Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Elite Colleges Admissions Merit Based?

Correction about that perception-- admission to the institution is not the same thing as admission to the program/major.

Deans/faculty DO make admissions decisions. It's just not evident at this top-level analysis.

But that plays into the flaws in the reasoning illustrated in the (insightful) observations about Caltech versus Harvard in terms of applicant pools not being identical. I'm not sure that there is a good way to compare one elite institution to another in the first place for the simple reason that each "brand" draws a specific potential applicant pool.

Since those complex brand-affiliation reasons can't be normalized in any meaningful way, I'm not sure that we can expect that the student populations ought to be "representative" of anything but the qualified applicants within that specific applicant pool. So maybe MIT's admits won't look like those of Harvard, no matter how fair or meritocratic the process became.

LOL...right.

I think you are making caricatures rather than citing facts like the author does. He is quite careful to use local populations for his stats.

Let's address the comment on Jews outside of the author's comments.

I applied to and was accepted to both Caltech and Princeton.
My maternal grandfather pushed me to apply to both - and he was an Ashkenazi Jew who owned a large business in the South - as was his wife, albeit having changed their names to fit in. I applied to Caltech and the Ivies because I was the grandchild of a Jewish couple and wanted to do pure research.

Caltech is famous for being full of Jews and has been headed by a Jew for most of its existence - and it is considered to be THE prestigious school for pure science. Which it still is.

Let's address Caltech vs Harvard.

Science is a component of Liberal Arts.

All the Ivies have very strong and prestigious sciences schools with many students going into Finance or Medicine or into grad studies. EO Wilson, Watson and Crick of Harvard. Einstein at Princeton. I grew up knowing these names before I was a teenager. I knew the Ivies for Science - Harvard for Biology and Princeton for Physics - not for anything else.

In fact, Harvard has as many admissions into the Sciences schools as Caltech does for the whole school. Ditto for Princeton. In fact, those two Ivies, if they took away all the other schools, would dominate Caltech in numbers alone - both in terms of students admitted, grad programs, funded studies, and cited professors.

I'm very confused by that statement, too.

3000 meaning what? NMSF? Or Jewish students? Or something else entirely?

I'm clearly missing something in that statement.

IIRC, the article said that National Merit Scholarship people publish an annual list of 16,000 top high school students (presumably based on SAT scores alone? Not sure). Less than 1,000 Jewish students make the list. Roughly 15,000 non-Jewish Asian and white students are on the list.

Ergo, if >2,000 non-top-student Jewish people were admitted to the top schools, the admissions people were favoring Jewish students by dipping into the low end of the Jewish talent pool. And as a result, they were probably rejecting some of those non-Jewish people who were "better" students (which could really mean "had higher SAT scores," I don't know.").

I'm recalling this information, not pulling it out of the article. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't think public universities should discriminate on the basis of sex, but if private women's and men's colleges can discriminate absolutely, other colleges should be able to discriminate to a lesser extent. You can't have it both ways.

And really, I was only addressing half of the equation, the demand side. Jon Law already addressed the supply side, when he said these institutions will admit the kind of students they're looking to admit. The schools manage their own brands, and admissions criteria are one way to do so. Every time an earthquake happens and the staff at Caltech is interviewed, the value of their brand is enhanced. Every time a Harvard graduate is appointed to a Cabinet post, the value of their brand is enhanced.

So now here we are, synthesizing the two sides of the equation, supply and demand. The two schools will have different customer bases applying to them, and of those, the two schools will make different choices based on the kind of customer they wish to serve. As a result, they're going to have very different outcomes.

Supply and demand, just like capitalism. Naturally... these are all private institutions we've been talking about, are they not? As such, are they not allowed to make whatever business decisions they choose? And if so, why is The American Conservative decrying the lack of meritocracy in these choices? Do they suddenly have a problem with capitalism?

There are two questions in your post.

First question is do the Ivies discriminate? The answer is yes. The numbers of non-Jewish whites and Asians admitted over time has dropped in favor of Jews and others in either absolute and relative terms. This is supported by both general population and NMSF comparisons. The only flaw I can see in the reasoning is if the number of apps correspondingly dropped for the "discriminated" populations and I would find that unlikely given how they were accepted before, all things being equal.

The second question is one of branding. I agree that Caltech and the Ivies are somewhat "local" schools. The author addresses this obvious issue by looking at both national and state populations and then playing admissions off both national and state NMSF numbers. In this case, its hard to see a flaw in this line of reasoning.

The one thing the author does miss, and it does play into school selection, is that a lot of public schools and tier 2 privates actively court NMSF students with full rides and good programs. The Ivies now have some solid competition. A number of my coworkers and friends with stellar kids chose to go this route and never applied at all to an Ivy.

On the other hand, I know from some kids here in Dallas that a lot of kids do apply to Ivies and do not get accepted despite NMSF, straight A's and and AMC Honor Roll.

And the article points out that the Ivies accept around 25% of the kids with perfect SATS. So that would tend to imply that the applications from top kids are in abundance still.

So it seems to me that the preponderance of evidence is in the Author's favor.

This is correct. They had to dip into the 98th percentile or lower.

A company owning apartment buildings could decide that excluding non-whites helps to "manage its brand", but civil rights laws prevent this. If private businesses are forbidden to discriminate on the basis of race, so should universities.

Thanks-- I just wasn't following the logic there.


Well, this is still missing what I was trying to point out-- that not all prospective students-- even those at or above the Xth percentile (whatever that might be) will consider themselves "BigNameInstitution" material. For reasons that often make no real sense in a rational, logical way.

Similarly, applicants may feel a sense of identity with an institution for reasons that are not easily distilled into rational, logical, or certainly quantitative measures.

What makes a student a "Reedie" as opposed to a "UVA" student?

I realize this is moving out of the Ivies, but I deliberately chose two schools with selective admissions, but distinct (and vastly different) identities.

It also hasn't got as much to do with geography as one might imagine, which is why I am skeptical that the population statistics applied here are really saying what the author THINKS they are saying.