8 ms·

Admission Announcement

35 points by car_analogy 4y ago

jimbob45 4y ago
Bold move to obfuscate more of the admissions process at a time when admissions nepotism is at the forefront of everyone's minds.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  I think that is entirely the point. It makes it much harder to claim discrimination by any particular group if there aren't any hard stats to compare to.
  - helpfulclippy 4y ago
    When the organization busts out phrases like "student-centered," you know it's entirely about the needs of the organization.
prepend 4y ago
I suspect this will increase, not decrease the anxiety of applicants. I 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.
- zahma 4y ago
  Doesn't it signal to prospective students to submit their best application and be judged holistically? Supposedly that's what all universities claim to do. 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.
  - prepend 4y ago
    I don’t think so. I think it signals a secret level of expectations and information asymmetry as the average sat score is still available to admissions people. 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.
    - olsonjeffery 4y ago
      There’s actually another, simpler explanation: they’re doing exactly what they’re saying. 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.
      - prepend 4y ago
        Perhaps, but that seems stupid as test scores are very useful for determining if someone will successfully complete college, and many other factors. 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.
  - buscoquadnary 4y ago
    People that remove objective transparent measures often do so because they are preventing them from doing they want to do that are contrary to those measures. 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.
    - glitchc 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- paulpauper 4y ago
  I think it's a bad move, but i don't think it will increase anxiety 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.
  - prepend 4y ago
    I think I would feel more anxiety if it was random and I had no control at all. So up until names were chosen, I expect anxiety would go up. 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.
newsclues 4y ago
Education is broken, and it’s attempts to self repair are so bad it needs a complete shutdown and restarting it from scratch.
rayiner 4y ago
Relatedly, an ABA committee has recommended that the ABA make the Law School Admissions Test optional for law school admissions: https://www.law.com/2022/05/06/aba-considering-eliminating-standardized-test-requirement-for-law-school-admissions/ https://www.law.com/2022/05/06/aba-considering-eliminating-s... I have little confidence there will be transparency or uniformity in how students who submit applications without LSAT scores will be evaluated.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  This is much more pernicious. LSAT score is fairly well correlated with bar passage. Perspective students should know up front whether or not they are likely to waste 3 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars
car_analogy 4y ago
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-price-of-admission/ https://www.takimag.com/article/the-price-of-admission/ gives additional context and speculation on this move.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  What a gross, tribalistic way of viewing the world. e: oh i see, just looked up the author
  - car_analogy 4y ago
    Do you feel the same about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCA-Asian_Pacific_American_Advocates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCA-Asian_Pacific_American_Adv... ?
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      I don't really know what that organization is. 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.
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    Are any of the statistics mentioned wrong? Are the facts uncovered by the Harvard lawsuit now wrongthink?
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Wrongthink? What are you talking about? 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.
      - ceeplusplus 4y ago
hardtke 4y ago
My daughter did just did college applications and her school used a service call SCOIR. For all of the colleges she was interested, they had a two dimensional (test score, GPA) graph that showed all recent applicants from her school and whether or not the applicant got accepted into that particular college. You could then see exactly what your chances are. For schools with too few applicants they did not generate this graph. After looking at her college choices it seemed like less of crapshoot. The patterns were pretty consistent.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Yeah, yet another thing that benefits generally affluent/elite schools (yes, a suburban public school in California would likely fall in that category). 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.
- curiousllama 4y ago
  That’s been around a while - I had a similar thing. Learned a lot from it. 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.
sterlind 4y ago
I'm a bit cynical, that deemphasizing and obscuring objective measures (SAT, GPA, etc.) might be motivated by wanting control demographics. 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.
- unexpected 4y ago
  I think this is a great idea! Sadly, I don't think the goal of the admissions staff is to let in a diverse class. It slowly has become a race-to-the-bottom of "which applicant will enable me to tell the coolest story at the cocktail reception" (note this announcement's focus on highlighting individual members of the incoming class).
- CrimsonCape 4y ago
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Nobody who matters disagrees with the comment that race and measured intelligence are correlated. You are trying to make the further link that race and intrinsic capability to be intelligent are correlated, which does not have to be "acknowledged" for affirmative action.
  - Miner49er 4y ago
    No. There's a huge difference between intelligence and test scores. Race and test scores are correlated, and that's what schools are acknowledging - they are not acknowledging that race and intelligence are correlated.
    - jeffwask 4y ago
      Race is a made up concept the correlates to nothing on a biological level except for a few insignificant markers. Race is a tool of culture and class warfare. Intelligence and test scores are tied to opportunity and education which are denied to cultures and classes by those in power.
hhs 4y ago
If interested: “This year, three Ivy League schools — the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and Princeton — declined to release admissions data on the day acceptance letters were sent out, a trend Stanford started in 2018. Cornell first stopped publicizing its data in 2020.” [0] [0]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/5/4/selective-universities-not-promoting-admissions-rates/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/5/4/selective-univer...
sremani 4y ago
Unfortunately, the Ivy Leagues of the world have a wonderful opportunity, they now have tools to provide education to millions of people but they are choosing a black box, opaque style of admissions and going for a Luxury Brand model. 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.
- ohyoutravel 4y ago
  Harvard Extension School is open enrollment
  - sremani 4y ago
    Not the same degree! Its apples and sea shells.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      A school won’t retain the same reputation if it opens up enrollment big time. There will be too many from that school. Maintaining the status quo is a core of society. No school graduating multiple hundreds of thousands of students a year will maintain its current ranking.
ineedasername 4y ago
>will use this educational experience to go on to impact and change the communities and world around them 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.)
- JackFr 4y ago
  For what it's worth alumni interviews are mostly meaningless in the applicatiuon process. Theyt exist more as a development tool for keeping alumni engaged. 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.
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    I'll admit that mine probably went poorly. It certainly wasn't bad or uncordial, but as much as I performed well academically I had no strong direction or sense of what I wanted to do in college or afterwards. 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.
- rayiner 4y ago
  > change the communities and world around them … senior partner at a medium-sized law firm. 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.
glitchc 4y ago
Doomed to false hope. With GPA guidelines, it's at least clear which schools I shouldn't even bother to apply to, and can tailor my efforts accordingly. This sounds like a pre-cursor to the introduction of a formal quota system.
spike021 4y ago
Sounds like a way to get more students who would've previously known they didn't have a chance to spend the application fee. 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.
reactspa 4y ago
My 0.02: 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.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  >Over the years I've observed brilliant students who do very poorly in IQ-type tests. But they write brilliant long-form essays. And how big of a sample size are you talking about? SATs and IQ tests are highly correlated. Same for school performance and IQ.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    > SATs and IQ tests are highly correlated. 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
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    What relevance do the SATs have? If they’re like the IQ test then that isn’t what makes a student bright, necessarily. As with the essay example.
salmonfamine 4y ago
Ivy League universities are hedge funds that have colleges and research institutions attached to them. 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.
- secabeen 4y ago
  Teaching is not the primary focus of most Ivy League universities, research is. There's more money in research and faculty would rather be doing research. Undergraduate instruction is also valuable, but is a secondary priority.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Can you explain how there is more money in research than fundraising from alumni and corporations? Just glanced at a few cash flow statements and most of the income comes from sale of investments received as donations.
cafard 4y ago
Some years ago, a study asserted that middle age is the unhappiest time of life. It occurs to me now that at least for the upper middle class middle age is when one is most likely to be watching/nudging/prodding a child through college admissions. It is definitely a source of stress.
gandalfgeek 4y ago
Why is "reducing anxiety" such a paramount goal?
- paulpauper 4y ago
  Studies regarding social media and teen anxiety regularly go viral , suggesting it's important.
troelsSteegin 4y ago
The announcement was not clear to me as to whether they would drop information from their Common Data Set reports, https://ir.princeton.edu/other-university-data/common-data-set https://ir.princeton.edu/other-university-data/common-data-s..., or simply not promote it themselves. 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.
yes_really 4y ago
> The Office of Admission considers each student holistically within the context of their setting to build a dynamic University community. Given this, data points such as overall admission rates and average SAT scores shouldn’t influence a prospective student’s decision about whether to apply to Princeton. 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.

35 points by car_analogy 4y ago

Bold move to obfuscate more of the admissions process at a time when admissions nepotism is at the forefront of everyone's minds.

Ancalagon 4y ago
I think that is entirely the point. It makes it much harder to claim discrimination by any particular group if there aren't any hard stats to compare to.
- helpfulclippy 4y ago
  When the organization busts out phrases like "student-centered," you know it's entirely about the needs of the organization.

prepend 4y ago

I suspect this will increase, not decrease the anxiety of applicants. I 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.

zahma 4y ago
Doesn't it signal to prospective students to submit their best application and be judged holistically? Supposedly that's what all universities claim to do. 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.
- prepend 4y ago
  I don’t think so. I think it signals a secret level of expectations and information asymmetry as the average sat score is still available to admissions people. 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.
  - olsonjeffery 4y ago
    There’s actually another, simpler explanation: they’re doing exactly what they’re saying. 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.
    - prepend 4y ago
      Perhaps, but that seems stupid as test scores are very useful for determining if someone will successfully complete college, and many other factors. 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.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  People that remove objective transparent measures often do so because they are preventing them from doing they want to do that are contrary to those measures. 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.
  - glitchc 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
paulpauper 4y ago
I think it's a bad move, but i don't think it will increase anxiety 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.
- prepend 4y ago
  I think I would feel more anxiety if it was random and I had no control at all. So up until names were chosen, I expect anxiety would go up. 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.

newsclues 4y ago

Education is broken, and it’s attempts to self repair are so bad it needs a complete shutdown and restarting it from scratch.

rayiner 4y ago

Relatedly, an ABA committee has recommended that the ABA make the Law School Admissions Test optional for law school admissions: https://www.law.com/2022/05/06/aba-considering-eliminating-standardized-test-requirement-for-law-school-admissions/ https://www.law.com/2022/05/06/aba-considering-eliminating-s... I have little confidence there will be transparency or uniformity in how students who submit applications without LSAT scores will be evaluated.

bradleyjg 4y ago
This is much more pernicious. LSAT score is fairly well correlated with bar passage. Perspective students should know up front whether or not they are likely to waste 3 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars

car_analogy 4y ago

https://www.takimag.com/article/the-price-of-admission/ https://www.takimag.com/article/the-price-of-admission/ gives additional context and speculation on this move.

whimsicalism 4y ago
What a gross, tribalistic way of viewing the world. e: oh i see, just looked up the author
- car_analogy 4y ago
  Do you feel the same about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCA-Asian_Pacific_American_Advocates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCA-Asian_Pacific_American_Adv... ?
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    I don't really know what that organization is. 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.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  Are any of the statistics mentioned wrong? Are the facts uncovered by the Harvard lawsuit now wrongthink?
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Wrongthink? What are you talking about? 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.
    - ceeplusplus 4y ago

hardtke 4y ago

My daughter did just did college applications and her school used a service call SCOIR. For all of the colleges she was interested, they had a two dimensional (test score, GPA) graph that showed all recent applicants from her school and whether or not the applicant got accepted into that particular college. You could then see exactly what your chances are. For schools with too few applicants they did not generate this graph. After looking at her college choices it seemed like less of crapshoot. The patterns were pretty consistent.

whimsicalism 4y ago
Yeah, yet another thing that benefits generally affluent/elite schools (yes, a suburban public school in California would likely fall in that category). 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.
curiousllama 4y ago
That’s been around a while - I had a similar thing. Learned a lot from it. 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.

sterlind 4y ago

I'm a bit cynical, that deemphasizing and obscuring objective measures (SAT, GPA, etc.) might be motivated by wanting control demographics. 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.

unexpected 4y ago
I think this is a great idea! Sadly, I don't think the goal of the admissions staff is to let in a diverse class. It slowly has become a race-to-the-bottom of "which applicant will enable me to tell the coolest story at the cocktail reception" (note this announcement's focus on highlighting individual members of the incoming class).
CrimsonCape 4y ago
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Nobody who matters disagrees with the comment that race and measured intelligence are correlated. You are trying to make the further link that race and intrinsic capability to be intelligent are correlated, which does not have to be "acknowledged" for affirmative action.
- Miner49er 4y ago
  No. There's a huge difference between intelligence and test scores. Race and test scores are correlated, and that's what schools are acknowledging - they are not acknowledging that race and intelligence are correlated.
  - jeffwask 4y ago
    Race is a made up concept the correlates to nothing on a biological level except for a few insignificant markers. Race is a tool of culture and class warfare. Intelligence and test scores are tied to opportunity and education which are denied to cultures and classes by those in power.

hhs 4y ago

If interested: “This year, three Ivy League schools — the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and Princeton — declined to release admissions data on the day acceptance letters were sent out, a trend Stanford started in 2018. Cornell first stopped publicizing its data in 2020.” [0] [0]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/5/4/selective-universities-not-promoting-admissions-rates/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/5/4/selective-univer...

sremani 4y ago

Unfortunately, the Ivy Leagues of the world have a wonderful opportunity, they now have tools to provide education to millions of people but they are choosing a black box, opaque style of admissions and going for a Luxury Brand model. 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.

ohyoutravel 4y ago
Harvard Extension School is open enrollment
- sremani 4y ago
  Not the same degree! Its apples and sea shells.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    A school won’t retain the same reputation if it opens up enrollment big time. There will be too many from that school. Maintaining the status quo is a core of society. No school graduating multiple hundreds of thousands of students a year will maintain its current ranking.

ineedasername 4y ago

>will use this educational experience to go on to impact and change the communities and world around them 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.)

JackFr 4y ago
For what it's worth alumni interviews are mostly meaningless in the applicatiuon process. Theyt exist more as a development tool for keeping alumni engaged. 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.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  I'll admit that mine probably went poorly. It certainly wasn't bad or uncordial, but as much as I performed well academically I had no strong direction or sense of what I wanted to do in college or afterwards. 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.
rayiner 4y ago
> change the communities and world around them … senior partner at a medium-sized law firm. 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.

glitchc 4y ago

Doomed to false hope. With GPA guidelines, it's at least clear which schools I shouldn't even bother to apply to, and can tailor my efforts accordingly. This sounds like a pre-cursor to the introduction of a formal quota system.

spike021 4y ago

Sounds like a way to get more students who would've previously known they didn't have a chance to spend the application fee. 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.

reactspa 4y ago

My 0.02: 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.

paulpauper 4y ago
>Over the years I've observed brilliant students who do very poorly in IQ-type tests. But they write brilliant long-form essays. And how big of a sample size are you talking about? SATs and IQ tests are highly correlated. Same for school performance and IQ.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > SATs and IQ tests are highly correlated. 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
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  What relevance do the SATs have? If they’re like the IQ test then that isn’t what makes a student bright, necessarily. As with the essay example.

salmonfamine 4y ago

Ivy League universities are hedge funds that have colleges and research institutions attached to them. 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.

secabeen 4y ago
Teaching is not the primary focus of most Ivy League universities, research is. There's more money in research and faculty would rather be doing research. Undergraduate instruction is also valuable, but is a secondary priority.
- cudgy 4y ago
  Can you explain how there is more money in research than fundraising from alumni and corporations? Just glanced at a few cash flow statements and most of the income comes from sale of investments received as donations.

cafard 4y ago

Some years ago, a study asserted that middle age is the unhappiest time of life. It occurs to me now that at least for the upper middle class middle age is when one is most likely to be watching/nudging/prodding a child through college admissions. It is definitely a source of stress.

gandalfgeek 4y ago

Why is "reducing anxiety" such a paramount goal?

paulpauper 4y ago
Studies regarding social media and teen anxiety regularly go viral , suggesting it's important.

troelsSteegin 4y ago

The announcement was not clear to me as to whether they would drop information from their Common Data Set reports, https://ir.princeton.edu/other-university-data/common-data-set https://ir.princeton.edu/other-university-data/common-data-s..., or simply not promote it themselves. 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.

yes_really 4y ago

> The Office of Admission considers each student holistically within the context of their setting to build a dynamic University community. Given this, data points such as overall admission rates and average SAT scores shouldn’t influence a prospective student’s decision about whether to apply to Princeton. 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.