Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Selective colleges and "well-rounded" applicants

All the while research indicated that you will most likely be more successful long term if you are one of these students and choose to go to a less prestiges school where you are in the top 2% versus going to one of the ivy league schools and being in the middle 50th or even the top quartile. Why are people trying to get in these school's again???

As to why, I think some gifted people (me for instance) are at their best when around other gifted people, even if they are no longer the smartest person around. I have accomplished much more at work, and been more satisfied, when working with other smart people. During the times when that wasn't the case, I tended to coast.

As the U.S. population grows while the class size of Ivy League schools hardly changes, inevitably the bar for admission to those schools is raised.

Mithawk read David and Goliath, many studies are sited discussing the lifetime success of students who attend a less prestigious college where they are at the 99th percentile of applicants vs those at the 50th percentile at ivy league schools. Despite the ivy league students having academic performance and test scores that exceed those of the top 1 percent at other schools, the ones at the top do better. Not just in terms of hiring and income but also upward mobility and publications if they are an academic.

One of the longest chapters addresses the question of how high-school students choose colleges. The protagonist is a woman with the pseudonym of Caroline Sacks, who was at the top of her class in high school and had loved science ever since she drew pictures of insects as a child. She was admitted to Brown University and the University of Maryland; she went to Brown, her first choice of all the colleges she visited, with the goal of a science degree.

Ms. Sacks ran into trouble early on in her science courses and hit a wall in organic chemistry. There were students in her classes who seemed to effortlessly grasp concepts she struggled with, and she got discouragingly low grades. She switched her major and looks back with regret, saying that if she'd gone to Maryland, "I'd still be in science."

In this conclusion she may be right. Mr. Gladwell reports data showing that, no matter what kind of college students attend, those who start a science major in the top third of the ability range of students at their own college (judged by their SAT scores) are much more likely to graduate with a science degree than those in the bottom third—the odds are about 55% versus 15%.

This is a classic "fish and ponds" problem. Being the Little Fish in the Big Pond can be daunting. "It's the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want," Mr. Gladwell concludes. Ms. Sacks should have gone to Maryland instead of Brown—she would have been a Big Fish, avoided discouraging competition and stayed in science.

This argument exemplifies one of Mr. Gladwell's stock maneuvers. We might call it "the fallacy of the unexamined premise." He starts this discussion by saying that "a science degree is just about the most valuable asset a young person can have in the modern economy." And if you would be a weak student at an elite university or a strong student at a lower-ranked school, the literature says that you are more likely to get that science degree at the lower-ranked school. Therefore you should ignore conventional wisdom and pick the lower-ranked school over the higher one.

The problems here are many: Degrees from different kinds of schools are not assets of identical value, as Mr. Gladwell baldly implies when he writes that students at Harvard University and at a mid-ranked liberal-arts college are "studying the same textbooks and wrestling with the same concepts and trying to master the same problem sets."

...The quality of Ivy-rejected candidates continues to improve, which is great news for Flagship State University.

And given that the admissions arms race is so toxic, and the winners often so significantly damaged by the process, it's time for a radical re-think on whether an Ivy education is still desirable, by either prospective students or hiring employers.

I'm not sure if the term "raise the bar" is appropriate, and I have similar feelings about the quality of rejected applicants improving. Those terms are conceptually so broad, and yet the criteria they apply to are, in practice, so narrow: high grades and high SAT scores. I'm not convinced that many of these kids are really participating meaningfully in all those extracurricular activities, and I wonder how many are only signing up to check a box ("fencing looks good on college apps; FFA, not so much").

As a group, these kids strike me as being groomed for Ivy League admissions more than anything else. I'm not saying they aren't intelligent and hard-working, because they are. But they're still groomed, and the arms race for college admissions doesn't leave a lot of room for failure, exploration, or taking meaningful risks (as in, the kinds of risks that can help you grow as a person but might bring your GPA down out of the stratosphere).

RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES are the world’s great venture capitalists for investments in human capital—that is, knowledge. Harvard enrolls thousands of students, each of whom is a “project.” Students acquire human capital, an asset that they turn to account as scientists, composers, financiers, politicians. Harvard also supports thousands of studies, each of which is also a “project”—an analysis of Bach’s compositions, an investigation of poor families’ expenditures, the mapping of the human genome. Like venture capitalists, research universities have the expertise to recognize projects with huge potential—the ablest students, the best experiments. Like venture capitalists, they not only fund projects but guide them and match them with specialized resources. Like venture capitalists, they retain an “equity share” in their projects—though they do this in a special way.