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Harvard applications drop 5% after year of turmoil on the Ivy League campus
- LyndaAnderson 2y ago[flagged]
- LyndaFAnderson 2y ago[dead]
- hamster77 2y agoHow much driven by college age population declines?
- mattmaroon 2y agoItll be interesting to see how Columbia does next year.
- CogitoCogito 2y agoSounds like a good thing: > The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school received 54,008 applications for the class of 2028, according to the Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper. The undergraduate college at Harvard University accepted 1,245 of those applicants, giving the incoming freshman class an acceptance rate of 3.59% — the highest admission rate in four years, the publication noted.
- wonderwonder 2y agoI would expect most Ivy's to follow. What parent is going to sit there and watch the chaos and violence on those campuses and think "thats where I should send my kids" There are schools like UF, FSU, Purdue, Auburn, etc that offer great educations with good name recognition. Obviously not the same recognition as a Harvard or similar but kids are not assaulted and brain washed into getting kicked out or arrested
- jltsiren 2y agoIt's not the university but the students. When you have a lot of young ambitious people with weird ideas in one place, you get trouble. Not always, but once in a while.
- wonderwonder 2y agoI would argue its not just the students but the faculty. Some very far left faculty advocating for this chaos there.
- wolverine876 2y agoWhat chaos and who is advocating for chaos?
- wolverine876 2y ago> When you have a lot of young ambitious people with weird ideas in one place, you get trouble. You get wonderful things and 'good trouble'.
- jltsiren 2y agoSometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes you can't tell until much later. One of the most noteworthy instances of student activism in the history of the university I went to was recruiting people to fight for the enemy in WW1. Those people then formed the core of the army that won the subsequent civil war. Things were bad for a while, but the country turned out to be mostly fine 15-20 years later.
- chrisbrandow 2y agoA direct connection between the application drop and the turmoil is tenuous.
- downrightmike 2y ago[flagged]
- taway789aaa6 2y ago[flagged]
- ghaff 2y agoYou can probably read too much into a small drop in applications which is doubtless a Hail Mary to get into a prestigious institution for many/most applicants. That a few figured this maybe isn’t such a big deal after all to basically waste their money and time applying maybe isn’t that surprising. Or it could be a blip for some reason.
- hinkley 2y agoThere was drama at my college one year, maybe my junior year? Because a higher ratio of people than expected confirmed their acceptance and they had too many freshman. I wonder what the over-acceptance ratio is for ivy leagues. Just because you got in doesn’t mean you can afford to go.
- nlunbeck 2y agoMy college's yield increased every year I was there, we got "the largest freshman class historically" four years in a row, even with their efforts to account for the new higher yield. It's hard to accept the right number of applicants when yield isn't exactly linear year to year
- TeaBrain 2y agoThe yield rates for the Ivy League schools are all over 60%. If they admit too many students, and their yield rate is unusually high one year, then they have the right to rescind admission of students, even if the students have already committed.
- saagarjha 2y agoThey have the right to do that, with the risk of tarnishing their reputation irrevocably.
- hinkley 2y agoIt does go some ways to explain the existence of weed-out classes though. You can sacrifice a little faculty and class space for freshman and sophomores if you know some fraction will not be showing up to 400- (or at some universities, 600-) level classes.
- janalsncm 2y agoWithout knowing a few basic facts it’s impossible to do more than speculate. What is the base level of variance in college applications? How often do applicant counts decrease y/y? Was last year’s especially high, and thus a drop is just a return to mean? What were the demographics of the applicant pool this year compared with prior years? Is it related to the Supreme Court decision? The school’s response to Hamas attacks? If the latter is true we should expect similar drops at MIT and UPenn which gave similarly unpopular answers to Congress.
- gnicholas 2y ago> Is it related to the Supreme Court decision? The decision would have two potential effects, which go in opposite directions. On the one hand, some students might decide they don't have a shot at getting in without official race-based admissions policies, and choose not to apply this year. On the other hand, there would be some students — particularly Asian students — who didn't think they had a good shot under the old system, but who might stand a chance in the wake of this case. Importantly, Harvard immediately made clear their dedication to diversity following the SCOTUS decision, signaling to applicants that Harvard would not simply do away with overtly racial criteria and leave the rest of the process the same. This would tend to mitigate both effects, until we see how things shake out. Either way, I doubt that the 5% drop could be based on the net effect of these two opposing forces.
- janalsncm 2y agoThe effects on the absolute number of applicants might be counteracting, but the distribution of applicants is not, which is why it would be so useful to see the demographics of the applicant pool. That said, the SCOTUS decision alone doesn’t explain why Harvard would be affected differently than Yale. Whatever the affect is, Yale has to follow the same laws. Perhaps I should’ve left that hypothesis out.
- Newlaptop 2y agoNot just Asian, but also straight-while-males. If you're a poor white male student in America, you're kinda screwed from both sides. America is divided by class, but responds by addressing race. The end result is that poor white kids get held to the higher standard as if they had the advantages of their rich white peers, magnifying the discrepancy between merit and privilege even further. If even a tiny percent of the discouraged and disenfranchised white students in flyover country believed they had a fair chance at admissions and scholarships to elite schools, that could be a huge increase in applications.
- singhrac 2y agoLol, this is probably because FAFSA was complicated this year. You'll find that applications to good schools are more affected by "can we afford this" than any perceived estimate of value (which is always high enough).
- janalsncm 2y agoWould the FAFSA also affect Yale?
- gnicholas 2y agoDid people know how bad of a fiasco FAFSA would be when they were thinking about applying? Also, why would Harvard applications drop when other Ivies saw increases by as much as 10%?
- singhrac 2y agoFrom what I understand FAFSA was delayed by 2 months this year (to December). But you’re right - if other colleges didn’t see a decline then it’s probably not an important factor. I guess it feels too tenuous a connection because I never thought about university politics when applying but maybe the marginal student is thinking about different things. I decided not to apply to some schools because the essay requirements were too long, or I didn’t they’d give me enough financial aid.
- paulpauper 2y agowow a whole 5%. this translates into an acceptance rate of 4% to 4.20%. you have a chance!
- fardo 2y agoI wouldn’t discount the reputational and long-term danger for the school of potentially losing “peak reach school” status, which this change may be symptomatic of. Harvard has long been the beneficiary of a reputation of “if you get in, you’re very likely to go, as it’s probably also your top choice or very close.” This maintained an upward pressure force in Harvard to keep it a top school, because short term a strong reputation drives top-ranking students that want to study with other top students, and long term those high quality students are likely to accomplish more and further reinforce the reputation. The flywheel starts to break if when you’re choosing between Harvard and somewhere else, you pick somewhere else. These kinds of small shifts are the rumblings you’d expect to see if the edifice was beginning to crack.
- neilv 2y ago> Some wealthy families are now paying consultants as much as $750,000 to prepare their children for college admissions, hoping that the extra expense will pay off with an acceptance letter to a top-ranked university. For $750K, that had better be all-inclusive -- don't come back to me and say you need more money for random staff bribes.
- spacebanana7 2y agoI've heard the unofficial price for guaranteed entry at Stanford is $25M, and that was a few years ago.
- Clubber 2y agoThat devalues the paper that hundreds of thousands of kids earned the hard way. It's sad.
- amenhotep 2y agoI take your point, but to be nitpicky, does it really devalue it? How many prospective students who've legitimately earned a place at Stanford would prefer to use it rather than sell it for $25m? That is a great deal of money.
- FredPret 2y agoKids aren't selling their degrees for $25m. Smart kids are earning degrees that are very prestigious because of how smart they are. Then dumb kids pay $25m in donations and bribes via their parents to get degrees right alongside the smart kids. So now when you see a Stanford degree, is it from a smart kid or a dumb kid? That's why it's devaluing.
- Clubber 2y agoYes, this. To add to that, say hypothetically, I'm an employer and I want to grow my company by building some software. I decide to shoot for the moon and hire a Stanford grad. I happen to get one of the "paid for," ones and they're just like the many, many other not great programmers. Through that experience the Stanford grad I hired isn't any better than the many, many other not great programmers I can hire from any school. Why would I ever give preference to a Stanford degree over any other? All the great programmers with Stanford degrees who earned them through really hard work, smarts and discipline are devalued because that one guy who Stanford said was good enough by awarding him a (paid for) degree, wasn't good enough. If you can pay for admittance, most likely you can pay for grades too.
- WalterBright 2y agoWhen I attended Caltech in the 70s, I asked about riots and demonstrations on campus during the Vietnam war era. They said that outside agitators had come on campus, and attempted to recruit students to form a protest. The usual response was: "I can't join a protest, because I'd miss Physics class!" and the organizers failed. It made perfect sense to me, because missing even a single physics lecture was a very, very bad idea. I was hanging on by my fingernails. RIP Prof Goodstein, my physics prof, who recently passed away. You were an awesome professor. He was also the prime mover behind "The Mechanical Universe" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtMmeAjQTXc&list=PL8_xPU5epJddRABXqJ5h5G0dk-XGtA5cZ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtMmeAjQTXc&list=PL8_xPU5epJ...
- SpaceManNabs 2y agoCaltech, Princeton, and UChicago remained pretty level headed (both faculty and most students) through all of this. Notice that the first two schools are notorious for not having grade inflation.
- bmmayer1 2y agoAnd the third. I'm a UChicago alum and my premed friends were always complaining about having to compete against beneficiaries of Ivy League grade inflation.
- SpaceManNabs 2y agoMy mistake. I am only deeply familiar with the first two.
- WalterBright 2y agoYes, the grading was brutal. But, when I did manage to earn a good grade, it felt really really good. Unlike high school where an A meant nothing at all. My dad (Air Force) called such things "PX ribbons", meaning you could buy them at the base exchange. The only one he ever valued was his DFC.
- tzs 2y ago
- t_mann 2y agoThe article talks about the resignation of the president and antisemitism, but that's actually not the only recent trouble at Harvard: there were multiple independent cases of suspected academic fraud: in the business school [0], the Dana-Farber cancer institute [1] and against the now-former president [2]. The latter charges might have been more political, but the other two look pretty serious. Truly not a great year for Harvard. [0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/11/harvard-business-gino-plagarism-allegations/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/11/harvard-busines... [1] https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-at-harvard-university/ https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-... [2] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/3/plagiarism-allegations-gay-resigns/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/3/plagiarism-alleg...
- aprilthird2021 2y agoI feel like we have to at least have a list of some of the accomplishments at Harvard to see if it was truly not a great year or just business as usual. Plagiarism is bad, but academia as a whole suffers from it. Stanford's last president stepped down when his old lab was found to have fraudulently submitted some research. At the same time, advancements in human understanding take place in the messy real world alongside such problems. If those are continuing or even growing, then I don't really care whether powerful donors like or don't like what Harvard's talking heads do or don't do politically
- wakawaka28 2y agoPlagiarism and fraud may happen in many schools but one would certainly expect more honest work out of a school costing 5-10x more than the competition. What are people paying for, if not a great reputation?
- aprilthird2021 2y agoRight, I'm saying perhaps there is a great deal of surprisingly innovative honest work coming out of such schools also. We only have a list of the negatives from OP. In every large organization there are both good and bad actors. If the good ones are 5x-10x better than other institutions' good ones, that changes our discussion here.
- ergocoder 2y agoIt is going to be difficult proving the causation. Intuitively, the turmoil likely causes the decrease. Let's say we have 3 groups: 1. Support Palestine 2. No strong opinion 3. Support Israel. Before the Hamas massacre, the 3 groups already apply to Harvard. Now that Harvard showed to support Palestine borderline Hamas. It alienates Number 3 and partly Number 2. Number 1 already applies to Harvard therefore doesn't increase in size.
- BryantD 2y agoOr: The administration's response to protests has a chilling effect and discourages students who care about their right to protest. I think your first sentence is completely accurate and as a result I'm going to pay less attention to my intuition.
- ergocoder 2y ago> The administration's response to protests has a chilling effect and discourages students who care about their right to protest. I doubt this is true. Harvard suppressed protests many times in the past. That didn't seem to discourage students in the past. This is not new. > I think your first sentence is completely accurate and as a result I'm going to pay less attention to my intuition. Because it merely goes against your intuition. That's all. Let's not act like you would require definite proof for everything.
- wolverine876 2y ago> Harvard suppressed protests many times in the past. Could you share some history with us? How was it the same and how different than what happened recently. Also, the suppression of the president of Harvard by outside forces seems new?
- ergocoder 2y agoThere was a pro-Trump/republican protest that was shut down by the school back in 2020. That didn't impact Harvard at all > Also, the suppression of the president of Harvard by outside forces seems new? Yeah, many are disappointed that it needed outside force. They are less likely to apply to Harvard now compared to then. That definitely contributes.
- ffggvv 2y agodidnt harvard also reinstate their need for standarized tests?
- klodolph 2y agoI wonder if this has something to do with the SAT requirements… https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/11/harvard-sat-act-admissions-requirement/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/11/harvard-sat-act... Harvard stopped requiring the SATs, and then started again.
- eitally 2y agoProbably similarly to how, when they decided to go full remote during covid, 25% of incoming freshmen deferred. It's been a topsy turvy few years in higher ed.
- gnicholas 2y agoIIRC this change was announced after the application deadlines, so couldn't have affected this year's crop of applications. It will likely affect next year's crop at Harvard, and the many other universities that have/will revert to their prior policy regarding standardized tests.
- sandspar 2y agoOf note is that the applications drop from Jewish students is likely higher than 5%. Jewish students are generally among the highest performing students on the campus.
- RickJWagner 2y agoI feel like elite universities are on a downward slide. Things just aren't what they once were, as far as prestige goes. I suspect Harvard, Yale, etc. will always carry some cachet. But the days of the elite, universally recognized golden ticket are probably gone forever.