Lottery only solution
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Anonymous
Cynicism and bitterness do nothing for your case. That is by no means what "building a class" is. There's about 500 books about how they do it. Read one. |
Anonymous
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Texas does this. Top x percent of every HS is guaranteed admissions to UT i believe. State schools can and should do that. Private universities can do what they want to build the class they want.
Us doesnt have a national curriculum and few national tests (and those are optional) so its harder to compare across the population. Other countries are often smaller or have national subject tests which scores determine everything (hence cram schools in Korea and other places). Id much rather have a national curriculum and meaningful subject tests to see that our population is actually educated to some standard but that would never fly. |
Anonymous
| Aren’t the states the laboratories of democracy? Someone should convince a state to do this with their state schools. Throw your name in the hat, you might get UVA or you might get ODU! |
Anonymous
| How about free tutoring for URM from pre K? Even though most colleges are now TO, more studying will make the college life easier. The majority can’t depend on activism as a lifelong career. |
Anonymous
Lol today I learned that most black people depend on activism to make a living. Can we stop with this scapegoating of blacks now? Affirmative active is gone. So you can stop. |
Anonymous
There is no college or university in the US who has a mission of rewarding "academic achievement performance" - their missions are to create communities of learning which are generally predicated on varying viewpoints, perspectives and lived lives. A lottery will undermine that mission. |
Anonymous
And what happens in reality is that the high schools cheapen the value of the GPAs to ensure there are many more than the "top X %" who gain admission. It is a true race to the bottom. |
Anonymous
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Those grades and scores already do get you "a lottery ticket" so that when you apply to most of the T25, you make the "first cut" and get your application looked at.
But no, I do not want college admissions to be solely based on gpa and sat. Nope nope nope. Apply to European colleges and take their tests if you want a system like that. |
Anonymous
Because they don't just want "kids who make the basic academic threshold". They want the best, brightest, most going to change the world kids. And those with the highest test scores/gpa are not always that. So they need to know about EC, LOR, essays, etc. They want geographical diversity, they want a balance of M/F, a balance of ECS with sports and those with the arts, they want people who volunteer because they want to and will continue doing it in college not just those who did it to check the box for college admissions, etc. |
Anonymous
They also want the kids who will donate when they leave and grow their endowments. |
Anonymous
Or we could spend more on public education and make sure there are no more than than 15 kids per classes k-12 with qualified and well compensated teachers and accessible curricula across the states and not ask schools to solve the hunger/poverty problems in their communities too. |
Anonymous
I think you underestimate the number of innovative ways Americans can find to be upset. |
Anonymous
But Harvard wants more than that. They want kids who will be game changers. They want the kids who did Y service hours but would have done them even if not needed for college admissions and who will continue down this path while in college and beyond, they want kids who lived the HS years doing what they are genuinely interested in and are leaders in their own right and that is different for each person, given their circumstances (be it rich kids, UMC kid, LMC kid, low income kid, etc). it's really not that difficult to understand. However, most are just upset because their kid may not have the final "IT Factor" that the school is looking for and feel their snowflake deserved Harvard because they worked hard and got good grades and checked all the boxes. IT's not how college application process should ever work and not how the real world works. Nobody hires for a job by "looking at resumes and if you are qualified for the actual job, well we are gonna do the drawing at 2pm today, good luck and congrats to the lucky 2 winners". Yes, life isn't fair. We have all missed out on a job because someone got it instead with better connections, not better skills. That is life. You can learn from that or you can just be upset and pout. Most of us learn from that---by learning to build as many connections as you can in your professional career along with being the best, most qualified person for your job. Focus on what you can change---trust me, there will always be some favoritism in the professional world, someday it might be you getting the benefits. |
Anonymous
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There are two different issues:
1. "Qualifications" are not purely individual and comparable. Each individual has an approximate major, an art or sport, special achievements, demographic characteristics, and the school has a budget for all these attributes in total. It's an optimization packing problem. 2. There are many ways to build a class, so which does the school pick? Some explicit randomness could be an improvement over AO "mood" and bias. |
Anonymous
| The problem with IT Factor is that they tend to see only PR images crafted by parents and consultants, outside of self-evident great achievers who perform in verifiable contests. |