Admission Announcement
admission.princeton.edu
admission.princeton.edu
When I had my alumni interview during the admissions process, it was with a senior partner at a medium-sized law firm. He emphasized that Princeton (at the time) received $200M/year in Alumni donations, and how important it was that students admitted to the school understand that obligation. We didn't talk about making an impact on the world. (Disclaimer: I was rejected.)
And while one that goes egregiously poorly can hurt your chances, the best alumni interview in the history of college applications won't move the needle.
I was disappointed by not getting accepted, but I was also a little relieved. The pressure of attending was intimidating, and when I met other students and applicants on a visit everyone seemed much more put together than I was. Some of that may have been their outward facing persona but either way I was happy to go to a school where I felt more comfortable needing time to figure things out. Also I wouldn't have tons of debt either.
But the interviewer's emphasis on donations has always always stuck with me about Princeton, especially because it was the only school interview where that was very explicitely made an issue.
Such an admissions process creates perverse incentives. These students are incentivized to write essays portraying themselves as having struggled to get where they are, and talking how they want to use a Princeton education to “change the world.” In reality, very few are going to go into public service. They are going to go work at investment banks, management consultants, corporate law firms, tech companies, etc.
It’s actually scary to think that we are raising a generation of elites that deny that they are elites, and instead are incentivized to see themselves as the underdog, or as agents for social change. Indeed, I get the increasing sense that institutions like Princeton see themselves in those terms, instead of bastions of WASP culture and tradition educating the next generation of bankers, lawyers, and politicians.
We've been there for years.
We have people born on third base that think they hit a triple. Billionaires that were born as millionaires and think they worked hard for their money.
People in public service don't change the communities and world around them. Public "servants" are just cogs in the machine.
> They are going to go work at investment banks, management consultants, corporate law firms, tech companies, etc.
And maybe go on to found Amazon which changed many communities and the world.
When Princeton applicants write admissions essays about “wanting to change the world” they don’t mean “… by driving Main Street out of business and making it easier than ever to buy cheap Chinese crap instead of American made products.”
For the better? Or for the worse?
I agree with the bulk of your comment, but it's scary how disconnected from reality stereotypes can get. The Ivy League is no WASP bastion (and Princeton is no exception) - per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30338742, their non-international students are:
Ivy League US Ratio
Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16
Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71
White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82
Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65
Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61
White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56I wonder if they actually think this will help with anxiety, and are wrong, or are just being duplicitous.
If the goal is merit based admission then the measured of merit should be transparent and accurate as possible.
This seems like “we’re going to stop publishing salary info to decrease anxiety of applicants” for companies.
It's easy to start quantifying application success based on several indicators like GPA, SAT/ACT scores, number and volume of extra-curriculars, and may some others. However, there are circumstances and other factors that are not quantifiable that universities claim to take into account. Sure a good SAT score works to your advantage, and everyone will know that until society's worked out something better. But an SAT shouldn't be the golden standard, and supposedly with holistic admissions it isn't.
I can see how masking the SAT score data might look duplicitous, but it may be an earnest attempt to encourage prospective students to see themselves as more than a matrix of numbers.
It will be interesting if this leads to higher or lower mean and median scores. I expect that scores will go up as the assumption by applicants is that only super high scores will result in admission.
Part of their “holistic” process includes SAT so the score does matter. I consider “holistic” BS marketing speak as of course everything in the admin packet is used and there’s never been a situation in my lifetime that a specific score meant automatic admission.
Not releasing SAT scores of admitted students might mean that their experiments with “holistic” admission results in lower average SATs. Hence their de-emphasis of test scores.
If their goal is to de-emphasize SAT scores then they should be cool with releasing SAT scores to emphasize that their de-emphasis approach has changed the patterns in SAT.
The more objective, open, and clear the measures are the better everyone can understand what is required, when you change to a "Holistic" measure it suddenly goes to whatever the admissions officer wants to do or feels like doing. Remember the opposite of objective is arbitrary.
if top universities drew names out of a hat, you won't feel any more anxious than buying a lotto ticket and losing. But the quality of the student body would be much worse, obviously.
Lotto tickets are low consequence, but college is high consequence.
If I had to test the anxiety of two processes for job application where one is merit based and the other is random, I’d choose the merit process because at least I can prepare.
After looking at her college choices it seemed like less of crapshoot. The patterns were pretty consistent.
My HS had a similar service (I think it was called naviance or something like that), but we did not have enough datapoints for most of the graphs I would be interested in.
Public schools have more heuristics. I could draw a box around who’s gonna get in vs not - everything but SAT/GPA seemed irrelevant. This included top state schools (eg UVA & Michigan).
Top private schools had a similar box - but it was much more “possible to admit” than “definitely in”. You’d draw a similar box as for state schools, and it was random within that box.
There were 1-2 individual outliers per school. Idk why (data excluded athletes, allegedly), but was interesting - there a back door to Michigan, even with a 3.0, if you can find it.
For instance, like Harvard trying to keep itself from getting too Asian, which echos how it tried to keep Jews out back in the '30s.
If the goal is actually diversity, my mom had a proposal: have transparent minimum requirements, then simply pick eligible applicants from a lottery. You can control diversity vs. academic performance by adjusting the test score bars.
Without defending them (I don't like how they operate) they couldn't control diversity through this method. Applications from students with very high GPA's & SAT scores are disproportionately from students from certain ethnic backgrounds, e.g., Asian students whose average SAT scores are roughly 20% higher than the population average [1]. In a case like that, I honestly don't know how to balance between equally qualified students having the same chance of being admitted vs. representative diversity. (Not that I think their current diversity levels are actually representative)
This wasn’t always the case. For a long time Asians scored below White Americans. However the former’s average scores have surged while the latters have stagnated at best. I don’t think there’s a single clear explanation for the surge in Asian SAT scores, but cultural issues like enthusiastic parenting as well as test prep and tutoring are almost certainly significant contributors. The effect of tutoring on academic achievement is massive, as much as two sigma.
Whatever it is, Asians found a way to greatly improve their average scores, so if we want to increase diversity without lowering standards it would be best for other groups to adopt similar or better preparatory strategies.
I do - it's immigrant self-selection since the 80s-90s.
Asians who immigrated in the late 20th and early 21st century are oftentimes the "elites" of their home country, asians who immigrated in the early 20th century were often laborers (ie. often poor people from Japan/China/Korea) or refugees (ie. Vietnam).
Now I wonder about more recent African immigration. And I don't mean refugees, but professionals. How do they compare to genera population.
There is a performance gap, and it's known as the "immigrant paradox" [1]. In short, research results show that achievement between imigrants & non immigrants of similar income levels is mixed. At earlier grades there is sometimes a performance gap that somewhat disappears in later grades. The gap may also be more pronounced in lower quality schools and disappear in better schools.
It's not a fully understood phenomenon, but I've seen speculation that families and their children that have been through the upheaval of immigrating to a new country may be a little more resilient to the sometimes-constant upheaval forced on families by poverty. And that native families at lower incomes are also more likely to be single-parent families.
Fortunately if there’s one thing the past decades have shown beyond all doubt, it’s that cultural attitudes towards basically anything can be shifted with clever media portrayals and other persuasive devices. It’s not outside of the realm of plausibility to convince underperforming groups to shift their priorities in a way that greatly improves academic success.
You're probably right that it's relatively rare that a family couldn't save every last penny possible to pay for at least a little of those benefits (though still not nearly as much as other families). Although there are families where parents are already working crazy hours and still really don't have money to spare, where a surprise $300 car repair means rent will be late and the next few weeks of food will be peanut butter sandwiches and spaghetti.
But there are two factors on the "socio" side that also hinder things even when finances are a little less extreme:
1) Families that lack a strong educational tradition may not really understand the dynamics of what is necessary to achieve the highest levels of academic success. Sort of like not having strong financial planning skills because they were never taught to you... You don't know what you don't know, so you aren't aware of what it takes to be successful.
2) There's at least a little bit of a mental health aspect to things. I can't easily put it into words, (and I might be wrong) but it seems like it could be bad in some ways to exist on that extreme of a level, for kids to practically never see their parents because they're always working, and for the family as a whole to have little ability to catch their breath and have... I don't know, a bit of decompression. Again it's hard to put into words, but I can say that I grew up pretty poor, and it was stressful as hell even without being at the very extreme edge of things, needing food banks etc.
Note that there were very few Asians in America prior to the refugee immigration waves in the 1970s and 1980s. (0.7% of the population in 1970 to 2.9% in 1990.) By 1989, Asians were out-scoring whites in the SAT math: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/09/12/s...
Asian 25% White 6% Hispanic 2% Black 1%
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...
Why is the response to lower the bar instead of promoting what Asians do to achieve such success?
Say you have a population that consists of 60 Asians and 940 non-Asians (which roughly matches the racial demographics of the United States) where 25% of Asians and 5% of non-Asians score above a 700 on the SAT math section. There would then be 15 Asians and 47 non-Asians who pass the bar. That means the Asian percentage of this theoretical group of qualified students would be ~24%. For comparison, Asians make up 27% of Princeton undergrads. Without the statistic I mentioned, you can't determine whether or not Asians are underrepresented.
e: oh i see, just looked up the author
I can tell you that if you had written the same article but switched around the races, I would definitely have felt the same way.
I'm simply saying that seeing everything through the lens of race, as this article does.
Here's a claim: > White people made American colleges immensely fashionable around the world, but now America is running out of white kids.
Fact check: there have never been more white people in America in the history of the US.
> I'm simply saying that seeing everything through the lens of race
It is a fact that prestigious private universities discriminate on the basis of race today.
I have little confidence there will be transparency or uniformity in how students who submit applications without LSAT scores will be evaluated.
The function of admissions for these institutions is:
1. Secure revenue through donations and full-tuition-paying students to cover their operating costs
2. Boost marketing/PR efforts by maintaining an image of prestige and progressive values.
The prestige of these schools is already unassailable in the public imagination, so this is a simple marketing maneuver in order to maintain a positive image as a progressive institution.
If the goal was to educate as many high-achieving students as possible, they would simply establish testing standards, admit students who pass those standards (pending a holistic review, most likely), hire more world-class professors, and expand the class size.
But increasing the class size of Princeton would also decrease their "exclusiveness" and by extension their prestige.
So in order to balance these concerns, the admissions process needs to walk a tight-rope between admitting desirable minority students that make for good marketing material, "legacy" & wealthy students, and the most academically gifted.
These institutions are structurally positioned to oppose an educational system whose goal is to provide the best education possible to the most students. It's not about equality. In fact, it's about preserving inequality in their favor.
[0]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/5/4/selective-univer...
Assuming that others (US News) will continue to report on Princeton's selectivity, and than Princeton's selectivity will not change, this announcement seems like "small beer". If they want to make Princeton a less forbidding place to apply to, they should promote success stories from people drawn from the applicant pools they are seeking.
But of course they should influence it. Data points of overall admission rates and average SAT scores are one of the best data for deciding to apply or not. It's weird how Princeton affirms they should not even "influence" it. It's a celebration of ignorance.
I'm an educator in higher-ed.
Always aced IQ-type standardized tests.
Over the years I've observed brilliant students who do very poorly in IQ-type tests. But they write brilliant long-form essays.
The world will be fine.
And how big of a sample size are you talking about? SATs and IQ tests are highly correlated. Same for school performance and IQ.
GP already implied this with IQ-type tests. I’m not sure what you’re arguing with unless there’s a disagreement about brilliant, which in this context GP seems to be different from what IQ measures
I hope there is at least one university of prestige that opens up its doors for admission.
Easy to Enroll and Damn Hard to graduate, so that the actually degree has real value while being accessible.
That was one of the worst parts about applying to universities for me over a decade ago. A few I knew I had practically 0 chance for, and then I still had to pay something like $50 each IIRC.