Reply to Sandburg - 9th in her high school class

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Sandburg - 9th in her high school class - went to Harvard"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Was it really that easy back then? Sandburg was 9th in her public high school class and got accepted to Harvard. Did she do something extraordinary like ranked tennis player??

Her dad went to Hopkins and was an Ophthalmologist, so they were full pay I’m sure that helped. [/quote]

Idk what she had or not but being full pay is peanuts for these wealthy schools with multibillion endowments, unless you can donate above millions, you get no bump in admissions.[/quote]

Wasn’t Harvard needs blind back then? [/quote]

Need blind for admission I think, but didn’t offer aid.  I have a friend who graduated high school around 1982.  He was valedictorian of his tiny high school in Nowhere, TX.   He got into Harvard but his family had no money and he got no aid, so he couldn’t go.  He went to UT Austin instead.

I think the original point is that competition for admission was lower back then, and presumably Harvard’s yield was lower as well, as a significant number of admits simply wouldn’t have been able to afford the tuition.  [/quote]

Huh? Harvard offered aid, then and now. They don't offer merit aid, but they offer need-based aid. I overlapped with Sandburg at Harvard and gad a mix of need-based scholarships, federal loans and work-study. And Harvard's yield rate back then was about 75%.

People forget several things when they wonder how a particular kid got into a highly selective college. For one thing, they forget that it's not just about "absolute merit," even assuming anyone knows what that means or agrees on how it should be measured. It's about social engineering a whole class: they want a certain number of squash players, a bunch of clarinetists, some people who will major in classics, some kids who grew up on farms and some kids who grew up in South America, and so on. (As they used to tell us back then: Harvard was not looking for well-rounded students. They were looking for a well-rounded class). Upshot: if Harvard has too few cellists and too few kids from Delaware and too few Folklore and Mythology majors, and a kid ranked 25th in their Delaware high school plays the cello and loves Joseph Campbell... well, that kid is probably much more likely to get in the the 24 kids ranked higher.

The other big issue is that selective colleges are more democratic now. In the late 80s my guess is that 75% of Harvard students came from a few hundred high schools: elite boarding schools, elite private days schools in major cities, elite urban magnets in major cities, and highly regarded suburban public schools in places like Westchester County, Shaker Heights, Newton and Brookline and so on. Now-- for excellent reasons-- Harvard is no longer willing to admit sixty Exeter kids and fifteen St. Albans kids each year: they want their class to be more geographically, racially, ethnically, nationally and socioeconomically diverse.

Oh, and more kids apply now. In the late 80s, Harvard had about 15,000 applicants/year and filled an entering class of 1600. Today, Harvard gets 60,000 applicants/year-- to fill a class of 1600.

As a result, being in the top five at a top school is no longer any guarantee of anything. It buys you a lottery ticket. That's it. Unless a kid cured cancer while winning an Olympic gold medal and is the child of a sitting president, there's no guarantee of anything.[/quote]

I just want to stress the part about most kids back then coming from only certain high schools. I transferred out of my private school (not elite private but solid) to an okay suburban public school. I had a 3.5gpa unweighted, mid-1200s on the SAT, minority, over a year of APs (unusual back then), awards at the state and regional level, and didn't even get into slacs currently ranked 20-50. I saw all my friends from my previous private - including the bottom of the class - get into them. I mean places like Connecticut College, Trinity College in CT, Dickinson - solid schools but certainly not ivies. The couple of kids who got into HYP from my average public were not just the top of the class, they were alumni kids. [/quote]

I think you got screwed on the GPA. Maybe colleges knew that the private was a tough grader and accounted for that when your private school friends applied. But your bad grades transferred and you ended up with a terrible UW GPA from public. Were you even in the top 1/3rd of the class there? 
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics