Yeah really, come on, Sam, Harvard does not even look at a stereotyped “inferior” applicant. And after a certain threshold the differences in success are really going to come more from so-called “subjective” factors than from a 20 point SAT difference.
Now, if what we’re saying is that out in the market some hiring manager will look at a Harvard/Stanford graduate who is Black, Latino, 1st. Generation, etc. and immediately suspect “affirmative action admit, was not really worthy, was passed to virtue-signal”, well, maybe the solution is to make that hiring manager unemployed, 'cause that’s an idiotic take.
And really, we are getting kind of hung up on the Harvard situation and I am among many in the world who have been questioning if Harvard (or choose-your-Ivy-or-equivalent) is still earning that high-demand rep from undergrads just as much as we expect the undergrads to earn their way in, or if it’s at this point running on the basis of the “you have read about our professors being geniuses in the news!” and “your kid will meet and know the future rulers of the world!” tropes.
Yeah, that was mentioned at the time, a driver there was the parents buying into, maybe even propping up, the myth of the brand-name “meritocracy”.
Oh, mostly this, for sure. The whole suit was silly on lots of levels, including that kid who apply to Harvard, are qualified to attend, and lose the Harvard lottery are all accepted at other schools that provide a similar education.
Indeed. So many amazing schools to absorb the rest, it’s hard to wrap one’s mind around the scale of college admissions. Back in 2020, I was driving through the Midwest (coincidentally on my way to start school after a 7-15 year hiatus) the day after a derecho went through. Had already made a reservation at a cheap motel in a town in Nowhere, Iowa the night before. Found out the cable was still out after I checked in and indeed the motel was one of the few places in town to even have power (so no food, even the Walmart was closed). So to kill time, as I often do, I went for a bike ride and found the town had a college of the same name.
Well… when I eventually got to internet (okay, really I just used my phone) and looked the place up, it turned out it was one of the best liberal arts colleges in the nation. In Nowhere, Iowa. (Actually, it was Grinnell).
I was afraid of this coming up, in the thread, because the statistics are way too complicated to discuss here. But I will point out a sentence in your pro-AA link that isn’t so different from my Laura N. quote (see link inside #173) in her takedown of MIT gender AA. On this we may be agreed on the facts, just not on what to glean from them. Here’s that supposedly pro-AA sentence:
One cannot disentangle the soul-destroying effect of Laura’s insensitive boyfriend, who reminded her she was an AA beneficiary (as if any beneficiary needs reminding!) from the effects on self-confidence of reading an anti-AA John McWhorter op-ed in the New York Times, or from reading pro-AA articles by Sherod Thaxton that repeat the mismatch theory in order to refute it. And you can’t disentagle from any of that the soul-destroying effect of being actually less academically prepared than the average admit. That ethnic and similar preferences inevitably contribute to racial stereotyping was one idea I took away from reading Thomas Sowell’s Preferential Policies: An International Perspective long ago, and I still think it.
What about legacy preference? Is that soul-destroying? I say, as one of the possible beneficiaries, at a lesser Ivy, yes, but not quite, because virtually no one on campus knew it. It must be much more soul-destroying to continually realize that others know it just by looking at you.
One of the benefits in being in elite environments is that one actually gets to unpack how your peers got here. Eventually, you hear about the advantages and general submerged state of privilege that many if not most of the students accessed en route to the institution. If anything, in my case and many of my classmates, we were empowered and saw that we were as intelligent, hardworking, and deserving as our more privileged classmates.
As I’ve told folks before, there is no university draft. If a particular campus is unwelcoming or is a bad fit, I fully support the option of transferring to an institution that is a better fit. Imposter syndrome impacts many students in many environments - it’s not exclusive to big-name elite institutions. And I have certainly heard students from privilege express similar feelings - they went to Choate or Gen. Dummer, and they’re struggling in classes, or don’t feel as smart or talented as their classmates.
The other thing about self-confidence is that it isn’t a fixed state. A student can excel in one course or activity, and struggle in another… all in the same day. As a professor I know some of my students will openly discuss their lack of confidence, while others will hide their insecurity. Only our counseling center (or the student’s own mental health professional) would know that. But one of the most important things I convey to students is the sense that you don’t deserve to be here is quite universal - some are better at disguising it than others.
I had the opportunity to challenge some of the assertions that McWhorter made in his book Losing the Race when he came to give a talk at Harvard years ago. I was a graduate student at the time, and was very intimidated by this Ph.D. who spoke very well and was an esteemed linguist (but not, in fact, an educational researcher). But I made the point that he seemed to subscribe that the students were navigating the campus and interpreting the experiences the way he would.
For instance, I remember a vignette where McWhorter more or less observed a student disengage from a class over a semester, and I thought it was strange that he noticed this, but didn’t think of engaging the student in office hours and unpacking some of the hidden aspects of higher education. (I always tell my students that things like attendance and arriving late, leaving early, and staying after for questions are variables that can greatly impact how an instructor determines a student’s engagement level, and that is rife with our own biases.) I was surprised when he more or less conceded this point.
A good counter-perspective is in Tony Jack’s work, The Privileged Poor. Jack argues that much of the hidden curriculum is obscure to kids who have not had access to prep schools and lessons on how to leverage the social environment to their advantage. An example is how to use office hours. Most students are told there are office hours for each course, but how often do faculty actually explain how office hours are used? Many students think that going to office hours is a burden to a professor (and some certainly act this way), or only if they have a specific question about a class topic. They don’t necessarily know that office hours are also for socializing, getting to know the faculty so they can write a recommendation letter, or just expressing a need for mentorship or coaching.
Since reading Jack’s book, I give examples of what students can do in office hours beyond “I didn’t understand yesterday’s lecture” and it has made a huge difference, particularly with underrepresented students. In fact, one student said to me that she used office hours with me as practice to talk to other faculty because she felt I was more approachable, and would ask me, “Can I ask a professor questions about how they decided to get their Ph.D?” and the like.
I can still remember all these decades later when I met with a professor during his office hours, and how excited he was that someone showed up. It must be horribly boring when no one takes advantage of this opportunity.
And I wasn’t even in his class that quarter! I hadn’t received my grade card in the mail (does anyone else relate to this sentence?) from the previous quarter, so I went to get my grade. I’d stupidly turned in the card without putting me address on it. Doh.
Thanks for such well-informed and civil responses to, in my, case, someone who keeps on using the not-nice word corrupt.
I’ve started reading the well-written, even entertaining, book you suggest (free download with a Pittsburgh library card). Of course, just like posts here, it cannot be expected to reverse long held views.
I’m impressed by the picture of dominance by rich entitled white students parading in unusually expensive clothing and accessories in front of less affluent students working part time jobs — in what is reputed a progressive institution. This seems an epic fail of holistic admissions. I wonder how much idealistic love of the poor can be found in the claimed extra-curriculars and admissions essays of the Hermès crowd.
What percent of the student body would be from the top 1 percent if admissions was solely by SAT score? Only about 400 students a year earn the maximum score, so it is theoretically doable. 1 percent families would increase use of cram SAT courses, so one can’t calculate it in advance. But I’m thinking there would be fewer admits from the 1 percent than today, and more from the bottom half. One Ivy should try it. Perhaps it would be the end of intercollegiate sports ranging from rugby to football — the neurology department should approve.
In 1959 Columbia hired a new admissions director named David A. Dudley, who declared that henceforth Columbia would do away with all forms of bigotry (against, say, Jews, blacks, and the poor) and favoritism (toward, say, alumni, the rich, and jocks). Instead, the class would be chosen solely on the basis of grades and test scores.
You can imagine what happened: Dudley’s first class consisted overwhelmingly of “IBM machines with testicles,” as they called themselves. Some 85 percent of that class were white Jews from New York. (Columbia was all-male at the time, to boot.) In a class of some 700, only 25 had been a captain of any high school sports team.
Keeping Jews (and Catholics, blacks, etc.) out of Ivy League universities is one of the ways in which school administrators applied Affirmative Action between 1918 and the 1950s [which in my eyes tainted the whole program forever because it shows the administration cannot be trusted not to be racist]. I learned from Feynman’s autobiography that he could not go to Columbia because he was Jewish, and therefore went to MIT.
It’s an often repeated story probably a bit exaggerated. But from what I read, David Dudley did end the antisemitic bias, admitted way more public school students, reduced athletic preference, and fatally angered an alumni committee used to dictating admissions policy. One can find stories like this concerning that class of 1964:
Next time this comes before the Supreme Court – which it probably will, because Harvard, at least, is openly planning to walk through Roberts’ loophole – elite schools should be given a choice of forgoing federal funding, or stopping the ethnic, gender, and wealth-related discrimination inevitable with an opaque application process. And I hope they choose the latter.
Do you have a source for that? Back before the great norming, high sat scores were rare (many individual tests had a high score of 760, 770, 780, or 790, with a perfect paper, so you had to be lucky as well as answer all the questions correctly to score an 800). Now i believe a perfect score always nets an 800. And 400 students per year seems low.
I don’t think this number is published by the College Board. Trust me, this is a debate I’ve had with dozens of parents.
If anyone tells me their kid got a perfect score on SAT, I always disbelieve them. There is no way I could personally know such a high fraction of that exclusive group.
This is usually in the context of “My kid with a perfect SAT score and 4.4 GPA did not get into Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or Columbia. They must be discriminating against Asian kids.”
Those all seem to be college-prep sites. I don’t think the SAT folks release the distribution of scores, and I think they are all guessing. I have no better basis for guessing than they have, but my guess would have been higher, especially as you can take the test multiple times and only submit your best scores.
I’ve heard that both Harvard and Stanford claim that they could fill their class with just people who score 1600 on the SAT, which may be hyperbole, but suggests the number is a couple thousand if those rumors are true. (I doubt they could BOTH do it, I imagine there’s an awful lot of overlap in their applicants.)
I know enough people whose scores would have been “perfect” after the re-centering that I’m not inclined to disbelieve those claims. That being said, I don’t think anyone has ever told me, for real, that they got perfect scores. Certainly none of the kids I’ve interviewed for Harvard had perfect SAT scores. And some of them were very impressive.
That sort of argument wouldn’t really serve as an excuse for other forms of discrimination though. Just because other suitable options exist doesn’t meant that it’s legal or just to discriminate due to immutable characteristics. Furthermore, the value of a Harvard education is in part due to the name and reputation of Harvard.
I knew someone in high school several grades above mine who had a 1600 score. This would have been pre-norming way back in the mid-60s. He skipped senior year to go to Harvard.
His younger brother was in my grade, and he wanted to go to Harvard, too. He didn’t have perfect scores, but they were close. Every Ivy accepted him except Harvard. We used to just ignore all his pissing and moaning, but I found it a little sad. FYI, they were a Jewish family…don’t know if that made any difference.
In my undergrad, I roomed with a Chinese exchange student for a year. He was involved in a Chinese cultural group on campus, to which I was frequently invited to events. The time they tried to have a crawfish boil? Well, that was some story.
But anyway, he said that not only did he get a perfect 800 on the math SAT, but that every single other Chinese student in his group did as well. He basically said that even a mediocre Chinese student could score 800 on the math with one hand tied behind their back. The sticky wicket was the English/verbal, which required all those cram courses and tutoring and what have you.
If even moderately true, it was probably one of the College Board math subject/achievement tests, no longer offered since 2021. According to Wikipedia, regarding Math Level 2:
The original idea of the SAT was that it was about ability to learn (“aptitude”) while the subject tests were about what you learned. These obviously overlap, but there is some real distinction.
I recall, in my good suburban high school, students running down halls — would have been 1972 or 1973 — whooping with joy over being in “the 800 club.” It was not likely about the SAT.
