<p>AP, people need to see that this isn’t just all about who the college chooses. It’s not just the top 10% allowed to throw a slip of paper into a bucket and hoping you get chosen. (And URMs allowed to apply as long as they are, say, top 40%- then chosen with gusto just for being URM.) The applicant has some control- the full application, what he can show he did during hs, how he shows he thinks, his vision, energy level, and follow-through/commitment. And, hopefully, some impact (on the level adcoms like.) It’s a competition. And, one with many target variables.</p>
<p>When people say, oh yeah, tell your sad story, they miss that this isn’t about sad stories. When people say, oh, that 2400, you are a shoo in, they miss that this isn’t all about stats. If you could think of it this way, maybe it would help: If you could choose without knowing a whit about SES, ethnicity OR stats, maybe not even what school or district, who would you look for? What would you value? </p>
<p>All of these tales of the bright, upper middle class (or from the upper tier of the middle, middle class) are fine. Yes, it’s a shame that so many bright kids are getting shut out. But stop to think-- why are all these kids so disappointed to be getting shut out? Does the girl from Long Island who didn’t get admitted to Cornell REALLY want to go to Cornell if 2/3s or 5/6 of the class are other kids from Long Island, Westchester, and the Southern portion of Rockland County? Does the OP’s D want to go to Harvard to be surrounded by an entire class plucked from Suburban Boston (with a slight nod to our West Coast brethren by accepting some smart kids from La Jolla, Atherton and Santa Barbara).</p>
<p>I think you guys are having trouble visualizing what the 8% or 10% or 5% admit ratio really looks like. You really want to believe that your special snowflake is special- and of course, he or she is truly special. But if you’re an Adcom and have just read 50 applications that day, and your kids application looks not just similar- but IDENTICAL to the last 49 applications, and the essay that your kid thought was so original was done by 500 other applicants… you begin to see why the laws of these numbers start to hold sway. We can all internalize the fact that there may be a few dozen kids with similar stats to your kid- and maybe a few essays on the identical topic. But look at the numbers- we’re talking HUNDREDS of kids from similar backgrounds and similar towns and identical stats and the same damn extra-curricular activities, and frankly, your OWN kid wouldn’t attend a college comprised of kids just like him or herself.</p>
Well after my son got into Chicago early, a bunch of his friends showed him their essays for critiques because they knew he hadn’t gotten in on his grades! He thought they were generally perfectly well written, but a bit boring and earnest. His essays usually ended with a bit of self-deprecating humor as a punch line and while they weren’t earthshaking, they were about activities that were a little off the beaten path. </p>
<p>I haven’t read millions of essays, but I’ve read quite a few on CC. I’ve only read one or two that were memorable enough that I thought, “This kid is going to do very well in admissions”, including one who got into Caltech over my kid. (Don’t worry he truly deserved it, and my son ended up with better choices for him.)</p>
<p>One admissions officer told me directly that 90% of essays are not memorable. It is the other 10% that they look at and take seriously. It is the essay, which after reading, which prompts the question, “Do we want this type of kid?” that is most successful for getting into selective schools. </p>
<p>As for my own kids, after reading their essays, I told them, “No middle ground here, either a school will want you or not.” I was more than comfortable with such clarity of self-representation. It was clear who they would be accepting or rejecting.</p>
<p>It’s not an issue of thinking in or out-of-the-box. Diversity issues aside, some of us just are skeptical of the judgement of adcoms, even in carrying out their own stated goals.</p>
<p>For instance, I think we can all agree that writing a drab essay is bad. However, we don’t agree on what would be exciting to a reasonable person. To give an example, one guy sent a shoe in with his application to Harvard and wrote, “Now that I’ve got one foot in the door, let in the rest of me.” The adcoms thought it was hilarious and admitted him. And yes, I learned about this directly from the adcom. Yeah, I would say admitting a budding Larry David might be worth it even if his other qualifications aren’t up to par, but I don’t think that stunt rises to that level. Personally, I don’t even find it clever or funny. But hey, I don’t make the decisions.</p>
<p>Probably because (a) it is more visible (unlike being a legacy or kid of a big donor), and (b) race and ethnicity tend to get people riled up a lot.</p>
<p>CAlum, you should admit how long ago that was. Like, an ice ago ago, in admissions terms. Apps to H have doubled since the early 90’s- and they still only have just under 2000 seats.</p>
<p>So it might take an even more appallingly corny joke to get in these days? </p>
<p>It doesn’t matter that things have gotten more competitive. It’s not like this shoe stunt was a positive thing but not quite competitive in today’s environment. It’s that they showed an appalling lack of good judgement. And among the increased numbers of apps these days, I would expect more weird decisions and preferences, unless you for some reason think that adcoms have improved.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus but tell me, how can people get so riled up when there are so few? I’m here to tell you! I just ran to the bank which us a stones throw away from Yale’s campus. Out of the throngs of students who were rushing to class, the majority were white, and Asians…I saw 4 blacks. And this is something that I see almost every day!! I’m only 3 minutes from campus and I tend to travel through that part of town frequently. </p>
<p>I meant that, in general (not necessarily in a college context), any perceived unfairness based on race or ethnicity (real or imagined) tends to get people riled up a lot more than an similar or greater perceived unfairness based on some other criteria (e.g. generalized corruption or nepotism, SES-based discrimination, or college admission preferences for legacies or recruited athletes). It does not seem to matter whether the members of the allegedly unfairly favored group are numerous or not.</p>
<p>“this only matters if it’s true that on average, URM’s with lower stats come across better in their applications than non-URM’s with higher stats.”</p>
<p>This may be true "above a stat threshold.* In other words, looking only at the group of applicants with (let’s say) 650+ on each SAT section and a 3.7 uw in a tough curriculum, yes, URMs with lower stats within the group may come across better than non-URMs with higher stats. In essence, the schools have decided that stats aren’t that useful in distinguishing members of that stats group from one another. And in fairness to the schools, they have a lot more data than we do about whether a 770 really predicts better achievement at Yale than a 670.</p>
<p>On viewing other students’ essays: My daughter’s English class did the whole peer review thing fall senior year. They had to write a common app essay and go through several peer reviews and eventual grading by the teacher. When she got to actually doing her common app and I looked at the essay that had been favorably reviewed (a lukewarm A) I saw that it was horribly bland and said nothing about her as a person. There were facts about interesting things that she’d done, but it didn’t ‘sing’. After some gnashing of teeth and eventual brainstorming she redid it to great effect. I could read her main essay and activity essay and say “yes, I see you and what makes you special.” It still doesn’t mean you’ll get in. You might not be special enough or special in the right way for your target school. She still wasn’t special enough for Stanford but received very nice compliments on her essays from other schools. At any rate - the essay that peers saw that was serviceable but ho-hum was not the one that she ultimately submitted. It was done with very little inspiration as a class assignment and eventually round filed.</p>
<p>c.) There are quite a few people in the upper/upper-middle class legacy families who harbor strong feelings of entitlement over their children being admitted because they themselves were third or more generation Princeton or [insert name of elite private college]. </p>
<p>Came across a few who were neighbors of some suburban relatives in the NE/West Coast. Most are prudent enough to keep their attitudes to themselves and longtime neighbor friends they feel “safe” with. A tiny few, however, aren’t hesitant about publicly blaming “undesirables” for the fact being a legacy isn’t as much of a boost in the last 40 years as it was when they attended during the '60s and before. And yes, they will feel put out if their children end up “having to settle” for schools like Middlebury, UChicago, Vanderbilt, or sometimes even another comparable Ivy*.</p>
<ul>
<li>A former supervisor recounted how earlier in his career that one colleague (probably early '70s from Princeton) came from a multi-generation Princeton family with a father so adamant about him attending Princeton that he made admission & matriculation there a condition of not only continued support, but also to avoid being cut off from the rest of the family/inheritance. Not even Harvard or Yale would have been acceptable to this father…it was Princeton or else.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>“And among the increased numbers of apps these days, I would expect more weird decisions and preferences, unless you for some reason think that adcoms have improved.”</p>
<p>It matters not a whit if all of us, collectively, think the decisions are “weird.” All the adcoms need to do is select a class that the college administration overall is happy with. They are clearly doing so, because if they didn’t, and the college administration / board of directors / president / whatever didn’t like the class, they’d tell them to change the criteria. These are employees who are part of whatever that college’s grand strategic plan and vision is. There’s some odd view on here that adcoms run rogue and just admit whoever the heck they want according to whatever criteria they want, and they aren’t doing good jobs. They ARE doing good jobs by the standards of the people who employ them. </p>
<p>“Does the girl from Long Island who didn’t get admitted to Cornell REALLY want to go to Cornell if 2/3s or 5/6 of the class are other kids from Long Island, Westchester, and the Southern portion of Rockland County? Does the OP’s D want to go to Harvard to be surrounded by an entire class plucked from Suburban Boston (with a slight nod to our West Coast brethren by accepting some smart kids from La Jolla, Atherton and Santa Barbara).”</p>
<p>Any elite private college, right now, could choose to rack-and-stack numbers, or to ignore racial / geographic diversity. And they could wind up with an overabundance of white kids from Long Island and so on and so forth. Why don’t they do it? Because they know it would HURT their rankings and their perceptions. That no one with any sense WANTS to be part of a college where everyone is upper-middle-class Long Island. </p>
<p>It’s like you guys want the stew but you don’t want the ingredients that make up the stew to be considered. The elites aren’t elite without the “stew” of a lot of different young folks of all different backgrounds - from ghetto to mansion, from east to west, blah blah blah - thrown together so exciting things can happen.</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. And if you’ve been in English classes with that kid and peer edited his essays many times, you have a pretty darn good idea of how good his college essay could possibly be.”</p>
<p>Oh, spare me. Even leaving aside the general busybodiness of pretending you “know” everything about other students and what their apps “must have” looked like, the types of essays that do well in college admissions - that tell a story about the person, that humanize him or her, that make him or her stand out in the crowd - aren’t remotely related to the kinds of essays that most students are writing in English class about the use of foreshadowing in Romeo & Juliet are whatever. </p>
<p>Anyway, it’s completely irrelevant if Kid A “knows” how good / smart Kid B is – because when Kid B applies to College X, the only people who have a handle on the applicant pool of College X are … ta da! … the adcoms at College X. </p>
<p>It’s as nonsensical as saying that I’m a better judge of whether my neighbor should have gotten a job that he interviewed for, than the hiring managers at that company who are able to compare my neighbor to all of the other applicants for the position.</p>
<p>NewHavenMom: I think people get riled because they are not looking at the demographics of the college campuses but at the admissions decisions of kids from their own particular high school class. That’s where the perceived unfairness comes in. I live in an ethnically and racially diverse community. Compared with the other students, the affluent African American boys from the public high school do phenomenally well in Ivy League admissions–way above what their academic stats would predict. So, yes, each year there are some hard feelings when a classmate who is known to not have worked as hard or done as well academically is heading off to Cambridge or New Haven and virtually all of the white and Asian applicants with far better stats, including the valedictorian, get rejected. I think it’s human nature to feel this is not “fair,” especially when you are young. It is hard for many of them to care about the broader context–that this wealthy kid whose been a friend from kindergarten age and in no way seems disadvantaged is part of an underrepresented minority in the country over-all. The white and Asian kids think that if he hadn’t applied to every single Ivy one of them would have gotten in. I doubt that. More likely, he is “taking away” a spot from an economically disadvantaged African American. Meanwhile, the top white and Asian students end up going to other excellent schools and life goes on. My personal opinion: I wish college affirmative action programs could figure out a way to focus on socioeconomic status rather than race. This would seem “fairer” and therefore not stir up divisiveness, racism and resentment which are bad for the country at large.</p>
<p>Yes, but when adcoms ADMIT that they consider race, athletics, legacy, etc, it doesn’t seem too far fetched to suggest that that may have had a role rather than assuming that there must be other factors of which you are not aware. </p>
<p>I just don’t see why we’re all supposed to maintain some polite fiction that these things don’t happen. We have brains, and yes, people do have some idea of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the people around them. Obviously, students don’t know everything about their classmates, but they often know quite a bit. If an African-American, legacy or athlete winds up being the outlier on the Naviance data for your school, what makes more sense: saying “that hook probably helped a lot” or “I guess he wrote a fantastic essay”?</p>
<p>If you want to choose the latter, that’s fine, but don’t pretend everyone else is an idiot or mean-spirited for inferring the former. You can’t have it both ways; if you acknowledge that there are preferences for attribute x or y, then it isn’t offensive for people to assume that a or b might have had a role in admission. That isn’t the same as assuming the other person wasn’t qualified. I mean, if Harvard made an announcement tomorrow saying they really wanted some tuba players in next year’s class, and then a bunch of tuba players got admitted, I’d think that might have had something to do with it, even if all of the tuba players were also valedictorians with perfect SAT scores. </p>
<p>Major fail. Which is why she is at UChicago (which is not interested in sports competition) and not at the Ivies (which are). The Ivies LOVE athletes. If you are a SWF, play lacrosse or swim well or go to ODP in soccer. You will be chosen. Sorry, mom, if you really wanted the Ivies, the EC should have been a sport. There are tons to choose from.</p>
<p>Thinking admissions officers are so much smarter and more logical than the general public is also laughable. Who gets hired to be an admissions officer? PhD’s in psychology, sociology, or creative writing? Statistics experts? They are office workers, not some brain trust. There have been articles studying the random things that affect their decisions, such as that the application was read after a snack or meal.</p>
<p>Kids absolutely know which of their peers are the real deal academically. It doesn’t take nosiness since the learning is today’s classrooms is very interactive and collaborative. </p>
(Don’t worry he truly deserved it, and my son ended up with better choices for him.)</p>