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E-PrinceWhile Princeton has returned to the No. 1 spot in the US News & World Report ranking of America’s Best Colleges, the University has again come up short compared to other top schools in the competition for Rhodes Scholarships.
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I want to preface the following statements by saying that I've worked with Dean Ordiway before, and he's a great guy. He cares a lot about all the students who apply for these fellowships, and he spends a lot of time with those most promising candidates, reading over their essays and coaching them.
That said, it might be worthwhile to question whether the current fellowship office system as well as the administrators who staff that office are helping or hurting Princeton's candidates and potential candidates.
There are several plausible stories one could tell - Princeton students are being over-coached, their essays and interview responses seem too "rehearsed" or "cookie-cutter" to the Rhodes selection committee after all that coaching. Or, perhaps the implicit tastes and resulting steering that Ordiway and other administrators do to potential applicants actually leads to a less than optimal final applicant pool (there are lots of students who, after meeting with Ordiway, are told they have little chance or should try for one particular fellowship over another). Again, it's hard for any given student to question these administrators' expertise, but the issue raised in this article beg for a more systematic explanation.
Yes, 10 years isn't that large of a sample period, but it's long enough to seriously question the null hypothesis. Moreover, it discounts to some extent arguments that "grade deflation" is hurting Princeton's applicants' chances. Moreover, even if Princeton "makes up for" this gap through higher numbers of Marshall/Gates scholars or other fellowship winners (someone in the Prince should get on that), it's still worth questioning how much the institution of the fellowship office is actually helping our candidates.
Is it perhaps worth noting that Harvard and Stanford have significantly larger undergraduate student populations?
Okay, there's going to be statistical idiosyncrasies, and there are equally plausible stories about why Harvard (or any of the schools) is so good at producing Rhodes Scholars (or perhaps just recruiting potential Rhodes Scholars).
That said, Harvard's undergrad student population (right now) is 6700, compared to a little over 5000 for Princeton. Obviously, this isn't going to be a linear function (and we should adjust for the fact that both schools have been increasing the size of their student bodies in the past 10 years), but the student body disparity does not explain the 35-to-13 ratio. Yale's student body is about the same size as ours.
As for Stanford, one could make the argument they're really underachieving given the size of their student body, but again, that's relative to the others in the top 5.
Anecdotal evidence, collected over many years: truly outstanding students--the kind who win a Rhodes--avoid Princeton, or hesitate about coming here, because of its centuries-old bias against showing real enthusiasm for studies; moreover, Princeton admissions has historically favored team players and well-rounded teacher's pets. Result: an undergrad culture that kills off eccentrics and innovators--or sees them transfer ASAP.
Both this article and the recent grade inflation article imply that someone at the Prince needs to take a class in basic statistics. How many people at Princeton vs Harvard and Yale apply for Rhodes scholarships? Only when we know that can we assess what is going on.
I have to agree with Stu. I don't know if there's something about Princeton that discourages eccentric kids from applying in the first place, but once they are here, its a pretty stifling environment.
If a tree fell at Princeton, and no one was there to compare it to Harvard and Yale, would it make a sound?
Stu,
West Point has more eccentric students than Princeton?
The Princeton statistics are actually impressive to me. We have a significantly smaller student body than both Harvard and Yale and we still manage to show comparable statistics. Didn't we have the most of any university the last two years running? I think that this says something significant about the gudance that Princeton provides to applicants. You can't come out on top every year...
Three different credits for the graph and none of them are the author of the article? Really? There are only five data points - no Herculean effort here, even for the most inept user of Excel's "Chart Wizard"