<p>Chris46, hugs to you and your D. Some of those results are indeed off the wall. What can one say? I really wish people wouldn’t start lambasting people who just need to do a little venting, and who do it in such a restrained manner. The fact is that even if a kid has a great acceptance in their pocket, they (and their parents) can still be pained that the kid was rejected from another wonderful school that the kid preferred. </p>
<p>On the other hand, if she is in at the U of C that is just fantastic. The U of C is a unique and wonderful place.</p>
<p>Just to put things in perspective for you, a friend’s stellar son who was accepted at several Ivies–one of which he is now attending–and waitlisted by several more was outright rejected by the U of C EA! I could only shake my head. People here acknowledge every day that being a male can help at LACs, so why they are denying that being a female–especially a non-diverse female–can hurt I do not know. When S was applying, people here who do college counselling professionally told me that the fact that he was “a white boy from NE” was going to be somewhat of a negative for his chances. Do white boys (and girls) from NE get in? Of course. That isn’t the point. But I don’t want to debate that.</p>
<p>If she goes to the U of C, she will have a superb college experience. I hope the finances work for you. :)</p>
<p>@Chris46 your daughter sounds like an amazing young woman. I know how disappointing the results were for her but I am sure after she feels what she needs to feel-and you as well-she will move on and excel at any school that is fortunate enough to have her!</p>
<p>I appreciate the reasoning behind the posting, warning students of the truly low admission chances at highly competitive schools, but wish the SWF cliche hadn’t been brought in. </p>
<p>I’m not sure the SWF thing is a cliche, especially at LACs. It is pretty routine to see guys admitted with lower stats.
(Not speaking to the Ivies – just the LACs.)</p>
<p>@chris46 - congrats to your daughter on her admission with full ride -please ignore people like pizza girl - she must be the only one who thinks her analysis is worth anything. </p>
<p>It’s been all over the web today that Harvard accepted 5.9% of applicants this year, “up” from last year’s 5.8. Anyone who has even a shred of skin in the game of applying to college should take that as a sign that applying to such schools is never any kind of guarantee, no matter how wonderful the student happens to be. I have such a student, who, in 9th grade is already being pushed towards Ivies when the time comes. I know full and darn well that any acceptances at any of them would be a wonderful luck of the draw, not any kind of given, and I’m a relative newbie at CC. </p>
<p>But hey-good luck with U of Chicago-a good friend and one of my D’s mentors went there for bot undergrad and law school and has done very well. </p>
<p>“Applying EA to U Chicago the student is clearly a motivated person and congrats. What is the point of this thread with that acceptance?”</p>
<p>Shouldn’t the appropriate response to EA Chicago be – yay, we won, game over? Waiting for something ‘better’ seems inappropriate. I got into the Ritz Carlton - am I going to worry about whether I get into the Four Seasons too?</p>
<p>“Applying EA to U Chicago the student is clearly a motivated person and congrats. What is the point of this thread with that acceptance?”</p>
<p>Oh I don’t know. Maybe the point of the thread might be Family circumstances, finances, distance traveled from home, etc. there is no game over the game of figuring out what happens next is just beginning. Thank you to cpt/pepper/consolation et al. for all the kind words. Other people can take from this little vignette whatever they want</p>
<p>I also find it peculiar–and rather offensive–that OP left the U Chicago acceptance out of her tale while citing the NMF full ride. I guess mentioning it would have undermined her agenda. </p>
<p>Chris, the problem is that you are presenting this outcome as an example that the system is broken. If the outcome is that your D is going to Chicago, then your story becomes a lot less convincing, even if it turns out that she can’t go for financial reasons. </p>
<p>I would add that your daughter’s list, as you’ve presented it in this thread, wasn’t all that balanced. Of that list, I’m surprised that she wouldn’t have gotten into Davidson, but other than that you aren’t just talking about elite schools, but super elite schools. If she had applied to Wesleyan, Oberlin, Tufts, USC and Barnard, she would likely have more options. Even adding a few more schools at the level of Brown and Williams - Hopkins, Northwestern, maybe Cornell - might have yielded some acceptances. Of course, I’m an unapologetic advocate of applying to lots of schools unless doing so would be a huge financial burden. </p>
<p>I’m also not thrilled with the plight of the white female posts I’ve been seeing for the last couple of days. First of all, as Pizzagirl said, there are clearly plenty of white girls from the northeast who get into these schools; that’s precisely why it is so hard to get in. At most of those schools, being female wouldn’t have been an issue, and at MIT, it would have helped. But I particularly don’t like the privileging of the racial aspect over any number of other hooks that explain why it is so hard for an unhooked student to get in. There’s room for a real debate about how much colleges should account for a variety of non-academic factors; personally, while I support holistic admissions, I do have the impression (it can’t be more than that, since I don’t have the facts), that admissions has probably gone too far in that direction. But let’s not pick and choose which kinds of hooks we’re going to get up in arms about. </p>
<p>In the any case, if your D got into Chicago, I’m not shedding all that many tears for the plight of the NE SWF on her account.</p>
<p>One thing I often see missing in such discussions is the importance about college essays. </p>
<p>Quite odd as I know for a fact they are considered very seriously alongside the stats…especially at respectable/elite private colleges trying to determine who’d be the “best fit” for their relatively small student bodies…especially at smaller LACs where admitted just a few students could radically impact the campus community/culture they’re trying to build and maintain. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Some high schools…including my public magnet have policies limiting the number of applications each student are allowed to submit. When I attended, we were all limited to a maximum of 8 and one had to be made to our state/local public college systems. </p>
<p>In my HS’s case, it was an attempt to ameliorate the intensive competition between students applying to the top elite colleges and an attempt to level the playing field for the large numbers of low income students. </p>
<p>I’m pretty surprised about both Davidson and Bowdoin. If she decides to stay on the wait list, she may yet get into those (don’t know if she prefers them to her present options).</p>
<p>Pain, folks, the pain. Hard to control reactions to pain, and pain is what one feels when expectations are dashed. Davidson’s not accepting the young lady puzzles me. Looking at three Naviance charts with 10 years of data, there isn’t anyone not accepted with OP’s DD’s state. She becomes an outlier in all of the charts. Not as much data on that school as the others, but that does make it a curiousity. If she truly prefers that school to UCh, I’d push that one. Something doesn’t quite add up here. Since she’s happily going to UCh, it’s a moot issue. The other schools, …well the stat show know surprise as there are a number of kids I see rejected, WL with her stats. </p>
<p>IMHO, I think those schools thought she would not attend if accepted. Some would put her on WL, just to see if she really wanted to go to that college.</p>
<p>If she wanted UCh, and still left room for other elite colleges, why even apply? Isn’t that the beauty of EA? One only applies to the few schools one prefers over the bar set by UCh.</p>
<p>This is not a lottery as there is no evidence that the 10% acceptance rate is uniformly distributed among all applicants. There is a description of the relative odds of people with different AI’s in one of the admission books. For example, some colleges point out that they turn down a high percentage of the valedictorians that apply and people focus on the conclusion of “see being a val is not a guarantee of admission”. But the other side of the coin, is that those rates are a lot higher than the overall acceptance rate.</p>
<p>Secondly, the acceptances are independent events. The odds of getting rejected by the 6th college is exactly the same if you got rejected by the first five or denied or waitlisted by them.</p>
<p>Fluffy- yes, but the outcomes aren’t truly independent in the statistical sense of rolling the dice where each roll is independent of the one that came before.</p>
<p>A bad essay, or a guidance counselor writing something which he or she thinks means “this is a hard working student” but comes off as “this kid is the biggest grind in the school” is going to put the kid in the deny pile at a wide range of schools. Down the selectivity chart where the stats are more important than the soft elements- fine, a bad essay won’t keep a kid out.</p>
<p>Parents assume the application is great because they love their kid. Even high stats kids write trite essays (with a few grammatical errors maybe?) and have clueless GC’s who don’t know how to present the kid in the best possible light. And a HS with little experience with elite school admissions is likely to have a couple of mistakes in the App- an outdated description of the courses offered? Not advising the student that a recommendation from both the studio art teacher and the music teacher is a bad idea- chem and English is a better combo???</p>
<p>That has to be the worse HS policy I have heard of. It really is unfair to restrict people given how competitive the process is.</p>
<ul>
<li> It is clear that getting into the top schools is very difficult and not deterministic.</li>
<li> I wonder about how real the “Tufts Syndrome” is for those top applicants. I know too many examples of people being accepted to one or two of the top schools, but denied by every “safety”.</li>
</ul>
<p>
That is odd and narrow thinking on the part of the HS. Students are competing with people around the world, not just in the local HS.</p>