Yes, that is true. In our case, both high schools were private and very small, without much variation in GPA for coursework. And those students with the highest academic rigor were IVY bound, so for a T20 or T50 school, it was pretty easy to figure out which school was worth an application.
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A few thoughts:
- if the schools are highly selective, then they’re highly rejective. And that means that even with perfect GPA and test scores, the odds are high that your kid won’t get in.
- schools everywhere have institutional priorities. Every school is different and each year might have a different set of priorities than the next year. My kid didn’t apply to highly rejective schools, but did apply to some holistic admissions schools, and at those colleges applied for a music scholarship. Got awarded a scholarship at 2 of the 3, with the biggest scholarship being at a school which nobody from our HS usually applies to. The school where she’s attending didn’t give her one but she’s in a music group there anyway. And the professor told her that she has perfect pitch and a huge vocal range. So why didn’t she get a music scholarship? Institutional priorities. They probably needed a cello or oboe player that year. Who knows? But there’s no point in us dwelling on it.
- instead of focusing a lot of energy on the places that have rejected your kid, consider shifting gears toward the schools that accept your student. Love the school that loves you back.
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A private school wants to admit whomever they want. Because they are a school that has a mission and a plan as to the type of students they want to admit in furtherance of their mission. I fail to understand why they need to give a detailed explanation of each and every decision.
I am reminded of the student we rejected who engaged in a campaign of harassment against our school because they were rejected. Even the father called everyone including the school president to complain - and this was for a grad program. Not every applicant is going to be admitted, even if they are qualified. There simply aren’t enough spots for qualified applicants at many schools.
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This makes it sound like you did the right thing in rejecting them!
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I agree with your post.
Public schools also choose who they want to admit. They too have institutional priorities.
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Oh, I agree - but they also have to consider their role as a taxpayer funded institution. It’s a little trickier, and it requires a different kind of transparency.
Sometimes, there may be a requirement from the state that the state university must or cannot use a specific factor in admission, or must manage admissions to a specific goal. In other words, there can be explicit externally defined institutional priorities.
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I fail to understand why they need to give a detailed explanation of each and every decision.
I never said this.
They need to make it clearer what they are actually looking for before you apply.
I bet about 90% of high school kids writing essays would agree with me.
Of course, elites do love Byzantine processes where subjective factors are the determining factors and insider information trumps all. Could we have such a system?
I wonder…
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Bluntly, if you are smart enough for an elite school, you are smart enough to figure out college admissions.
And if you are smart but don’t figure out college admissions, guess what? You will end up at an excellent school still!
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Some schools do explicitly list the holistic factors they consider. Here’s an example I’m aware of, but there are likely other schools that list their admission factors as well.
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That is promising, but this is a public school not in the top 20.
As mentioned above…admissions makes more sense the lower you go in the rankings.
Blockquote Bluntly, if you are smart enough for an elite school, you are smart enough to figure out college admissions.
Equally bluntly…that is nonsense.
You are smart. How many fingers am I holding up? Come on. You can do it. “Smart” people have no special insight into information that they don’t have access to.
“Holistic admissions” is a purposefully vague concept that permits all kinds of things. We are starting to see government and consumer lawsuits over this. Deservedly so.
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An intelligent person has the wherewithal to read the MIT admissions blog, follow the Yale admissions podcast, read Jeff Seligo’s book. It actually isn’t rocket science.
Underlying your apparent unhappiness is the assumption that if a “top” student isn’t admitted to a “top” (T20?) school the system is broken.
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Underlying your apparent unhappiness is the assumption that if a “top” student isn’t admitted to a “top” (T20?) school the system is broken.
No. As is usually the case on CC…you are putting words in my mouth.
T20 colleges need to make it clearer what they are actually looking for and actually admitting. They APPEAR to ALL want the same things, but in PRACTICE they differ tremendously.
That is all I am saying! It is really not a revolutionary thought. And you can’t just dismiss it as a silly notion.
The evidence of what I am saying is all around you. Just look at the questions people post on CC and Reddit.
“Back in the Day” when I was an active interviewer for Brown, the U published very granular breakdowns of the freshman class. Admissions rate for Vals, Sals, top 5%, score brackets, types of honors/distinguishing characteristics.
IT MADE NO DIFFERENCE as far as I could tell. Every year you’d get the same number of kids with a B+ average and below the bar SAT scores (and the subject tests- which were required back then) and a very complicated explanation of why even though they aren’t the “typical academic profile” Brown really spoke to them because they were (pick one) Boho, Artsy, Activist, Vegan, Non-conformist, radical. Every now and again one of the kids from this pool would be honest enough to say “I never want to take another math (or English, or history) class again, and Brown is the only U that has no distribution requirements” or something like that.
Once in a blue moon you’d hear “I don’t have the stats for Brown. And I don’t want to go there. But my grandpa is making me apply- he loved his time there”.
But radical transparency didn’t seem to matter. People gonna read what they read, and act accordingly. And reality and one’s aspirations don’t often match up…
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That may be, but if you read the 24 factors, the majority of them would likely be used by any school that practices holistic admissions.
And, expanding on @blossom’s post above, even if a “top 20” school were to list their admission factors, it wouldn’t change much. You still don’t know how each of these schools weighs their factors in any given year, or how an applicant is ranked on some of these factors.
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Based on my very limited observation…more and more high results kids are now attracted primarily to schools that guarantee stats-based admission and scholarships to reward their hard academic work. Some of these schools have honors colleges that are now harder to get into than “T20” schools…The idea of simple meritocracy has a natural appeal for such kids. This is why some of the “T20” brands are losing their luster and lower-ranked schools are rising in importance. In the end, the market will fix this, as it always does.
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I don’t think the T20 brands are losing any luster.
What’s happening is that high achieving kids are realizing they can get an excellent education at a non “T20” school. And so some of those schools may be gaining some luster.
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Just a few thoughts on unpredictability in highly selective holistic review college admissions, the kind that can look like “anomalies” when you are just looking at academic qualification scatterplots:
First, having studied a lot of different “what we look for” statements, information sessions, podcasts, admissions officers interviews, supplemental essays, and so on, to me it is clear they are not all stating they are looking for the exact same kids. Of course there can be some points of commonality, but there are differences in what they choose to include, what they emphasize most among what they include, various descriptive details, and so on. And I think if you are interested in these colleges, it really does pay to spend some time carefully reflecting on that information and picking out the colleges, if any, that really seem to be most clearly talking about you.
Second, as we have discussed periodically here, these colleges are not looking for all of one type of student, they are looking for a mix of students that will collectively satisfy all sorts of institutional goals and priorities. But that means any given admitted applicant only needs to be a good bet to satisfy some of these priorities, and so two different successful applicants may have been seen as good bets in two different ways. These are sometimes called buckets, the idea being they need to try to fill various buckets with an enrolled class.
Again, they are quite clear about this in general, but then what you don’t know is what is happening in each cycle. Like, you don’t how many spots they have to fill in any given bucket that cycle, how many other strong competitors there will be for any given bucket that cycle, and so on. So in a given cycle, it might be easier or harder to be the kid they take for the Wyoming bucket, or whatever.
Finally, even understanding all that, it is somewhat unpredictable what impression readers and committees will get from an entire application file, including recommendations and possibly an interview report. Like, usually even the applicant does not have access to all that information. So even knowing what they are looking for, there is an unavoidable uncertainty about how that will end up being applied to a given individual applicant.
And in fact, sometimes enrolled kids get a copy of their admissions file, and they are surprised at why they got admitted. Like, they thought their strongest qualifications were A, B, and C, and yet what really made a difference for them were factors X, Y, and Z. And not infrequently, those surprises are coming out of things like recommendations or interview reports they had not seen when applying.
My point is that all these sources of uncertainty are not really a matter of the institution trying to hide the ball. It is just super complicated, every admissions cycle is different, not even the applicants know everything that might eventually be in front of a reader or committee, and so on.
As a final thought–I really believe, though, that a lot of the very low admissions rates at certain colleges are because people who could have known they would not be competitive apply anyway. Like, maybe their academic qualifications are clearly not up to the college’s normal standards, but they are hoping something like “good ECs” or “extenuating circumstances” or applying ED or whatever will make up for that. And most of the time that is just not a realistic hope.
Or they clearly do not understand and share an institution’s values. Like they see that institution as a prestigious name that will help them get a career that means $$$, but that isn’t the sort of kid that institution is looking to enroll.
And then for Internationals–who are an increasingly large contributor to very low average acceptance rates–they may also not understand the implications of needing a lot of aid at need aware colleges.
All that being said, I do think even if you have the right academic qualifications and do understand and share their values, and are either domestic or a full pay International, you still sometimes are no better than like a 15-20% chance. Not 3-4%, better than that. But all those sources of uncertainty above are what push it down to that level even if you “do everything right”.
And I don’t think the colleges themselves really know better. Like, these days some are doing initial review phases and such to cut it down to just that competitive pool. But I get the sense that sort of initial review phase at most will get it down to a pool with something like that sort of final acceptance rate. Meaning the readers and committees still have a lot of work left to do to shape the final admit pool.
So if their own initial review process cannot do better than that? I think that means there is nothing they can possibly tell us that would let us do better.
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Not all, and primarily in red states, for other reasons as well
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