Reply to Where are my 90s era Harvard classmates sending their kids?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What this shows is that getting into Harvard used to be immensely easier. People who went to Harvard in the 90s wouldn’t be in at anywhere comparable today. [/quote]

It’s not harder or easier per se, but the grade inflation is making the signals of quality very noisy. A few decades ago, the high school grades already helped the admissions pick the outstanding (academically) students pretty accurately. In addition, applicants these days are supposed to play victim and write a sob story about what kind of hardship they have gone through and how they have overcome their hardship and what lessons they have learned. It’s like everyone is applying for a script writing major![/quote]

Wrong. It is easier. Harvard used to have a much higher admission rate. In 1988, it was 14.6% and less than 15,000 applications.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1988/7/8/freshman-class-sets-application-records-pthe/

In 2025, there was a 3.43% acceptance rate out of 57,435 apps.

https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/makeup-narrative/#:~:text=This%20year%2C%20the%20College's%20acceptance,totals%20a%20historic%201%2C965%20students.[/quote]
But you also wouldn’t apply unless you have an almost 4.0 GPA unhooked. Also, kids are dramatizing their sob story to have a chance of being admitted as a hardship case.[/quote]

I had a 4.0 in high school without ever studying for more than an hour a night, ever. Was elected class president, worked a summer job, no national awards. Got into Yale. Took an SAT prep class and mom and dad could pay tuition.

[b]The kids now work much harder than I did and are so much more accomplished. [/b]They are taking harder classes, taking more of them a year, doing actual work/research, getting national awards. The IDEA that you think kids are crying their way into Harvard now shows real intellectual disinterest. The kids who are talking about their "sob story" are also winning the TOC. These colleges take 1 kids out of every 25 apps. Get real.

The real advantages now are with athletes, donors, and legacies - and those still favor the white kids. [/quote]

This is just not true in my experience. What's true is that kids have more extracurriculars. And everyone knows the strategies that only a select few used back in the 80s and 90s. If I had a nickel for every kid who has a published paper these days... who believes this BS?

Work harder? I doubt that very much. I can say that I not only worked much harder on academics (as measured by hours of hw per day) than my kids but read a lot more books, wrote exponentially more papers, went much farther in foreign languages, and so on.

[/quote]

What do you think happened? I’m curious on your perspective as to why you had a better education than your kids. Was it impossible to find?[/quote]

People are going to jump all over me but here is my experience. I am in academia and numerous people in my family (parents and siblings) are also academics. Also have a family member who taught at one of the most well-known prep schools in the country for decades. Every single person I know says the quality of students at the top has gone down. Maybe overall the mean has gone up. Certainly there is more geographical diversity in college applications -- and that is a good thing.

What I see and hear constantly is that teachers and professors who have been teaching for decades have had to lower their expectations.

Why? I don't know... phones? video games? maybe high schoolers spread themselves too thin. Maybe we reward test taking over deep thinking. Or maybe, weirdly, we have gone back to a world where money buys admission through exorbitant college counselor groups or niche activities?[/quote]

Do professors weigh in on admissions?  It seems to me that admission officers have institutional priorities that may or may not be academic. I always wonder if professors have any input in the process. [/quote]

Never heard of a professor's weight in admission at the college level. Grad school, absolutely.  not undergrad. 
[/quote]

That seems so odd to me. Wouldn’t professors be in the best position to identify students who would succeed at the school? [/quote]

That’s one of the core issues. No offense, but most admissions officers in those elite colleges don’t appear that qualified themselves.[/quote]

Not to mention that the admissions staff don’t teach the classes or do the research that these students assist in. Admissions sounds like a position with lots of decison-making authority but almost zero accountability.[/quote]

Admissions goes through applications so quickly that they inevitably make some questionable decisions. Some of these admissions officers have their own agendas too and they never are held accountable for their poor choices.[/quote]
Exactly. What gives them the incentives to pick the best applicants from the perspective of the college? I was stunned to see that many admissions people weren’t even alum of the college![/quote]

Every admissions officer claims to pick students who are a “fit.”  The supplemental essays are designed to determine whether the kids are a “fit.”

But none of the students I know have ever met an admissions officer on campus. . .  which begs the questions
 
1. If most admissions officers aren’t alumni of the college and don’t mingle with undergrads on campus, how can they identify whether a candidate would be a “fit?”,

2. Why do the professors and administrators trust the admission officers?, and

3. Will admission officers inevitably be replaced with AI to provide more consistent results regarding “fit?”
[/quote]

1. They go based off of criteria set by administrators.

2. Because they hired to do this job? Why does any organization trust its employees?

3. Probably[/quote]

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