Comment by mrangle
14 hours ago
The problem is that private elite colleges never used just SAT scores for admissions criteria, and no amount of assertion that they did or should will change that fact.
Focusing on SAT scores advances a false narrative, and serves to try to exert outside influence on adjusting admissions criteria to be more robotic.
While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom.
What that means is that these students are more often found in elite prep schools. But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools.
Though I agree that there is definitely a common difference of opinion as to what such a candidate's profile looks like. If one doesn't have much experience in the Ivy competition pool, for example, it's hard to understand your specific competitiveness.
>While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom.
The paper says that the three main causes for Ivy-plus admission rates among the 1% are:
"The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families"
But are these oh-so-important factors what make for successful students? Let's ask the authors.
"Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success."
Hm. I guess you'll need a new excuse.
It’s even simpler than how you’re putting it. Gini coefficient has risen since 1980 and freshman class quality by objective measures like incoming grades and test scores is declining since 1993. It is really improbable that being rich helps you in college - in fact you don’t need to have a study at all to know that the opposite is very probably true. But people like the guy you’re replying to are so hung up on first principles thinking like “increasing selectivity means greater quality.” He thinks that’s axiomatic, when you need to conduct a pretty serious study to measure quality.
This study was good because it shows how being rich improves your admissions chances. Probably, increasing numbers of richer students have been causing class quality to DECLINE, not improve, and if it weren’t for donations funding research, the universities are actually WORSE off with the children of the merely richest Americans. This aligns with my experience at such universities, over many years, both as a student and an educator.
> While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom.
But the SATs still matter. They are a generalized measure of the student’s quality and are a good measure of how they’ll succeed in general. They should be given more weight than subjective measures. And focusing on them also avoids favoring those “extra” activities that are more accessible to students from wealthy families, who can afford it (money and time). For example, a family that needs the big kid to help watch the little kid can’t afford to have the big kid stay for after school sports.
By the way, plenty of public school students also have good test scores AND the extra things you mention. The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic. That’s legacy admissions but also race or gender based quota based discrimination.
I agree with a lot of this comment. For example, focusing on SAT scores is definitely not the way to go.
> But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools.
The only way you could make this assertion would be if you knew "high level candidates" who were being refused admission "to elite colleges". And do you mean one? Or talking collectively? So a counterexample would be an high-level candidate who was admitted to NO elite colleges.
I do know examples. It happens all of the time. It doesn't even bother me. Colleges only have so many space. Unqualified rich kids getting in: undesirable and irritating. Qualified kids not getting in: a necessary consequence of the math.
The easiest way to find examples is to look in poor communities, where kids don't even know that Harvard would be free for them instead of $87k/year. Can't find any exceptional candidates there? Look harder.
The idea that there is some fictional "high-level" to begin with is crazy. Reducing all of a young person's humanity to a single metric ("level")?
> never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools
This really strains credulity. Decision criteria may not be purely based on academic merit (e.g., SAT), or even significantly based on it. It may also be true that they seek candidates likely to succeed b/c why not? Successful alumni are a self-perpetuating advertisement for your school.
But to say they have never refused admission to a candidate that will "truly" go on to succeed is trivially falsified, if only by having limited admissions slots. It's an imperfect game, and I think you're giving them too much benefit of doubt, and playing a "no true scottsman" game here.
This is naive. The job of admissions is to make money for the institution. Academics, being "well rounded", being a "leader" is all kayfabe.
Colleges are a “marketplace” as much as any other marketplace. Just how Stanford disrupted the traditional Ivy League monopoly, other schools can disrupt the status quo by consistent churning out leaders, great thinkers, entrepreneurs, and the like.
What sells the colleges the most is the sense that successful people tend to be there. So while admissions profit can be a very short term goal, any admit counselor knows that the long term goal is to create admirable leaders and change makers.
This is not impossible for publicly funded schools. Berkeley has put out consistently top AI researchers and engineers, more so than Stanford in my opinion.
Stanford builds companies; Berkeley builds entire industries
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If things were really so machiavellian they wouldn’t take broke students at all.
How are you judging “students who excel in leadership positions” at 18 year old while dismissing SAT scores as an admission criteria? Most of the “captains” in my high school have grown up to have mediocre careers (including me) and at some point were in leadership positions mostly because they “looked cute”.
SAT scores are taken into account by many schools for that very reason that it can change how you read the application of a candidate.
SAT is almost always read in terms of the deviation from the school or community average. So its not the case that having a decent score from a shit school is worse than a slight-better-than-decent score from an elite school