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'Idaho farm boys' aren't 'diverse'

July 17, 2010 By

College diversity policies don’t extend to Asians, low-income whites, Junior ROTC officers or Idaho farm boys, writes Russell Nieli, who works for Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, on Minding the Campus.

A new study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford uses data from eight highly competitive public and private colleges and universities over three years.

To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.

Low-income status improved the admissions chances for blacks, Hispanics and Asians, but not for whites.  Private institutions were much more likely to admit affluent whites than disadvantaged whites with the same grades and test scores.

Private institutions, Espenshade and Radford suggest, “intentionally save their scarce financial aid dollars for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students.”

In the Bakke ruling Lewis Powell laid the groundwork for “diversity” admissions, Nieli points out. Powell wrote:

“A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.”

But the Ivy League doesn’t see Idaho farm boys or other red-staters as diverse. In most cases, extracurriculars help admission, especially for students in leadership roles, but that’s not true for Junior ROTC officers or 4-H or Future Farmers of America leaders, the study found. Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”

Update: New York Times columnist Ross Douthat cites Nieli and the Espenshade study  in The Roots of White Anxiety.

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Getting in without SATs

March 30, 2010 By

Sarah Lawrence, a small liberal-arts college, picks admits without considering SAT scores. With grades varying so much from school to school, the admissions committee uses “a sample essay graded by a high-school teacher to determine the curriculum’s rigor,” New York Magazine explains.

But the samples also tell something about the readers. “I had one essay that said how awful Twilight was”—the essay was about damaging themes of female submissiveness in the series—“and I was like, ‘Admit her!’?” says Melissa Faulner, a 2006 grad on the committee. Whereas what the readers wryly call TCML essays—“theater changed my life”—are looked at more skeptically.

A girl from Texas scored a three (out of five) in academics while getting top marks in the other two categories. “Her grades really are bad,” Will Floyd allowed. She hadn’t gotten one A in high school. “But her writing was gorgeous,” he noted. The girl explained in her application that she has test anxiety and problems with rote memorization. But she had good recommendation letters. Besides, Sarah Lawrence’s curriculum emphasizes writing over test-taking. She got in.

More than half of applicants are offered a place at Sarah Lawrence.  Tuition and room and board cost more than $55,000 a year: 61 percent of undergrads receive financial aid.

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The video application essay

February 26, 2010 By

College applicants are trying to wow admissions officers with personal videos, reports the Boston Globe. Tufts is the first selective college to encourage video submissions as an “optional essay.” More than 6 percent of 15,436 applicants sent in a one-minute video; many are on YouTube.

Amelia Downs performs a series of dorky dance moves named after math terms like the scatter plot and the bar graph. Sam Zuckert plays a song made solely from the sounds of a piece of paper ripping, crumpling, and waving in the wind. And then there’s Mike Klinker, using a remote control to fly a Styrofoam elephant — with his name on it — through a clearing in the woods.

Tufts students and alumni are commenting on their favorites on YouTube.

Lee Coffin, Tufts’ dean of admissions, says the clips showcase a creativity and personality that would be hard to convey on paper. The idea is part of an effort begun by the university in 2006 to evaluate aspects of applicants’ intelligence not reflected in SAT scores and grades.

. . . The videos are judged as one part of a whole picture, with a student’s academic record still weighing the most, Coffin said. Production value will not be a factor, nor will public comments be considered in the admissions team’s decision, he said. What counts, he said, is creativity and wit, something that shows a student’s voice or talent – that can answer, “What spark do they bring to the class?’’

While other selective colleges don’t solicit videos, applicants often submit them along with blogs and personal websites.

Harvard College has for decades asked students to submit any supplementary materials — art portfolios, manuscripts, music recordings, and films — that display exceptional talent. But Harvard’s admissions dean frets that video applications may give an unfair edge to students from affluent families.

At Tufts, Coffin said more than 60 percent of the videos were submitted by financial-aid applicants.  “Access to video capabilities — via computers or cellphones, even — among teenagers is almost universal,’’ he said.

I worry more that flashy extroverts will edge out shy, nerdy students.

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Honors for all

January 1, 2010 By

Some schools with lots of collegebound students are trying to limit the proliferation of honor societies, reports the New York Times.

There have been so many honor societies created at Commack High School on Long Island in recent years that some students ended up in six or seven of them, racking up memberships like so many merit badges or thanks-for-playing trophies.

This year Commack cut the technology society and combined Latin, German, French and sign language into one world languages society. That got the number down to 11 societies. Still, nearly a third of juniors and seniors belong to honor societies; among these students, the average number is three.

Students eager to impress college admission officials want as many honors as possible, even if they have no time to attend meetings or to earn A’s.

“This cheapens the currency,” ”said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit educational policy group in Washington. “Once everyone’s wearing rhinestones, you might not notice someone wearing diamonds.”

I suspect admissions people can figure out that the applicant with a B- average and a membership in the Spanish honors society is a B- student.

But, in my day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, National Honor Society was the only honors society. It was reserved for students with high grades and had no meetings or community service requirements.  Students with special interests — or a desire to impress admissions officers — joined clubs.

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Ivy-bound Asians need extra-high SATs

October 15, 2009 By

Asian students accepted to elite private universities in 1997 had much higher SAT scores than whites, Hispanics or blacks, concluded a study by Thomas Epenshade, a Princeton sociology professor. From the Daily Princetonian:

. . . African-American applicants with SAT scores of 1150 had the same chances of being accepted as white applicants with 1460s and Asian applicants with perfect 1600s.

The results of the study come three years after Jian Li, a rejected Princeton applicant, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. He alleged in the complaint that he had been discriminated against based on his race when he was denied admission to the University.

Espenshade noted that Asian-American students with high grades and test scores might have had weaker “soft variables,” such as essays, extracurriculars and teacher recommendations.

That’s not likely. College-bound Asian-Americans may be weaker in writing skills, if English is their second language, but they’re just as strong in extracurriculars as their classmates and just as likely to impress teachers. If overcoming adversity wins bonus points, many Asian students should qualify as the children of struggling immigrants.  A more likely explanation is that college admissions staffers want a class balanced in interests — not too many science and math majors — and in appearance.  It’s like the old quotas against Jews.

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‘Holistic’ decisions are unreliable

April 19, 2009 By

“Holistic” assessment is unreliable, said Scott Highhouse at Wake Forest University’s “Rethinking Admissions” conference. Highhouse, a professor of industrial-organizational psychology at Bowling Green State University, warned that research shows personal interviews don’t predict who’ll succeed on the job and who’ll flop. The audience was not happy to hear that, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

One social psychologist in the audience asked Mr. Highhouse about the importance of personality traits, such as conscientiousness, that seem to correlate highly with student success.

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Mr. Highhouse said. “How to measure conscientiousness in a way that is standardized.”

He’d titled his talk, “Don’t Shoot the Messenger.”

I worry that an emphasis on interviews, essays and “community service” claims will reward bullshit artists rather than performers. Take Susan Boyle.  She doesn’t know how to package or present herself.  But she can perform.

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Rejection tweeting

April 7, 2009 By

HIgh school seniors are getting their college letters — fat and thin — and Tweeting Through the Pain, reports The Daily Beast.


alesacm: Stanford’s rejection letter was waaaay better than Harvard’s.

his_holiness: I was rejected from the University of Washington. My dad has been a professor there for 30 years and is on the board of admissions. FML

warmsound: ponders requesting a formal rejection letter from Princeton… just to get the most out of his application fee.

yaacoviland: Rejected by Waterloo. Accepted by Harvard. Been repeating WTF out loud to myself for the last fifteen minutes.

draytonhiers: Something strange has happened. Being rejected by Yale has made me feel better about myself, rather than worse. I can’t explain this.

gabmeister1855: Got rejected from Berkeley. Damn dirty hippies.

Kids are applying to more colleges these days, so they’re getting rejected more. It’s good practice for life.

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Angst of an admissions director

April 7, 2009 By

Pitzer admissions director Angel Perez writes in the LA Times about the agony of rejecting well-qualified students. Pitzer received received 4,079 applications for 245 spots in the freshman class. (The college accepts 22 percent of applicants; most who are accepted choose to go elsewhere.)

I recall the fate of one young woman whose academic profile was top-notch. She had a 4.0 grade-point average at a competitive high school in Los Angeles, she listed a fair amount of extracurricular activities, and her essays read well. But she was from a town very close by and had never taken the time to visit the college. We offer many opportunities to do so, but she had had no contact with us.

She was rejected on the suspicion that Pitzer wasn’t her first choice. But Pitzer took “a young man from New York City who was academically below our margin.”   
I interviewed him, and in my evaluation I wrote, “This kid bleeds Pitzer College.” He was concerned about issues of social justice and social responsibility — two key values that our institution was founded on.
The student’s grades were below the Pitzer average; he submitted no test scores (tests are optional).  Perez read his essay out loud to the admissions committee.
They laughed out loud in response to this young man’s humor, and they could not believe how much time he took to demonstrate to us how right he was for Pitzer.

I followed up the reading by telling them about my impressions from the interview: “He won’t graduate top of his class, but he is going to be a powerful presence here.” One of our staff members, who was clearly impressed, said, “This kid really does want to change the world, doesn’t he?”

Pitzer tries for an even balance of men and women (it’s 61 percent female), a mix of California and out-of-state students and ”a strong balance of socioeconomic and ethnic diversity,” writes Perez. Clearly, they’re trying to boost their rankings by showing that a higher number of accepted students choose Pitzer. That means highly qualified students looking for a back-up school will be rejected while less-qualified students who really, really want Pitzer will get in.

Last week, I interviewed Downtown College Prep seniors who were applying for college scholarships funded by the charter school’s donors. The class of ’09 is unusually large and remarkably talented.  Most students apply for a scholarship — financial need is a  factor as well as grades — so I saw top students and students who’d struggled academically. I wasn’t most impressed by the kids who wanted to be a role model for the Hispanic community or those who said, “I don’t want to be a statistic.” I liked the girl who said, “I love math.” She plans to study aeronautic engineering. And the boy who said, ”I love reading.” He’s hoping to qualify for the nationals in a slam poetry competition.  There was a boy who’s into chemistry but may not get enough aid to study chemical engineering at the excellent private university that accepted him. (Not a tragedy: He’s got a UC option.)  Another kid was fascinated by the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution and the civil war in Yugoslavia. I met kids who are passionate about photography and choreography. Most come from working-class families; some are working to help their laid-off parents pay the bills. 

One of the interviewers was Magdalena Villalvazo, a member of DCP’s first class who spoke at the first graduation in ’04 and earned her college degree in ’08. She works as a banker. Her speech is in my book, Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds.

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Inflated selectivity

March 24, 2009 By

Beware College Rankings warn Frederick M. Hess and Thomas Gift on National Review Online. Many more colleges are now ranked as “most competitive”: Barron’s lists 82 schools compared to 54 ten years ago.  There are more “highly competitive” schools too.

Grade inflation, and students’ applying to more schools than they used to, have juiced the numbers to make students look more qualified and schools more selective.

. . . A 2004 College Board study reported that the fraction of SAT takers claiming an A average had risen from 13 percent to 18 percent over the past decade, a time during which SAT scores declined slightly. The mean GPA of high-school graduates increased from 2.68 in 1990 to 2.98 in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Education; meanwhile, twelfth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress declined between 1992 and 2007.

All the children are above average in Lake Wobegon; elsewhere in the U.S., they’re way above average.

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College admissions is a lottery

March 15, 2009 By

At ultra-competitive colleges, admissions is a lottery, writes Chad Aldeman on The Quick and the Ed.

I have a friend who’s worked for two college admissions departments. One was a traditional liberal arts college in the Northeast, and the other a highly competitive college in the greater DC area. At the former, she says it was a mostly sane process where they more or less knew the high schools of students, had time to read the student’s personal statements, and truly thought about whether the student would be a good fit for this particular institution. Here in DC, at the competitive school, it was totally different. Mainly because of the sheer size of the applicant pool, they had to rely much more heavily on the all-important numbers — high school GPA and SAT score — rather than thinking holistically about the student. The admissions office, even after setting a relatively high standard, had thousands of applicants to choose from, and very little time to do so. During admissions season, each officer was given 500 applications per week. At 40 hours a week, not counting breaks and meetings, the admissions officer had 10 minutes to make a decision about an applicant. Ten minutes (unless, as my friend points out, they’re athletes or legacies).

Instead of torturing students to come up with extracurriculars and essays, admit it’s random, throw the grades and scores in a hopper and run it like the med school matching system, Aldeman suggests.

April is the cruelest month for high school seniors, writes Jay Mathews in the Washington Post. He has tips for coping with the college crunch.

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