INSIGHTS
MAR
14
COSTA’S CORNER
Something always seemed wrong
The revelations that are coming out of this college entrance scandal I don’t think are all that surprising if you have gone through the process of getting your kids into a good college. I don’t think there is much sympathy out there for the parents that were involved and for the kids either.
Having gone through the process twice I know firsthand how exhausting it can be. How frustrating. The range of emotions as acceptances and waitlists letters come pouring in. The disappointments. It’s all a process and looking back on it, knowing what we know now, you just have to wonder, was my son or daughters spot in that “reach school” taken by someone who did less but paid more to get in?
Like every parent who has ever gone through this arduous process with their child, you knew it was unfair. There were kids that did not have the qualifications and overall resume to get in to certain schools and yet they were accepted over much more qualified students. Admissions officers swear that everyone is on a level playing field as they go through the applications, but we knew that was BS. You just hoped that your kid fit in some quota that the school was trying to achieve.
Did we as parents believe that there might have been something else afoot? Absolutely. However, the admissions process is secretive to the point of almost being illegal. People that have no idea of the quality of the applicant are using metrics that can be altered and recreated to fit any narrative and they pass judgement without having looked further into the applicant’s actual dynamics. Understandably, the admissions people have to go over thousands upon thousands of applications and to pick the 1200 best has to be incredibly hard and mistakes can be made, so I don’t really blame the admissions officers themselves but the process.
Elite schools tend to express how selective their admissions process is. To stay elite, they will only accept anywhere between 7% and 12% of all applicants. Though there are probably hundreds if not thousands of applicants to these schools that are qualified, they must apply to more than one elite school.
I have had a few friends over the years that have attended Princeton, Yale and Duke and they have all said the same thing. It was harder to get into their chosen school than the actual coursework.
Why does it have to be this way?
Like I just said, elite schools want to keep the elite status and if they allowed their enrollment to increase it would diminish its status but not diminish the quality of the students entering. Think about it. If this elite school has an acceptance rate of let’s say 10% and they increased it to 15% that would most likely increase the number of students by about 400. Granted, that does present a problem with housing, facilities and staffing but if a school were serious about breaking the logjam of admissions, it would find the funding to hire and build. These elite schools have massive endowments and creating a larger more diverse student population should not be a poison they can’t swallow.
The point of all this is that these schools because of their restrictive admissions policies tend to force people of means to find “creative” ways to get their children accepted. Maybe as the details emerge things might change in the admissions process. Maybe, seeing some of these well healed go to jail might make others a little less apt to cheat the system and actually have their kids do the work required and succeed or fail like the rest of us.
Even with the strength in the Tech sector over the last few weeks, I’m staying the same as usual.
50% Stocks
25% Fixed Income
25% Cash
The revelations that are coming out of this college entrance scandal I don’t think are all that surprising if you have gone through the process of getting your kids into a good college. I don’t think there is much sympathy out there for the parents that were involved and for the kids either.
Having gone through the process twice I know firsthand how exhausting it can be. How frustrating. The range of emotions as acceptances and waitlists letters come pouring in. The disappointments. It’s all a process and looking back on it, knowing what we know now, you just have to wonder, was my son or daughters spot in that “reach school” taken by someone who did less but paid more to get in?
Like every parent who has ever gone through this arduous process with their child, you knew it was unfair. There were kids that did not have the qualifications and overall resume to get in to certain schools and yet they were accepted over much more qualified students. Admissions officers swear that everyone is on a level playing field as they go through the applications, but we knew that was BS. You just hoped that your kid fit in some quota that the school was trying to achieve.
Did we as parents believe that there might have been something else afoot? Absolutely. However, the admissions process is secretive to the point of almost being illegal. People that have no idea of the quality of the applicant are using metrics that can be altered and recreated to fit any narrative and they pass judgement without having looked further into the applicant’s actual dynamics. Understandably, the admissions people have to go over thousands upon thousands of applications and to pick the 1200 best has to be incredibly hard and mistakes can be made, so I don’t really blame the admissions officers themselves but the process.
Elite schools tend to express how selective their admissions process is. To stay elite, they will only accept anywhere between 7% and 12% of all applicants. Though there are probably hundreds if not thousands of applicants to these schools that are qualified, they must apply to more than one elite school.
I have had a few friends over the years that have attended Princeton, Yale and Duke and they have all said the same thing. It was harder to get into their chosen school than the actual coursework.
Why does it have to be this way?
Like I just said, elite schools want to keep the elite status and if they allowed their enrollment to increase it would diminish its status but not diminish the quality of the students entering. Think about it. If this elite school has an acceptance rate of let’s say 10% and they increased it to 15% that would most likely increase the number of students by about 400. Granted, that does present a problem with housing, facilities and staffing but if a school were serious about breaking the logjam of admissions, it would find the funding to hire and build. These elite schools have massive endowments and creating a larger more diverse student population should not be a poison they can’t swallow.
The point of all this is that these schools because of their restrictive admissions policies tend to force people of means to find “creative” ways to get their children accepted. Maybe as the details emerge things might change in the admissions process. Maybe, seeing some of these well healed go to jail might make others a little less apt to cheat the system and actually have their kids do the work required and succeed or fail like the rest of us.
Even with the strength in the Tech sector over the last few weeks, I’m staying the same as usual.
50% Stocks
25% Fixed Income
25% Cash