Reply to AMA My smart but unremarkable & unhooked kid is heading to a Top 10 college

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[quote=Anonymous]Steven Pinker wrote about the "murky bottleneck" of undergraduate admission to Harvard in 2014. He addresses the issue of why the YouTuber-type kids are picked over academically gifted applicants. I suspect this is true at other comparable schools (besides MIT). Unsurprisingly, he is not a fan of the process:

"At the admissions end, it’s common knowledge that Harvard selects at most 10 percent (some say 5 percent) of its students on the basis of academic merit. At an orientation session for new faculty, we were told that Harvard “wants to train the future leaders of the world, not the future academics of the world,” and that “We want to read about our student in Newsweek 20 years hence” (prompting the woman next to me to mutter, “Like the Unabomber”). The rest are selected “holistically,” based also on participation in athletics, the arts, charity, activism, travel, and, we inferred (Not in front of the children!), race, donations, and legacy status (since anything can be hidden behind the holistic fig leaf)."

Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests
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