“We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians,” Harvard President
Drew Gilpin Faust told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored
by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, on Monday. That means admissions
officers rely on intangibles like interesting essays or particularly unusual
recommendations to decide who comprises the 5.9 percent of applicants who
get in.
Faust's top tip for raising a Harvard man or woman: “Make your children
interesting!”
For parents and students alike, that’s both good news and bad news. The bad
news is that of course it’s much easier to say that than to actually make it
happen, though Faust recommended encouraging children to follow their
passions as a way to develop an interesting personality. It’s much easier to
complete a checklist, however daunting, than to actually be interesting.[1]
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-...
Having gone to a high-percentage Asian high school, I can tell you that traditional Asian parents mostly push their kids to do a limited set of things (high academic scores, orchestra, etc.), which can easily lead to a homogeneous pool of applicants.
Faust is saying that if you want your kid to get into Harvard, you should instead encourage them to do things that set them apart from the thousands of other smart kids applying. Build an airplane, climb a famous mountain, invent something, be a sailor, race sled dogs, etc. Those are the things that make an applicant stand out.
the interpretation in your last paragraph is even worse in a way for faust and harvard: only children with the right parental financial resources and support would have been able to "Build an airplane, climb a famous mountain, invent something, be a sailor, race sled dogs" before the age of 18. it is also hard to see why an academic institution cares so much about such things.
And as another poster noted -- Asians are still greatly overrepresented at Harvard. Faust really is saying that Whites aren't interesting (Blacks are of about average interest as their numbers match the general population now).
Seems to be her meta-message.
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
[1]
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-...
[2]
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-...
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
Err, that's not at all what she said or even implied.
That's the point: they didn't work harder than anyone else applying to Harvard. They can't make decisions based on GPA/ACT/SAT scores, because everyone has the same top scores.
Hypothetically, and probably not that far off: So you have 10,000 applicants for a class of 2,000 and 8,000 of those applicants are valedictorians with extremely high SAT/ACT scores and they've managed to check all the regular boxes (played sports, instruments, etc.). How are you going to cull 6,000 applicants?
Another win for casual racism.
College admissions could really do with some sort of objective criteria. Because yeah, obviously human foibles always creep in.
Like GPA and SAT/ACT scores? Because they tried that. Secondary education is too easy and variable in the US, and Harvard can't really do much about that.
Talk about putting words in one's mouth...
An admitted class that's mostly homogeneous (in race, interests, gender, whatever) is just as much of a failure as an admitted class that's stupid.
The purpose of an elite college's admissions office is not to admit the top N students on some metrics, nor is elite college your "just reward" for being in the top N percent of your year on some metrics.
As with tech employment, there is an element of having the specialization an employer wants, an element of "culture fit," and an element of being able to do the song-and-dance that appeases the gatekeepers (the SAT is a lot like a coding interview).
As with dating, it's not "academic performance in, admissions out." The college has a personality too, and it has to like you.
What other metrics are you referring to besides academic performance? The color of the skin? Obviously not. But this sentence implies something else. It admits that asians deliver superior performance in terms of test scores but that there must be some other metric that causes Ivy leagues to dismiss them.
I would like to know what that metric is. What is the supposed metric that asians are inferior to other races at that causes their superior test scores to be completely dismissed? Do you know the answer? Can anyone else answer it?