NYT: "Peak College Admissions Insanity"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The elite schools are basically a harry potter sorting hat for IB, Big Law etc.. and what they really are doing is creating a net work among the already rich/elite kids. Middle class smart kids may get in but very few have the contacts and skills to net work themselves up that high. The richer you are the less relevant your major needs to be

Bingo.

[Anonymous]

Am I totally clueless or is part of the problem also the common app? When I applied, there was no way I could have applied to 18 schools as the girl in the article unless they were all huge colleges that basically used a formula. I didn’t waste my time applying to so many schools. But maybe it’s a chicken or egg question since the acceptance rates have gotten so low, kids have to apply to reduce the risk of not being accepted anywhere.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"It’s been a while since top students could assume they’d get into top schools, but today, they get rejected more often than not."

So then all these top students are going to "second-rate" schools. But the thing that makes schools top-rate is mostly the students, which makes those second-rate schools ... top.

The teaching at most colleges is going to be good, because there's a surplus of good academics. So if you go to a school with many classmates who are smart, engaged, and motivated, you're probably going to end up with a good education, whether that's a top 10 school or a top 50 or even top 100 school.

Poor use of the transitive property.
There are second tier students at second tier schools. Plenty of them. I’m not saying they are underperformers or unintelligent by any means. But the average kid at Villanova is not the average kid at Princeton. No way.

Sure, but
1) if you didn't get into Princeton and did get into Villanova, you're probably more similar to Villanova students than Princeton students.
2) if you just missed getting into Princeton, you're more likely to end up at someplace more selective than Villanova but less selective than Princeton, and
3) even if you are a Princeton-type who ended up at Villanova, and are more academic/driven/accomplished than your average classmate, you will have a good number of highly academic/driven/accomplished peers.

Students are usually not picking between Harvard and Podunk State, but between slightly more selective University and slightly less selective University.

I don’t disagree. But the PP asserted that the Princeton reject accompanied by a handful of other ivy rejects going to second tier school (like Villanova), simply by virtue of their attendance makes a second tier school “top”. And it doesn’t.

The smart hungry kid will succeed no matter where they attend college.

Yes. My kid is graduating from one of the universities that is on the list released today of institutions still accepting freshmen. He has great social skills. He scored a very prestigious summer internship and job offer and will be working with kids who predominately graduated from Ivies and top 20s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The elite schools are basically a harry potter sorting hat for IB, Big Law etc.. and what they really are doing is creating a net work among the already rich/elite kids. Middle class smart kids may get in but very few have the contacts and skills to net work themselves up that high. The richer you are the less relevant your major needs to be

I don’t know about finance but that’s not true for big law. My spouse and I are both very very middle class kids who went to Ivy or similar colleges by working our butte off in HS and nailing the SAT (thank you Waldenbooks for that prep book!), getting great grades there and great lsat score to jump into the best law schools in the country then federal appellate clerkships. Biglaw is filled with people like that. The rich kids that aren’t working and just parlaying connections are not ending up at the top firms at least in DC. They may do better in regional markets like Richmond if their families are regional power brokers.

I don’t work in finance but at least some of the very well off finance folks I know are children of immigrants who I don’t think come from elite backgrounds…just super smart who work their butts off. The ricch family people I know are in commercial real estate or individual asset management.

Myth of meritocracy so that we don’t change the system. Who bought you those sat books? Who encouraged you to apply to Ivy League colleges? Who paid for your tuition? The concept of the law school is very foreign to Europeans, who instead prefer the inns of court. This is because they recognize law schools for what they really are: bourgeoisie breeding grounds.

[Anonymous]

It is harder to get into the top schools. There is so much grade inflation and test optional has run amok. Every average kid thinks they have a shot now, but they don't. In the age of social media, it is harder to ignore the stress of the process. There is more economic uncertainty and families are obsessed with a good school to get a good job.

However, I know plenty of kids who did just fine going to an average school. It is more about if you have the drive and know how to succeed in a work environment. There are plenty of people who are book smart but lack life skills and can barely hack a job.

However, a lot of colleges are closing as the population of teens will fall over the next decade. Schools will try to make up for it with international students but it will continue to be a widening gap between the top schools and those that have falling enrollments and are located in less desirable locations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our family is just getting started in the college process, so forgive me if I’m totally wrong here, but this article has me confused. I thought for ED, you could use the college’s aid calculation tool to get a sense of what aid you might get and then if accepted ED, you could wait until the aid information was received before pulling your other applications, and reject the ED offer if it wasn’t in the ballpark of what the school calculator had indicated. This article seems to say that if you apply ED but also apply for FA and get in, you are obligated to pull your other applications before knowing your FA result and have committed to go regardless of FA result—although the article does indicate colleges would not be able to force a student to attend a school they couldn’t attend.

So which is correct as far as ED if you need FA?

The former is correct, but the latter serves the NYT's point so that's the set of facts used.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I thought it was good and covered all bases, except one, that I continue to rant about.

Part of the reason there is so much competition for the top schools is because so-called elite employers only recruit from them. We need companies to see that there are tons of bright students everywhere. Just look at the girl profiled in the article who is clearly smart and likely has a ton of grit. She's going to Hunter College where no investment bank or MBB would ever look to hire from. Until that mindset is broken, things will not change.

What are you talking about? CUNY schools like Hunter, Baruch and CCNY have some incredible programs for finance, particularly quantitative trading. Their MFE program is probably the best in the country. https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2023/08/masters-in-financial-engineering-graduate-pay

Doesn't change the fact that their undergrads don't get the time of day compared to MIT or even Dartmouth grads.

[Anonymous]

So what I’m getting out of this conversation is that if you and your family don’t give a sh*t about investment banking or corporate law, none of this panic applies to us. Good riddance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So what I’m getting out of this conversation is that if you and your family don’t give a sh*t about investment banking or corporate law, none of this panic applies to us. Good riddance.

Investment banking
Management consulting
Big law
Academia

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So what I’m getting out of this conversation is that if you and your family don’t give a sh*t about investment banking or corporate law, none of this panic applies to us. Good riddance.

Investment banking
Management consulting
Big law
Academia

Academia is 100% about where your graduate degree is from. I got into a top graduate program because I worked as a research assistant in undergrad at a middling school for a prof who had gone to graduate school with friends who now were on the admissions committee at that top graduate school. The academic market is also about which departments need someone in your subfield of your discipline, which you can’t predict Italy the beginning of your 5-7 year graduate and postdoc training. It’s nothing like a normal job market.

[Anonymous]

One of the many sad parts about that article is that the rich but smart kid who wasn't burdened by a need for financial aid only got into her places where her parents were legacies (Dartmouth, UVA).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One of the many sad parts about that article is that the rich but smart kid who wasn't burdened by a need for financial aid only got into her places where her parents were legacies (Dartmouth, UVA).

That’s reality.

Who do you think is paying all the full freight and making donations?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One of the many sad parts about that article is that the rich but smart kid who wasn't burdened by a need for financial aid only got into her places where her parents were legacies (Dartmouth, UVA).

Another person who didn't read the article carefully. She was also admitted to Johns Hopkins and Michigan/OOS.

[Anonymous]

My kid went to an average school (UVA), majored in Econ (Not McIntire) went to Wharton and now makes a ton of money, it happens, just have to grind and make the most of your opportunity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Probably 50% of the kids in my analyst class quit within a year. Lots of abisive personalities driving people to literally hospitalization from exhaustion (and then firing the person when the returnee to work). Telling you Friday at 6pm you need to assemble a merger pitch deck and model for a Monday 9am meeting only to come in on Monday and decide they don’t want to pitch it after all.

Maybe it’s better now…but I doubt it.

This. I knew one analyst that would often accidently fall asleep in the men's room as he was exhausted from working 110 hour weeks.

We had one Managing Director we called "5 o'clock Bob" who would tag some poor analyst late afternoon on Friday to work on some pointless project. He knew exactly what he was doing.

There were some truly egotistical asshats in investment banking back in the day. I was unhappy when I was there and would never want my kids to go work in that type of environment. I wonder if it has changed at all.