<p>May sound harsh, but shouldn’t a kid with HYP in his sights be smart enough to get that there is fierce competition, 90% will be rejected, desirable stats may exceed yours, there is no program on campus that meets the “reasons” you give for wanting to go there (or that satisfy the interests/directions you point to in the app,) etc? Should H-level applicants be the sort who stop at outdated advice?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ah, yes, but even a 6% acceptance rate doesn’t sound all that daunting to a kid whose SAT/ACT and class rank is in the top 1%. Seems like plenty of room for error, and everyone says you’re in. If you’re 17, are you really inclined to questions it?</p>
<p>I think many students (parents, teachers, counselors) with the stats for HYPS severely underestimate the number of students with comparable stats. They don’t realize that just under 25,000 students scored in the 99% cr+m+w. People naturally, but mistakenly, assume that such a student, the top 1%, shouldn’t be rejected anywhere.</p>
<p>I am absolutely in the won’t know if you don’t try camp. Same as can’t win if you don’t play. There is only so much you can know before application deadline, and “being rejected” narrows the field for you. Or, “acceptance” opens doors you might not have thought possible.</p>
<p>Following your logic @lookingforward? one wouldn’t reach for anything.</p>
<p>LI: I happen to agree with you. Please forgive me the pomposity of my construction; I liked the cadence.</p>
<p>I wish every student could have the benefit of the kind of counseling I provided my own two, their friends and my students.</p>
<p>I would like to help hundreds of kids.</p>
<p>I tried to provide this for a fee – a very modest fee when compared to the packaged services. I think I asked $100 an hour.</p>
<p>I found that parents had no desire to listen to me. </p>
<p>They were willing to pay that fee for me to edit the kids’ essays, but they wanted no help in the selection process.</p>
<p>LI: I am so pleased that the advice you received had such a happy outcome for your son.</p>
<p>Git, following my logic, one would be analytical. Do the homework.</p>
<p>
Conversely, I have seen posters on these forums tell a student asking for “chances” that his SAT (or what have you) is too low, when in reality the student has some strength that may or may not catch the eye of admissions. It almost seems like some posters want to discourage as many students from applying as possible (in order to increase their own kid’s chances?) </p>
<p>Everyone should have safeties and realize that the lottery schools are a crapshoot, but do we really want their student bodies to be made up entirely of Einsteins?</p>
<p>Lorem Ipsum – “. . . let us remember that the applicants are still teens who tend to rely on the advice of teachers, counselors and parents – and, in large pockets of the country, the advice that these mentors give are wildly outdated”</p>
<p>Isn’t this also a function of the constantly moving target of “holistic admissions”, which means different things to different schools, with few schools disclosing the current institutional preferences that influence their admissions process. Isn’t transparency the first step toward more informed students/parents etc and, under holistic, if everything May count doesn’t that mean that nothing Must count.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I would, if I could identify them. Would you really reject an Einstein so that the women’s rowing team has a good coxswain so that Harvard’s women can row a boat 1 second faster than Yale’s?</p>
<p>If Harvard wants to reject Einstein for the women’s coxswain, isn’t that entirely their right, and if you have disdain for their values / ethos / selection criteria, you can go elsewhere? Again, what’s the problem here? You seem to think that Harvard is obligated to twist itself to your selection criteria, which is heavily weighted towards SAT scores and evidence of a superior intellect at a young age.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, yeah, if the applicant pool at Harvard looked like your high school class – then you’d expect if you were in the top 1%, you could get in. But a high school student who hasn’t figured out that it’s only the cream of the crop from each high school applying to Harvard in the first place isn’t as smart as he thinks.</p>
<p>Personally, any acceptance rate under 30% feels like a reach / lottery to me. Seriously. And my kids hit those lotteries, but in no way did I ever feel that they were sure shots.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Except among small, very affluent pockets, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as “OMG, NU or I will just up and die” as it appears to be with the Ivies on the east coast. I think that’s because U of Illinois, U of Michigan, etc. are absolutely perfectly fine backup plans. I think those of you on the east coast don’t often understand that out here, very smart kids will often just set their sites on those schools and there is just isn’t the need to strive for the tippy-top, since it’s pretty evident that one can lead a quite nice, secure, upper middle class life with a U of Illinois, etc. degree and it’s not going to hold one back in any conceivable way.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, what are they going to say? We really want kids who spend their free time doing Activity X? So then they’ll get inundated with kids who all do Activity X. Yawn. They want INTERESTING people to select from, not kids who all dutifully did what they thought would get them in. Why is this so hard to get?</p>
<p>Well, even Einstein’s university barely wanted him. He was a very annoying student to have around.</p>
<p>And in measuring his contribution, I might trade understanding more about the universe for having a world with no atomic weapons. Just saying.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> endowment dips slightly, to $30.7 billion, as European losses offset investment gains - Business - The Boston Globe](<a href=“http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/09/26/harvard-endowment-dips-slightly-billion-european-losses-offset-investment-gains/OWLuXKNanvZU0ZEjheTLAL/story.html]Harvard”>http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/09/26/harvard-endowment-dips-slightly-billion-european-losses-offset-investment-gains/OWLuXKNanvZU0ZEjheTLAL/story.html)</p>
<p>If a $31 billion dollar endowment earns 8% and avoids paying taxes at a 25% rate (choosing a rate between the long-term capital gains rate and the highest ordinary income tax rate), that amounts to a $620 mil annual benefit. Harvard’s other federal subsidies include tax-deductible donations from alumni, Pell grants, and federally guaranteed student loans.</p>
<p>If Harvard’s admissions policies are largely devoted to furthering Harvard’s power and prestige, rather than the national welfare, Federal subsidies on the order of $1 billion a year ought to be curtailed. The argument sometimes made that Harvard et al. are “private” and should thus not to have to justify their admissions policies is weak, considering their huge tax and other benefits.</p>
<p>I personally don’t really care about the coxwain, but I liked having YoYo Ma playing concerts while I was there. Or Esmerelda Santiago making movies. Or Peter Sellers putting on operas. Or even Grover Norquist making trouble! I met all of them.</p>
<p>As for reading applications - haven’t read undergrad applications, but I was a student reader for the Columbia architecture schools which gave me a pretty good sense of how arbitrary the process of reading hundreds of essays and looking at hundreds of portfolios and reading hundreds of letters of recommendations, and peering at hundreds of transcripts is!</p>
<p>The “insitutional prefs” are generally, ime, there to be found, starting with the web pages. Yale wants future leaders, Stanford likes kids who have been entrepreneurial about their ed choices (or words to that effect.) One school touts all the community projects current students do, another talks about research and internships. Some allow for devise-your-own major, some have heavy core requirements. Some are in rural areas, some are in major cities, which can affect the resiliance they look for. </p>
<p>If you say it’s a mystery and leave it at that, sure, you’ll think why not give it a shot. If you dig a bit, you learn more. Clearly MMom knows how to do that and LI benefitted from CC (and, I’d guess, other sources that gave him a broader perspective.) And others.</p>
<p>ps. recruitable female coxswain has been a boost. In a few years, when kids catch on, something else will replace it.</p>
<p>In re: post #1229:</p>
<p>The fact that Harvard or any other school values good rowers doesn’t mean they don’t also value paradigm-changing brilliance. And surely, Beliavsky, you are not really worried that if the next Einstein enters the college admissions race he or she is going to fall through the cracks. The next Einstein will do just fine. Better than fine. Because he or she is a freaking genius! </p>
<p>If, say, Harvard doesn’t recognize this person’s gifts and he or she ends up at Princeton or the University of Chicago or Michigan or [fill in the blank], maybe the members of the adcom that let him or her go will each take a moment to kick themselves in their respective behinds. That will be their problem, not neo-Einstein’s. </p>
<p>It seems to me, Beliavsky, that you believe it’s possible to develop a testing instrument capable of measuring the difference between someone who is pretty darned smart (say, top one-quarter of one percent) and someone the likes of whom only comes around once in a generation. I don’t think that’s possible. Even if such a sophisticated and nuanced instrument could be developed, who is going to pay for the high-level psychometric experts to design it? To solve what problem? It would only be a problem if there are only X number of schools capable of nurturing genius. I’d say the number is significantly higher than the number we can count on our fingers and toes.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Are you seriously saying that we would be better off if Einstein had not lived? </p>
<p>I can’t believe this is coming from a university professor. </p>
<p>BTW, everyone living in New York would be better off if the Wrights had never invented the airplaine, but I still think it’s kind of a warped way to look at things. </p>
<p>As for assessing the Manhattan Project, whether it was necessary in light of the threat that the Nazis would build their own and/or whether it was morally acceptable to use the bomb to save American troops from a bloody land invasion of Japan, that is a complicated issue. I’m not sure it’s warranted for this thread. I will note that Einstein lead the anti-proliferation movement after the war. If more world leaders had the kind of conscientiousness, consideration, and empathy that Einstein possessed, the world would be a better place. That is, we would do better to reward more Adlai Stevenson’s and less Aaron Burrs, more Marcus Auerelius’ and less Neros.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s not that hard to figure out who these people are, especially if they are coming from magnet schools where they were head and shoulders above their classmates and/or if they have distinguished themselves nationally. And I think the “it” quality is probably easier to predict for someone who works in that field, for example Quantmech, as opposed to a career admissions officer.</p>