am not outraged by them, because trying to benefit one's offspring, even as adults, is natural and common. Small business owners commonly employ their children and pass on their businesses to them. Is that bad? Two of our three children have expressed interest in becoming doctors, like their mother. She says she wants to pay for not just college but medical school, because she did not leave medical school with debt in her country (where the path to becoming a doctor is shorter). They will be "privileged" over students with several hundred thousand dollars in college and medical school loans. Should parents with the means to do so not help adult children?

This, exactly.

I'm no longer very convinced that good college seats are necessarily to be found exclusively in the so-called elite schools, however. I've shifted my opinion on this even in the time since my daughter entered high school five years ago.

It seems more and more to be a system which is about token diversity accompanied by an overwhelming culture of extreme privilege. No, thank you. While that makes me sad, because I do believe that at one time, those institutions were about quality in education and commitment to their mission statements, I strongly suspect that those days are long since vanished.

I'm increasingly of the opinion-- and I'm not alone-- that the better bet for highly capable students is to get out of undergraduate studies without debt, and not to worry over-much about the branding of one's diploma.

My child isn't a daughter of the 1%, and therefore, an elite college isn't a part of meeting that particular goal. A full-service research institution can be, however, because she is easily a standout among that cohort. Interestingly, she's met quite a number of other students who have opted for this same approach.

Also interesting-- no Common App, and no letters of recommendation from anyone. Wasn't part of the application at all. They cared about EC's, sure-- but more as a way of seeing who has the ability to handle academics with ease, as opposed to those working 50-70 hours a week to pull A's in a few AP courses, if that makes sense.

It depends on what they want to do afterwards. The brand does matter for finance and consulting jobs. It matters less for aspiring physicians and professors, I think, but for the latter group the graduate school matters a lot.

This is similar to my current opinion: graduate from a reasonable 4 year college (state uni, respectable-but-not-necessarily-top-tier private), and then a strong graduate program in your area of actual career interest/aspiration.

I'd even add, there's something to be said for backing it up one more step, and picking up a vocational certification on your way through high school, or during a gap year, so that you have the possibility of working your way through college with a job with a living wage, rather than at minimum wage.

Instead of giving less weight to AP exams, I'd like to see scores reported on a finer scale. A score of 5 corresponds to a wide raw score range. The 12 students who got perfect scores on the AP Calculus exam (see the article Lincoln High School student gets perfect score on AP Calculus exam -- 1 of 12 in the world to do so) deserve a bit more credit than the the other students who scored 5's. Some will say "don't report raw scores -- it will just increase the pressure to be perfect". My answer is that other things being equal, schools should prefer the best students, and I'd rather have students competing based on academics.

Except for the first clause, which I think waters the rest of the sentence down, I fully agree with Bostonian's last sentence above because it will certainly provide the best means to differentiate those with 5s. It just makes sense.

The point of the ivies is that they allow you to shine for the rest of your life with a vibrant glow of achievementistic glory.

It's not really whether you are "suited" toward the college or get an "education".

Think of it as an "awesomeness certificate."

Plus, you get to join things like the Harvard Club.

What I though was nuts is how these people aren't even trying to hide the fact they bought their kid's admission, and the university is giving out all these facts and statistics:
The first part is just, I don't know, crazy to hear, but in my opinion the fact that colleges are being transparent about it is good, at least....

Well, of course such institutions are happy to have the word get out about this, at least unofficially. I mean, sure-- one wouldn't necessarily want to top this list in USN&WR or anything, but as long as the right people know about the option...

it's rather like, er, an alternative marketing strategy aimed squarely at a highly desirable demographic, when you get right down to it.

Think about that for a moment and let it sink in.

A simpler definition is that it is yield management, taken to a higher level.