College Confidential is filled with requests from applicants to “Chance me,” i.e., for knowledgeable readers to give their honest opinion of the applicants chances at a particular school. Here is one for Williams.

I’m a female in the Class of ‘09 at a small private school in CT.
-GPA (unweighted) 3.98
Our school doesn’t rank or give weighted GPAs

[lots and lots of stuff]

Thanks to everyone who can give me feedback. I hope I have provided enough information or I haven’t provided extraneous information.

1) You need to provide your race for anyone to provide a reasonable estimate.

2) You don’t need to provide all sorts of meaningless (to an outsider) sports stuff like “Coaches’ Award, Varsity Tennis ‘07.” This has zero impact on your college admissions. What matters is: Are you good enough to play at Williams? If you are, you should contact the appropriate coach and report what she said. She might make you a tip. If so, you are in. She might offer to help in some way, but offer no guarantees. She might not return your e-mails.

3) Without more knowledge about the quality of your high school, it is hard to have an informed opinion. Grade point averages and ranks are meaningless without this background data. Top 10% of Exeter is better than top 1% of the bottom 1/3 of public high schools in the US. Best bet is to tell us which colleges admitted students with transcripts similar to yours (both in terms of courses taken and grades received) in the last few years.

4) Why would someone in Connecticut take the ACT but not the SAT?

Morty discussed the issue of intellectual vitality. He pitched this, not so much as a way to somehow identify kids with some sort of spark — see my previous discussion — but as a method for avoiding punishing kids who “take chances.” Let’s say you have two students, both with similar academic profiles. But one of the students took an academic chance [say, started studying a new language in 11th grade] and got a bad grade. Right now, the system favors the student who does not take that chance, who just studies the things that he is good at. Morty doesn’t like that. He wants to, at least, not penalize the student who studies something out of her comfort zone. He implied, but did not make clear, that he even wanted to favor such chance taking, all else equal. He mentioned that a very large number (80?) of the students in the class of 2012 had a intellectual vitality (”IV”) tag.

But Morty admitted that he did not know if their attempts to identify intellectual vitality were working. And, being an empirical economist (a phrase he used multiple times), he wanted to study it. Specifically, he mentioned supervising an honors student in doing this research. It was not clear if he had already selected a student. If you are a rising senior who has ever even thought about graduate school in economics (whatever your current major at Williams), you would be an idiot not to consider contacting Morty right now about working with him on this.

Morty discussed the issue of how Williams can/should ensure that the students we accept want to come and will be happy here. We have a big advantage in that lots of people seek the number one liberal arts college, especially from abroad. But does someone from Shanghai really know what they are getting into? Do they understand what it means to spend 4 years in rural New England? Morty noted that the Common Application makes it easy for someone who is already applying to Harvard and Swarthmore to just add Williams to their application list. Why not? [It is free for someone who checks the financial waiver box and, since elite colleges want more poor kids, why not check it?] Morty noted that we want to somehow tell which applicants really understand Williams and want to come here for the right reasons.

A committee of trustees (led by Bob Scott ‘68?) is actually looking at this issue and actively considering having Williams add a special essay section. Morty used the example [Not sure if this was actively under consideration?] of pointing out the course catalog and asking students to pick a few classes that they really wanted to take and to explain why. The expectation would be that students who really want to come to Williams would take the time to write these essays, would have the energy to look up the CVs of the professors and tell a compelling story. Even if this causes several thousand applicants not to apply [which seems plausible], Morty argued that this would be a feature rather than a bug. Why bother with students who aren’t that interested in Williams? They are unlikely to come even if we accept them. [And don't forget adverse selection since the ones that would come from this category are the ones that couldn't get in to any place better.] And even those that do come are less likely to be happy, contributing members of the community.

[I think that this is a great idea. In general, there are two models of Williams admissions. First is the contest. Once you set the rules (grades count for this much, SAT scores for this, X number of slots for athletes and URMs), you select the best candidates, regardless as to whether you think that they will come or be happy at Williams. You let them decide since they "won" the contest. The second model for Williams admissions is the dinner party. (Perhaps I need a better analogy? Suggestions welcome!) Although there are standards for who you most want at your party, you are especially interested in inviting people who will come and have a good time. Miserable guests make other people miserable as well. At the very best parties, all the attendees will be excited to be there.

In order to have a sense of whether this is a good idea, you would want to measure the happiness and contribution to campus life of different sorts of students, especially those who you think would have gone to the trouble of filling out an extra essay and those who wouldn't have. One (imperfect) way of getting to that would be to compare early decision Ephs (both those accepted early and those admitted regular) with other Ephs. One assumes that the ED Ephs are more likely to understand what Williams is all about and be making an informed choice. If such students are much happier and more involved in the community than a matched sample of non-ED students, then requiring an Williams-specific essay makes some sense.]

If Morty and/or the Trustees go very far down this path, it promises to be the biggest change in undergraduate admissions in a decade. Comments anyone?

Check out this great article on future Eph Amanda Reid ‘12. The highlights:

FALA director Kirk Quitter describes Reid as “one in a million.” “Her future is going to be whatever she wants it to be. She’s an outstanding artist, an outstanding scholar, and she’s going to change the world,” Quitter said.

Reid, who will graduate Friday, was recently selected as a Ron Brown scholar — one of the most prestigious awards presented to African American youth in the country. She will receive $10,000 a year for four years at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.

At Williams, Reid plans to delve into a combination of studio art, African American studies and history.

David Kane will be pleased to note that she turned down Yale (and, more importantly, Amherst):

Reid was also accepted to Yale University, Cal Poly Pomona, Amherst College, Swarthmore College, the University of Delaware, Carleton College and the University of Arizona.

During her high school years she was part of the swim and track teams, National Honor Society, Art Honor Society, French Honor Society, Black History Month assembly committee and student council. She organized FALA’s Amnesty International club.

“Amanda is so ahead of her years. Everything Amanda does is meaningful. She brought a sense of action and activism to our school,” FALA art educator Janeece Henes said. “She changes how you think and how you perceive.”

Another interesting piece of data from the 2007-2008 Common Data Set (pdf) concerns statistics for the wait list.

C2. Freshman wait-listed students (students who met admission requirements but whose final admission was contingent on space availability)

Do you have a policy of placing students on a waiting list? Yes
If yes, please answer the questions below for fall 2007 admissions:

Number of qualified applicants offered a place on waiting list: 1,553
Number accepting a place on the waiting list: 682
Number of wait-listed students admitted: 67 admitted, 51 matriculated
Is your waiting list ranked? No

It seems that this data is for the class of 2011. Has anyone heard what happened for the class of 2012?

In the competition between Williams and Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford, 90% of students cross-admitted, choose one of HYPS over Williams. But what percentage of applicants are cross-admitted? I always assumed that the vast majority of students who are admitted to HYPS are also admitted by Williams since all these schools have very similar admissions priorities. Are many students rejected by Williams but admitted by HYPS? Here is one.

On a Monday in March, Holly Rippon-Butler was feeling sick, so she had her father pick her up from school.

Along with being ill, Holly, a Schuylerville High School senior, had to deal with recently being put on the waiting list at her three top college choices — Middlebury, Amherst and Vassar.

But life was about to get worse. That afternoon, she received a letter from Williams College. Her application had been rejected.

So, that same day, when Yale University replied, Holly had to brace herself for another rejection.

“I was feeling like, well, if I got wait-listed at all these schools, and rejected here, well, with Yale — no chance,” she said on a recent day.

Holly logged on to the school’s Web site, and found something strange. Music began playing, although it was choppy because of her dial-up modem. A photo of a bulldog appeared on her monitor.

While the words “Welcome” and “Class of 2012″ appeared on the screen, it wasn’t until Holly read an online letter that she realized she had been accepted into Yale.

Her eyes filled with tears. She went to the garage to tell her father the news.

The family, who lives on a farm, was in shock for the next week. Holly, an only child, was going to Yale. And while it costs $50,000 a year to attend, the university was paying for nearly all of it.

A nice story. But why would Yale admit Holly while Williams rejected her? My guess would be that someone on the Yale admissions committee has a soft spot for either farm girls or students from Schuylerville. Other explanations?

What proportion of Williams students should come from abroad?  The debate on the relative merits of international candidates is an Ephblog staple, and last week, the topic re-emerged following the publication of a New York Times article on elite Korean prep schools.  The piece detailed the intense academic environment at the Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul, which students attend with the goal of eventually gaining acceptance to a prestigious American university.

We, however, have a man on the scene.  Williams graduate Joe Foster teaches at the Daewon School and was quoted in the Times article, testifying to the dedication of his students.  He was kind enough to discuss, via e-mail, his experience at an education institution very different from those we are accustomed to.

Ephblog: How did you wind up at the Daewon School?

Foster: Well, my parents are both teachers and I was raised at a boarding school in California, where my father was a dean, so I’ve been around education all my life. Maybe for that reason I always harbored some resistance to both school and teaching. After the dot-com crash, though, I was ready for a change and some travel, so I came to Seoul. I didn’t have much of a long-term plan, but I got a job teaching SAT prep and really took to it — in fact, I completely fell in love with teaching. I stayed at that job for four and a half years, and the first time I looked for something else I stumbled across the Daewon position. I’ve been at Daewon for just over a year.

(more…)

It was just 4 years ago that I (successfully?) urged Julia Sendor ‘08 to choose Williams over Harvard. This thread, and the appearance of long-time reader Sam Jackson (Yale ‘11), provides an opportunity to revisit. There are scores of students that were accepted at both Yale and Williams. Around 90% of them will probably choose Yale. I think that a majority are making a mistake, that most of them would be better off if they chose Williams. I think that most students are misinformed about what life is actually like at the two schools. Perhaps we can convince Sam (and other Yalies) to participate in the conversation.

To be clear, I don’t think that Sam (and other Yalies) have a bad time or get a bad education at Yale. I just think that they would have a better time and get a better education at Williams. Let’s start by focusing on academics. (I hope that Sam will answer these questions, both for himself and the “typical” student.) For both Yale and Williams:

1) How many professors know by name the typical student? By “professors,” I mean tenured or tenure track faculty. I think that, for the average first year at Williams, this is at least 4 if not 6. At Yale, I predict 1 or 2.

2) How much written feedback does the typical student receive on his papers from professors? At Williams, this must be in the thousands of words. At Yale, very little. Most/all of the written feedback is from poorly-paid and harried graduate students. Some is from lecturers and adjuncts of various sorts. I bet Sam has received written feedback from no more than two professors in his first year.

3) How much one-on-one conversation does the typical student have with professors? At Williams, this varies dramatically by student and does depend on how often you seek out faculty members outside of class. The same is true at Yale. But the average Eph gets around 10 times more direct interaction with faculty. The average Williams student in a single tutorial exchanges more words with that one professor in a semester than Sam Jackson will exchange with all his professors put together over the course of four years.

These are, of course, rough estimates. But I did live with Harvard undergraduates for 4 years and there is no doubt that these estimates apply there. I suspect that the same is true at Yale, although things are (reportedly) better in New Haven.

The market failure is that the typical high school student has no idea about this reality. She thinks that her interactions with professors at Yale would be, more or less, just like her interactions with professors at Williams, the only difference being that the Williams professors assign the books written by the Yale professors. If students really knew what they were getting, more would choose Williams.

Contrary opinions welcome.

I was poking around on EphBlog looking for something, when I realized I’d never really looked at the Ephblog Quote Wall. Looking over it, I saw this:

In some respects what we say may never matter, yet history has proven time and again that there are sometimes cases where one voice has made a difference. The most successful of these though were always the ones who were compassionate in their cause and careful with their words. — M. Esa Seeglum ‘06

I’ll be honest that I have no idea what inspired this quote or who the author is (the link on the page was broken). But it lead me to reflect on my time at Williams and some of those who had inspired me. It also made me contemplate Larry’s suggestion that we might discuss people at Williams that had great influence on us, be it professors, fellow students, townsfolk, staff, or otherwise. I suppose this could be for the better or for the worse, but I’m hoping better. For any recently admitted students who have stumbled upon us, I hope this can give you a flavor of why we Eph Alums are so involved (sometimes overly so) in our alma mater. As you can see from this blog, our fierce loyalty involves sometimes equally fierce criticism because we want Williams to continue to improve. But I think it is safe to say that Williams has had a great impact on the lot of us, and it is good to periodically step back and remember why.

For me, there are quite a few people who had great influence on me, but I’ll start with one here. Professor Bill Darrow, Chair of the Religion Department and all-around great guy. Of course, he is a brilliant professor, but I had a number of brilliant professors at Williams. There was something extra in the way he managed to welcome students to explore complex questions, to challenge us and yet make us feel “safe” in some way to do it. He taught tutorials in his cramped office in the Stetson maze with books surrounding you on all sides, wearing what can only be described as “Cosby sweaters.” He was like a caring uncle or grandparent - but a really, really smart one. For those of you out there who know him, you’ll also recall his particular manner of speaking where his voice dropped when he made a point and how he would kind of look upward as he reached for words sometimes.

I came to Williams as a little overachiever, as most of us did. I didn’t do so well in my first Religion class - at least for me - and my confidence was shaken. Indeed, my first semester grades were my worst by far at Williams. But I was lucky enough to have Prof. Darrow as my advisor. He was encouraging, gently pushing me to still take his 300-level tutorial as a freshman the way I had originally planned (coming in, I had quite big plans for myself). What possessed me to think I could handle it, I don’t know. What possessed him to encourage me to keep going with it, I don’t know that either. It was remarkable. I was challenged every week, struggling with texts that I only partially understood, trying to put together a 10-15 page paper or critique another student’s each week, and I’m sure looking like a complete idiot. But it was one of the most valuable experiences of my time at Williams. I got through it, proved to myself I could stack up with other students despite the immense self-doubt I was feeling at the time. It also lead me to major in Religion, the subject where I, on average, had some of my lowest grades. But Professor Darrow convinced me that was okay, he was one of the first people to help me realize the value of just thinking, and thinking hard about things. There didn’t have to be a problem to solve, the pursuit itself was worthy - and the grades, while important, were not the best judge of a successful course.

I stuck with it, and “Papa D” continued to challenge me, and comfort me, through my time at Williams. During our senior major seminar for religion, the group of 10-12 of us spent Wednesday afternoons together at the top of Hopkins Hall discussing birth and death (yes, the actual topic of the seminar), and often staying late after class still discussing the issues. We also managed to use the Sixth Sense, Bladerunner, and the Neverending Story in our presentations in that class, showing the sense of humor he also exhibited toward us! He encouraged us to gather for lunch beforehand (and came to my co-op once for it, to my great thrill), to continue these discussions, to explore the flights of ideas hatched in the mind of 21-year-olds late in the afternoon.

It was his office I cried in the spring of my junior year when everything seemed for the moment to be falling apart around me. I was trying to serve on the JASC, had a suicidal first-year in my entry, a paper due in his class and another, some other student-activity related issue happening, and it was the first anniverary of an old friend’s death. I went in to ask for an extension on the paper (which he always gave to anyone), and ended up spending part of the afternoon there with him, the stacks of books, and a box of kleenex. He probably doesn’t even remember it, but his compassion reflected all that was good about the close student-faculty relationship at Williams to me.

I had the good fortune to serve as his TA in my final semester. When we talked about the job, he mentioned the value he saw in going back to those texts from Religion 101, the ones that he knew had given me so much trouble at the beginning. It was a way to complete the circle of my time at Williams. He actually thought about things like that - the full cycle of education and growth, and how it impacted his students.

Going forward in my life, I have sought to model that combination of encouragement and support - with a little push to challenge oneself. I also have to pause sometimes and remember the value of things that aren’t so task-oriented. Reading important books and thinking important thoughts are good things. So there is my (somewhat sappy) anecdote for you all about someone at Williams who influenced me. I hope that others will add their own posts in the commentary. And if you don’t, I’ll be forced to add more of my own!

It’s that time of year.

OH my gosh.
everytime i check an online decision i feel like my insides are being devoured very slowly and painfully by who knows what. its the worst feeling in the world. i usually cant get myself to click the button to check for a good 1~2 hours. nauseous? heck yes!

Admissions letters went out yesterday. Do we have any applicants among our readers? If so, let us know how the process seemed to you.

Good luck to all.

This essay seems to apply just as well to our alma mater as it does to the author’s school:

Even worse than the temporary psychological distortion is… the permanent sense of entitlement the admissions game provides. Winners can plausibly claim they participated in a brutal competition (even if many potential competitors were never told about it). So we owe no one anything. Many of the people I went to school with became doctors, public advocates, television writers who bring laughter to the American people. But most of them became, like my friend who believed that getting into Harvard was the hardest thing in life, investment bankers. We meritocrats have not, generally speaking, used our fantastic test-taking abilities to build a more equitable world. In fact, buoyed by a sense of the fairness of the process, we may have done the reverse.

Some of our readers will soon find themselves on the Williams wait list.

Like jittery investors scrambling to hedge their bets, selective colleges and universities are placing far more applicants than usual on their waiting lists this spring as a safeguard against an unusually murky admissions season. But while the policy gives colleges some peace of mind, it plunges students into an admissions purgatory that could string out the stressful selection process for weeks to come.

Colleges have typically been able to estimate the percentage of accepted students who will enroll in the fall with a fair degree of confidence. This year, several factors have conspired to thwart their projections: a shaky economy, record numbers of applications, and sweeping financial aid expansions that make it harder to predict what colleges middle-class families will choose.

Faced with so many variables, colleges are wait-listing more students to fine-tune the numbers and makeup of their incoming freshman class. Lengthening the waiting list creates a crucial buffer of students in a year of deep uncertainty about how many will eventually show up, college officials say.

…

“It’s always tricky to predict, but this is probably the trickiest year yet, because the landscape has shifted so radically,” said Dick Nesbitt, director of admissions at Williams College.

For colleges, “it’s like picking the brackets in college basketball,” Nesbitt said. “You might think you’re being scientific, but then you get blindsided.”

Williams, which received more than 7,500 applications for a class of 538, will accept about 100 more students than last year, but will not significantly increase its waiting list beyond last year’s 500 students, Nesbitt said.

Comments:

1) Newton North is the alma mater of Esther Mobley. Was that discussion only a year ago? Good times! Hope that Mobley likes Smith.

2) I think that, back in the day, the official story was that predicting acceptance levels was relatively easy. College officials had lots of experiences and things were mostly stable from year to year. I think that this was true then but that the world, as Nesbitt describes, is now a different place.

3) Five hundred seems like a huge number to me. Were the lists anywhere near that long five or ten years ago? There has been discussion in the past of ensuring that the College took enough students off the waitlist to ensure that people saw the list as “credible.”

4) I think that the ending of early admission at Harvard and Princeton is playing particular havoc with the Williams process. There are, literally, hundreds of students who, in past years, would have been accepted early by these schools and not bothered to apply to Williams who are now being considered by Nesbitt and Co. What are they to do? They would love for these students to come to Williams but don’t want to admit them all given the knowledge that they are very unlikely to accept. I suspect that this one of the reasons for the 100 extra acceptances. Williams would love to “steal” some of these students from Harvard/Princeton.

5) I heard a story last year that the valedictorian from Newton South was rejected by Williams while being accepted by Harvard. The implication was that Williams had rejected her, not because they did not want her but because they fully expected her to be accepted elsewhere and then to turn down Williams. I suspect that this is a real danger for Williams applicants with superb credentials who don’t give the College at least some hint that they really want to come. For example, if you live in Newton but never visit Williams, I’ll bet that your chances of getting in are much reduced.

6) The best way to think about this brave new world is that there are now three major waves of Williams admissions. First is early decision. If you really want to go to Williams and you are either poor or rich, then apply early. Your chances are, I think, much improved if you do (although there is some debate on this point). The only cost is less power in negotiating financial aid (but that only applies to “middle class” students) and the lost opportunity of applying elsewhere. Second is regular decision. The usual rules apply, but you are even more advised now than in the past to indicate to Williams that, if you are accepted, you will attend. How to do that is left as an reader exercise for the comment section. Third, and this is new, is the wait list. It seems that Williams and schools like it will be taking many more students off the wait list than they have in the past. I hope to do more reporting on this topic. Do we have any readers who came in off the wait list? Tell us about your experience.

An article by this headline in today’s Washington Post discusses an impending decline in high school graduates next year “in many parts of the nation” and a significant shift in the racial composition of classes applying to colleges. We’re not talking about a nationwide shift yet, if ever, but as is the case in all heterogeneous dynamic systems, interesting effects will hit specific cross sections of universities first. My favorite quote in the article:

Schools in more remote areas, with fewer resources and no particular academic focus, could struggle, said Steven Roy Goodman, an educational consultant and admissions strategist. That is why the 700-student Northland College in Wisconsin uses its location on Lake Superior to promote it as “the environmental liberal arts college.”

“To use the obvious ecological metaphor, we must specialize in our niche, because we can’t compete with dramatically better-resourced generalists,” Provost Rich Fairbanks said.

I generally find comparisons to ecosystems pretty sexy.  My experience tells me there are amazing parallels between organization identity and organism niche that make the lessons of one apply quite neatly to the other more often than would be apparent.  I still remember the graphs of biotic population dynamics I encountered in my advanced ecology class at Williams that showed that stable coexistence of organisms was only possible when their specializations were sufficiently disparate.  It’s a story of competition-management that plays out all over, from the small colleges of Wisconsin, to the SLACs of the Northeast, to botanical gardens sharing a climate zone and region.

The New York Times has an article today about high school students learning squash to increase their chances of admission at elite colleges. When it comes to football, there are tons of students to pick from; when it comes to squash, there are a lot fewer–hence the strategy.

When I was at Williams, Episcopal Academy was the squash powerhouse prep school–not sure who it is now. And, squash is pretty easy to learn. One of my proudest moments in school was when in my junior year I beat the 7th ranked player in the nation. Admittedly, Don was coming down with a bad case of the flu, and it was the best game of squash I ever played, but hey, I still won–and I had learned only two years before, in a freshman PE class.

Also, Bill Simon ‘73 (the person running for Governor in California until he stepped aside for Schwarzenegger and whose family gave the new squash courts) had never played squash before he got to college, and he was captain of the Williams squash team his senior year.

At the moment, the most e-mailed article on the The Boston Globe’s web site (www.boston.com) is one entitled, “At elite colleges, new aid for the middle.”

Some excerpts:

“The misconception is you get financial aid only if you’re poor,” William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, told about 160 parents and their college-bound children last week at a recruitment event at a Worcester hotel also attended by admissions officers from Duke, Stanford, Georgetown, and Penn.

Fitzsimmons and the other officials said they are increasingly reaching out to families caught in the middle: those who are too wealthy to be eligible for federal grants, but not so wealthy as to be able to absorb the $50,000 a year for college, particularly with the rising costs of home ownership.

A decade ago, when the annual price for elite colleges hovered near $30,000, the five colleges gave little or no financial aid to families earning $100,000 or more, unless they had more than one child in college. Now, colleges say they typically cover between $20,000 and $30,000 of the $50,000 bill for comparable families.

At Harvard, the average need-based grant for families in the $100,000-$140,000 income range last school year was $21,693, up from $17,910 in 2004-05.

At Stanford, a family with an income of more than $100,000 with one child in college would get about $30,000 this academic year, compared with just $4,000 to $5,000 a decade ago. Stanford specifically targeted $5 million of its $10 million overall aid increase last year for middle- and higher-income families, its financial aid director said.

College officials define middle class as families who make $100,000 and more per year….

At the admissions directors’ presentation in Worcester, Fitzsimmons stunned many parents when he showed a slide of the income levels of Harvard’s 3,357 undergraduate aid recipients last academic year. About 40 percent of the recipients came from families who made more than $100,000, while just over 30 percent were from families making under $60,000. The highest income on the slide was $180,000 and above.

An anonymous comment awakened me to the fact that this is the year to test a prediction regarding matriculation at Williams that I have had for a while: that weather during Previews weekend is a significant factor in an admittee’s decision to attend. Bad weather will lower yield on admittees. This year is the first chance I have to test my hypothesis since 2001. Read on for details and musing.

(more…)

Ryan Lupo ‘11 sounds like just the sort of student who will thrive at Williams.

In addition to his outstanding performance on the football field, Lupo is a member of the National Honor Society, a Peer Leader at the school for the last three years, a member of the Student Council and a Boys State delegate.

Lupo also is in the school choir and was the leader in the school musical, “Pajama Game,” where he portrayed Sid Sorokin. “It was a lot of work and practice,” he said of the musical. “It starts up right after football so I went from one right into the other. I really enjoyed doing it and I am going to try to do that at college. I’ll be playing football, but I also hope to be in an a capella group they have.”

He’ll also be trying to continue his success on the football field, leaving behind his 16 school records as he heads to Williams “I leave Aug. 27, so we actually start pretty late,” Lupo said. “The football season will be shorter for me now than it was in high school. We play eight games in the NESCAC and that’s it. I’m already looking forward to the Amherst-Williams game. It’s a great rivalry and I’m excited to get to be a part of it. I can’t wait to get there.”

Indeed.

And, for potential members of the class of 2011, if you are deciding between Williams and a larger school, keep in mind that it is mostly impossible to do two things seriously. You can’t both play football and sing a capella. At Williams, pursuing two passions is routine.

Julia Sendor ‘08 made the right choice 3 years ago. Will you?

The Record covers admissions news for the class of 2011. Lots of interesting stuff. How is that quota for international students doing?

There are 93 non-U.S. citizens offered acceptance, making up 8% of the group and representing 43 different countries. The majority of international applications arrived from China. “The more distance areas you pull from, the lower your yield,” Nesbitt said. He used this trend to explain why accepting a greater number of students overall will not affect the College’s yield, since many of the accepted of the accepted students from California and overseas may not want to go to school so far from home.

In another thread, an anonymous reader wites:

Hmmmm. since int’l students have lower yield than the US ones, I would expect that the int’l percentage be in 5-7% range. I guess that they have not revised the quota this year either. Well, maybe next year.

I was under the impression that the yield from international students was higher because of Williams’s policy of need-blind admissions for non-US citizens, matched by only a handful of schools. Why would it be lower? Because international students are more likely to choose a “name” school over Williams than US students? Perhaps. Or are Nesbitt’s comments only supposed to apply to distances within the US?

My prediction is that the international quota is being slowly phased out. I expect to see more than 6% international students in the class of 2011.

Un-PC Gene Expression points to the latest SAT data (pdf) for the class of 2010. Highlights:

1) Colleges don’t care much about the Writing score, so ignore it for this discussion.

2) Although more women take the SAT then men, the standard deviation of the male scores is much larger (and the mean slightly higher) so men hold their own at Williams-level scores. For example, since the 91st percentile in Math for the 680,725 male test-takers is at 700, there are approximately 62,000 men with scores 700+. For women, the number is 31,000 (0.04 * 785,019). The Verbal (Critical Reading) scores have similar distributions, but, since scores are correlated, there are still probably many more men in the population than women scoring above, say, 1400. Williams does not need to lower admissions standards for men in order to maintain gender balance.

3) Asian Americans have higher scores in math and much higher standard deviations. Look at the percentile corresponding to a 700 for Math. It is 81! This means that there are 26,000 (0.19 * 138,303) Asian Americans with 700+ Math scores. Compare that number to
1,500 (0.01 * 150,643) for African Americans. The ratio of 26,000 to 1,500 is approximately 17:1. What is the ratio of Asian American to African American students at Williams? Approximately, 1:1.

Now the differences for verbal scores are much less. See here for more on Asian American admissions.

Does your Math SAT matter for getting into Williams? Of course. That is true no matter your race. But Williams is going to do whatever is necessary to ensure that no large US racial group is represented at significantly less than its proportion in the US population. If you are African American or Hispanic (or if you at least check the appropriate box), what matters is not your absolute SAT score but your score relative to applicants of the same race.

The point of this post is not to argue the merits of current Williams policies but to explain those policies, and the constraints which they confront.

Things are hopping over at College Confidential now that admissions news is out.

Decision: WAITLISTED, gotta love yield protection

Stats:

* SAT: CR: 770 M: 800 W: 690
* SAT IIs: 800 mathII, 760 USH, 740 Physics
* GPA: 103.6
* Rank: 3/727
[Snip]

…

Why I think I was waitlisted: I showed no interest. I never visited and never will. I honestly just applied because it was easy.

…

I got into Columbia, Cornell and Chicago, all of which I would choose over Williams.

Good for Williams! Later commentators in the thread claim that Williams does not practice yield management, one aspect of which is the rejection of highly qualified candidates whom you expect will not attend. By rejecting them before they can reject Williams, the College improves its yield.

Does Williams practice yield management? Of course! (Comments welcome.) The valedictorian of a local (Massachusetts) high school, accepted virtually everywhere (Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, et cetera) was waitlisted by Williams. Why? Probably because she never visited and/or didn’t sign up for an alumni interview and/or gave no indication that she was interested in Williams. Might she have come if accepted? Perhaps, and that is the danger of yield management. But the College gets around this a bit by waitlisting her. If she indicates any interest in coming, the College would probably accept her in a jiffy.

Should Williams practice yield management? In an ideal world, No. But in this imperfect world it has little choice and, fortunately, the cost of doing so is low.

Perhaps we can help our friends on College Confidential.

[Q]: Is Williams paying for the Preview Weekend plane ticket? The letter was kind of vague, and I need to know as soon as possible because my family is coming also. Thanks!

[A]: If they haven’t actually sent you a plane ticket, then probably not. They never offered to buy one for me. I think they usually do it for the diversity previews (April 14-17th) but not for the normal-people previews (the 16-17th).

Really. Even if you are a billionaire URM, they still send you (unasked?) a free ticket? And non for the “norrmal-people,” even the poor ones? I judge this unlikely but have no firsthand knowledge.

Not sure if I like the “normal-people” terminology, but what would be better? Non-URMs? People of no color? Help me out!

Few things more fun than attractive Ephs on the front page of the New York Times (previous examples here, here and here).

Does this article provide another example?

To anyone who knows 17-year-old Esther Mobley, one of the best students at one of the best public high schools in the country, it is absurd to think she doesn’t measure up. But Esther herself is quick to set the record straight.

At Newton North High School in Newton, Mass., a Wonder Woman mural offers a role model to some girls. Newton North, one of the best public high schools in the country, gears its teaching toward gears its teaching toward a wide range of students.

“First of all, I’m a terrible athlete,” she said over lunch one day.

“I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly,” she continued. “This is one of the things I’m most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, ‘What sports do you play?’ I don’t play any sports. It’s awkward.”

Esther, a willowy, effervescent senior, turned to her friend Colby Kennedy. Colby, 17, is also a great student, a classical pianist, fluent in Spanish, and a three-season varsity runner and track captain. Did Colby worry, Esther asked, that she fell short in some way?

“Or,” said Esther, and now her tone was a touch sarcastic, “do you just have it all already?”

They both burst out laughing.

Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing girls” translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns.) Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do.

But being an amazing girl often doesn’t feel like enough these days when you’re competing with all the other amazing girls around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.

Indeed. Turns out that Esther (middle girl in photo) applied to Williams. Read her application essay here. I especially like the ending.

I live in Newton Massachusetts, where I cannot find my tradition. People here seem to be sitting on the edge of their seats, hardly able to wait for progress. Five minutes away, in Boston, there are prestigious schools and fancy, famous law firms on every corner. This is the seat of liberal thinking. But all of the thinking can jade you. I encounter so much skepticism, especially about religion. When I seek assurance about important spiritual things, when I begin to doubt that there is any kind of divine force regulating reality, there is nothing in Newton to grasp onto, no well of faith to replenish me. That’s when I long for unfaltering, faithful, devoted Kentucky. I long for its simplicity and pace.

The people here race to work, rush home, and dash off to Cape Cod or Maine on weekends…..

I want to be rooted somewhere. I want to belong somewhere. I want a place in the world to be a little part of me, and I want to carry it with me to other places.

Here’s what I’m looking for: I’m looking for the security, the familiarity, and the heritage of a small town. I’m looking for the free thinking, the openness, the accepting and welcoming attitude of Newton, of a big city.

What is Williamstown like?

Exactly that. I have carried a little bit of Williams with me for twenty years. Haven’t you? Much more below.

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The NYT Education Life section from Sunday leads with a cover story called “The Asian Campus,” the subject of which you can probably infer.

Factoids:

1) The print edition of the section includes a runner along the bottom part of the page listing the Asian enrollment percentages at selected colleges and universities (Stanford 24%, Harvard 18%, etc.). Amherst (13%) and Wellesley (27%) are included; Wesleyan and Williams are not.

2) Daniel Golden, author of “The Price of Admission,” is quoted describing Asians as the “new Jews” in the context of higher education.

3) The article’s author attacks the Asian admissions problem through the prism of the race-blind UC system. The state of California is 12% Asian; the UC undergrad system is 37% Asian. At Berkeley, that number is 41%, 46% for the current freshman class.

4) Apparently, the current UCLA freshman class of 4,809 includes a grand total of 100 black students. I mean, holy shit. After checking the UCLA athletics Web site, I’d say at least 34 of those frosh are varsity athletes.

5) The big question is about the future of admissions in “the post-affirmative action age,” according to the author.

Are we headed toward a day when all elite colleges will look like Berkeley: relatively wealthy whites (about 60 percent of white freshmen’s families make $100,000 or more) and a large Asian plurality and everyone else underrepresented?

Unhelpfully, the author does not provide an answer for his own question.

There’s an article in The New York Times that talks about the rite of passage of taking college tours. Given that they’re together in the car for hours, parents and children actually have to talk.

I enjoyed the tidbits: the investment banker who liked the fact that his daughter could drive so he could thumb on his Blackberry and take conference calls; the prospective student who announced after a several hour drive to Colgate, “I am not going to a school on a hill,” and got back into the car; and the daughter who crossed Swarthmore off her list when she spotted a student wearing Birkenstocks.

When I was applying to colleges thirty-five years ago, I crossed Princeton off my list after an encounter with a rude tour guide; and Middlebury was out after a receptionist in the Admissions Office pointedly noted that, “Middlebury is highly selective; are you sure you want a catalog?” Any other war stories?

There’s an interesting article in The New York Times today entitled, “In Search of Standouts Who May Not Stand Out Enough.” It describes a program run by the Posse Foundation, in which talented urban students are selected and then groomed for attending colleges such as Brandeis, Bryn Mawr, Lafayette College, and Pomona. After going through a selection process which includes interviews and seeing how well they work with others, the chosen students are then grouped by the college they will attend, creating a “posse.” They bond before they get to college, and therefore help each other over the rough spots while they’re at college.

A creative way to help and support solid students who may not have made it to a selective college on their own.

After reading Dick Nesbitt’s article and perusing the accompanying table showing enrollment by race, several things stand out to me. Follow the jump for all my thoughts…

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The PC explanation for why Jews make up 3% of the US population but 10% or more of the students at places like Williams is that Jewish culture values educational achievement. That is undoubtedly true, but the New York Times has an article today suggesting a different hypothesis.

A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.

The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England.

You can read the study itself here and more commentary here.

Topics like this are probably too controversial for graduation week-end, but I can’t resist noting, in the context of the College’s Diversity Initiatives, that one of the reasons that some groups are “underrepresented” at Williams is that, pari passu, other groups at Williams are overrepresented. Want to increase diversity — meaning to make the percentages from various groups equal to the percentages in the applicant pool — at Williams? Don’t let in so many Jews.