"scarce" resources, college and sexism

[rm]

And then there's this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23britz.html

It's the sort of thing that makes it hard for me to imagine any world in which women, at least as a group, don't always lose.

via rackmount

Comments

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Admissions officers believe, I think, more than is justified, that it matters where you go to college. There are a few schools - a tiny handful -that everyone has heard of and are known to be huge plusses, like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, but outside that wee group all the distinctions we make about 'good and selective colleges' are just fakery. People make all kinds of distinctions between, like, Brown and Oberlin and Kenyon and UNC Chapel Hill, as if there is a hierarchy there that means anything in any other part of existence, and it's false.

The single most important thing is to go somewhere you feel at home and not to go into a huge mountain of debt for an undergraduate education. If you're part of the 99.8% of students who don't get into one of the five colleges whose mere name on a diploma matters, there are simply no other significant factors to consider. Admissions officers think there are but they're shilling.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I went to a college below my level because I was both a slacker in high school and because it was a way to get a private university education without any debt (also DC seemed like a good place to go to J-school).

15 years after graduating, I feel grateful I didn't wind up going to one of the schools that mattered, because it's one less thing upon me that creates expectations about how I look, what I do, how I behave.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Whereas I always regretted not even trying.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

There's more than five that matter if you want to continue with grad school.

Which ones they are, of course, depends on your field. Which many people don't know going in, even if they think they do. *sigh*

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Well, sorta. I mean, people say that, but in my experience it's less true than people want you to think. I see grad programs taking people from all over, because most undergraduate programs in most subjects are bad, because nobody cares about undergraduate education. And who knows what they want to go to grad school in when they start?

Of course, grad school admission is a whole other thing, and is wildly different from field to field and even department to department. It's both hideously and arbitrarily competitive. I have no idea why I got in some places and not others, and there's no way to reconstruct the decision. For all anyone knows it was my star sign.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Mm. Having talked to people involved in grad school admissions, college affects (though doesn't determine) how my department looks at applicants. This might differ from program to program, though.

It's also really not arbitrary, but I think it is a lot more subjective than undergrad admissions, because "fit" becomes extremely important. There's this thing about who in the department likes you...

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Perhaps arbitrary isn't the right word - but 'fit' is at least as much about them as about you. It's idiosyncratic at best.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely.
And it can be how much you figure out about what they want to hear, too.

[drfardook.livejournal.com]

There is a huge distinction between the four schools you mentioned. I just wish that they wouldn't try to describe the schools as if they existed on a hierarchy when they all have very different missions, history, character, and students.

There's some numerical data you can use to describe the school in a ranked fashion, what scores are required to get in, what percentage of applicants it admits, what their demographics are, how many graduates go on to get a PhD, what their incomes are like, etc. The problem is that people don't know how to read a chart so they're just going to look at who's number 13 and who's number 22 out of 50. Oh, that must mean Oberlin's better than Kenyon but not as good as Brown.

Except people from Oberlin have a notoriously hard time getting along with the general population (I'm one of them... its true) while the CIA recruits heavily from Brown. I think that's a little more important than who rejects more kids.

So I understand why admissions officers are going to try to sell each college on its own merits, but these are things you can't place on a graph.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

I went to a state school and ... don't really regret it. I'm debt free too!