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<p>Sometimes it is “arrogant parent speaking.” But I’ve seen enough admissions results where someone gets into HYPS and then gets rejected from, say, Washington St. Louis, that it screams Tufts syndrome. Maybe it’s not the case here, but I believe sometimes it happens. </p>
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<p>Interesting. At least as of 2012, my offspring’s NYC public magnet alma mater limited students to 8 private colleges. A dozen years ago, it was 5 privates and out of state publics. CUNY and SUNY didn’t count. Then it went up to 6. I’m not sure it was ever 7. Then it was 8 and that no longer included OOS publics. </p>
<p>In the end, so many things factor in for an admit. Though many see the Ivies as a set of schools, each has its own flavor and self-image, not to mention geography and academic realities. And trends in each’s applicant pooI. What Yale wants to see in an app will be different than Brown or Davidson. It is entirely possible more kids from one geo area applied this year to, say, Bowdoin. They won’t take every great kid from a sub-area. They may have found a super candidate from the hs down the road. You just don’t know.</p>
<p>I don’t know if we want to dog OP on what may have gone wrong with the app. So let me put it this way: each thing you put into the app is a reflection of many things these schools do look for, including judgment. It was a judgement, eg, to tailor essays to each school. </p>
<p>CollegeAlum mentioned STEM activities. Agree that if a student says she wants a STEM major and doesn’t have the related math-sci activities, a number of schools are going to note that. </p>
<p>Ps. cobrat, even with limits, the abundance of kids applying to ivies from Stuy, TJ and a few other hot hs is overwhelming. Just saying.</p>
<p>I think it is great that OP’ s D has a choice between University of Chicago and full ride, and best of luck to her, whichever she chooses. I think we might have gotten better perspective had OP not forgotten to mention this, but it is still surprising to me that this student did not receive at least one other offer outside of U of C and the state flagship.</p>
<p>Ten years ago, our guidance counselors used to discourage students from applying to more than a half dozen schools at most, yet now admit that they have been surprised in recent years at how unpredictable admissions at hyper-selective schools have become and no longer discourage students from applying to as many as twenty schools, no matter what Naviance would predict. High yield rates at many of these schools indicate to me that there are not lots of students receiving multiple admissions. </p>
<p>Probably, but you can only attend one college so technically you only need one acceptance. There was really nothing “wrong” with the list of colleges for this student. Sounds like applications went to the best of their regions colleges probably with hopes for finaid, picked a college for NMF and finally picked the top school in a region “over.” Sounds like they got a financial safety acceptance and a tippy top college acceptance. You don’t need to grab as many brass rings as possible. If this applicant absolutely wanted to stay in the NE as their region of choice there were other colleges that could have been on that list and some that with the stats the applicant would probably have yielded merit money if finances was a prime criteria - but they cherry picked. There’s no sad story here…just a parent who isn’t “happy.” </p>
<p>Btw, I do agree that the overall make-up of the applicant pool can shift what we see as acceptance rates. Eg, from H’s 35,000 apps, probably only 15k were true contenders. So the more specific chances for “contenders” are better than 5.x%. Not that it matters- in the end, there are really only two decisions. So, for fun, we could say their chances are 50-50: yea or nay. fwiw. In a national pool, that’s still not good enough to assume anything.</p>
<p>I agree that the results in this case are somewhat puzzling given the D’s stats. Especially the wait lists, but they scream “tufts” syndrome to me in that they were perhaps waiting for the call to confirm high interest in attending. But my question is what was the reasoning behind the EA to Chicago? Why not ED at her first choice? She still ended up doing all the extra apps anyway, and it is clear from the OP that attending Chicago was not all that high on her list of preferences. Perhaps the EA was enough for Chicago to conclude this highly qualified applicant would in fact attend if offered admission. Think she left the others guessing.</p>
<p>I remember one long-time cc member, maybe @hunt , posted once that Amherst and Williams almost always take the super-high stats applicants. This is one reason I was surprised by this result.</p>
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<p>This is more of an issue for MIT than the others. The other schools may have assumed that the OP’s daughter was premed. Even without STEM activities, the OP’s daughter’s ECs perfectly fit the profile of a premed candidate. For MIT though, it’s a little unusual to not have demonstrated serious interest in math or science, even if one’s ultimate goal is to be a doctor or even some completely non-technical career.</p>
<p>Maybe. Maybe not, considering the pool. And the major. I think it most matters at HYBM. Is she pre-med (if so, I missed that.) Even so, the competition matters. And the full app, what it conveys that they want.
CAlum, maybe there’s a chance thread with more- but how do you see she perfectly fits a pre-med profile?</p>
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<p>I see your point as I’m sure others do, but the analogy doesn’t quite work with love life and jobs. With ove life, the only analagous situation was Kate marrying Prince Edward. Apparently, she wanted to marry him since she was a little girl, she chose a prep school which was known as the place to go if you wanted to meet and marry royalty, and eventually he chose her and now she is a princess. Most of the time people don’t spend years with their heart set on one person before they actually meet that person in order to attain ‘regal’ status, and yes, like it or not ivy admission is somewhat like being knighted in American society.</p>
<p>As for jobs, a company does not have the same appeal. Getting into college not only entails an education and ‘status’, but also potentially joining a community for the rest of your life. A job is usually just a way to make money, or if it is more than that, the particular company you work for doesn’t hold any special romantic appeal. No chemist grows up dreaming of working for DOW Corning. There are exceptions I suppose. The Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Randy Pausch of the famous “Last Lecture” had hoped to work for Disney Imagineering for a long time but he was turned down. But most of the time it is not like that where there is one or a set of places which are the place to be and which are difficult to attain. </p>
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<p>Well, maybe not Dow Corning (although I knew some silicon chemists in grad school who very much targeted the DOW companies for employment and spent 5+ years working towards that goal.) However, during my chemistry education, I did set my sights on a handful of pharmaceutical companies for whom I wanted to work upon graduation - and I wasn’t the only one. Actually, I’d say that most of my lab colleagues specifically targeted a small number of pharma companies for employment, because they valued the particular work environment, the work that the company did, and the opportunity to impact the lives of patients.</p>
<p>So, I actually think that he analogy has some merit. In my case and in the minds of my colleagues, those research jobs were MORE than “just a way to make money,” and the specific company did hold a certain appeal.</p>
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<p>OK, but it’s not that tough to get into a top 5 or 10 grad school, and coming from these schools, it’s not that tough to get a job at these companies.</p>
<p>Collegealum, I think it is tough to get into the top 5-10 grad schools. Am I reading you wrong? did you mean to say that IF you enrolled in a top grad school, then you have a better chance of empolyment in specific companies?</p>
<p>“yes, like it or not ivy admission is somewhat like being knighted in American society.”</p>
<p>Oh please. The majority of people who graduate from Ivies get up, go to work, slog through, come home, eat dinner, kiss the spouse, walk the dog and take out the garbage just like the rest of us peons. You aren’t evenly remotely knighted or anointed. </p>
<p>Collegealum, it is VERY difficult to get into those top 5-10 grad schools, and even then, it’s very hard to get a plum job in pharmaceutical research once you have your doctorate (especially now that many of those jobs have disappeared.)</p>
<p>Why is this so hard to believe? Don’t we see kids post on here all the time that they want to work for a big IB firm or for Google? For these kids (and maybe their parents), a job is not just a job.</p>
<p>Ack! I didn’t even see the comment about knighthood.</p>
<p>Out here among the Great Unwashed (in Flyover Country) - it’s much easier to get anointed. You just need to get a degree from University of Michigan, and you’re golden.</p>
<p>It is actually tough to be an Ivy grad in many ways, especially Harvard. Grads tend to hide the fact that they went there (“I went to school in Cambridge.”) They run into weird prejudices socially and at work, resentment, and overblown expectations of their abilities. In some ways, they are doomed to only feel comfortable with others who went there. “Anointed” indeed.</p>
<p>As for admissions, the committee builds a class and it depends on how a particular student adds to the mix. Simple as that. Ivies also care about character, ability to overcome obstacles and so on, and I actually believe they can tell when a person’s high school career was a matter of resume building (not saying this applies to anyone in particular). In other words, the best way to get in may be to not care about getting in and just living your life (which would also prevent disappointment).</p>
<p>Congratulations to the student in question for getting into U. of Chicago!</p>
<p>Hey, look, I didn’t go to an ivy. But there is some kind of status involved that is attractive to people, however you want to characterize it. I didn’t say it wasn’t silly.</p>
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<p>If you get a decent GPA (3.5 + ) at a good state flagship or better, have good GRE scores (700+ in quantitative general GRE, 750+/990 in chemistry), and have roughly a year of research experience, you will most probably get into multiple top 10 schools. This likelihood gets even higher when those stats are improved or if you have publications. </p>
<p>In comparison, I know people who were in the top 50 in math and physics olympiads, have perfect stats and showed they were academic stars in environments were everyone had ivy-level test scores , and had other top awards, get completely shut out from the top 10 schools. Some people who couldn’t get into the top schools were literally one-in-a-million, even from my vantage point 20 years later. So yeah, comparatively, I would say it is not that tough to get into a top grad school. </p>
<p>On the one hand @pizzagirl, you continually ask the question why people care so much about getting into the ivies when the fact is that kids don’t have to go to an ivy to become a doctor or some other kind of professional and make a lot of money. So what is your answer? I would think it’s because they are looking for something more than that. Part of that is the prestige itself.</p>
<p>Yes, my royalty/knighted description was hyperbolic. I chose it as sort of an extension of how princess kate planned to meet and impress Edward. Describe it however you want–branding, recognition for work rendered, whatever. But taboo or now, the prestige itself is a pull.</p>
<p>@Harvestmoon1:
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<p>But as with all posts to CC, we aren’t given much of the most important information: quality of essays and recs - type of school attended and the student’s rank/profile within that school. (The applicant could have been overshadowed by others from her same school). We have the parent’s listing of an array of accomplishments, but sometimes applicants - together with their parents and/or high-priced private admission colleges - essentially create the CV for the purpose of college admissions. Sometimes very accomplished students (and/or their parents) are not well-liked at the schools they attend… and teachers can use the shelter of a confidential rec to convey messages that are not helpful. Sometimes students who have racked up great stats write weak essays – they may lean toward trite or prosaic, or perhaps they just don’t write well and their submission could be riddled with grammatical errors – or on the other hand, the essay could be so “perfect” that it gives the sense of having been written with outside help. </p>
<p>We don’t know. I’m not saying that any of these things apply to the OP’s daughter, because there should be no need to speculate as to admissions decisions at what are essentially lottery schools. </p>
<p>It might make sense to speculate about Tufts syndrome if the OP had listed a single college that fell into the realm of “match” or “likely” – but none of the schools named fit that definition. </p>
<p>Actually, one problem I had with the OP is that I couldn’t really get a sense of the student because of the broad range of accomplishments presented. (I’d tend to guess the student’s strength was in theater tech, simply because that’s the one thing that kind of stands out as something that wouldn’t be done with the primary goal of building up an impressive resume for college apps-- but I really don’t know. I can’t know – that’s the sort of stuff that might have been revealed in the essays we didn’t see. ) Perhaps it really is a student with very diverse talents and interests… but I think that if I had 10 minutes to read over a college application and make some sort of gut level yes / no / maybe decision, I’d tend to favor applications that presented some sort of clear theme or narrative. Especially for “maybe” territory: what would be the key points to argue in favor of that students’ admission?</p>