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Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions (Selingo)
Hiiiii I'm still alive!
4/5. This book was recommended by my kid's high school guidance counselor office in one of the daily mass emails we get from her school. I suppose the subtitle of this one may as well be, "Why your kid won't get into the super-elite school you think they ought to get into," which is the not-so-subtle messaging to parents (and I think has something to do with why the counselor office recommended it). This seems to boil down to the premise that the current incentive system (both in terms of generally how the school is perceived and how specifically ranking lists perceive the school) make it such that colleges have a lot of incentive to be sought-after by as many applicants as possible (they want to be "sellers" -- the ones who decide whether they want the students -- rather than "buyers," in the author's terminology, which are the ones wooing the students), so colleges have arranged things so that in many cases there are a whole lot of kids vying for a relatively very small number of spots. In any case, the book also makes the case that there are enough "buyers" that provide a great education and might also give you merit scholarships that in most cases it's a bit silly to restrict oneself just to the "sellers," especially if you are wanting financial aid -- it's sort of like picking a brand name vs. a non-brand-name. (And, as in the brand name case: though you are rather more likely to get a better deal with the non-brand-name, sometimes there are reasons to pick the brand name, though Selingo doesn't get into that so much.)
The author follows a few kids as well as a couple of admissions committees to see how it all works (and documents how the admissions people have a hard job, as well as how they are trying to craft a class, not just looking at individual students) -- this is really quite interesting, to see how all of this works. Along the way, he also puts in some details I didn't know, like how it got started that kids get overwhelmed with glossy mailers from college (this wasn't always a thing!) and how Northeastern went way up in the rankings in the last 10 years (the bare fact of which I did know, because my cousin once removed is a sophomore at Northeastern, but I did not know that it was a concerted effort). And then there's financial aid, which is this whole problem of inequitable information as the financial aid awards aren't done until after kids have applied.
Along with the buyer/seller college distinction, he also makes a distinction between "drivers" and "passengers" -- the former indicates the kids (and, let's get real, their parents) who are very savvy about what they're looking for and what they want, and for their entire high school career have been driving, so to speak, toward the college goals they're looking towards, and start their applications on a relatively early time frame. These are the kids who know the difference between early action and early decision, and have mapped out where they want to apply early (if they do) and, strategically, why. Then there are the passengers, who just get carried along by the whole process... the good thing is that it seems like they mostly still end up okay, though perhaps not in as optimized a place as the drivers.
There's a bit in the book about sports recruiting, which I knew nothing about when I started the book, but I learned shortly after starting reading it that D's niece (who comes from a very sporty family) was sports-recruited (as a junior!) and is going to attend a rather-elite school year after next :) So it was interesting to read this bit of the book in conjunction with learning this information. Moral of the story, perhaps: if you think you might be good enough to play varsity for your sport in college, and you have pretty good grades (niece has straight A's and what was described to me as a "good enough" SAT for her future school), this might be a relatively "easy" way of getting into college. (I put it in quotes because I honestly think niece, who has been swimming since she was practically an infant, worked as hard or harder than any other high school kid I know. Her swim team had practice Thanksgiving morning!) It is, however, a really good thing for my kids that college is not in fact based on their sporting chops, because early sports training was very much not their thing. Although E is consistently not last place in cross-country, which I'm very pleased about! :)
Anyway, this was an interesting read and worth reading if you want to know more about what goes on with college admissions.
4/5. This book was recommended by my kid's high school guidance counselor office in one of the daily mass emails we get from her school. I suppose the subtitle of this one may as well be, "Why your kid won't get into the super-elite school you think they ought to get into," which is the not-so-subtle messaging to parents (and I think has something to do with why the counselor office recommended it). This seems to boil down to the premise that the current incentive system (both in terms of generally how the school is perceived and how specifically ranking lists perceive the school) make it such that colleges have a lot of incentive to be sought-after by as many applicants as possible (they want to be "sellers" -- the ones who decide whether they want the students -- rather than "buyers," in the author's terminology, which are the ones wooing the students), so colleges have arranged things so that in many cases there are a whole lot of kids vying for a relatively very small number of spots. In any case, the book also makes the case that there are enough "buyers" that provide a great education and might also give you merit scholarships that in most cases it's a bit silly to restrict oneself just to the "sellers," especially if you are wanting financial aid -- it's sort of like picking a brand name vs. a non-brand-name. (And, as in the brand name case: though you are rather more likely to get a better deal with the non-brand-name, sometimes there are reasons to pick the brand name, though Selingo doesn't get into that so much.)
The author follows a few kids as well as a couple of admissions committees to see how it all works (and documents how the admissions people have a hard job, as well as how they are trying to craft a class, not just looking at individual students) -- this is really quite interesting, to see how all of this works. Along the way, he also puts in some details I didn't know, like how it got started that kids get overwhelmed with glossy mailers from college (this wasn't always a thing!) and how Northeastern went way up in the rankings in the last 10 years (the bare fact of which I did know, because my cousin once removed is a sophomore at Northeastern, but I did not know that it was a concerted effort). And then there's financial aid, which is this whole problem of inequitable information as the financial aid awards aren't done until after kids have applied.
Along with the buyer/seller college distinction, he also makes a distinction between "drivers" and "passengers" -- the former indicates the kids (and, let's get real, their parents) who are very savvy about what they're looking for and what they want, and for their entire high school career have been driving, so to speak, toward the college goals they're looking towards, and start their applications on a relatively early time frame. These are the kids who know the difference between early action and early decision, and have mapped out where they want to apply early (if they do) and, strategically, why. Then there are the passengers, who just get carried along by the whole process... the good thing is that it seems like they mostly still end up okay, though perhaps not in as optimized a place as the drivers.
There's a bit in the book about sports recruiting, which I knew nothing about when I started the book, but I learned shortly after starting reading it that D's niece (who comes from a very sporty family) was sports-recruited (as a junior!) and is going to attend a rather-elite school year after next :) So it was interesting to read this bit of the book in conjunction with learning this information. Moral of the story, perhaps: if you think you might be good enough to play varsity for your sport in college, and you have pretty good grades (niece has straight A's and what was described to me as a "good enough" SAT for her future school), this might be a relatively "easy" way of getting into college. (I put it in quotes because I honestly think niece, who has been swimming since she was practically an infant, worked as hard or harder than any other high school kid I know. Her swim team had practice Thanksgiving morning!) It is, however, a really good thing for my kids that college is not in fact based on their sporting chops, because early sports training was very much not their thing. Although E is consistently not last place in cross-country, which I'm very pleased about! :)
Anyway, this was an interesting read and worth reading if you want to know more about what goes on with college admissions.
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But even if not true on the numbers, is true on the concept of the Ivies (and other very selective schools) being extremely selective on purpose, in order to create/assist in their -- sorry, I'm a little sick right now I can't remember the word. But their general IvyLeague-ness. And also leads to grievances, naturally, too. So you have "oh, Perfect Student did everything right and still didn't get into Harvard" but also that sentences sometimes ends with "Harvard must be really hard to get into" and also "what do you have to do to get into Harvard" AND ALSO "Perfect Student did everything right and didn't get in, who took the place they earned and should have had, booo to that person". Whereas, why do you think Perfect Student should have gotten into Harvard, that it was "their spot" that someone else took? Well, all of the Ivy League branding goes into having a lot of students and their parents think that you can do everything right and actually then get into schools. But that's not really how it works.
It's something I talked about when I was doing college applications and have said since then to parents/adults who don't understand why the kid is so stressed. It's that there's this uncertainty and the admissions process is fully designed so that you can't just Do The Right Magical Thing and get into the school.
Of course that's just the exclusive ones. One of the schools I applied to, as far as I'm aware, took in everyone in the city (probably also the county) who wanted to go there and had graduated high school and could pay tuition; that one had an application form that was about two pages long.
But that's also how you get into "cheats" like legacies, which isn't really cheating, except that it is: you don't earn your way into one of the Magical Exclusive Spots, your parents, your grandparents, their parents etc, all did that, you're just the receipient of other people being well-connected. And then things like sports scholarships also being controversial. And so many different programs. Because the artificial scarcity leads to so much fear and attempts at controlling a process that is deliberately designed so that I -- a concerned parent (I am not a concerned parent) -- cannot game the system so that my kid can get in, but someon else's kid can't.
And then we get into financial aid and it all gets so much worse. (I got into every university I applied to. They all offered financial aid. The one I wanted to go to the most in the world didn't offer me as much financial aid as I needed. So I didn't go there, and I actually do regret it to this day that I didn't take out loans or try to transfer late, which is not usually how the story goes.)
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And this:
Of course that's just the exclusive ones. One of the schools I applied to, as far as I'm aware, took in everyone in the city (probably also the county) who wanted to go there and had graduated high school and could pay tuition; that one had an application form that was about two pages long.
Yeah, and that's a lot of what this book is about, how some schools have this incredible scarcity going on (and have jiggled things to make it like that) and how a lot of schools don't.
And then we get into financial aid and it all gets so much worse. (I got into every university I applied to. They all offered financial aid. The one I wanted to go to the most in the world didn't offer me as much financial aid as I needed. So I didn't go there, and I actually do regret it to this day that I didn't take out loans or try to transfer late, which is not usually how the story goes.)
Oh oof, I'm sorry. And yeah, I hadn't appreciated before reading this book how wildly unfair it really is that there's such an inequity of information between schools and students as to how much all of this actually costs! (I mean, I knew this was a thing and that it sucked, it just somehow hadn't occurred to me that the benefit is all on one side of the scale here, so to speak.)