
An Admissions Surprise from the Ivy League - pavornyoh
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/opinion/sunday/an-admissions-surprise-from-the-ivy-league.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
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roymurdock
At the undergrad level, the ivy leagues are a place where you go to meet
people rich, driven, well-connected students and their successful parents.
This is their value proposition - not a world class education. Larry Summers
is going to give the same econ 101 lecture as every other college professor,
but his name combined with the harvard brand is going to carry a lot more
weight on a recommendation letter for that Fed summer internship.

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?

~~~
sotojuan
> At the undergrad level, the ivy leagues are a place where you go to meet
> people rich, driven, well-connected students and their successful parents.

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.

~~~
roymurdock
I attended a decently selective private school for 3 years. I studied abroad
at an elite university for a year.

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.

------
huac
The ultimate goal is to get more students to apply to these top schools -
especially lower-income students. In a vacuum, this is commendable; certainly
our top schools should do a better job of educating students regardless of
tuition. But while this initiative will likely raise application rates, will
it increase acceptance, matriculation, and graduation rates for lower-income
students?

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.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Increasing the amount earmarked to financial aid, particularly to grants
> instead of loans, would be more effective_

Agree. In addition, reducing or eliminating legacy preferences [1] would go a
long way.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences)

~~~
zeveb
Of course, the legacy preferences are part of the value proposition of such
schools. You don't go to Harvard for an education; you go to Harvard for a
Rolodex. Having been drinking buddies at Harvard with a guy whose father went
to Harvard gives you an entree into society.

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endzone
or instead of this parade of bullshit, they could decide admission on a truly
meritocratic basis as is still done in the UK, EU and most countries around
the world. you score high enough in the relevant exam and you gain entry.

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.

~~~
beeboop
You can't really base admissions on merits when all the applicants have
essentially maxed out those merits. They're all valedictorians with SAT scores
that are nearly perfect.

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.

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VLM
Where will the rich kids go? If the real product they're selling, is hanging
out with rich kids, perhaps for the hope of future opportunities, spouses,
whatever, then sending them all to state-U or whatever will just make the new
"cool brand" the state-U.

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...

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JoeAltmaier
A laudable effort, which of course is immediately beset by paranoid tiger
parents 2nd- and 3rd-guessing every detail and how it will affect their
wonderkind.

~~~
bilbo0s
To be fair...

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".

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The OP was an article in the NYTimes. Unfortunately one of those people got
quite a bit of bandwidth wasted on them. Now it will take effort to undo that
damage.

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lighthawk
An admissions surprise would be getting rid of standardized testing and only
admitting within the pool of the top 5% of each graduating class for schools
whose requirements meet the university guidelines.

Adding online lockers is a nice attempt, but doesn't solve the problem.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Substituting one test for another? Why is that helpful to promoting diversity?

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.

~~~
bilbo0s
Actually, the original point of standardized testing was not to "level the
playing field", but rather to identify the academically talented. The job of
Ivy Admissions Officers is to identify students that will enrich the
environment of the universities by which they are employed. These are two
separate problems.

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.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Not fair! They can simply look harder. How can it be said with a straight face
that there are _zero_ qualified candidates in those example states?
Preposterous. It just takes time to find them.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Wyoming has about 580 thousand total population, and no prep schools
comparable to the East Coast ones. Its not simply raw intellectual ability.
The most qulualified student in each year from that state will most likely
find an Ivy League overwhelming. If each such school wants at least one man,
one woman from there, it's not going to work.

------
exelius
In my high school (a well-regarded, mixed-race high school in one of the
worst-run districts in the US in the late 90s) the "advanced placement"
courses were used as a form of segregation. White kids (drawn from an affluent
enclave in the inner city and who made up 1/3 of the school) nearly all
requested to be placed in "IB" classes instead of AP classes. It didn't matter
if you were smart, because the material wasn't really any harder than the AP
classes -- it was just what all the white kids did.

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.

~~~
jbob2000
This is one part of the problem; that doing good academically and caring about
college is a "white" thing. Changing that has to come from within the
community, I'm not sure there's much we can do from the outside.

~~~
exelius
That's not even it. Parents can care about college and want their children to
do well academically, while at the same time not know how one goes about
getting into college or why Yale would be more attractive to someone than
University of Iowa.

