<p>Well, kids like mine who won writing awards and had 800 verbal SAT scores were at least able to judge grammar, syntax, and word choice. Remember that some of these kids are extremely bright and intellectually mature, and are therefore capable of making adult-level assessments. That’s why they are the kind of students who are admitted to HYPS et. al.</p>
<p>I said I thought the boy who ran the table was well-qualified stats-wise. There was nothing suspect about that case for me. People who did have an issue with it seemed to be questioning the quality of his EC’s, and also whether or not a Caucasian or Asian applicant could have been admitted to all 8 with his same qualifications.</p>
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<p>Such a blind system just isn’t possible, because ECs give away ethnic and other identities all the time. Many kids do things in their communities or win awards that clearly mark them as Jewish, Korean, black, etc. </p>
<p>Nothing is completely fair and admissions to elites certainly are not. A kid that lives in an upper middle class suburb is going to be judged by the standards associated with that town/high school and, unless they are very low income, an adcom will not know that their parents could not afford tutors and private sports lessons. A majority kid in that situation would likely be in the same application bin as all the other kids from his or her high school,with no hook. A URM, even if he or she had all the advantages, could be considered hooked. However, even relatively poor kids in affluent towns still had the advantage of a better learning environment, teachers that would meet with them, local sports leagues that would likely waive fees when needed, and other factors when compared to a kid from an area with a much lower socioeconomic status. I would agree that “diversity” as a goal is trickier when a kid is still given the diverse hook, when the kid grew up with all the advantages in life. </p>
<p>OTOH, those situations are probably limited. One of America’s core values is to be a meritocracy. Giving a spot at an elite to a kid from a very poor background that scores a 1900 with no prep, has stayed in schools and achieved there to the extent possible, and has avoided the lure of the street, is very likely as good a, if not a better, candidate than a kid with all the advantages that scored much higher and has more AP classes. That kid deserves the opportunity. In reality, there are very few kids that meet elite standards that come from low achieving high schools. Those that are trying hard, but aren’t quite up to elite standards, are much more likely to end up at local CC or directional State U, when they could have been very successful at college ranked in the top 100. The average achieving kid from the suburbs that does not get into a top 20 is still much more likely to go to a very good college and get the traditional college experience than a poor kid.</p>
<p>Again, being disappointed is one thing. Being thankful for what you are given and the opportunities in front of you is more satisfying than blaming all those “others” for stealing what you perceived as righfully yours (and OP not directed at you, as I think your kid is probably happy with her choice at this point and the OP was written as a vent).</p>
<p>Sally: I know a kid who has a hispanic last name but who is of European Spanish descent. He was offered a great scholarship to a top 25 school but turned it down because he felt like it was wrong to take it since he was not a URM (not something he applied for). His parents were supportive of the decision, even though it meant they now had to pay for college. </p>
<p>“Such a blind system just isn’t possible, because ECs give away ethnic and other identities all the time. Many kids do things in their communities or win awards that clearly mark them as Jewish, Korean, black, etc.”</p>
<p>Not to mention the essays are full of information about their lives, ethnicities, religions, family status, economic status. Although my Chinese child has an Irish name, just the name and address of some kids will give them away as Asian.</p>
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<p>Oh really? Where did this child get his master’s degree in English? How long has he worked in the admissions office of a top college/university reading admissions essays?</p>
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<p>I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with the outcome but the point here isn’t whether there were SWF from the NE * admitted <a href=“I’d%20certainly%20hope%20so!”>/i</a> it’s how many * applied. * I believe this was pointed out pages and pages ago. </p>
<p>The OP was trying to point out that her D came from an overrepresented pool of kids and had a harder shot at admission, much harder than she thought going in. I thought her point was that the class below had better take note and adjust their college lists accordingly. But maybe this is kind of like a Rorshach test where we all project ourselves into the post. </p>
<p>I only know a lot about PhD admissions and I can say for certain that there is a huge element of self selection in PhD programs, much more so than in undergrad. Most people really only apply places where they think they have a shot. The people you meet from schools like Cornell and MIT are some of the top students there, the less accomplished students who may have been great during college applications are gone by then. </p>
<p>PhD admissions could care less about extracurriculars not related to your field/research. Only connections between recommenders matter. You could have met them through an NSF REU which tries to give opportunities to students who have less research going on at their home institutions. Resume padding is not rewarded, the admissions committee consists of professors who can see through that. The people I know who were most successful in admissions are very bookish and quiet but communicate well with professors who are also like that. They commonly express that PhD admissions are much more fair than undergrad admissions even though there is still some randomness. Students who couldn’t get into HYPSM for undergrad are not choosing between two or three of HPSM (Yale is not as good in my field at least).</p>
<p>For PhD programs, money is not an issue anymore for applicants during the process since you get paid a stipend which is the most generous at the top places. It is expensive to live in some of the cities (Palo Alto, Cambridge etc.) but just to give you an example, Stanford is offering me probably around $37,000, and Harvard $33,000 with an extra few thousand for three years due to a prestigious fellowship I am being offered.</p>
<p>The one thing that is a bit skewed at the very top schools is that most people I met at the visits came from top schools. However these were not necessarily based on the school overall but more on the physics department.
For example, a lot of people from schools like Illinois, UCSB, UCB etc. where they have a top ten physics department, </p>
<p>I did meet people from very random places like University of NV and the student mentioned that people don’t really apply to top places from there. I think it is probably due to the fact that less students per school apply from lower ranked schools. I do observe that a lot of the grad students from Penn came from lower ranked undergrad institutions, one even started at a CC.</p>
<p>“I’d say that a kid can know as much or more about a fellow student he went to school with for 12 years than the adcom will from just reading his application”</p>
<p>Actually, that isn’t always true. The students are aware of what a child reveals at school. As with many things in life, you only see one side of a person in any given situation. My son went through a very painful family situation of which almost no one in the school was aware. He basically told several of his very good friends, two of whom weren’t even at his school. He did discuss it with his guidance counselor at the end of his junior year because he wasn’t sure what, if anything, he should say about it on his college application. I can guarantee that the majority of the students had no idea what was going on with him and I know for a fact that the parents didn’t know what was going on. Until my son started sharing what happened at the end of his senior year, I had never shared our situation with one parent at his high school. Also, while other students were aware of my son’s musicality, many of them had no idea that he was a classical composer and pianist. It wasn’t something that he pursued through school and once again, many, many parents had no idea that he did this outside of school. </p>
<p>OTOH - I think that most people at his school were thrilled for him when he was accepted to his SCEA school. I never sensed any rancor/bitterness from one parent with whom I spoke. They all seemed to be truly delighted that my son was presented with such a wonderful opportunity.</p>
<p>Also, my son only shared his essays with one English teach, his grandma and me. Who are these kids who are going around showing their essays to all their classmates? </p>
<p>Let’s start here *but the admissions officers are not omniscient and thus are incapable of accurately discerning all the relevant factors from an application.*and ask ourselves just how posters got to be such experts. Clearly, you don’t KNOW what is relevant. You may know a success story or two, a disappointment or two- that’s all. You have an idea what YOU think would work better- but no basis, to begin with.</p>
<p>Just why do you think you can identify a “special snowflake?” Ever read even a dozen apps, much less hundreds or thousands? </p>
<p>This really isn’t about the challenges. It is about the triumphs. You don’t get into Yale because your parents endured or failed. Not because your parents are successful. You get in based on what YOU did, what you gained, in strengths, attributes and outlook, how you stretched, how you view the world, how you commit your time and have some impact. Sorry, but many overestimate one side and severely underestimate the other.</p>
<p>You don’t know.
Try to get your thinking out of the box.</p>
<p>Please bear with me as I attempt to respond to a few posters. </p>
<p>@partyof5 - May I please posit that I never said what you present in your post. I never said strictly use test scores and GPAs anywhere. I specifically said, “The adcoms would focus on everything else: scores, gpa, ECs, essays, LORs etc.” That seems like a lot more than test scores and GPAs to me. </p>
<p>I also believe that given ECs, essays, LORs, portfolios etc. if a student cannot give an excellent picture of himself, it is not a fault of the adcoms. No need to know race and zip code to discern if the student knows himself or not and can present himself as a genuine candidate. </p>
<p>@Pizzagirl - You are exactly correct in your analysis, but the problem is the damage has already been done by the time the application is submitted. </p>
<p>I do think everyone gets the concept of holistic, and unfortunately, so do the students to an extremely perverse extent. Read all the posts on CC of students searching their family tree to see if they are 20% of some ethnicity, so they can identify as other than white. Look at the asians who struggle to even check the box identifying as asian. Look at blacks who are currently in some internal fighting of some sort of actually who is african american. Actually from Africa, seems not to count. From Georgia, OK. This is nonsense. </p>
<p>Holistic in itself is not a negative. However, the current factors used in the holistic process have students and families contorting to be what is the flavor of the day. That is not individualism; that is pandering to politics. In my book, that is a huge negative and is not a lesson I ever want my kids to learn. </p>
<p>There is no reason the holistic factors cannot be different, i.e., independent of race, zip code, wealth etc. I just believe that the current external factors being used are destructive to the mindset of students as people. I favor essays, LORs, ECs, portfolios etc. </p>
<p>@TheGFG - I think your approach, while I fully understand it, might be a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Your approach still pits one group of students against the other and even sub groups against the other. That still makes students not view themselves as individuals and just shifts which group feel favored and which feels on the out. </p>
<p>As for diversity being defined more clearly - that strikes me as an oxymoron. Is not the ultimate philosophical end of diversity the height of non-clarity because of the plethora of differences used to define it from the start? The word itself signifies non-clarity.</p>
<p>@Mamalion - Please re-read my post. I never said diversity is bad. I cannot even think that far because I fundamentally have not a clue what it is. And worse, no one has stepped up to show with evidence from the college campus, whatever diversity is, whether it is good for college admissions process. </p>
<p>I recommend reading the article I link to because the author makes some excellent points. He has a PhD, has written many books on race and sociology and he has not a clue what diversity is and what its goals are. </p>
<p>The entire premise of my post is no one knows or agrees as to what diversity is, but only for some unknown reason, it is a good thing. But, I ask the simple: if no ones what it really is and people differ on what it is exactly, what are people universally claiming is good about it? That is the rub of the problem, people are seeing what they want to see, yet provide zero empirical evidence of what it actually is and whether it has good effects are ever provided.</p>
<p>It is important for everyone to understand that I am not for or against diversity. I cannot be because I do not even understand what it is to make a constructive decision of whether I agree with it or not and whether it is good for society.Therefore, I am ambivalent to the term. </p>
<p>@sally305 - I understand the distinctions of different experiences and family structures, which kids come from. What I do not get is why those experiences, fundamental differences and the like cannot be more accurately and non-prejudically discerned from essays, ECs and LORs, portfolios etc? </p>
<p>This concept that adcoms must know whether a kid is rich and in private school versus poor and in public school is less useful and less personal. I even find such rich, poor, white, black etc. data prejudicial because whether a kid is rich or poor, white or black tells me nothing, I mean tells me zilch of what he thinks, his moral fiber, his values on citizenship and his belief in God or not and how he views himself. Only his essays and LORs and other supplemental data provide that information. </p>
<p>I agree context is everything, but I rather use non-superfical context and get the story from the student’s application, not using superficial demographics to assume what the kids might be like.</p>
<p>As for your “we do not live in a color blind society yet” comment, I ask the basic question - how are we ever going to live in a color blind society until we actually behave like we are in a color blind society? Of course, we do not live in one if people intellectually finds ways to justify not living that way. It strikes me as expecting the opposite results from what one actually is practicing. It is like the halfway to the wall game; you will never get there continually practicing the opposite of aha tone desires, no matter the degree of the practice.</p>
<p>Please You don’t need a master’s degree to recognize proper grammar, clear organization, precise syntax, imaginative thinking, and any number of qualities that make good writing. In addition, kids know who speaks articulately, who is in the honors and AP English classes and does well based on the teacher’s assessment, who writes for the school publications and has their articles selected by the advisor for print, whose writing is chosen by teachers as a model, who wins essay contests judged by outside parties, and so on. </p>
<p>One point I’d like to make here is that the fact that a private college chooses to accept some applicants with lower stats for reasons some people disagree with doesn’t necessarily represent a problem * for the college.*</p>
<p>***if a student cannot give an excellent picture of himself, it is not a fault of the adcoms. ***</p>
<p>That, folks! And many do not. There is your key. And, they cannot give a good self presentation if all they can think about is how they did in their one high school, among friends, with teachers who have watched them grow. The tippy tops want more and the average applicant is not giving them that “more.” Not even if they are val or top dawg or have great rigor and stats. </p>
<p>It’s not rocket science. But it is definitely not the in-the-box thinking most hs train kids in. They are NOT applying for 13th grade or a special summer class with that hs teacher. They are not being admitted based on what their peers think of them. Or whether their advisor in their hs thinks they wrote something great for the school lit mag or some local contest gave them an award. That’s still “hs box” thinking.</p>
<p>Correction to last sentence of my above post: </p>
<p>“you will never get there continually practicing the opposite of what one desires, no matter the degree of the practice.”</p>
<p>I wasn’t aware I was suggesting any approach, awcntdb. I was merely pointing out that holistic assessments are not necessarily fairer than non-holistic. </p>
<p>I ask you seriously, would you recommend that, if it is relevant, a student try to present himself as less privileged than what might be assumed by his race, community, school attended, etc. in the application? If so, how, and where? I feel a little uncomfortable with all the posts putting the responsibility solely on the student to show himself well in a context. Of course that makes sense in a way, because it is elite admission he’s seeking. Perhaps it is also incumbent on the schools, though, to incorporate more questions that address subtler factors. It’s been a number of years since my child applied, but I am glad to hear that some applications are now asking things like whether the student used a college counselor, what SAT classes were taken, and how many times the student took the SAT.</p>
<p>As for the essays, even bright accomplished kids have a very hard time talking about themselves in a way that sells themselves yet does not come off as arrogant or bragging, and they can have difficulty knowing what revelations are important and will be favorably/neutrally received and which will not. For example, I have seen a number of threads on CC asking whether a student should reveal a battle with mental illness. It may have seriously impacted his academic career, but yet may cause alarm for the college who has to worry about campus shootings and suicides. How much sharing should be done about traumatic, disturbing experiences, and what constitutes over-sharing? There is no easy answer, hence the stress.</p>
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<p>I think that is an excellent point! I see it with my own D…she’s a great kid, but I’ll admit that when I read her essays, they seem dry and factual and don’t really reflect who she is. Contrast that to a young woman who started a thread in the parents forum asking for advice about selecting from a number of excellent acceptances she received (including Yale). Her personality jumped off the screen! And she reminded me of my own D as I know her. But if I was on the committee reading the two girls’ essays, I know which one I would have chosen. And the fact that the young poster was AA and my own D is not would have had nothing to do with it.</p>
<p>They did ask, in the prior CA, about outside support. And, depending on how the college required scores to be reported, it was possible to see the history of all scores. Depends on the college. For many, all the detail is now downloaded to the college, which has its own format for reviewers to see. Eg, they can delete whether a kid is applying for aid. </p>
<p>GFG, agree about essays. Many kids openly discuss all sorts of things that can lead to a negative impression. Classic examples include how they don’t study or put it off til after midnight. In high school, this could be the sort of revelation (self examination) a teacher could work off or be happy the kid was recognizing himself. Not for admissions to a highly selective.</p>
<p>I don’t know – I’m not sure if “giving an excellent picture of yourself” and “being forced to come up with a sob story that highlights how and why you are disadvantaged” are the same things, and I question the power differential in place. My sister’s husband went to jail. her kids grew up in a really crappy environment in a bad neighborhood with absymal schools, and yet they also chose not to write the “My daddy’s in jail” essay that probably would have gotten them into top schools. They’re great kids, and as my niece put it, she’d prefer not to have to sell her family out in order to get into college. She preferred to preserve her dignity and sense of self-worth, since she thinks of herself as many things, of which the fact that her dad went to prison is the least salient aspect. She’s a community leader, has a great afterschool job where she has been promoted several times, gets good grades. Why should she have to give up her dignity and self respect in order to “win” a college acceptance – so the adcom can feel good about themselves for giving a poor unfortunate person a chance? It feels a bit like the adcom seems to ‘win’ at the expense of these kid’s self esteem and dignity. And in this system everybody loses. The kids who don’t have a sob story feel like they’re at a disadvantage but the kids who do have a sob story find it used against them and also find that it defines them. The whole system stinks. people should be able to get into college on their own merits without giving up their self esteem or dignity.</p>
<p>Hey, I don’t doubt that a family may know a real dummy URM who got into this or that selective school. Schools can make mistakes. I just question whether that’s typical, or an indication that the process is fundamentally flawed. You probably know some arrogant jerk who got into Harvard, but that doesn’t prove that Harvard admits lots of jerks or unfairly favors jerks. It’s one guy. They screwed up.</p>