Despite cautions from their college counselors, some parents and students remain uninformed about the college selection and application process. The SAS community is not immune to these false assumptions, but regardless of whether this is a result of overruling parental decisions or students’ stubborn fixations with specific schools, belief in these fallacies guarantee some form of disappointment; no one admits that they are walking into a pothole until they slip or break a leg. Let’s prevent that from happening.
Last month, we sent a survey to 43 students in the class of 2018 that asked students how they assess the quality of a college’s academic program, providing them eight choices that they could rank from one to eight (or from most to least importance). The response most often ranked number one, with 28.7% of the votes, was “by ranking.” This data is a cue for college counselors, as well as some college admissions officers, to be concerned.
Let it be clear: college rankings are far from objective or reliable. Every single college ranking should instead be described instead as a “joke,” or, even more accurately, a “pile of crap” (verbatim from The New York Times and Consumerist, respectively).
Perhaps this is due to the fact that a large part of a college’s ranking is not determined by actual data, but the opinions of the colleges themselves. U.S. News, for example, releases “peer assessment surveys” that determines a university’s ranking by 25 percent.1 College presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions are asked to rate the “academic quality” of hundreds of other institutions.1 The result was that schools often downgraded their competitors and exaggerated their own undergraduate programs.1
In one of the 2009 peer assessment forms from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, only two institutions were awarded top marks, including UW-Madison itself.1 Colleges that received the second-lowest rating of “adequate” academic programs included the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and every single Ivy League.1
Then there’s the issue of time. President of University of Vermont Daniel M. Fogel estimates that two to three minutes of researching the academic programs of around 260 colleges would require 10 hours.1 When college presidents like Fogel are “being paid hundreds of dollars a day,” it would make little sense to devote a day’s effort to the unpaid task of answering questionnaires. Fogel also confesses to only devoting 10 to 15 seconds to complete the survey for each institution.1
But rankings, as evident in the responses to the class of 2018 survey, have influence over the choices applicants make. In a 2008 study from the Association for the Study of Higher Education noted that, in 1995, 60 percent of entering college freshman in the U.S. placed rankings as “very important” in their college choices.2 This number has continued to grow, and colleges have used our naivety to their advantage. Since 2012, five schools have admitted to falsifying the data they submitted to U.S. News, which included inflating students’ SAT scores and class ranks.3
The third most popular response to the question to “How do you assess the quality of a college’s academic program” was “by selectivity”, which was selected as “most important” 19.05% of the time.
Any senior at SAS knows that hyper-selective colleges are the mecca of education. The news of someone being accepted into these institutions is always accompanied by a collective gasp of surprise and respect. However, most of us never stop to examine the inherent value of selectivity. It cannot be denied that a more selective admissions process means more qualified peers who might one day prove to be useful connections; selectivity is not the all-encompassing metric that many of us think it to be.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Getting In,” he makes a distinction between treatment effects and selection effects.4 The main difference between the two is that the selection effect doesn’t transform the subject at hand, it merely selects subjects with appropriate traits out of a much larger pool. An example of this would be the NBA—you don’t become a 6’5 basketball star by being drafted by the NBA, you get drafted because you are already a 6’5 basketball star.4 In contrast, medical schools don’t take candidates who are already good doctors.4 They are confident that their rigorous training will make candidates into good doctors, regardless of their previous ability.4
Gladwell applies this logic to hyper-selective schools: it is erroneous to attribute the accomplishments of the alumni to the education alone. Because schools with high selectivity rates are only accepting “the best and the brightest,” it is foreseeable that these students will go on to accomplish great things. This is not to say, however, that none of their success is due to the college’s academic experience, but suggests that we attribute too much to the situational factor of the institution rather than the dispositional intelligence and work ethics of its students.
For example, ask any SAS student whether they are familiar with Antioch College in Ohio, and you’ll probably be greeted with blank stares. But the school, with a 72 percent acceptance rate, has produced more Nobel Prize laureates per capita than any of the Ivy Leagues. This should not be interpreted as a blanketed statement that Ivy League educations are overrated, but that a college’s selectivity rate does not reflect the quality of its undergraduate program.
Another factor to consider is that a low acceptance rate inevitably means that the student population will be more homogenous in certain ways. In order to maintain its reputation as an elite bastion of education, these schools fill up their population with driven students with 4.0’s, 12 AP’s, and three non-profits.
As our Director of College Counseling Mr. Mark Moody also notes, “….as students move into bigger institutions, they’ll find themselves competing with a larger pool of people for success. Schools with graduate students also mean that they get priority over you, which leads to the case that graduate students are often the ones teaching classes instead of Ph.D. holding faculty. Sometimes a graduate teacher is energetic and terrific…. [But] I think that students who thrive in the SAS setting should ask questions and consider the type of classroom settings they’ll encounter, and what opportunities they’ll have for mentor relationships.”
Loren Pope, who compiled a list of 40 colleges that “change lives,” deliberately only included schools that accept a range of B students because he believes that “B students ask more probing questions than A students, ” who he thinks are too “caught up in trying to curry favor.”5 The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni took it one step further by saying “many kids admitted into top schools are emotional wrecks or slavish adherents to soulless scripts that forbid the exploration of genuine passions.”6
Another misconception that has to be clarified immediately is that resume padding; whether its blatant lies about one’s position or about club involvement, both are egregiously wrong. But what about that club you started with your friends where you just horse around in the middle school gym, or that non-profit you founded that exists only on paper, if you list those as genuine instances of leadership and organization, doesn’t that also constitute resume padding?
Perhaps resume stuffing is merely symptomatic of the inordinate weight we attribute to college decisions, but it has serious detrimental effects. Last year, Emma Li argued in another article why lying in our applications diminish the hard work of others.
What she didn’t mention, however, is that a “stuffed” resume also damages your chances of getting in. Both a thirty-two page report published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a former Yale professor echoes the same message: the current ten spaces dedicated to extracurricular activities in applications encourage students to spread themselves out too thin.7 8
Mr. Moody also encourages students who forget the idea that ‘more is more.’ “I see students taking on academic course-loads that are so heavy that they interfere with sleep, involvement with activities, and leading a balanced life,” he adds. “Taking more than three or four AP’s in a year can actually backfire from the perspective of a college admission committee, and even Ivy League admission officers have told me that it’s a turnoff when they see overloaded schedules—they imagine a stressed-out student who lacks authenticity in their motivation.”
Another conclusion from the Harvard and Yale source is that charitable work is a privilege that is mostly reserved for affluent students. Also according to Mr. Moody, colleges are more interested in students who have genuine interest and dedication in activities they actually care about. Both are lessons that SAS students should take to heart. Considering the glut of charity clubs our school has, it might be wise to turn towards other sources.
Colleges always say that they’re looking for passion, but, according to a Cornell admissions officer, passion looks less like being the president of ten clubs and more like a project, experiment, portfolio, or an endeavor where you learned, tinkered, and created.9 Some of these ‘passion projects’ include transforming used cooking oils into bio-fuel and eventually translate into a ‘hook’ in their applications.9
One of the least popular responses to the survey question of “How do you assess the quality of a college’s academic program” was “by size and/or location.” Considering that we all currently live in Shanghai, China, it would make sense that we care less about location as we don’t have a preference for a “home state.”
But this may not be an accurate reflection of our honest opinion on the importance of college sizes and locations. As one of our college counselors, Mr. Tom Colt, explains, we hold a strong penchant for colleges in an urban location:
“Kids are attracted to urban areas because they want the city feel, the city vibe,” he says. “For example, the schools in the states that have become popular, and you’ll notice this at any college fair when you see the lines that form next to their table, are places like NYU, BU, and University of Chicago.”
Colleges are also beginning to use their urban setting as a selling point, and SAS students seem to be buying it. One of their marketing strategies is to suggest that bigger institutions located in cities have more internship opportunities.
But that suggestion is plain false: internship opportunities are not exclusive to schools located in a large city. Instead, the emphasis on internships are ubiquitous among colleges and are not confined to the city.
According to Mr. Moody, because everyone understands the importance of internships in today’s world, colleges are finding more and more creative ways to provide internship programs for their students. It’s also increasingly common for colleges to help their students locate internships in different cities, then pay for its travel costs.
"For what it’s worth, I do think [the] size of [the] college has an impact on [its] academic experience,” Mr. Moody continues. “At well-resourced liberal arts colleges, from your first semester, you’re going to have discussion-oriented or hands-on lab classes taught by Ph.D.-holding professors who choose to be there because they care about teaching AND research. It just naturally leads to connections being made and mentorship relationships that yield leads to research opportunities and internships."
These popular misconceptions don’t affect every student out there. Surprisingly, there are a few students whom already possess the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity necessary to do great things in life at the age of seventeen. But if you, like us, spend your free time lounging around on YouTube, it might be prudent to consider whether or not the college you wish to attend is capable providing you the resources and attention you desire. Just remember that there are no perfect colleges, but colleges that allow you to look back on your experience ten years later with gratitude, verbalized as “It changed my life.”
Cowritten by Angela Ma and Andy Zhao
For further readings, please refer to the following articles provided by Mr. Moody (italicized) and sources used for this article:
1 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/19/rankings#sthash.G4zCV6r4.dpbs
2 http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bastedo/papers/BowmanBastedo.ResHE2009.pdf
3 https://www.vox.com/2014/9/5/6106807/college-rankings-us-news-boston-clemson-problems
4 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in
5 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/education/28face.html?mtrref=www.google.com
6 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/opinion/rethinking-college-admissions.html
7 https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/collegeadmissions
8 https://newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere
9 http://www.businessinsider.com/ivy-league-admissions-officer-college-application-tips-2017-4
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/world/europe/re-evaluating-the-college-rankings-game.html?_r=0
https://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8471271/us-news-rankings-education
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/11/a-college-rankings-world/414759/
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-college-rankings-0828-story.html
https://coloradoacademy.myschoolapp.com/ftpimages/438/download/What%20Do%20College%20Admission%20Offices%20Look%20For2.pdf
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/who-needs-harvard/
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/don-quixote-college-choice-and-the-myth-of-fit/28781
—The Blinding Facade that is College Rankings—
Last month, we sent a survey to 43 students in the class of 2018 that asked students how they assess the quality of a college’s academic program, providing them eight choices that they could rank from one to eight (or from most to least importance). The response most often ranked number one, with 28.7% of the votes, was “by ranking.” This data is a cue for college counselors, as well as some college admissions officers, to be concerned.
Let it be clear: college rankings are far from objective or reliable. Every single college ranking should instead be described instead as a “joke,” or, even more accurately, a “pile of crap” (verbatim from The New York Times and Consumerist, respectively).
 |
| (via Angela Ma) |
Perhaps this is due to the fact that a large part of a college’s ranking is not determined by actual data, but the opinions of the colleges themselves. U.S. News, for example, releases “peer assessment surveys” that determines a university’s ranking by 25 percent.1 College presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions are asked to rate the “academic quality” of hundreds of other institutions.1 The result was that schools often downgraded their competitors and exaggerated their own undergraduate programs.1
In one of the 2009 peer assessment forms from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, only two institutions were awarded top marks, including UW-Madison itself.1 Colleges that received the second-lowest rating of “adequate” academic programs included the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and every single Ivy League.1
Then there’s the issue of time. President of University of Vermont Daniel M. Fogel estimates that two to three minutes of researching the academic programs of around 260 colleges would require 10 hours.1 When college presidents like Fogel are “being paid hundreds of dollars a day,” it would make little sense to devote a day’s effort to the unpaid task of answering questionnaires. Fogel also confesses to only devoting 10 to 15 seconds to complete the survey for each institution.1
But rankings, as evident in the responses to the class of 2018 survey, have influence over the choices applicants make. In a 2008 study from the Association for the Study of Higher Education noted that, in 1995, 60 percent of entering college freshman in the U.S. placed rankings as “very important” in their college choices.2 This number has continued to grow, and colleges have used our naivety to their advantage. Since 2012, five schools have admitted to falsifying the data they submitted to U.S. News, which included inflating students’ SAT scores and class ranks.3
—Why Selectivity Should Never Be a Selling Point—
The third most popular response to the question to “How do you assess the quality of a college’s academic program” was “by selectivity”, which was selected as “most important” 19.05% of the time.
Any senior at SAS knows that hyper-selective colleges are the mecca of education. The news of someone being accepted into these institutions is always accompanied by a collective gasp of surprise and respect. However, most of us never stop to examine the inherent value of selectivity. It cannot be denied that a more selective admissions process means more qualified peers who might one day prove to be useful connections; selectivity is not the all-encompassing metric that many of us think it to be.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Getting In,” he makes a distinction between treatment effects and selection effects.4 The main difference between the two is that the selection effect doesn’t transform the subject at hand, it merely selects subjects with appropriate traits out of a much larger pool. An example of this would be the NBA—you don’t become a 6’5 basketball star by being drafted by the NBA, you get drafted because you are already a 6’5 basketball star.4 In contrast, medical schools don’t take candidates who are already good doctors.4 They are confident that their rigorous training will make candidates into good doctors, regardless of their previous ability.4
Gladwell applies this logic to hyper-selective schools: it is erroneous to attribute the accomplishments of the alumni to the education alone. Because schools with high selectivity rates are only accepting “the best and the brightest,” it is foreseeable that these students will go on to accomplish great things. This is not to say, however, that none of their success is due to the college’s academic experience, but suggests that we attribute too much to the situational factor of the institution rather than the dispositional intelligence and work ethics of its students.
For example, ask any SAS student whether they are familiar with Antioch College in Ohio, and you’ll probably be greeted with blank stares. But the school, with a 72 percent acceptance rate, has produced more Nobel Prize laureates per capita than any of the Ivy Leagues. This should not be interpreted as a blanketed statement that Ivy League educations are overrated, but that a college’s selectivity rate does not reflect the quality of its undergraduate program.
 |
| Antioch College in Ohio (via Cappex) |
Another factor to consider is that a low acceptance rate inevitably means that the student population will be more homogenous in certain ways. In order to maintain its reputation as an elite bastion of education, these schools fill up their population with driven students with 4.0’s, 12 AP’s, and three non-profits.
As our Director of College Counseling Mr. Mark Moody also notes, “….as students move into bigger institutions, they’ll find themselves competing with a larger pool of people for success. Schools with graduate students also mean that they get priority over you, which leads to the case that graduate students are often the ones teaching classes instead of Ph.D. holding faculty. Sometimes a graduate teacher is energetic and terrific…. [But] I think that students who thrive in the SAS setting should ask questions and consider the type of classroom settings they’ll encounter, and what opportunities they’ll have for mentor relationships.”
Loren Pope, who compiled a list of 40 colleges that “change lives,” deliberately only included schools that accept a range of B students because he believes that “B students ask more probing questions than A students, ” who he thinks are too “caught up in trying to curry favor.”5 The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni took it one step further by saying “many kids admitted into top schools are emotional wrecks or slavish adherents to soulless scripts that forbid the exploration of genuine passions.”6
—Resume Padding Can Hurt Your Chances—
Another misconception that has to be clarified immediately is that resume padding; whether its blatant lies about one’s position or about club involvement, both are egregiously wrong. But what about that club you started with your friends where you just horse around in the middle school gym, or that non-profit you founded that exists only on paper, if you list those as genuine instances of leadership and organization, doesn’t that also constitute resume padding?
Perhaps resume stuffing is merely symptomatic of the inordinate weight we attribute to college decisions, but it has serious detrimental effects. Last year, Emma Li argued in another article why lying in our applications diminish the hard work of others.
 |
| (via Mark Anderson from Andertoons) |
What she didn’t mention, however, is that a “stuffed” resume also damages your chances of getting in. Both a thirty-two page report published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a former Yale professor echoes the same message: the current ten spaces dedicated to extracurricular activities in applications encourage students to spread themselves out too thin.7 8
Mr. Moody also encourages students who forget the idea that ‘more is more.’ “I see students taking on academic course-loads that are so heavy that they interfere with sleep, involvement with activities, and leading a balanced life,” he adds. “Taking more than three or four AP’s in a year can actually backfire from the perspective of a college admission committee, and even Ivy League admission officers have told me that it’s a turnoff when they see overloaded schedules—they imagine a stressed-out student who lacks authenticity in their motivation.”
Another conclusion from the Harvard and Yale source is that charitable work is a privilege that is mostly reserved for affluent students. Also according to Mr. Moody, colleges are more interested in students who have genuine interest and dedication in activities they actually care about. Both are lessons that SAS students should take to heart. Considering the glut of charity clubs our school has, it might be wise to turn towards other sources.
Colleges always say that they’re looking for passion, but, according to a Cornell admissions officer, passion looks less like being the president of ten clubs and more like a project, experiment, portfolio, or an endeavor where you learned, tinkered, and created.9 Some of these ‘passion projects’ include transforming used cooking oils into bio-fuel and eventually translate into a ‘hook’ in their applications.9
—False Impressions from Size and Location—
One of the least popular responses to the survey question of “How do you assess the quality of a college’s academic program” was “by size and/or location.” Considering that we all currently live in Shanghai, China, it would make sense that we care less about location as we don’t have a preference for a “home state.”
But this may not be an accurate reflection of our honest opinion on the importance of college sizes and locations. As one of our college counselors, Mr. Tom Colt, explains, we hold a strong penchant for colleges in an urban location:
“Kids are attracted to urban areas because they want the city feel, the city vibe,” he says. “For example, the schools in the states that have become popular, and you’ll notice this at any college fair when you see the lines that form next to their table, are places like NYU, BU, and University of Chicago.”
 |
| Location distribution of the colleges the class of 2017 is currently attending (via Naviance) |
Colleges are also beginning to use their urban setting as a selling point, and SAS students seem to be buying it. One of their marketing strategies is to suggest that bigger institutions located in cities have more internship opportunities.
But that suggestion is plain false: internship opportunities are not exclusive to schools located in a large city. Instead, the emphasis on internships are ubiquitous among colleges and are not confined to the city.
According to Mr. Moody, because everyone understands the importance of internships in today’s world, colleges are finding more and more creative ways to provide internship programs for their students. It’s also increasingly common for colleges to help their students locate internships in different cities, then pay for its travel costs.
"For what it’s worth, I do think [the] size of [the] college has an impact on [its] academic experience,” Mr. Moody continues. “At well-resourced liberal arts colleges, from your first semester, you’re going to have discussion-oriented or hands-on lab classes taught by Ph.D.-holding professors who choose to be there because they care about teaching AND research. It just naturally leads to connections being made and mentorship relationships that yield leads to research opportunities and internships."
——
These popular misconceptions don’t affect every student out there. Surprisingly, there are a few students whom already possess the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity necessary to do great things in life at the age of seventeen. But if you, like us, spend your free time lounging around on YouTube, it might be prudent to consider whether or not the college you wish to attend is capable providing you the resources and attention you desire. Just remember that there are no perfect colleges, but colleges that allow you to look back on your experience ten years later with gratitude, verbalized as “It changed my life.”
Cowritten by Angela Ma and Andy Zhao
For further readings, please refer to the following articles provided by Mr. Moody (italicized) and sources used for this article:
1 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/19/rankings#sthash.G4zCV6r4.dpbs
2 http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bastedo/papers/BowmanBastedo.ResHE2009.pdf
3 https://www.vox.com/2014/9/5/6106807/college-rankings-us-news-boston-clemson-problems
4 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in
5 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/education/28face.html?mtrref=www.google.com
6 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/opinion/rethinking-college-admissions.html
7 https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/collegeadmissions
8 https://newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere
9 http://www.businessinsider.com/ivy-league-admissions-officer-college-application-tips-2017-4
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/world/europe/re-evaluating-the-college-rankings-game.html?_r=0
https://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8471271/us-news-rankings-education
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/11/a-college-rankings-world/414759/
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-college-rankings-0828-story.html
https://coloradoacademy.myschoolapp.com/ftpimages/438/download/What%20Do%20College%20Admission%20Offices%20Look%20For2.pdf
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/who-needs-harvard/
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/don-quixote-college-choice-and-the-myth-of-fit/28781
