Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Ivy League Admissions.

Maybe I am being naive, but I don't think that the ivies are completely biased toward selecting students who will only go into finance and other business professions. Many, many students are selected without those interests, and many do NOT go into those fields.

And there are pre-professional fields at many of the ivies - Penn, Princeton, Brown and Cornell have engineering, Penn has nursing, etc.

Not trying to completely defend them, since I think the prestige factor is way out of proportion, but I do think they offer an amazing education for those who can get in.

I think the 10% admitted based on academics is misleading. Look at the College Board website and look up Harvard's 25th-75th percentile SAT scores. 75th percentile for CR, M and W is 800 - so I guess that others here are saying that only two-fifths of that 75th percentile and above, the kids with 800 on the section, are admitted on academics. Umm...that doesn't make sense.

If your school has Naviance, take a look at the SAT & GPA of kids admitted to Ivies from your HS. Hmmm...most of them look academically qualified.

And when others are counting only the "b" kids in that 10 percent, that isn't true at all. My eldest knows "a" kids who are not only very well rounded, interesting, social kids, but also the cream of the crop academically.

There's a flaw in this logic. What about all the 800 scorers who don't get admitted? What are the criteria for choosing? When Pinker says "At the admissions end, it’s common knowledge that Harvard selects at most 10 percent (some say 5 percent) of its students on the basis of academic merit." he's not talking about mere SAT scores. He's talking about higher level rarer academic accomplishments. For applicants who don't have such higher level rarer academic accomplishments, even if they have high SAT/ACT scores, some non-academic criteria will be used, and they are not in Pinker's 10 (or 5) percent.

The real point is that it shouldn't be this way. All applicants should be taking tougher tests.

Verruca Salt got a golden ticket.

Falling off the stairway to relevance (or rolling off it, in her case) must hurt.

I really think this "two types" thing is a complete myth.

You sound like a Calvinist over this LOL

Why?

Polymaths certainly exist, and those who excel at a single preferred domain also do. The two general groups of individuals do sort of form a mutually exclusive pair of sets. Granted, there are probably some people who trend one way or the other without being at either extreme, but among gifties, it doesn't seem to me to be a grossly controversial statement to note that most tend to be one or the other.

So there are children who take college coursework in one domain as quite young kids-- those would be the pointy ones. There are also children like my DD, who is entering college years before her peers (though she wouldn't have been ready quite as young as a "pointy" peer-- perhaps 12-13yo rather than 6 or 7), and is seemingly "very good" at everything she has ever done-- but doesn't yet for-sure-for-sure have a major picked out, and keenly feels that she isn't "extraordinary at any one thing."

She is right about that-- she isn't. She's very good at everything. But she is also a lot more comfortable to be around for most people than super-pointy types who are VERY good at a single domain and may only be "adequate" or even just "good" at other things.

It's not clear to me what the right proportion of the two basic tendencies is "right" for an institution of higher learning, but clearly such institutions have an unstated desire to produce "rounded" education in their graduates, else general education requirements for degrees would not exist. I have seen quite a few VERY brilliant students struggle with some elements of such general education requirements, for whatever that is worth-- the pointy ones sometimes can, in a relative weakness.

The bottom line is that BOTH types look identical via the imperfect and not-terribly-difficult testing that is currently used to winnow the field of applicants. Test them both at age 18 with the SAT, and on any given day, perfect scores are as likely as not.

By that measure, they are both "highly qualified" for elite institutions.

A suboptimal alternative is for applicants to take those tests at an earlier age. The Study of Exceptional Talent (open to students scoring 700+ on math or verbal before age 13) newsletter mentions periodically that it will write letters of recommendation for members, mentioning that their high scores were achieved at a young age. The newsletter said some colleges find this to be useful information.

Great point, I absolutely agree. I'm always puzzled when people say they will discard scores taken at a young age. It seems like great information (though perhaps it helps to have followed through with later academic achievements as well). That also looks like an incentive to go for SET if colleges respect that achievement.

Another Stephen Hsu blog post
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/09/harvard-admissions-and-meritocracy.html
supports Steve Pinker's contention
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/...should-judge-students-standardized-tests
that "At the admissions end, it’s common knowledge that Harvard selects at most 10 percent (some say 5 percent) of its students on the basis of academic merit."

Other recent blogs on this
Stephen Hsu (earlier)
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-is-best-for-harvard.html
Scott Aaronson
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2003

There's a lot of great points in these blogs and the comments.