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Is It Time To Throw Out the College Application System?
An anonymous reader points out this opinion piece by professor Adam Grant that questions how useful the current college application system is and suggests some alternate methods to gather information about candidates. The college admissions system is broken. When students submit applications, colleges learn a great deal about their competence from grades and test scores, but remain in the dark about their creativity and character. Essays, recommendation letters and alumni interviews provide incomplete information about students' values, social and emotional skills, and capacities for developing and discovering new ideas. This leaves many colleges favoring achievement robots who excel at the memorization of rote knowledge, and overlooking talented C students. Those with less than perfect grades might go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg or become entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs.
So you have pointed out all of the problems but not offered a solution or any other workable ideas.
So if you only have one choice you only have one answer.
overlooking talented C students. Those with less than perfect grades might go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg or become entrepreneurs like Steve Job"
They may be talented, but college admissions is supposed to measure students' likelihood of success at tasks they will be graded on.
It's not hard to earn at least Bs on basic high-school materials; having all Cs shows a lack of ability to do the hard work or a difficulty with or lack of commitment to basic academics.
The things in College should be much more advanced, so "Artistic talent" can't really be an excuse for poor high school grades; sorry, but your latent potential talents in one tiny sliver should not get you admitted to a degree program you aren't ready for yet.
Exclusive schools, such as Bowdoin, have already made SATs option. Standardized testing is the biggest target of "achievement robots". I know of some South and East Asian families who instead of having their kids involved in team sports, drama, art or anything involving other humans, have their kids start studying for the SATs at age 12. Perhaps that's is seen to work in Asia, but it is not healthy for the entire globe to follow the same model. It is a better world if USA/Canada/Europe can follow a more well-rounded model. Include other forms of intelligence (i.e. drama, athletics, music, art) more heavily in the mix and allow standardized testing to be optional.
if you have an incredibly creative C student who will "go on to dream up blockbuster films like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg" who cares if they go to college? it isnt like you need a degree to be creative.
College applications, hell; let's throw out the job application process. It's essentially a mechanism to give self-important extraverts with little skill a huge leg up on highly intelligent, diligent introverts who are repulsed by the idea of salesmanship in general, and having to sell oneself in particular.
Unfortunately, as with college applications, I can't easily come up with an alternative that does a better job.
Plus, of course, there's absolutely no way to actually "throw out" either of these processes across the entirety of academia, industry, government, etc. Every private college and for-profit business can do whatever they damn well please in terms of applications, and for many of them, inertia is a way of life.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Replace 'Asians' with 'Jews', and you'd sound exactly like a 19th century Harvard dean trying to figure out how to prevent the WASPs from running away.
Soft metrics for college admissions are just a facade for discrimination. "This guy may not test well, but he sure has well-rounded eyes!"
Please overhaul! But not out of fear the next Lucas, Spielberg or Jobs isn't going to be admitted. Do it because it's an annoying waste of time and effort to fill out a completely different application and write a completely different set of essays for each and every school. Even better, establish a single application fee that buys the student the ability to apply to some (reasonable) fixed number of schools. Believe it or not, the cost of application (esp. when applying to several schools) is actually a meaningful disincentive for students at the low end of the income spectrum.
If doctors could set prices, you would be onto something. Unfortunately the big insurers dictate to providers how much they will get paid for a given service. Ever wonder why your primary care doctor only spends 6 minutes with you when you go for a checkup? It's because he/she needs to see 10 patients an hour to get enough payment from the big insurers to keep the lights on, let alone pay off their six-figure education debt.
Hearing the insurers complain about the high cost of healthcare can be used as a calibration for your bullshit meter. They could easily reduce costs by 25% or so by not existing (15% "overhead", they mean profits, and probably 10% or more of all costs to a practice is paying clerical staff to keep all the billing straight, due to the hundreds of insurers who all have their own billing systems with unique quirks that you ignore at your peril).
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Do a masters at a better school - you can do one in a year and it will hide your weak undergrad. I have an associates, a horrific undergrad upgrade to bachelors and a big buck masters, and it definitely opened doors for me. Just having access to a careers center at a top graduate school - they know so many people, who know people, etc. When I get hired, it's the skills learned at the Associate level that people find most valuable....
Key findings are: (1) HSGPA is consistently the strongest predictor of four-year college outcomes for all academic disciplines, campuses and freshman cohorts in the UC sample;
Of course it is. That's like saying "doing well in school is consistently the strongest predictor of doing well in school"
The people that are good at making good grades in HS are also going to be good at making good grades in college.
I was an A- student in HS and an A- student in college but I tutored 4.0 students that had a much poorer grasp of
the concepts than I did. Why did they have a 4.0 while I hovered around a 3.5? Because they hired a tutor before
they needed it, because they knew how to take tests, etc... Basically, they excelled at school. The bigger question
is does this actually translate into excelling in your career or in life in general. Many of the people I graduated with that
had higher GPAs than me there is no way that I would ever hire them as a programmer while many of the people I
graduated with that had lower GPAs than me were excellent programmers.
I've known a few intellectually brilliant people who still live off their parents because they can't take care of themselves. They are "so in the clouds" that they are worthless, unproductive members of society. Sure, they're fun to discuss philosophy with, but I would never want to have one as a room mate or depend on them in any way. I don't care how smart or left-wing you are, every person has the responsibility to find a niche in society that allows them to work and TAKE CARE OF THEMSLVES.
These "creative C students" are exactly the people we DON'T want in college, creativity having nothing to do with it. They the sorts of people who can't complete simple tasks or do anything practical. How the hell do you expect them to not just completely fail out of college? A college degree program that does not require students to GET EDUCATED in a range of areas (literature, foreign language, basic math & science, fine arts, etc.) is not a good educational program, and these C students will not have the discipline to make it through classes in subjects they're not interested in.
Nobody will suggest that we give them a free ride through those classes either. So they're GOING TO FAIL.
I'm biased because I am one, but the creative types I respect the most are college professors, especially in fields where you have to seek your own funding. You HAVE to be creative to publish new science. But you also have to be able to teach, present ideas clearly and logically, manage people, promote yourself, stay focused on specific productive problem areas, etc. Some of them (such as myself) had industry experience prior to going into academia. These people are WELL ROUNDED.
Well-rounded is what we want to get into college. People who can manage their time and money, think about more than one type of thing, work on problems they don't necessarily prefer, etc. The most successful people are those most willing to do well at the less interesting parts of the job. And THOSE people are not C students.
The problem is, if you're a Harvard. Stanford or MIT, you already have thousands of students applying for a few hundred spots. And in the case of these schools, almost every one of these students is a carbon copy of the other - class valedictorian, perfect score on the SATs, perfect levels of extracurricular activities, etc. Beyond the essays and interviews that highly selective schools do, how else do you measure for people who aren't just "good at school" and churn out perfect scores on tests due to photographic memories or intense pressure?
My story is interesting - I've always been a mediocre (B or B+) student and a lot of it comes down to my lack of talent at memorizing stuff for tests. Even now that I'm out of school, I play the vendor certification game and often get mediocre (but passing) scores on those tests. I think I'd do a lot better if I had a photographic memory. Same goes for math -- I find the concepts very interesting but have some sort of calculating disability that I still haven't been able to figure out. Put stuff like that together, plus my insistence on pursuing a difficult degree (chemistry,) and my grades were no great shakes. I really don't know which is better -- the rote memorization method that China and India use, or our method which, if you ask a random sample of people, apparently doesn't work well enough.
One of the problems with lowering standards in the highly selective private schools is that you'd be opening the doors of a closed club to more people, and I'm not sure these institutions want to do that. I went to Big No Name State U, and the experience in these places is very much what you make of it. Especially if the place is big, you need to seek out every advantage and opportunity rather than have it handed to you. I read something a few months ago that compared the experience at a state university to that of the Ivy League, but of course my memory sucks so I'll have to look it up later. :-) Anyway, this author seemed to indicate that the primary difference is that once you're in the private university system, they don't let you fail. Opportunities to make up work, etc. that don't exist in a lecture class of 400 students are given to people who have trouble. The alumni network ensures that anyone who makes it through will get a good job, and the brand name on the degree will follow you forever. It's like you're in a club, and it's your reward for working like a dog (and paying a lot of money) to get into the top tier.
On the other hand, higher education is good for you as a person.
There's definitely something a little iffy about the notion that an education is something that prepares you for a job. I'm a programmer who got a degree in computer science, which falls into what you described, but my college education also included "well rounding" in things like arts, economics, foreign cultures, philosophy, and the like that I feel was essential to being a good citizen in non-financial respects.
There's just something odd about cutting off there and going "hey, you're good now." Cutting off at high school, or cutting the liberal arts part out of my education to make it a more job oriented experience would have left me in a much worse place to take on the world. I see it as odd when we go around advocating doing that to as many people as possible.
Part of it is just how a college education is historically tied to being upper class, and some latent classism on my part("how could THOSE PEOPLE manage without my education"), but I also feel that it's good for society as a whole to have as many people as are willing and able to complete a degree university do so, regardless of their job prospects.
On the other hand, higher education is good for you as a person.
There are lots of experiences that can be good for you as a person if you have the right personality and mindset. Serving in the military can teach you a lot about discipline, sacrifice, teamwork etc. but I would have been hopeless unsuited for such an experience. Similarly there are some people who are completely unsuited to benefit from higher education. Society needs to get out of the mindset that everyone needs to go to university. It is damaging the universities for those who do benefit from higher ed and it is saddling many with a crippling student debt. There are many different routes to become a valuable and respected member of society and many of them do not lie through university....and lest you think I am biased against universities I am a university prof!
The problem with fixating on Steve Jobs is that he's an outlier. The two sets of extremes that he represents should be ignored when considering education policy in general.
Also, he succeeded "in spite" of whatever faults the current system has. So it really makes no sense to distort the entire system to suit people like him.
He's statistically insignificant and is proven not to be harmed by the current regime.
He's the wrong part of the bell curve to fixate on.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.