Lets start hiring high ROI coaches.
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Very few at Harvard are there because of parent donations or extreme wealth.
Even at USC they have a back door where you can enter in the spring semester instead of fall. Donor kids can get funneled there. Same happens at SMU with spring admission or one year deferral.
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I mean more so the private school kids that are pretty much funneled into the university and have access to the educational resources that a middle class student wouldn’t have
In other words, who’s going to get into Harvard:
A middle class top 5% high school grad from Cy Fair High School, or a upper-middle class top 5% high school grad from Kinkaid
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Kinkaid costs more than $30K/year. Those kids are generally well beyond upper middle class.
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Both. Your example doesn’t hold water.
The question is, which one will be able to take advantage of the connections made at Harvard and the answer is student whose parents have the money. Which could be either the Kinkaid kid, or the cy fair one, or both, or neither.
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Ok but the likelihood hood of the person you’re describing is likely a kinkaid student…
Well many schools check extracurricular stuff from high school to determine just what UH1927 is saying.
-Schools are businesses and need higher returns
If school is just a one way ticket to improve lives then they all should start taking less qualified kids to help them advance. Schools have a right to set standards and many use the involvement in hs to weed people out.
Top 5% kid isn’t getting in to Harvard unless they have a special talent like piano or lacrosse unless it’s from a place like Andover or Exeter.
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Considering 39% of Harvard students were in the top 5% of their class, that’s a lot of presumed piano and lacrosse lessons.
If it is anything like rice it is a lot of piano and community service and cello. My daughter and I went to Rice for a visit. She had a bunch of AP classes. She was NHS, captain of varsity girls wrestling, all A’s. But since she took athletics for 4 years her GPA took a hit. An A in athletics hurts your cumulative GPA. Heads up to future high school parents.
So we were there and listening to parents and they all played sports, in AAU, and all were amazing musicians, with private tutors, and they all were community service oriented, outside of high school. High school was for one thing. Get the perfect gpa, nothing else.
When the head person leading the tour mentioned that community service is good on your resume, especially since most of you have started your own community service organization, my daughter looked at me and said we should leave. lol.
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That makes no sense to me. Why would it be weighted any different?
I’d still like to know where he got those figures.
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AP classes, etc. get additional weighting. I guess he’s saying avoid electives that don’t, or at least don’t continue them after you have to.
Yea I forgot that those classes had extra rating. So if you mostly took those classes then taking one that isn’t will lower the average. It isn’t that the athletics is necessarily weighted lower, it is that the other classes are rated higher.
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Seems like an A for doing sports in HS should be a benefit and not a hindrance. I am sure it is at most schools, but Rice is a profoundly different sort of place. My uncle went to school there and also taught there…I had a chance to meet a number of kids from Rice when i was younger…They are not like me and you… They are different and they know it and wear it like some badge of honor. It is a strange place, very insular…VERY. I grew to intensely dislike them and their school because of how they came across to me, and who i was.
I don’t think that “High ROI students” are the bulk of any university’s population today. Top schools nowadays are extraordinarily selective, to the extent that admissions to the likes of UT and USC and the UC System are functionally a crap shoot. Today, it’s about as hard to get into Georgia Tech as it was to get into Rice in 2005, and it’s about as hard to get into Rice as it was to get into Harvard in 2005. Kids that are at UCLA today would have been at Stanford a generation ago. The Zoomers have effectively been conditioned to minmax their college apps, which effectively means that if you spend time watching your school’s football team for 3 hours a week, you’re losing to some kid that’s spending the same time grinding their 1570 SAT score to a 1590, or moving their 93 in AP Chemistry to a 97, or applying for internships and volunteer opportunities you didn’t even know existed. Combine that with the fact that they know they’ll still be paying their degree back when they’re pushing 50, and you have a recipe for the most transactional the student/university relationship has probably ever been.
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My daughter made nothing but ‘a’s in k level and AP classes. She graduated outside the top 7% (qualifier for auto acceptance to atm and it main campus) tied with about 40 folks that were in band, choir, or athletics, losing out to about 60 folks that were not in basic electives.
Harvard sponsors 42 sports. There are over 1,300 undergrads playing sports for the Crimson. Thats 20% of undergrads. Now throw in the debate team, orchestra, theater, Onion, etc…
90% of recruited athletes receive admission to Harvard.
If you are at 5% at Kinkaid and aren’t playing field hockey or QB, you aren’t getting in to Harvard.
When I graduated Kinkaid, about a dozen kids out of 105 went to Ivies. Now, the school is larger and far fewer kids get in to the Ivies. This year only 6 out of 145 are headed up to the NE and 4 will play sports ( Brown, Cornell, Penn, Yale). Nobody is matriculating to Harvard.
I think you mean the Harvard Lampoon.
Sounds like Kinkaids ROI isn’t as great, then. My son at Memorial had several classmates accepted to ivies who were in the 1-5% ranking, including Harvard. For allot less cost than Kinkaid.