An Admissions Surprise from the Ivy League
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Everybody already knows this. 9th graders don't need harvard to tell them how good of a school it is through a new website. 9th graders need parents who are informed about the process, and who have enough money and time to bankroll extracurriculars and support the kid through whatever endeavor is going to make him/her special enough to deserve a spot. This is usually a lifelong process.
So if the end goal is to raise student awareness/ability to get into an elite university, the problem needs to be addressed at a much more fundamental level than "web portal for 9th graders". Petition your network of business and political leaders to improve public education and welfare programs that educate and support low-income families and their children. Donate a portion of your multi-billion dollar endowment to this end.
But one has to wonder...what incentive does an elite institution really have for increasing equality?
I am not going to disagree with that, but it's not the only benefit. You should probably mention that if you want to go into research/grad school (especially for liberal arts), it pays to go to a school where the top professors and academics work.
That said, there's also something I disagree with:
> Larry Summers is going to give the same econ 101 lecture as every other college professor.
As someone who goes to a subpar Computer Science school, I disagree. Tom Leighton explained Discrete Math better than any professors I've had. Sussman and Ableson, even in the 80s, were better than any lecturer I've had.
Maybe it's because I go to subpar school, instead of a "good enough"/"good but not elite" school, but I can definitely see the benefits of an elite school in academics alone.
Of course, this is all irrelevant to the rest of your comment, which I agree with. I also happen to be a first generation immigrant and almost everyone I met in the same position as me was clueless about the college process.
The quality of the lecturers was basically the same. At both institutions, some were fantastic and others were terrible. In fact, I had one professor at the elite school that was probably the biggest bullshitter of a teacher that I've ever had. I also enjoyed much greater access to professors at the regular school as they weren't always busy with research/speaking engagements/writing books.
The quality of the average student was leagues ahead at the elite university. The exams at the elite university were much more rigorous.
The end result was that I had to cram for a month for those elite exams, during which time I "learned" (read: memorized) a ton but also promptly forgot most of it after doing well on the exams. The lasting benefit of the elite university was meeting all of the really interesting and intelligent people who have become some of my closest friends.
Most 'metrics' applicants are measured by correlate highly with income. There are SAT prep classes, schools with more AP/IB classes, personal statement 'helpers', interview coaches, and so on. This initiative needs to be coupled with a better understanding of the challenges that lower-income students face.
There is, of course, no mention of financial aid packages by the coalition. Increasing the amount earmarked to financial aid, particularly to grants instead of loans, would be more effective.
You could just stop there. The ivy league schools already get way way more applicants of every type and flavor than they can ever admit.
Some suggest that they just want more applicants regardless of who those applicants are, because these schools are competing to see who can be the most selective. Harvard, Yale, Stanford etc. compete for the "honor" of bragging rights to who is most selective. They have a strong incentive to increase their denominator.
There are already programs for low-income and 1st-generation college applicants. I don't see how its provably more effective to continue plugging that hole, vs this new initiative to bridge students from high school to ivy-league. They saw a gap, and they addressed it.
Its so easy to snipe at Ivy League schools, no matter what they do. Thus my other comment on this subject.
Agree. In addition, reducing or eliminating legacy preferences [1] would go a long way.
Do the elite worry about legacy admissions? They do not.
Do the elite worry about their old-boys clubs being exposed and the public turning against them? No duh.
I don't understand the relevance of your second sentence. Do you believe that minorities see themselves as doing well at SATs and hence taking prep courses disproportionately?
Top schools tend to give full rides to sufficiently poor students. (I probably would've bothered to apply to them if I'd known that before I started at my state university...)
Those classes and signs of affluence. Are they JUST signs of affluence, or are they also signaling mechanisms for academic fitness? Having gone to an city public school with students across the financial spectrum (all the way from projects through upper class suburban) there was certainly a correlation between income and these classes, but there was also (logically) a correlation between the students who took those courses/had those good SAT scores and students who had the right tools/experience to succeed academically/not be one of the many first-year college dropouts I also unfortunately saw.
What I worry is that we're addressing the problem too high up the pipeline. I'm not sure how many of the highschoolers I saw who had no access to mentoring/training figures, or extra help through parents/extracurriculars, would have been ABLE to succeed in college off the bat. The metrics, although correlated with money, _do provide utility_ to the things colleges want to look for in a purely academic context. A poor student can be intuitively brilliant on some subject, but entirely lacking the sort of background, academic and work habits, and other tools someone with earlier exposure would have built up by college. (again, this is a broad generalization, there are certainly outliers, and while one could make a well-taken effort to capture them, I'm just musing on the underlying problem)
In summary:
- I want to see more of those less fortunate get opportunities in higher education
- I'm not sure dropping them into the system after years of having been less fortunate will have the level of success that is often aspired to.
- I'd like to see more focus on opportunities earlier on in upbringing; but here's the biggest catch 22: I'm not sure we'll EVER fix things like SAT prep courses. Even if we offered free prep, SO MUCH of taking advantage of it relies on having the right mentors/guides to push you to take advantage of that, build the right mindset, and that's harder to give broadly pro-bonum than some free prep courses. (The other problem in a similar vein is, and perhaps I'm just not creative enough, but I'd be hard pressed to come up with measures of academic fitness that _couldn't_ be gamed with more time/money. At the end of the day, time and opportunities DO lead to more academic fitness, so to me it becomes a question less of digging for diamonds, and more of trying to give more people time and opportunities early on.)
That's the real conundrum though as it seems: If we want to make a level of schooling that doesn't just become "another highschool", it will necessarily select the "best and brightest". And for any system of judging that, having more money/resources(time) will likely allow someone to improve their odds. I'd be curious as to if anyone sees ways around this; or to go back to my "risky question" statement, if there IS a safe way around this.
anyway, the real scandal of ivy league admissions is the insane discrimination against asian americans. if you're from the preferred ethnic groups, you already get an enormous effective boost to your test scores.
I agree affirmative action is not ideal. Priority acceptance should be based on family income, not race. But the end result would be nearly the same as it is now.
I grew up in an upper class suburb (though not an upper class family myself) and saw tons of wealthy minority students that performed worse in school but got accepted at places their white friends weren't. They also got to do stuff like apply to scholarships for hispanic Americans when their families were of middle-eastern region ethnicity. No one was going to risk calling them out and being labeled a racist.
There are limited Ivy League seats, but that's all marketing. They use the same textbooks as your state U; you sit in similar 300-person halls to hear Intro-To-Whatever lectures.
I'm not so sure we need to shake up admissions processes to suit these self-appointed 'best schools'.
It reads like advice to improve bars and restaurants. Now, the best most profitable bars and restaurants are the ones doing (fill in the blank) the best. To really gullible people, if every bar and restaurant on the planet did (fill in the blank) as well as (cool place) then every bar and restaurant would be as busy and successful as (cool place)... all of them at the same time, LOL. Obviously if air conditioning or electric lights or indoor plumbing were ubiquitous then a new selection criteria would spring up and the best places would have a different mythology about why they're the best and the rest will remain inferior.
Its an intentional confusion of macro and micro policy.
On a micro scale yes its very easy to fine tune some random poor kid to get into the cool kids-only club. On a large macro scale all that's going to do is change the selection criteria so the poor kids can't get in, or the cool place to get into is no longer "XYZ". Its kind of like real estate blockbusting.
Before major social shifts, you tend to see a lot of pump priming like this to get the population used to the idea of changing things in that area. Likely there is a lot of upheaval anticipated in higher ed or young adulthood and very soon the ticket to the cool kids club is no longer going to be going to Yale... or Stanford... I donno what its going to be, but if we're subject to endless social engineering blockbusting of the ivies, I guarantee whatever the future is, it won't be the ivies.
Perhaps all rich kids will have their parents fund startups instead of going to business school or whatever. Or seeing as professional tutors and grad students are now cheaper than tuition, personalized instruction will become the norm. You don't need a piece of paper to get a title of nobility or meal ticket if your dad is rich enough...
Those people are going to attack anything that doesn't better their own child's chances at an acceptance letter. (Believe me, I know. I've had the misfortune of being given the task of dealing with some of these people in the past.) So the objections of those parents should not be given too much credence. Have a low level person hear them out. Determine if there is anything there that is worthwhile. Then, leave it at that. Not much time should be wasted on bandwidth for those people. After all, at least in my experience, those people RARELY have "wunderkind".
Adding online lockers is a nice attempt, but doesn't solve the problem.
The whole point of standardized testing is to level the playing field, so folks are admitted by demonstrated ability and not what prep school they went to or what neighborhood they grew up in.
Just as an illustration, consider one of the "goals" of Admissions Officers at one of the Ivies. This particular Ivy, some time ago, set itself a goal of admitting one male, and one female, from every state in the union. Simply selecting the top candidates via "demonstrated ability" will not allow them to meet this goal. It would be difficult to find elite students in Arkansas, Alabama and Montana who would compare favorably to elite students from Massachusetts, New Jersey or Minnesota. So it's plain that this goal had to be satisfied via other means. Programs like those the article talks about are a part of achieving these lesser known admissions goals.
If a student can get into the top 5% of their class by GPA, and if the university believes that school is capable of providing the standards required to judge which students make up the top 5%, how does that not help choose the most elite students from each school while giving the school the flexibility to determine how and what they can teach, as long as it meets the university's standards?
If a school doesn't have the resources to teach the students effectively, why do we even send our kids to that school? Saying "because we have to" is a cop out. The school needs to be fixed or realized for what it is- a school that is ineffective at teaching at an elite level.
I said the school had to meet the standards of the university. If the school is extremely difficult and the top 5% of the class doesn't have the same GPA as someone from another school that is less stringent but still meets the standards of the university, then students from the top 5% GPA of both schools would be able to apply.
And what is wrong about providing incentive for the best students to get into schools that are not performing quite as well but are still certified by the university as being adequate? It is much better for top performing students to spread out and raise the bar.
It is far from a race to the bottom. It's about bringing up the bottom.
The only way this works is through public education, where the K-12 system is tightly coupled with an elite public university system, and public policy can drive both into a tight partnership. There's a system somewhat like this in California called TAG; any student who signs up and makes grades in community college can usually get guaranteed entry into a UC. It only works because the California community colleges are required to teach all "transfer courses" at the UC level in terms of content, etc. It might be possible to extend this kind of guaranteed enrollment down to K-12.
I'm suggesting that you have to be within the top 5% class GPA to get in. So, some students may actually have a lower GPA, but still have a chance to get in, because they were in the top 5% of their class.
I'm also saying that students don't have to have the resources to take SAT prep courses, because they would only have to do well at their own schools.
If the public or private school was not accredited for possible acceptance into an Ivy League school, parents should know that and be able to do something about it, and so should the state or county.
But more importantly, poorly performing schools need to be identified and fixed. If they can't be, then it needs to be obvious that they are not able to prepare students for elite education.
It is not right for only those from wealthy families to be the only ones that can be adequately prepared, because they can go to prep schools and train for and retake standardized tests.
I think most districts in the U.S. have similar processes to attend an alternate school, but barriers remain high in low-income areas, ranging from stigma to logistics (e.g., transportation to a more distant school). Even when structures are in place, the ability to attend a different school is a stretch for some.
Black students (from a blue collar, middle class area; also 1/3 of the school) weren't excluded from the IB classes, but generally only the nerds/geeks requested placement. The kids who did were labeled "Oreos" by their peers, so there was peer pressure not to take the IB classes if you were from this area. These students generally came from good, supportive families, though their parents probably never went to college and thus had no real clue how to work the system to get your kid into college. Anyway, all the black kids were placed in "AP" classes instead of "IB" classes, just because that's how it worked.
The hispanic students (from a poor immigrant area, the other 1/3 of the school) were largely excluded from this system. They would be placed in "ESL" (English as a Second Language) or "remedial" classes, even though most were perfectly fluent in English (often they spoke Spanish at home) and the entire reason they were behind in a number of subjects was because the middle schools they went to were understaffed and under-resourced.
The racism was only super-obvious to the students because of the way they physically segregated the classes: each set of classes was in a different building. So you had the white building, the black building, and the hispanic building. People rarely had a reason to go to another building.
But the only difference between my high school and the bad schools in the district was that we had IB classes as an option, because we had a bunch of affluent white kids. Our IB classes were taught by great teachers who cared a lot, and I got a decent education. My teachers stressed the importance of going to college. But if you weren't an affluent white kid and you didn't know how to play the college game, you were no better off than if you went to another, worse high school.
And that's the difference, right there: if your parents went to college, they know how the game works. They know that University of Phoenix is not a real college, and they know what an Ivy League school is and why it's important. A kid who grows up with a father who is a welder and a mother who cleans houses doesn't have those resources. They know going to college is important, but they may not know the difference between a community college, a 4 year state university and an Ivy League. They may not know that you have to apply a year ahead of time.
It's not the affluent white kids' fault that they know this and their less affluent peers do not - you got thrown into this system as a confused 14 year old, so your parents were the ones making all the decisions when you started high school. But many white kids (and their parents) see attending a good university as their birthright -- if only they have the willpower to seize it. They see complex application processes as a challenge they have to rise and meet. There aren't even enough spots at these top schools for just a fraction of the affluent white kids, not to mention kids who don't even know that going to Harvard, Yale or Penn is a big deal.