Not necessarily. Did Harvard at one time have a higher percentage and did they institute policies to reduce that number? Or, did they see the numbers increasing and take steps to slow or reverse that increase?
Admissions officers are experts in pattern recognition. They’ve seen it all before, probably a dozen times that morning. They know when an essay is ghost written-- a bright kid doesn’t sound the same as an adult pretending to be a bright kid, and it’s pretty obvious when a essay doesn’t quite “fit” with the rest of the application. In any case, anyone who is a serious contender for a modern Ivy League spot is probably much brighter than any random nearby adult they are likely to rope in.
Admissions people understand that the application packages of people from modest backgrounds is going to look a little different than those of someone who has a lot of resources to pump in to admissions, and they adjust accordingly. They can tell who has had professional coaching on their applications, and they can adjust their expectations. It won’t necessarily hurt you-- it’d be more or les expected from certain types of applicants-- but the thing they are looking for isn’t the polish, it’s the voice. And a coach can help you find that voice, but they can’t make one out of whole cloth.
That doesn’t mean the system is fair. Poor kids have a bazillion disadvantages in the process, most noteably just not having resources that really understand the process. And there are times when admissions coaches say “Eh, he sounds like one of us” and that’s that. But admissions counselors definitely aren’t fooled for a moment by the various ways people try to transform money into admissions advantages.
I suppose it depends on how much integrity the professional (or highly educated parent) has.
Agreed. When I went to one of the bottom tier Ivies in the 1970’s, I recall that they kept statistics on the relationship between high school and college GPA for the various feeder high schools, and considered that in admissions. Using such data is crucial to avoid admitting students at high risk of flunking out.
This is a great example of what I meant by basing admissions on lots of different numbers. The College Board should release, to colleges, machine-readable data on how common it is for students at each high school to do well in AP tests. Then it should be a plus if an applicant does well at a school where few others do. This implies that the applicant is able to excel in face of ineffective teaching, a crucial skill when you are a student at a university where research is valued above undergraduate teaching, or where many students get caught up in an anti-intellectual, alcohol-fueled, fraternity culture.
I do have a concern that you may be thinking that the college admissions office should get the information on how unusual was that AP 4 or 5 from a letter of recommendation. I suspect that reading such letters would be a mistake because of high danger that, out of generous motives, many school guidance counselors exaggerate to get students into top schools.
This is a great example of how easy it is for people to be so sure of what they couldn’t possibly know.
And yet, it’s easy to tell.
Writing convincingly in the voice of someone completely different is a rare skill, which is why not everyone is a best-selling author. And Ivy League admissions is exponentially more competitive than it was even a decade ago. meaning this “helpful adult” needs to not only take on the voice of a teenager, but the voice of a teenager so uncommonly brilliant that they are the type of person you would meet a handful of times in your lifetime.
And the admissions officer will have access to a letters of recommendation, a full breakdown of your academic and extracurricular activities, etc. Your essay about curing cancer won’t work if it’s not on your resume. Your claim to be a heartfelt social activist isn’t going to ring true if your only volunteer work is a one-week pay-for-play voluntourism trip to Costa Rica.
And this has to get past a team of people who do this for a living, who have countless examples to compare it to, and who have nothing more to do at work than figure this stuff out.
I’m sure it happens now and then, but it’s a strategy that is much more likely to backfire to succeed.
At some point, the human element is going to have to be introduced. You can’t replace context with correlations. Data can tell you what, but not why or how.
It’s not a matter of reading one letter and blindly accepting it. For one thing, admissions officers work particular geographical areas for years at a time. They know the schools in their area. They read apps from the same school and region together, so that they can see how the rec letters and essays compare. They do school visits to recruit in the fall. If they get what looks to be a strong app from a school they’ve never even heard of, they are going to look that school up and see the available data on that school. You might be able to get away with exaggeration (one other kid passed an AP exam, 3 years ago), but not out and out falsehood–and not for several kids in a row.
Furthermore, as has been mentioned before, a modern application is a huge mass of information–it’s not one recommendation, it’s two from teachers and one from a counselor. It’s an essay and probably a couple supplemental essays/statements and an interview. It’s a school profile page. It’s the actual application/resume. It’s a transcript and a bunch of score reports. Whatever narrative a kid is building about themselves has to be consistent across all of those, and that’s surprisingly hard to fake. I suspect more honest applications that “smell funny” get rejected (there’s always another!) than out-and-out deceptive applications get in.
Somewhat ironically, those with the means and understanding to fake a whole package tend to be at high performing schools–and this kind of thing is least possible at high performing schools. Admissions counselors know these schools–they know the teachers that write the recommendations, the counselors, the programs. They know which schools have competitive math teams and where being in NHS is a joke. Admissions counseling and high-performing schools are like a small town–everyone doesn’t know each other, but everyone knows a lot of people, and everyone knows someone else that knows someone. It’s easy to investigate. I would expect any extraordinary false claim coming from a school like that will be detected.
I’m sure people have just flat out lied their way into competitive schools. But I think the process as it exists is a lot more exhaustive than you realize, and it does have quite a few fail safes built in.
I guess it should also be noted, even just for devil’s advocate reasons, that Harvard (like all other Ivy League schools and 19 of the top 20) meets 100% of financial need. The legacy admissions of rich white dolts keep the endowment up and allow the “disadvantaged” to attend the school if they get in.
One other thing: professional help absolutely does help in preparing an application, and that’s terribly unjust. But it’s not a matter of someone writing your essay. It’s a matter of someone helping you chose your activities/extracurriculars to fit a central narrative, framing the things you’ve done in a way that illustrate qualities that matter to colleges, soliciting rec letters in ways that reinforce a central set of qualities, and, yes, write an essay that expresses the same profile.
Even without all that, informed support helps a great deal on the essay. But, again, it’s not about writing the essay for the kid. It’s about sitting there as the kid rambles about their life and helping them see which of their own insights and experiences are actually unique and interesting, vs. cliche and predictable. It’s about going over an essay with a kid and cutting out the boilerplate they don’t even realize they have written. Typically speaking, the first time I go over an essay with a kid (and these are my students/former students, not clients), I shitcan the whole thing and send them home to redo it entirely, usually starting with what I thought was the best idea they had, which is almost inevitably buried in a bunch of crap. They end up with a much, much stronger essay because they had support, but it’s not by any means ghost written.
So since this is now a general “the problem with college admissions” thread:
I would place almost no value on “extracurriculars.” Everyone trying to get into a decent school is checking off the list of which clubs and service projects are hot this year. They serve no purpose besides showing which students are wealthy enough to be able to spend their free time on this instead of a part-time job, and the activities themselves are compromised by students going through the motions for college apps instead of actually wanting to be there.
We all know that high school GPAs are gamed in the same way and are difficult to compare across schools. Even at the most elite high schools in the U.S., which the Harvard admissions officers may have some familiarity with, it’s always tempting to avoid challenging oneself to preserve the GPA. And there’s no way they actually can evaluate the GPA from a random public school for “disadvantaged applicants.”
I don’t think aptitude tests are worth much of anything except as a minimum disqualifier – does the SAT still just test basic vocabulary and math through trigonometry? Does Harvard really take applicants who don’t get through calculus in high school? Should they?
The ability to write intelligently is, in my experience, a rare skill even among top students. I knew a Harvard English major who couldn’t do it, in fact. If there is a reliable way to screen out essays-for-hire, I would place a lot of emphasis on the form of the writing sample.
One thing that does predict the ability to keep up with high-level coursework is high scores on AP exams. At least the ones I’m familiar with have been fairly rigorous and a much better diagnostic of actual ability to do academic work than the SAT-type tests. I’ve heard that some of the exams are being radically overhauled this year, and would like to see the new ones before saying that they continue to be a reliable gauge.
I frankly don’t think it’s the job of the university system to try to address lower-level disparities by admitting underqualified applicants. The reform needs to come earlier in the process.
I would think the quality of extracurriculars matters a lot more than quantity. Surely admission officers can distinguish a dilettante who is just wants to get in the yearbook as much as possible from someone who is engaged with the greater world around them. A part-time job can certainly count as a extracurricular if the student frames it that way. I remember doing this with my own college apps.
Universities invest a lot on “extracurricular” activities, because college students don’t go to college simply for book learnin’. It would not be in the university’s best interest to accept students who have no interest in joining clubs, running for student government, playing sports, or being politically active. High school is where kids start cultivating an interest in these things.
Personally, I’d love to know if anyone has created a database containing information for every high school in the country. The database would tell you how many AP courses the school offers and what kind, the average AP exam score, the average GPA, the average SAT score, the average income, etc. These metrics could then be rolled up into a single index. Another index could be designed to characterize each student (based on their socioeconomics, GPA, test scores, difficulty of their coursework). A student/school ratio of 1 would indicate a student who was truly exceptional, controlling for factors outside of their control (socioeconomics, race, cultural background, etc.).
Of course they should. It is easy enough to jump right into calculus having only trigonometry under one’s belt. And while calculus is important, to be sure, I don’t understand why it should be a pre-requisite for a liberal arts education. Plenty of kids decide to take statistics their senior year of high school. Personally, given how important statistics are in this day and age of Big Data, I think that’s a much more valuable skill than finding the area under the curve.
Personally, I think we need to stop pretending that qualifications are anything other than a way to winnow down applications to a manageable pie. Do we really think high school kids are smarter and better able to tackle the world than their predecessors who did not have a roster of extracurriculars and a slate of AP classes and perfect SAT scores? My office is staffed with young(er) people with Master’s and Ph.D’s, even though neither are required to do our jobs. We went to schools that are far more impressive than the institutions the gray-haired veterans in our midst graduated from. And yet we are all doing the same jobs, with similar competencies (on average, cuz to be honest there’s some good ole boys here who must have been hired under old school AA). “Qualification” is a moving target. You don’t have to have a 4.6 GPA to be a good doctor. You don’t need to score in the 95th percentile on the SAT to be a good scientist or engineer. You don’t need to take AP geology to be a good journalist or film producer. It’s time we stop acting like these measures are anything but a way to flash status for those who can afford them.
There are two such indices:
They have different methodologies, but both are pretty transparent.
Looks like the Bamboo Ceiling will take a while longer yet to break.
sigh People are selfish and greedy. As soon as it doesn’t benefit them, people try to change the rules
Who’s selfish, and who’s trying to change which rules?
Here are Berkeley’s numbers. Interesting that Berkeley separates out many different Asian groups, and Middle Eastern falls under White.
http://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data
Breaking out just the Black, Hispanic, Asian and White:
Black: 2.9%
Hispanic: 17%
Asian : 41%
White: 25%
Most of the international students in the UC system are Asian it appears:
http://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/students/current/enrollment_data
I’d like to read about this. Got a cite?
Thanks.
A powerful example of these problems comes from UCLA, an elite school that used large racial preferences until the Proposition 209 ban took effect in 1998. The anticipated, devastating effects of the ban on preferences at UCLA and Berkeley on minorities were among the chief exhibits of those who attacked Prop 209 as a racist measure. Many predicted that over time blacks and Hispanics would virtually disappear from the UCLA campus.
…
Throughout these crises, university administrators constantly fed agitation against the preference ban by emphasizing the drop in undergraduate minority admissions. Never did the university point out one overwhelming fact: The total number of black and Hispanic students receiving bachelor’s degrees were the same for the five classes after Prop 209 as for the five classes before.
How was this possible? First, the ban on preferences produced better-matched students at UCLA, students who were more likely to graduate. The black four-year graduation rate at UCLA doubled from the early 1990s to the years after Prop 209.
Second, strong black and Hispanic students accepted UCLA offers of admission at much higher rates after the preferences ban went into effect; their choices seem to suggest that they were eager to attend a school where the stigma of a preference could not be attached to them. This mitigated the drop in enrollment.
Third, many minority students who would have been admitted to UCLA with weak qualifications before Prop 209 were admitted to less elite schools instead; those who proved their academic mettle were able to transfer up to UCLA and graduate there.
We live in a strange society when a measure that bans racial considerations in admissions, is called racist.