<p>“Plenty of qualified students like your niece, legacy or not, are rejected.”</p>
<p>I wish that those who striving for HYPed schools would look at the stats of the REJECTED students . . . that extra look explains starkly that the overwhelming majority of qualified applicants are routinely denied admissions to these most selective institutions.</p>
<p>Examples from Brown:
You are a valedictorian? That’s a great accomplishmnet . . . and 81 % of Vals were denied . . . as were 90% of those in the top 10% of their class </p>
<p>How about great SAT scores:
got an 800 Math SAT? 83% denied
what about an 800 Critical Reading? 80% denied
perfect 36 on the ACT (can’t get any better than that): 72% got a rejection letter</p>
<p>In our yearning for our kids to be able to attend those elite schools we look with hopeful eyes on the “accepted students” data . . . the rest of that admissions iceberg lies just below the surface.</p>
<p>I know that I never donated enough money to affect my kids’ chances of admission. I donated money because I liked the school. If it had rejected my kids, I wouldn’t like it so much any more. It’s that simple, to me.</p>
<p>Re posts 562 and 563: I agree that it is common sense for an applicant who has any individual one of those “top” characteristics. You can often glean that information from the college’s website. But CC has been really informative in cases where the applicant has multiple high-level qualifications: e.g., the valedictorian with 2400 SAT I, 2400 SAT II, multiple college classes taken in high school, AP National Scholar number of AP’s, all 5’s, state level awards, varsity sports, genuinely good person and really, really smart (beyond what can be seen from the stats). There is a certain amount of mistaken thinking that the combination of qualifications will be sufficient for a top school.</p>
<p>Reading CC long enough, one finds that applicants of this category–what I’d call the genuinely outstanding, but not “knock-your-socks-off” outstanding applicant–are rejected a significant fraction of the time at the very top places (probably less than 50%, but perhaps more than 25%). One also gains an impression of the qualities that the admissions people at various schools go for, with a bit of reading between the lines. </p>
<p>Most important part of this post: CC offers some extremely valuable perspective on admissions outcomes, especially if the local high school sends a relatively small number of students to top schools, so there are no statistically meaningful conclusions to be drawn locally. </p>
<p>When I first started lurking on CC, there was not yet enough information of this type available. It would have been really helpful to know in the year that QMP and cohort were applying to college.</p>
<p>There are a lot of students and parents who have not yet seen the pattern, don’t expect it, and benefit from CC information. One sees this not only in mis-estimation of chances, but in the assumption often made on CC (especially by students) that there must have been something seriously wrong with any rejected applicant in the “genuinely outstanding” category.</p>
<p>On legacy preferences, you just need to know where your family’s legacy schools stand on the issue. Some are shocked to learn their alma mater expressly does NOT consider legacy, e.g., MIT, Caltech, Cal and UCLA and in my home state, UT and Texas A&M. They’re in the minority, though. Most schools say they “consider” legacy, but at all the “road show” admission presentations I attended at our kids’ high school, I never heard an Ivy or other selective school admission counselor explain with any degree of transparency how legacy is treated in the context of their holistic review rubric, save one: Rice. I did think the Vandy rep explained it the best by highlighting the numbers. Hmmm…see this post excerpt from their admissions blog:
<p>There are some frequent come-backs to my observations, which I will go ahead and include in this post and the next, to save everyone time:</p>
<p>Stats aren’t everything: I agree 100% (preemptively).</p>
<p>It’s the essays: Essays are no doubt very important. In a few cases a rejection of an otherwise “genuinely outstanding” applicant may be predictable, given the essays. But that does not explain all of the cases.</p>
<p>There are just too many hyper-qualified applicants: I agree that the paper qualifications have ramped up quite a bit from the time that my age group applied to college. I do not see signs that the actual capability or brilliance of the students has risen as dramatically as the paper qualifications have. Also, tokenadult has posted a list of the number of total spots in “top” universities intended, I think, to illustrate how small a fraction of these spots the top SAT scorers would actually occupy, if admitted. The statement that there are too many hyper-qualified applicants is true in part, but doesn’t explain the phenomenon.</p>
<p>Some applicants have outstanding qualifications outside of school, which they are too modest to reveal in a school setting, and therefore no one knows about them: This could happen, although it does not happen very often around here; presumably this depends on the nature of your locality, including socio-economic status, demographics, and local culture.</p>
<p>What is this obsession with “top” schools? I agree, it’s overblown on CC; yet there are some differences in the quality of education at different schools.</p>
<p>A college populated entirely by future professors would be excruciatingly boring: Not to the future professors.</p>
<p>A college populated entirely by future professors would have a limited endowment and very few donors of buildings: Can’t argue that one.</p>
<p>In our yearning for our kids to be able to attend those elite schools we look with hopeful eyes on the “accepted students” data . . . the rest of that admissions iceberg lies just below the surface.</p>
<p>Again, stats aren’t enough. That’s the issue with mathcing yourself by stats. You also have to understand enough about that school, it’s self-image, strengths, structure, etc, to know it’s a fit for you- and show how you are a fit for it. And provide essays and responses that make those adcoms see both that fit and your quality. This is something more kids miss than people think. They can parrot the mission statement or they can be generic. Neither is enough.</p>
<p>I’d also caution folks that few posters on CC are experts. There’s alot of conjecture and insistence. If a 2350 gets a reject and posts his ECs, you don’t know about the rest of his package-</p>
<p>Interesting factoid for those of us who don’t follow Harvard admissions…</p>
<p>I just went to double-check a few Common Data Sets to see what they said about the relative importance of legacy. <a href=“For%20those%20unfamiliar,%20in%20section%20C%20of%20a%20school’s%20CDS,%20admissions%20data%20is%20presented,%20including%20a%20handy%20list%20of%20factors%20considered%20in%20admission,%20each%20of%20which%20is%20rated:%20Very%20Important%20-%20Important%20-%20Considered%20-%20Not%20Considered.%20Commonly,%20things%20like%20GPA%20and%20test%20scores%20are%20rated%20Very%20Important%20and%20ECs,%20essay,%20interview,%20demonstration%20of%20interest,%20etc.%20are%20given%20variable%20weights.”>i</a>*</p>
<p>So, I discovered that Harvard marks every factor as simply “Considered,” except those factors that are “Not Considered.” The CDS archives indicate they made this move in 2008-09. </p>
<p>I haven’t thought this through yet, but my knee jerk reaction is, I like it. It feels more transparent, like a formal representation of lottery admissions.</p>
<p>The president of D’s super selective college told the students that they were intelligent, passionate and LUCKY. As another poster has said, there is an abundance of hyper-qualified applicants to these schools. You were picked because you were lucky enough to have something that fit the institutional need of that college class.</p>
<p>So when a hyper-qualified student’s application to Yale is rejected, you might think, “Great stats and ECs, but we don’t know the rest of the package like the essays and the recs. If we could see them, then we would be able to see where the flaw lies.” </p>
<p>But then that same application gets that student a yes from Harvard. Well, I guess the application was golden after all…</p>
<p>No…that student fulfilled an institutional need at one school but not the other. But you often can’t know what that institutional need is in advance. That’s where the lucky part comes in…</p>
<p>Yes. And I think this is where the 20 applications comes in.</p>
<p>All those top students have reaches and safeties, statistically speaking, but once you get to a certain level, there are no matches because the selectivity at the “match” or “target” schools is so small nobody in their right mind could consider this a “target.”</p>
<p>So, regardless of people who want to dismiss it as shallow or unimportant or whining, some kids really do end up in a very confusing situation, imho, and I’m not sure there is an easy explanation for why, except they had “bad luck.”</p>
<p>I haven’t read this whole thread. Too long! But I have a lot of sympathy with the two parents whose high-achieving kids weren’t accepted anywhere. My guess is that they needed substantial financial aid, and that if they had been able to pay full freight, they would have been accepted. Or they could have applied ED, and greatly increased their chance of acceptance. Sadly, things are much more difficult for students who need a lot of financial aid.</p>
<p>We went through the exercise and applied to several schools including Notre Dame, Duke, Northwestern and promptly received rejection letters, but on a lark we also applied to Yale and was accepted…the sad thing is my daughter has no real interest in wanting to attend Yale or Wellesley for that matter. So, she’ll go to State U. and it’s gonna cost me less than 2K a year.</p>
<p>Having read the whole thread… there is a certain randomness in this process. My son did the right things: one reach, 2 matches, one safety. He had the answer from the safety by November. It’s too close to home for him (and has a miserable M:F ratio), but gave him good merit money and would have worked if nothing else did. His two matches accepted him with similar merit money, about 50% of costs, and he didn’t get in to the reach. Who knew it would be so hard for him to decide between the two matches?? Both have Div III wrestling, both had coaches calling him, and he didn’t know what to do! Turns out one of the matches won’t talk about a gap year until it gets a deposit, and the other said, great idea – we’ll hold your place and merit money. And that’s really what tipped the scale.
We came out of this intact – but it helped that his sister paved the way. She applied to schools without merit money and got in and then had no money. He didn’t even apply to schools without merit money. She went to her 2nd choice school, she’s fine, too, but got a little more bruised in the process.</p>
<p>“We went through the exercise and applied to several schools including Notre Dame, Duke, Northwestern and promptly received rejection letters, but on a lark we also applied to Yale and was accepted…the sad thing is my daughter has no real interest in wanting to attend Yale”</p>
<p>This makes my day as parent of a kid who was rejected by Yale but would have probably considered seriously if admitted! ce la vie.</p>
<p>I have no problem with someone turning down a school for a less prestigious one due to fit. That’s why we apply to many schools. To be mad at someone for turning down an acceptance to a school you were rejected from is incredibly petty.</p>