What do you consider high selective? I would realistically expect that if a kid with great test scores and grades, gets an essay professionally edited to have something interesting sounding in it even if it’s a pack of lies (remember, the college can’t realistically verify much other than the person’s identity and appearance and those test scores/grades. If a student says they went backpacking in Botswana for a summer the college pretty much has to take their word for it), and applies to a decent number of highly selective schools, the averages are going to work out in their favor.
For selective institutions, this is not true. For one thing, everyone weighs GPA in different ways, and the first thing selective schools do is throw out the weighted GPA and recalculate it based on their own internal system. They also spend more time LOOKING at the transcript than plugging in a number. If you are applying for engineering, they are going to look at those STEM grades much more than your French grades–but if you are applying for French Lit, you’d best not have a C in French.
I think the 80-odd schools with a rating of “1” in this listis a pretty good start.
This is where the congruency thing comes in. If a kid talks about backpacking in Botswana in their essay, you’d expect to see it reflected in letters of rec, counselor’s report, extracurriculars at school, that sort of thing. And for highly selective, one back packing trip that one time–the sort of thing you can lie about–is really not worth much. They want a sustained commitment and focus, and they want to see it across the rec letters, the essays (several, now, remember). i have supervised a lot of apps, and in my experience the kid you describe would likely get shut out.
Not for the schools I was applying to. Maybe for UTEP.
I want to be more forceful about the kid with perfect scores and grades and one BS extracurricular for an essay. I don’t “think” that kid will get shut out. i know they will. I have supervised applications for students with damn near perfect academics and test scores–I mean, objectively near the top of the nation in pure academic achievement–who were shut out of the most selective pool. In those cases, they just didn’t have much else–they maybe did a few things, like an internship or a club or travel, but there wasn’t any passion. They weren’t ambitious for anything: they just wanted to go to college, get a diploma, and get a job–and it showed. And they got what they wanted and all was fine. But they didn’t go to Harvard.
Does this hurt them in concrete metrics that they can’t get into these small country clubs for the nation’s elite? I mean, if they still go to a top 10 school for a given field (whether that be computer science or a specific engineering field or some other major that has a real dollar value) they are still going to get a high paying job when they graduate? And for the non-payoff majors (all the ones that offer little in the way of skills that make money for someone), what kind of job does an undergrad degree from Harvard in history get you?
When I see this list you link, I ask myself what the benefit is to a kid.
I can think of 4 concrete dimensions for whether a college is something you even want to go to :
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Cost
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Reputation/ranking of the degree program in the payoff majors
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Percentage of members of your preferred gender for sex partners/availability of events to meet them (so basically the school size and how many girls/guys it has and it’s partying culture)
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Grading difficulty. Harvard’s infamous average A- course grade meant that if you decide you want to go on to grad school, you have a hugely better chance. Not sure if this is published anywhere. I had a friend who went to a highly elite school and he had a mediocre experience. It was Caltech, and this shafted him in three main ways:
a. He was a virgin throughout college. b. He applied to medical school, and remember what I said about a batch process? Any medical school adcom *should* know that Caltech is a hyper elite school and a kid who makes a C in a course there would trivially make an A at any state university. But that's not what actually happens. In reality he had to reapply because his 3.2 was too low a GPA despite a ridiculous MCAT score (42/45, percentile rank is above 99.9%). c. High student debt, ultimately he did get accepted to a california medical school only. (so even though Caltech's need based process meant he didn't need loans for undergrad, ultimately he still ended up owing hundreds of k) -
Recruitment by companies. It’s difficult to get a job with no experience, you will be auto screened out at most companies these days even if you went to MIT. It costs money for a company to set up a recruiting booth. Are they going to spend those funds at a nearby State U with a thousand graduates with the degrees they want every year, or at some elite country club with 10 graduates?
Your starting to sound like the guy from Boiler Room; which is probably beneficial in your line of work.
I explicitly said they still had plenty of options, and the opportunity to get a good education and full potential for a great life and career. Going to a highly selective school is an option. It’s a thing some people want–and there are good reasons for and against it, which I laid out in some detail above.
That said, the recruiting from those schools is pretty intense. For one thing, it starts long before you graduate: even if you are majoring in history, you will have opportunities for internships with firms where you can develop a set of practical skills. Most of your liberal arts degree types are going to professional school–Law or Business. The ones that don’t have a good chance at management consulting or finance type jobs.
More to the point, though, the kind of kid that gets into a highly selective is the kind of kid who spends their 4 years doing things, not just going through the motions. So by the time they graduate, they usually have a plan–they’ve been working toward something for some time.
The recruiting at a highly selective university is much, much stronger than at your local state school. It’s not a matter of having a booth at a fair; top companies have on-going relationships with highly selective schools, starting with internships and culminating with job offers. Job placement is one of the strongest reasons to go to a highly selective school.
I want to repeat, it’s not the end of the world if a kid doesn’t get into a top 50 school. It’s not even desirable for a lot of kids–it’s often not worth the money, and even if it’s free, it’s often not ideal. But they are great places for certain kids under certain circumstances, and if you want to pursue such a thing, you need to work very deliberately to make sure you have a good shot at admission.
This works for grad school too. My chemistry friends at Dow, 3M, and the like tell me they pretty much only recruit at and hire from a handful of schools. Although UIUC is your local state school if you live in Urbana :D.
Absolutely. And it starts before you graduate: all my students at MIT and Stanford seem to end up at Google or Facebook or Goldman Sachs for their summer internships, where they get to live in company housing and make $25/hr in some cool city, instead of going back to their job at the Knights of Columbus pool. And the internships for top MBA programs pay at crazy, crazy rates.
You don’t have to go to a top school to have a high powered career, but it certainly helps.
With all the talk about GPA’s and extracurricular activities I’m curious how admission officers would assess someone who had been home schooled all through to high school level? I’m assuming test scores would be more important then as well as an in-person interview.
Even “pure” homeschooled kids have transcripts, writtwn by their parents. They show what has been studied and some sort of grade… I have no idea how they are evaluated. Lots of homeschool kids are enrolled in formal programs, so there are often grades there.
Homeschool kids can and are expected to have “extracurricular” stuff. If anything, home schooling facilitates this because it’s more flexible. Lots of kids homeschool BECAUSE they have anither huge thing going in-gymnastics, or orchestra, or chess, or dance-that is so time consuming they can’t do “normal” school. That’s certainly relevant to an application. Others do scouts, independent research, science fairs, large community service projects- internships . . All the same things schooled kids do. And generally homeschool kids can play spots with their local school, if they want.
My one (that I know of) first-year college classmate who was homeschooled took a lot of SAT Subject Tests.
Just as an anecdote, a co-workers homeschooled eldest daughter just started at a “2” school on Manda JO’s list without any hitches at all and it was specifically the only place she was interested in attending. I suspect she would have been a strong candidate at the most selective schools as well - very high-achieving with a ton of outside activities.
I find this discussion fascinating( and kudos to Manda JO for her usual excellent contributions ), especially as I find it transporting me back to my application years. I find it hilarious that as I was reading this thread I was involuntarily raising my hackles a bit since I was more a JB99 type of student, only on the easy-going and lazy spectrum rather than hating everything. I’m sure I would have been miserable at Harvard even if I could have gotten in with my very high test scores but unimpressive grades and lack of substantial extracurriculars. I was profoundly suspicious of ambitious people and actively disliked the intensely competitive. It was just so utterly alien to my personality, I figured there just had to be something a bubble off with them :D.
God bless state schools! Manda JO is quite right, super-selectives are not for every personality type.
This whole discussion amazes me. I took the Canadian SAT (or whatever it was) 45 years ago. Ontario admissions were essentially handled by a central bureaucracy AFAIK and allocated according to scores. Nobody wrote letters or recommendations, I never wrote any essay. Regardless, I was admitted
As for extracurricular activities - I went to a private school miles form home, and did not have doting parents driving me all over. (Took public transit to and from school). I was the shortest kid in the class, and no money or parental support for sports or such. Best I could point to was the nerdy chess club and theatre lighting crew. Even though I was almost always about rank #3 in class in an elite school despite being a terminally lazy procrastinator, I sort of wonder how I would fare in the weird admissions regimen mentioned for this thread.
My take on extracurricular activities - I went to a Catholic college, so many of my fellow students in arts at the time were on track to go to Teacher’s College (what else is there with an Arts degree?) and become teachers in the (Catholic) Separate School system in Ontario. What I saw was so many of them who probably hadn’t gone to church for a decade suddenly finding religion and participating in things like their parishes’ Boy Scout or Girl Guide program to get that all important recommendation form the parish priest about how they contributed to the Catholic community.
So for the “power tool” study nerds applying for college today, how many join in certain activities just to check off the box “well rounded” and how many really care about what those activities? By requiring and examining such activities, admissions officers are driving certain behaviours, but seem to pretend they are not the cause of such behaviour. As the old joke goes - “the key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Thank you md2000. My sentiments exactly. I really do think that college applications are not encouraging honesty. The system is encouraging applicants to compete in telling stories. Sad really!
Worse than that, it seems to be multiple full time jobs deciding who to let in - and like stock advice, it’s probably no more effective than monkeys throwing darts - just significantly more expensive, and the students end up paying for it.
The British system does look better by far. What drives this requirement for stories and multiple essays in US college applications? I’d really be interested in knowing that. As far as I know the top British universities are as challenging as a Yale, Princeton or Wharton, if not more so.
Sad? Really? I mean, everyone acknowledges that the US college admissions system is broken, but “failing to encourage honesty” seems like the least of its problems.
Manda Jo eloquently pointed out that getting into college is a lot more like getting a job than anything else. In both cases, you’re not “telling stories” in the sense that you’re using the phrase. You’re pitching yourself to a selective entity. That sort of thing will always encourage people to show a curated, “best” version of themselves. Applications for college and applications for jobs
You responded enthusiastically to MD2000, who said that admissions were handled by a central bureaucracy—not even by the school itself—and exclusively on the basis of test scores. I happen to test well, but I know a lot of very smart people who don’t test all that well, sometimes due to learning disabilities, but they write outstanding essays. Admitting exclusively on the basis of test scores is pretty unfair in its own right.
The US system of college applications/admissions is certainly problematic on a number of levels. But “failing to encourage honesty” seems fairly low on the list of problems, at least to me.
I think you may be reading too much into my initial “telling stories” comment. I only meant that having a compelling narrative helps. I mean, that’s true in many areas of life, and college applications are no exception.
One reason colleges like essays is that lots of applicants are crappy writers. Sure, it’s easy to cheat and have someone else write your essay, but evaluating writing competence is one important function of those essays.
Also, if someone submits an application with a beautifully-crafted essay but did poorly on the essay portion of the SAT, that may be a hint that they had a lot of extra help with their application essay. That in itself is an important data point.
What’s your objection to essays? I gather you see them as interfering with what would otherwise be a meritocracy. Is that a fair description of your position?
I taught English in a French high school while I was considering applying to grad school My students were amazed that I could have an undergrad degree in the humanities (mine is essentially in philosophy) but then switch to a hard-science field like mechanical engineering for grad school. My understanding then and now is that such a switch simply wouldn’t be permitted under the French system. My students were also aghast that I graduated with $20,000 in debt. If I were in the French system, I’d probably be a debt-free technical writer as opposed to an engineer who paid off his undergrad debt with his engineering work.
Also, at least back then (2001) most French job applications required a hand-written letter of application. My understanding is that a lot of importance is attached to handwriting, and beautiful orthography is seen as a sign of intelligence. I’m plenty smart, but by handwriting is abominable. I’d be borderline-unemployable if handwriting were the first bar to clear.
My point is that while the American system for applying to college is deeply flawed, I don’t see that it’s more deeply flawed than any other system. That doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t improve it, of course.
Resumes, cover letters and an interview process seem like a breeze when set against satisfying college applications. I don’t mean to suggest that everyone is lying/exaggerating, but I do think it is problematic. I have no issues with pitching oneself as long as it is within reason. Are colleges perhaps so concerned with the overall drop in literacy among college freshmen, that they place so much emphasis on essay-writing? Which colleges are doing better job at reforming the application process/applicant-selection process?