I remember how it was -- JR
Some of America’s Ivy League universities are suddenly shy
Far from trumpeting each year how low their acceptance rate is – thus underlining how hard it is to get in and how exclusive they are – three of the eight universities in the exclusive group are withholding the information this year.
Some Ivy League admissions officers say that drawing so much attention to how few candidates made the cut is doing more harm than good, ratcheting up panic among high-school students and their parents and perpetuating a myth that it is nearly impossible to get into a good college.
“We’re focusing not on how hard we are to get into but on who these young people are that we chose,” said E. Whitney Soule, admissions dean at the University of Pennsylvania.
Princeton and Cornell universities also no longer share detailed admission figures after informing applicants of their results.
“We know this information raises the anxiety level of prospective students and their families and, unfortunately, may discourage some prospective students from applying,” Princeton wrote in a statement on its admissions website explaining the change.
It is a marked shift from a standard annual game plan in which all eight Ivy League institutions – and scores of other well-known schools – publicly share figures for how large the applicant pool was and how few of those hopeful students actually made the cut. Most typically issue news releases, highlighting their single-digit acceptance rates.
This year Harvard said it had admitted 3.2 per cent of the 61,220 people who applied to join the fall 2022 class, edging down from 3.4 per cent last year.
Yale and Brown also reported record-low acceptance rates for this year, at 4.5 per cent and 5 per cent, respectively. Columbia and Dartmouth roughly tied last year’s rates of 3.7 per cent and 6.2 per cent.
The reticence of three of the eight Ivys came as the number of Americans applying to universities jumped sharply.
Through to mid-March the widely used Common App – an undergraduate college admission application – received 6.64 million applications, a 21 per cent jump from the 2019-20 school year.
There were 1.18 million applicants, an increase of 14 per cent. Highly selective universities – those admitting less than half their applicants – reported the biggest increases in applications. One factor explaining the increases is that many schools made test-score submissions optional during the pandemic.
There is also a longer-term trend at play: high-school students with high aspirations see the statistics from prior years and, concerned about getting in, try to hedge their bets by applying to more schools. The pools continue to grow; acceptance rates continue to tumble; the cycle repeats.
Harvard, Yale and other Ivies received an unprecedented number of applications last year and near-record figures for the early-admission deadline of the current cycle.
Stanford University in 2018 stopped reporting its admission data, saying it wanted to de-emphasise the perceived value of low acceptance rates, though other schools have been slow to follow suit.
About a year ago, Akil Bello, senior director of advocacy and advancement at FairTest, a non-profit that advocates for more limited use of standardised tests, began using the term “highly rejective” to describe some of these schools, rather than highly selective.
Mr Bello said his aim was to cast the low acceptance rate in a different light, one that wasn’t worthy of crowing about in a news release.
“I was challenging the notion that the statistic of admission rate was a positive indicator,” he said. “That’s really all it is. It’s a rejection rate.”
Ms Soule, from Penn, said the goal wasn’t to make the admissions process less transparent.
Schools still do post admission figures publicly, in the Common Data Set online and in reports to the Education Department, though there is a time lag before those are available.
At the time of admission, she said, the focus should be on the students who are getting in and what about them that caught the attention of admissions officers.
That is more useful to prospective students than a slight increase or decline in annual acceptance rates, she said.
“If others follow along, that would be great,” Ms Soule said.
“This is the right way for us to celebrate those we’ve admitted.”
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MIT Leads the Way in Reinstating the SAT
Expect others to follow. Selective institutions that don’t use standardized tests will fall behind.
“I find it hard to take seriously the state of Michigan’s contention that racial diversity is a compelling state interest—compelling enough to warrant ignoring the Constitution’s prohibition of distribution on the basis of race,” Scalia began. “The problem is a problem of Michigan’s own creation. That is to say, it has decided to create an elite law school . . . [and] it’s done this by taking only the best students with the best grades and the best SATs or LSATs, knowing that the result of this will be to exclude to a large degree minorities.”
Scalia said that if Michigan wants to be an elite law school, that’s fine. But there are trade-offs involved if the school also wants to prioritize enrolling some predetermined percentage of underrepresented minorities for aesthetic reasons. “If [racial diversity] is indeed a significant compelling state interest, why don’t you lower your standards?” he asked. “You don’t have to be the great college you are. You can be a lesser college if that value is important enough to you.”
Last week, the highly selective Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faced with a similar dilemma, apparently chose to maintain its high standards. It became the first prominent school to reinstate the requirement that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores, a practice that MIT and many other colleges had abandoned during the pandemic.
MIT explained the reversal in a blog post. “Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT,” wrote Stu Schmill, the dean of admissions. “Our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MITis significantly improved by considering standardized testing—especially in mathematics,” he added. Thus, “not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education.”
None of this is unique to MIT. Mr. Schmill cited a major study released in 2020 by a University of California task force that highlighted the SAT’s ability to assess accurately high-school students for college readiness. Opponents of standardized testing claim the SAT is biased toward more-affluent whites. According to race scholar Ibram Kendi, “The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever designed to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies.”
If that’s true, how is it that a racial minority—Asian students—tend to score highest on the SAT? And how is that even low-income Asians outperform middle-class students from other racial and ethnic groups? Moreover, social science has long demonstrated that the SAT is a better predictor of college performance than high-school grades are for black students, while the reverse is true for white and Asian students.
Thus, black students have the most to lose as schools move away from objective test scores and toward more-subjective holistic assessments of applicants. The University of California system simply ignored the social science and ditched its SAT requirement. MIT should be applauded for putting the interests of students ahead of racial balancing.
Racial differences in test scores are less a reflection of innate intelligence and more a reflection of a young person’s developed academic capabilities. Given that millions of blacks are relegated to some of the worst-performing K-12 schools in the country, why would anyone be surprised by racial gaps in SAT scores? In large cities such as New York and Chicago, most black students cannot read or do math at grade level. Standardized tests aren’t causing these disparities, just revealing them. And the responsible way to address the problem is not by scrapping the test but through more school choice and better test preparation.
Of course, to Justice Scalia’s point, MIT also realizes that double standards for admissions will eventually lead to double standards for grades and degrees. The school must keep its eye on such competitors as the California Institute of Technology, which has a race-blind admissions process. “I have a hunch that MIT’s decision was driven by competitive pressure,” wrote Steven Hayward, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, since “its arch-rival for science supremacy in academia—Caltech—might start to leave MIT conspicuously behind if MIT continued down the road to politically correct admissions practices.”
No doubt. But the broader concern is that other nations—China, Japan, South Korea—will gain a competitive edge on the U.S. as our elites wage war on meritocracy in the name of equity.
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Soaring school absenteeism im NYC
Chronic absenteeism has hit a staggering 40% in the city public-school system, The Post’s Susan Edelman reported Sunday. That translates to about 375,000 children out of 938,000 registered students missing at least 10% of schooldays.
And that figure, up from 26% in the pre-COVID 2018-19 year, is an undercount: Kids who log in online or have nominal contact with a teacher while out with COVID or quarantined get marked present.
The question is: Will Chancellor David Banks stop the Department of Education bureaucrats from fixing the data, not the problem?
Post-pandemic school absenteeism is plaguing big-city school districts across America, as many parents retain (unfounded) fears about COVID transmission in school — and all too many kids got out of the habit of showing up every day. Yet chronic absenteeism (defined as missing 18 days or more of an academic year) often results in low achievement, truancy, dropping out, delinquency and substance abuse.
Far worse (in the educrats’ eyes), poor attendance figures imperil DOE’s bottom line: Much state and federal aid is pegged to the number of students in school on a daily basis.
So the DOE regulars have rushed to paper over the crisis, pushing principals to “correct” the absentee data. In a memo leaked on Twitter, DOE sets a goal of reducing chronic absenteeism citywide to 30%, with each district and school given a target to hit — and principals urged to review past attendance records to ensure that absences got coded correctly.
Hint, hint: Fudge the records, guys.
Yes, the DOE is also using some of its avalanche of federal funds to hire social workers and others to make home visits and otherwise get the kids coming to school more regularly. It probably needs to make every school expand its front office to ensure endless calls home (which means more effort to get working numbers) whenever a kid doesn’t show.
It should also revisit the de Blasio-era policy that says poor attendance can’t prevent promotion to the next grade.
It’s up to Banks to ensure the bureaucracy actually mends its ways on this front, as on all too many others.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/05/banks-needs-to-get-nyc-schools-absenteeism-fixed-not-the-records/
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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