Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Ivy League Admissions.

See, that is what bothers me about the US system, to some extent-- that there is this schizophrenic mentality that "well-roundedness" is good, but at the same time, students are expected to have a singular passion well-developed at 17 years of age. So being pointy is in some ways disproportionately rewarded by a system that CLAIMS to value polymaths, but punishes them for being polymaths.

"Soundness, roundness, and a gimmick." Except that's the advice for PhD candidates going on the job market.

When was the last time when a well-rounded individual was considered desirable for college? My nephew was accepted to a HYPSM about 8 years ago, and even then people were saying that colleges were looking for "pointy people", that when put together made a well-rounded class.

Regardless of what colleges supposedly should do, and what they do do, there is still the inescapable fact that SAT/ACT test have too low a ceiling, and the colleges are missing a huge amount of information about the academic ability of their applicants, and there is no excuse for them not actively pushing for harder tests.

This!

They have a very good reason for refusing harder tests--it restricts their freedom. The first goal for colleges are self preservation and growth, hence the preference for legacies and athletics, both of which fuel alumni donations. But once self-preservation and growth has been achieved, college believe themselves to be forces for social engineering, helping right what they see as wrong in society.

If the test ceilings are high and clearly student A is superior to student B, then it is hard for the college to refuse student A. But it may turn out that the A group students are highly skewed in some ways, such as socioeconomically, racially, geographically, family structure (two parents vs one), etc. Colleges think, rightly or wrongly, that part of their job is to help those who did not grow up in the right circumstances and therefore were unable to achieve the way group A did. Having low ceilings gives them discretion to make these decisions.

Well I certainly suspect that some colleges like the low ceilings for the smokescreen that they provide. But I don't know for sure if it is planned, or if they are just being opportunistic, or if they are not aware of it, or don't believe it.

But then there is also the question of what they do with this smokescreen. I am very skeptical that it is used for social justice, and if anything, the opposite may be true, that they use it to intentionally favor some groups and disfavor others, at the expense of social mobility. An obvious way to do this is, while supposedly being "needs blind", to look for signals of ability to pay, which a lot of extracurricular activities are.

I agree-- I think that it provides a smokescreen and can be used in any way that they like, while they can still defend the position (to EITHER audience)-- with statements like "need-blind!" or "the RIGHT kinds of students," depending on who they are pitching it to.

I don't believe for one minute that ad-coms and the administrators that they answer to don't know that the SAT/ACT isn't a good measure of true aptitude for high-level thinking and potential academic success at a high level. I think that they simply don't care, and that if anything, they prefer the situation as it is.

It retains a certain sense of mystique when nobody is exactly sure WHAT it actually takes to get in, and when ad-coms can change it on the fly as desired. KWIM?

I still favor the social engineering angle.

There was a recent NY Times article on colleges that, among other things, showed the endowment per student (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/upshot/top-colleges-that-enroll-rich-middle-class-and-poor.html). Assuming this chart is accurate, there are 7 colleges (including 3 Ivies) that have endowments of around $1M per student. Given that college endowments have averaged real returns of about 7%, these 7 colleges could charge zero tuition if they chose to. But I believe college is a Veblen good, so there is no reason for them to offer a low price.

Among the Ivies, Dartmouth follows with ~$650K/student, while Brown, Columbia, UPenn, and Cornell are "slumming it" with endowments between $250K - $350K per student. At $250K per student, Cornell could generate about $18K per student in financial aid without depleting its endowment, and that ignores all other sources of financial aid the student is eligible for. So for practical purposes, I do believe that the Ivies are truly "need blind". There are also 23 other non-Ivy colleges with endowments higher than the bottom 4 Ivy colleges, and these too can be considered completely "need-blind".

This is a simple example. I understand that colleges choose to spend their endowment returns on many other things besides financial aid, but I think the "need-blind" status holds.

There was actually a thread about that article here.
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted...._colleges_that_enroll_po.html#Post200440

There are two different things that need to be distinguished: "need-blind" and "meets full need".

"Meets full need" means that a student is charged what they can affford based on parent/student assets/income, or to be concrete, pays the FAFSA-EFC (where it is completely and universally understood that if you borrow $X then you are paying that $X (plus interest)). In fact, places like Harvard are even more generous than this to the poorest ninety percent of households. It is definitely true that there are several colleges that genuinely try to be affordable to almost everyone (if you can get in).

"Need-blind" means that financial status is not a factor in admissions. This is what I am skeptical about. Even if the admissions people don't see the financial info, the applications will be full of signals of ability to pay, and the universities have a very obvious financial incentive to consider that. Of course there will be a correlation between academic ability and SES, so a statistical bias towards higher SES consistent with that correlation is completely justified, but if the statistical bias towards higher SES is even higher than that, then the "need-blind" claim should be called into question.