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E-PrinceEditor's Note Appended
Correction Appended
No student really understands all the intricacies of how admissions officers in West College will create of the Class of 2013. There are some well-known factors that play a role - SAT scores, high school ...
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Actually, the poverty line for a family of four is $21,200... $14,000 is for a family of two.
While data collection would no doubt be a bit complicated, it might also be worthwhile for the admissions office to see how the best students they didn't admit fared at the institutions they attended. Interesting to see if the group enrolled at Princeton outperformed the students they won the close calls over.
i think it's important to realize that despite the fact that many princetonians are from a handful of traditional boarding schools, they are not all rich. in fact, most of these schools are very diverse, including socioeconomically. schools like exeter are need blind and is free for families making less than a certain amount of money.
You're right, of course, that tracking students through their time at Princeton would produce better metrics for admission. But it is naïve to think that the admissions office has any incentive to do so.
As Jerome Karabel convincingly argued in The Chosen, admissions offices do *not* select candidates principally on merit. Merit certainly plays some role for most, and most of the role for some, but the admissions office have to balance merit against other (political) goals. At the moment, the central political goal is increasing diversity, particularly socioeconomic diversity.
The problem is, it is notoriously difficult to predict how most students from low socioeconomic backgrounds will perform in college (a select extraordinary few the obvious exceptions). It is far easier to predict how upper middle class students will do.
If the admissions office were to track students through their four years, they would presumably find the same pattern: very large variance in the performance of low-income students as compared to their credentials. This would make it very hard to justify admitting many such students, when upper middle class students are not nearly such a gamble.
Thus, the admissions office has the incentive of ensuring that the merits of candidates are ambiguous, so it has significant (and unchallengeable) room to maneuver in building each class to conform to all of its (political and non-political) goals.
This (the power of ambiguity) is actually a well-known result in organizational theory, which has made universities one of its key study subjects.
If you're going to argue that the Admissions Office should check in on admitted students to see if they "succeeded," don't you have to tell us what on earth you mean by that? Nor is it obvious that this is the only reason to admit a student; perhaps we think Princeton is a better place because we have a certain person among us. An education should change a student, but how it changes them -- and when it does -- are not so easy to assess or predict as you seem to think. Thoughtful people could and do disagree about what it means to "succeed" in college and about whether it's worth having certain students here even if they don't "succeed" by whatever definition you are imagining.
"Please define success"
The question here isn't how success is to be *defined*, and it seems you're playing philosophers tricks here, demanding rigorous definitions that are sure to be controversial. (Though I hear Aristotle had a pretty decent account of human flourishing, if you're actually interested)
Rather, what matters is this: whatever the admissions office happens to be thinking thinking when it admits X and not Y, it would be nice if they went back to their admissions records four years later to see if X (not to mention Y if that were at all feasible) did indeed perform as they expected him to - would they in fact have admitted X in retrospect? That question is obviously worth asking.
No, it's not a "philosopher's trick" or a word game to ask what the author means when he tosses around the word "success" in such a fuzzy-headed manner. The point is that admissions officers don't, and shouldn't, have specific outcomes in mind when they admit students. If someone is admitted as a talented engineer but ends up writing a stellar English thesis, is that a failure? What if they're admitted as a performing artist but end up starring on a sports team? What if they're admitted as an academic talent but end up getting Bs and Cs because they are spending all their time doing volunteer work and falling in love and making lifelong friends and coming out of the closet and changing their mind about politics and reading great books in the library? The admissions office is not in the business of judging whether any of these things are successes or failures. And measuring outcomes of higher education is notoriously hard in any case, since it usually means oversimplifying our picture of what college does for people. All the admissions office does, and all it should do, is to put together a class cohort that will then get the opportunity to have a series of possibly uncontrollable, life-changing experiences over the next four years; admissions officers don't get to say what those experiences ought to be, and they don't need to check to see if they predicted them later on.
"If someone is admitted as a talented engineer but ends up writing a stellar English thesis, is that a failure?"
No, but if he ends up writing a piss-poor English thesis it might be. In any case, they'd only have to decide whether they'd have admitted someone in retrospect, not whether they'd have hired someone in retrospect for the *same reason*.
What you need to accomplish is to minimize buyer's regret, and reexamining decisions four (or ten or fifteen) years on seems like a good way of optimizing admission offers. I assume it isn't your case that any process that admitted You has to be perfect.
I wonder how much alumni has to do with this? For instance how the heck did George W. Bush ever get into Yale? Im sure the same nepotism and Alumni stuff is going on here too. I am moving to Princeton next month in October from Dallas and of course there is no way I would ever be able to get into Princeton on a Degree program because they do not accept transfer students and I am not about to start over. Howerver I do plan on attending the Continuing Education program and then transfer my Princeton transcripts over to another University. Hey I may not have a degree from Princeton but I can at least say I went. LOL
Oh and I don't like the anaology of the plumber. For one thing a plumber you pay to fix your pipes. At princeton the student is paying princeton to attend class. In this case Princeton is the plumber.
PS> Get ready Princeton here I come. I'll be the guy in the cute lil Volvo C30