Confucius at Oxford: How One Bumbling Idiot (Me) Got Into Harvard

October 03, 2005

How One Bumbling Idiot (Me) Got Into Harvard

Highly amusing article in the New Yorker today. It explains quite well the admissions philosophy of Harvard, Princeton, and the other Ivy leagues. You can read the article for yourself, but I thought I'd highlight a few significant paragraphs:

... Harvard, Yale, and Princeton chose to adopt what might be called the “best graduates” approach to admissions. France’s École Normale Supérieure, Japan’s University of Tokyo, and most of the world’s other élite schools define their task as looking for the best students—that is, the applicants who will have the greatest academic success during their time in college. The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance.
... It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didn’t want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isn’t enough.

In effect, the Ivies admit students whom they think will be the greatest success after they graduate. In the real world, of course, success is not determined by your academic results. Success is often more closely correlated with your willingness to work hard, your drive to succeed, and your ability to work with other people. That's why, for example:

... recruited athletes have an acceptance rate to the Ivies at well over twice the rate of other students, despite S.A.T. scores that are on average more than a hundred points lower.

All this is highly debatable, of course, but then again the track record of the Ivies in turning out highly successful graduates speaks for itself. This reflects something I've been banging on about for a long time: our stress on academic results in Singapore is highly misplaced, not just when it comes to choosing our future leaders, but also as a general plan of education at large for our extremely limited population. We need to emphasise the skills which contribute to success in the real world, not in the classroom. Often they overlap, but more often they don't.

We need to produce successful people, not successful students.

Posted by pj at 04:41 PM

Comments

In fairness, not everyone can aspire to your all-round brilliance. We useless head-in-the-clouds academics deserve a chance too!!

Steph spoke on October 3, 2005 08:28 PM

... says the lady who was a Blues rugby player, an acapella singer, a top-notch lacrosse and hockey player, and who speaks half-a-dozen languages.

Yes, and how are you enjoying your PhD at Harvard, Steph?

PJ spoke on October 4, 2005 12:49 AM

You say all this as if all Ivy League students get there on merit and that it's inherently desirable that they should end up running the world. Doubtless many other I.L. alumni would agree with you.

George 'W' Bush went to Yale. How much of his subsequent success was down to the university he went to, do you think?

gareth spoke on October 4, 2005 06:01 AM

Sorry if I gave that impression, but did you actually read the article? Bush is a legacy admission, and the author covers that as well. The article's main thesis is that Universities are brands and therefore admissions protect the brand. The biggest part of that is the admissions philosophy I outline above, but another important aspect of that is rewarding loyalty- i.e., admitting the children of those who were alumni and donated in massive ways back to the university (monetary or otherwise). These kids are known as legacies. There were many at Harvard too.

PJ spoke on October 4, 2005 11:00 AM

PJ, I am humbled, I am as nothing beside a swing-dancing, channel-swimming Olympian and style icon with degrees from Oxford AND Harvard (how's that DPhil at that little known uni, what was it called again, Oxford, wasn't it?). And I don't wear a fedora with anything like the same aplomb!

Steph spoke on October 5, 2005 01:11 AM

I have read the article (or at least, flicked through it). I still think that emphasising character and personality in admissions basically favours those who can project themselves confidently at interview, who were drilled from a young age to get through such an
interview (at a private school, say) over the more capable, but timid, academically-minded student.

This could explain, for instance, why numbers of state educated and privately educated undergraduates are approximately equal at Cambridge and Oxford (a good analogue for the Ivy League in Britain, or at least one I know a little more about), despite there being
approximately ten times more of the former in the country as a whole. I would find it hard to believe that there is anything intrinsically in the make up of private school kids that makes them more intelligent as a class than those who went to state school. (They may
be more educated, but that is not the same thing.)

Since Oxbridge graduates get parachuted into highly paid jobs, and form the bulk of the political elite, the British end up lumped with a self-perpetuating ruling class, and upward mobility of the able outside this class, while not impossible, is definitely not promoted.
I am sure it is the same in the US. Of course, this view isn't in any way new, but what I think is needed is better identification and nurturing of talented students at an early age across the state school system, and to imbue in them the skills that are required to
succeed in the real world there, rather than effectively favouring the children of people who have already made it. (Of course, there are always anomalies who buck this trend -- like your good self, and, I would hesitate to say, me.)

Gareth spoke on October 13, 2005 12:20 PM

Hey Gareth, I agree with what you wrote. However, I have to point out that I'm coming from a very different perspective than you are. In Singapore, students are relentless tracked and streamed from a young age, with the criteria almost
being entirely academic results. This results in the system being 'gamed' by students who cram relentlessly for exams, and teach themselves how to pass their exams well by studying lots and lots of past papers and the like. Perhaps this
is fairer, but it also has produced generations of Singaporeans who have tremendous capabilities to memorise information, but limited capacities to interpret and process the information, much less innovate, and thus do not have the skills to succeed in life (which is not measured by exams). Worse, it has marginalised all those who are tremendously talented in other areas but are unable to do as well in terms of academic results. I would immodestly suggest myself as an example (as you did), in that my academic results were decent but my talents lay in other areas. Anecdotally, my classmates who have been the most
successful in life were not necessarily those who did well academically. What I will always be grateful to Harvard for is recognising my potential and giving me a chance to really excel in life, because the Singapore system didn't give me
that chance.

What we really need is, like you say, better identification and nurturing of talent at a young age. But Britain and Singapore are trying to move towards that medium from different directions. The American university system does an imperfect job of it, but a better one.

I think also we need to distinguish between a) what is good for a university, especially a private university; and b) what is good for a country. You're absolutely right: we need more elite universities. But given my government's tendency to micromanage and meddle via social policy, perhaps what we need are more elite *private* institutions.

PJ spoke on October 13, 2005 12:22 PM