I think most selective institutions have similar techniques for assessing GPA, so you’re right, it can be done. For a campus with a significant national intake, it takes building up a pretty large knowledge base, however.

Second, about your comment: “Timothy Burke Says:

March 29th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
Good points, Sam. Yes, when some folks say, “Take only the most qualified applicants”, I’m not always sure what measurements they have in mind that would allow that goal to be rigorously pursued. It isn’t just that there’s a gender issue in that case: GPA, for example, is an incredibly variable indicator of “qualification” for a selective college. A 4.0 GPA at some high schools may be the equivalent in terms of predicting likely success at a place like Swarthmore to a 3.0 GPA at others. ”

At the University of Michigan, where I went, a newspaper article describing the admissions procedure stated that all GPA’s were recomputed. First, all non-academic courses were stripped, and the raw GPA recomputed. Then, a correction factor for the school was applied. The admissions department was very aware that a 3.0 might mean below average at some schools, and stellar at others.

At Bryn Mawr, there are many things that I think are wonderful about having only women around. When I taught last semester, it was great to be able to approach things in ways that I never would have if there was a man in the room. It was freeing in a way. There was no one in the room I had to convince that there was gender discrimination in the workplace. They knew. And we could talk about girl stuff.

But, I’ve noticed, since most of my colleagues are men, that they sometimes forget how to deal with men. Not that they don’t have male professors and some men in their classes and boyfriends, but just dealing with men in a normal everday setting is sometimes weird for them. We’ve all noticed it, not just me. And some are worse than others. Some really do sequester themselves.

I sometimes think about whether I would have enjoyed a school like Bryn Mawr at 18. I don’t think so. Yes, it would have been nice to be free in the way I mentioned above. And given that I was in the South where gender relations are skewed, it might have benefitted me greatly. But I had to learn to navigate all that on my own. I had to learn how to cope with assertive men in the classroom and the newspaper room.

It would be an interesting what if, if colleges diversified on everything but gender. What would they look like then? Would white men become a minority at such schools? Somehow I don’t think so, but they might have to work a little harder to get in. Is that fair? I don’t know.

Many classrooms in fact function best off of differentials between student aptitudes, interests, commitments and prior life experiences. Modest forms of diversity in those areas are generative or productive of “quality” educational experiences.

The leadership/community service stuff is the stuff which is most easily gamed by applicants these days, and it partially feeds the kind of ridiculous, unreal overscheduling of the lives of overachieving high schoolers. Personally, if I was allowed to send in a custom order to the admissions office here, I’d put in a bid for a substantial quota of high schoolers who did strong work in the classroom and didn’t really give a rat’s ass about community service, leadership, or much else besides hanging out and having fun when they weren’t doing their schoolwork. It’s nice to have a few people who were running their own soup kitchens at the age of 15, but what you end up seeing instead is a lot of ambitious overachievers stuffing their youthful resumes full of that kind of stuff.

The other thing I notice is the emphasis put on “leadership” and “community service”. I really really hate those requirements. (My experience–I worked my way through college, got excellent grades, and had a very hard time getting a job because I had no “leadership experience.” I’d run a business for years before college, I’d worked 20 hours a week during college–but employers wanted someone with “leadership experience”, like organizing frat parties.) Back to topic–in my community, I notice that often in the same families, girls are involved in some kind of volunteer activity, but boys have part-time jobs–if you weight “community service” higher than working, your criteria are skewed both against the working-class and, I suspect, against boys.

Laura, again, the problem is not so much whether universities should be dating services as the expectations of the probable customer base of a given university or college. There are a pretty consistent set of things that 18-year olds are thinking about as they look at places they want to apply, and at least some of them aren’t really anything that those insitutions are trying to engineer or make an explicit part of their objectives. But at the same time, if you are an admissions director, you have to pay attention to what your applicant pool commonly thinks is true about your institution. There isn’t any school in the country that consciously, programmatically sets out to be a “party school”, probably, but there are plenty that understand that having an image as such plays a major role in attracting certain students and repelling others. I think a college where it became a common image that it was hard for women to find male partners because they were scarce might find that affecting its applicant pool in undesirable ways. So yeah, I don’t think colleges or universities should set out to be dating services, but at the same time, in the real world, it would be potentially self-destructive to be aggressively disinterested in common perceptions among applicants about whether or not it was possible to find love and sexual connection with other students.

Recognizing that I’m being a complete fuddy-duddy and hypocrite, I have wonder whether or not universities should be dating services. I mean we’re really heaping a lot of missions on to the college system — it’s supposed to provide an education, social networks, and dates.

If schools kept the uneven split, they could still help their women find dates. What did they do in the old days when schools were mostly men? Didn’t they do dances with the women’s colleges or something? All the smart Ivy league girls could have sock hops with the local community colleges.

I know that I’m saying this as a 40 year old bore. And I met most of my boyfriends, including my husband, on a university campus. So, don’t listen to me.

“She was the leader/president/editor/captain/lead actress in every activity in her school. She had taken six advanced placement courses and had been selected for a prestigious state leadership program. In her free time, this whirlwind of achievement had accumulated more than 300 hours of community service in four different organizations.”

but unfortunately had average test scores and grades. And the male and female SAT scores were essentially identical (1356M vs 1370F). So is it really true that less smart men are being brought in? It sounds more like less social/involved/extraverted men
are being brought in. And that could be undesirable if you want your student body to be outgoing, socially responsible, extraverted type A sorts of people. It would have been nice to have some transcript facts in hand for the comparison: GPA’s, number of AP tests passed, etc.