There is yet another basic question. What percentage of those admitted are from different minority groups and how do those percentages compare to the share of the population represented by those groups?

Note that the percentage of minorities in the US population --for the age group 18-23-- has been growing. How about the share of those in each Harvard class?

College access is known to be a prime determinant of income inequality in America. What role is Harvard playing in all this?
 

From Monday's Crimson story about the admitted group: "Slight increases resulted in record highs for minority groups, with a pool that is 10.7 percent African American, 19.6 percent Asian American, 10.1 percent Latino, and 1.5 percent Native American."
 

one might say that the backlash has already begun, with harvard and princeton's elimination of early action/decision programs--though if other schools don't follow suit, it won't make much difference...
 

Methuselah writes:

When I applied to college (1969) my high shcool only let you apply to three colleges. Today it's not uncommon to apply to a dozen or more--so of course rejections are up.
 

8:59: What makes you think that information is in any way secret? Sheesh, it's hard NOT to learn those kind of facts. Reminds me of when I taped the Big Game and didn't want to know who won.....


Richard, I think the more interesting question is not "Are kids over-pressured?" -- of course they are, and most educators' job is to mitigate the effects one kid at a time -- but "How much debt (of all kinds) can the American family take on in pursuit of the ever-receding American dream?" Whatever the actuaries have said about what application fee is necessary to minimize frivolous applications to these schools, they're not taking into account the fact that frivolous hopes are the heart of American home-economic identity.

Who can afford 80 bucks or whatever to apply to Harvard? Hell, you can't afford NOT to apply! You're middle-class now, sure, but you're going to be rich rich rich by the time you die. Right? Right? More debt now? What's the difference? Gotta buy a lottery ticket if you wanna win, right?

If parents were more rational actors (ha ha ha) about their kids' educations they would show it with their wallets. So can they be taught THROUGH their wallets, and become aware of when they are wasting their resources and their kids', emotional as well as schedule and money? No: because we live in a debt culture. As long as debt is the American family's number one export, mortgaging one's teenage years will always seem like the only sound choice, the one consonant with the family's other choices about interacting with society.

In favor of much more forceful counselling (college and otherwise) in schools; maybe even in favor of 'tracking' -- and a humanist to the core, honest,

Standing Eagle
 

SE, tell me more; I'm not sure exactly what you would counsel the kids to do. Not spend the money on applying? Not go into debt? (The implication being that Harvard isn't worth it.)

What would the rational action in this context be, and how would it affect Harvard?

Thanks,

Richard
 

Yes, I would tell the parents not to spend the money to apply to schools that their kids can't get into and wouldn't thrive at.

Also I would tell parents that the goal of college is not to reach for the very highest rung on a single ladder of success. It is development, learning, and a sense of self. Those don't come from packaging yourself for some grown-ups at a prestigious place. Ask Kaavya Viswanathan.....


Standing Eagle
 

These questions, by the way, are at the heart of what a college understands itself to be, which in turn should be at the heart of what a university understands itself to be. Which means the Crimson does a lousy job in a way that no one has quite put a finger on in this context -- a lousy job on paper in a way that precisely corresponds with what a lousy job it does as a campus SOCIAL entity. It's in not understanding the purpose of students' time, and primacy of unstructured time that a liberal-arts education should maintain, that the Crimson fails its members and its readers all at once.

Philippically,

Standing Eagle
 

Smart advice.

I wonder: Do people still feel that Harvard brings a good return on investment? Not just investment of money, but investment of childhood and adolescent time and emotional energy? Is the benefit of Harvard really worth the cost that so many of these young people seem so willing to pay?

Just thinking out loud, as it were.
 

The obvious irrational actor is the person who applies to Ohio State, Wooster as a reach, Tennessee, Southern Illinois, and hey, what the hell, Harvard. Way to throw away eighty bucks. It's purely aspirational money; a STATUS application, a way of telling oneself that one intends to be as successful as the name Harvard correlates with.

SE
 

Clearly. But how many of those do you think there are? I would assume that the vast majority of such applicants would look at the statistics and not even bother. (But I have no idea, I could well be wrong.)

Wouldn't it be more likely that the vast majority of those rejected from Harvard are still people with very strong applications—the valedictorians, the 2400-SAT people, and so on?
 

Richard,

If the typical family could read and understand statistics they wouldn't sign up for adjustable-rate mortgages.

Moreover, in the average American family, as in Lake Wobegon, all the children are WAY above average.

And being a valedictorian does not give one a strong Harvard application; you know that. My point is precisely that strength of application is measured in ways that most kids and their parents aren't given to understand.

Standing Eagle
 

"Slight increases resulted in record highs for minority groups, with a pool that is 10.7 percent African American, 19.6 percent Asian American, 10.1 percent Latino, and 1.5 percent Native American."

How do these percentages compare to those at the Graduate Schools?
 

Hey 2:53 / 8:59 :

Heard of Google? It's your new best friend. Also, the Gazette.


Let me at this point register a generalized objection to sock puppetry. Does everyone know what that is? Pretending to be just the courier for what is actually one's own message...


Standing Eagle
 

In 2005, among those aged 14-17, this was the national distribution by ethnicity

77% White
16% Black
17% Hispanic –including some counted also as Black or Mixed Race
4% Asian

For more detail see:

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/006808.html

At Harvard, the percentage of students in various racial categories is:

6.5% Black
5.3% Hispanic
13% Asian
For a breakdown of these figures by school see:

http://vpf-web.harvard.edu/budget/factbook/current_facts/2006OnlineFactBook.pdf
 

Those averages hide the severe problems in some schools. For example, in the Design school only 1% of the students are black.
 

I don't understand why the percentage of minority students at Harvard needs to mirror the percentage of these groups in the overall population. These percentages are not the same in Congress, they are not the same in Corporate Boards and they are not the same in most positions of leadership. Why should Harvard be different?
 

It's interesting to note that the vast majority of FAS professors did not attend the Ivies or any of the other "top ranked" schools as undergraduates.
The fact that these people didn't get into these schools, didn't want to go to these schools or didn't apply to these schools, did not stop them from becoming professors at a top research university.
"Top ranked" schools and the pressure to attend them, is not "the end all and be all." It is sad to see that so many parents, today, believe that it is.
Sam Spektor
 

"Vast majority." Are there actual data on where Harvard professors went to college?
 

Sam,

I certainly don't disagree with your conclusion: "top ranked schools" are not the "end all and be all." But I wonder about your argument for it. First, it's not obvious to me that becoming a professor at a top research university is the paradigm of success for many of the applicants. Cold comfort, I suspect, to know that this option might remain open. But perhaps more importantly, I'm sort of surprised to hear that the vast majority of FAS professors didn't attend one of the Ivies or any of the other "top ranked" schools as undergraduates. My sample size is very small, but in my own department (Philosophy) the data seems to suggest just the opposite. I don't know where everyone went, but I do know where about 2/3rds of them went; and all of the ones I know about went to top ranked schools. Is my department that unusual?

Sean
 

Sean,
I was speaking of the entire FAS faculty. I looked at this several years ago and was surprised. I can't believe it has changed very much since then.
There have always been some very bright kids who have gone (for one reason or another) to the University of Oklahoma or some bright late bloomer who finally found himself/herself after enrolling at Penn State.
Sam
 

A quick look at the Government Department will show that not everyone comes from the "select group" of schools. Of those whose cv (or other bio data)was readily available, ten faculty members did their undergraduate work at the "select group" and seventeen did it elsewhere. Michigan State, North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and Arkansas were among the seventeen.
There are lots of very bright kids at all these schools... some of whom become faculty members at top research universities.
If one is truly motivated,a student can get a great education at many universities and colleges, even those not in the top twenty of the US News survey (a survey which is a farce in many ways).
Sam Spektor
 

Standing Eagle:

I have no college degree and I'm just an interested reader but I'm very curious about the numbers and something you said...how is the strength of an application weighed that as a parent or student I'm not going to understand...out of 22,000 odd applications, how are the successful few determined...how can it be a fair process when you're dealing with those kind of numbers in a limited period of time...or are these questions that are unanswerable and which I may not like the answers to. Richard talks about 2400 SAT scores and valedictorians and extracurricular activities...that's what I would expect but you're saying no. So how is it decided?

lmpaulsen
 

Impaulsen,

It's not that you 'wouldn't' understand it, just that most parents and students aren't given the opportunity to.

That said, I'm not an expert on how a Harvard class is put together. One way of describing the trick to it is to refer to it as 'putting together a class,' rather than accepting and rejecting applicants. There are a lot of different factors that (without creating quotas, exactly) need to be satisfied. Will the lacrosse team have a goalie? Will there be leadership for the Indian-American community? What about real future engineers, rather than self-deluded ones who will really concentrate in History, or History of Science?

The simpler answer is just to say that Harvard rejects an insane number of people who were kings and queens of their high schools, in every category, every year. And moreover (thank God) they reject tons of knobs with perfect test scores.

And the larger point is that most of the 'qualified-in-simple-terms' people that get rejected wouldn't be great or happy community members at Harvard. They should go be king of a different kind of campus, or a courtier at Colby, or a vizier at Villanova. Or, more likely, they should take the best course of study they can get advised to construct at a terrific state school. Which is not to say that Harvard is qualified to sit in judgment of such people in such a way, but it is to say that for itself, Harvard's admissions criteria make good sense. There are probably lots of other places on the web, even at harvard.edu sites, where you can read how they go about it. Or you can read "The Chosen," which says some of the same things in ways you "won't like" -- a matter of spin rather than reality.

It's an incredibly talented incoming class. And probably 80% of the applicants to it can be rejected out of hand, not because they've failed to achieve something but because they don't stand out, and I mean REALLY stand out.

On some level Harvard is probably complicit in NOT discouraging such kids from applying. It benefits Harvard to reject a lot of people, as it does all schools, in the US News rankings. Prestige and "selectivity" (as measured by how many applications you reject) are self-reinforcing metrics of quality, and increasingly they are proxies for each other more than anything else.

God knows what they do with all those admissions fees.

Standing Eagle
 

Thank you, Standing Eagle, I never thought of it in terms of "putting a class toether" but that makes some kind of sense...and leaves me feeling a bit better about that part of the process anyway.

Thank you for taking the time to explain, for the reading tips.

Have a good day...

lmpaulsen
 

Thank you, Standing Eagle, I never thought of it in terms of "putting a class toether" but that makes some kind of sense...and leaves me feeling a bit better about that part of the process anyway.

Thank you for taking the time to explain, for the reading tips.

Have a good day...

lmpaulsen