<p>It’s the tuition cost, harvardfan. They project that MIT will be significantly more expensive for their family than Harvard or Princeton would have been. You will notice that the family comes from a different culture. I do not think that there are “arrogance based” issues here. (For that matter, some of the most arrogant people I know are on the faculty at MIT.)</p>
<p>Nothing can explain.
Some people get in Harvard and Princeton but not MIT.</p>
<p>Adam Wheeler got into a bunch of schools.
College admission officers are not real psychoanalysts.</p>
<p>Quantmech: I did not say “arrogance”. But entitlement is easily felt from her statement because of her son’s talent. She may be rightfully so. Her sentiment is quite a typical example of an immigrant who idealizes the American meirtocracy society. Unfortunately, we are anytihing but meritocratic. What a shame.</p>
<p>deleted link to ivygate, which I forgot was a blog.</p>
<p>a snippet (one of the more benign excerpts):
Overheard at Charter [eating club]</p>
<p>Griff Harsh (Meg Whitman’s son) throws beer in Guy’s face.
Guy: You can’t do that to people.
Griff Harsh (points at himself): Billionaire.</p>
<p>I think arrogance (and almost any other infraction) is forgiven if your mommy donates $30 million for an entirely new residential college. Said contribution now allows 500 more qualified students to be admitted every year to Princeton. A decent trade-off, don’t you think?</p>
<p>Let’s not blame the parents. This is just a good example of H doing anything they want. Sure, there are probably much less qualified applicants who were accepted, maybe because the kid who got in’s hobby of underwater cave exploring was in sync with their ad com reviewer’s.</p>
<p>No need to question any further than that…to a large degree college admissions is a crapshoot, as someone pointed out to me, having high SATs, cum, national awards/recognition and superlative recs opens the discussion, doesn’t necessarily get you in…and the kid and family may be darlings to boot.</p>
<p>The reason the comments are directed to the mathematician’s parent (mother) is because of her very public whine in her blog (see the blog connection in past post). Commenters were responding to her cries of ‘no fair’.</p>
<p>I would say that if you’re the best prospect in math in the country, it’s in the country’s best interests that you have the full breadth of choice for your education. And I think they’ve earned the right to complain without being mocked.</p>
<p>The education is not as important for Biff Harsh and the 500 supposedly “qualified” candidates. They won’t be taking it as seriously.</p>
<p>As for Biff, they should just give him a degree without stepping foot on campus. If they are going to whore themselves out, why not go all the way?</p>
<p>And by the way, there is plenty of arrogance in the ivy league from people far less qualified than this IMO guy and not just from the kids of donors. The fact that everyone furrows their brow to try to figure out if a math genius is humble enough is a joke. I’ve seen this time and time again.</p>
<p>I agree with collegealum314. </p>
<p>If you are quite good in math by CC standards, you will probably run into a few people at college or beyond who have clarity of mathematical thought you can only dream of. (I have certainly run into such people, over the course of my career.) Those people really ought to have their choice of universities, in the interests of the country. </p>
<p>My calc prof remarked to our class once that our current level of math, it didn’t really matter whether the person teaching it was John von Neumann or John von Fill-in-the-Blank. People who’ve reached the level where it does matter ought to be brought into early contact with professors who can teach them appropriately. I dislike the out, “There’s always graduate school.”</p>
<p>Math 55 at Harvard, taken as a high-school junior, doesn’t catapult a student into the Mathematical Pantheon, but it’s really very impressive. And in this case, the student in question is headed somewhere great, so one might be tempted to say, “No harm, no foul.” I do feel sorry about the financial implications for the family, though.</p>
<p>The more I think about this, the more I am convinced we have all been analyzing this wrong (except for me in my last post, but even then I was not thinking clearly enough).</p>
<p>Of course taking Math 55 as a high school junior is impressive, as are the student’s USAMO achievements. No one who looked at his record would dream that Harvard would reject him. I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that some random admissions officer – or any group of them – rejected him because they were looking for underwater cave divers, or whatever, or because he seemed less than humble.</p>
<p>The only way he gets rejected is if the Math department – who probably know him very, very well, and not just his Math 55 teachers – says, “No. Don’t admit him. We don’t want him, and we don’t want him around.” Why they would say that, I don’t know – maybe it’s as innocent as the applied-math issue, though I doubt it – but I am sure that someone, duly authorized, said something just like that.</p>
<p>This has nothing to do with holistic evaluations, or well-rounded classes, or whether math competitions produce good mathematicians, or affirmative action, or non-technical admissions officers, or anything like that. This kid made enemies. Or maybe his mother did. I think it’s as simple as that.</p>
<p>JHS–I grant that’s plausible. If I were in the family of the MIT student rejected by Harvard, I would not leap to the conclusion any enemies had been made. I might perhaps wonder whether the student had been just not quite <em>that</em> impressive. However, university faculty tend not to understand the time demands on students in high school, unless they have high-school students in their families–e.g., the sheer number of hours per day committed to being in the school building, for starters; and the time-consuming day-to-day homework, without the freedom that college student have to shift workloads around, for another. (If the student in question was home-schooled, this is inapplicable, but otherwise, it is a difference between the time available to him and the time available to the other students in the class.) </p>
<p>The scenario you suggest is one that a good admissions person should have followed, in terms of the inquiry. But it might not have happened. Or the inquiry might have been handled in a comparatively haphazard way.</p>
<p>I once heard of a conversation conducted openly in the halls of a Harvard building, which started out something like this:</p>
<p>Eminent older prof, to eminent younger prof: Y has asked me to write a letter of recommendation. Is he any good?</p>
<p>If the H admissions rep was inexperienced, he/she may not have caught the nuances of the reply, and may not have understood how mathematicians speak of students.</p>
<p>JHS</p>
<p>Think you are right, that this had to come from the math dept, but might it also be possible that the math dept - knowing him very well (and probably already knowing he’d gotten in to MIT EA) - thought he belonged at MIT?</p>
<p>MIT would have also rejected him if there was a character problem.</p>
<p>A possible explanation is the yield concern. He applied to Harvard and Princeton after Dec 15. This indicated that he prefered MIT over H & P. With his profile, the admission officers can easily identify. Applying to H & P was his mother idea, not his. (“I insisted that Sergei also apply to Princeton and Harvard”). I probably recycled his MIT assay too.</p>
<p>^They say they don’t take desire to attend into account for admissions decisions.</p>
<p>And, in fact, I know a kid that said in his Harvard interview that he was only applying to Harvard because his dad made him apply. They admitted him anyway, and he went to Stanford. He was really smart, but not in the league of this IMO guy.</p>
<p>Yield concern doesn’t work as an explanation at all. Harvard really doesn’t care what other colleges a kid has applied to. Its attitude is if we accept him he’ll come here, and that is usually how it works out. I can’t imagine Harvard turning down someone it considered first-rate because of a concern that he might decide to go elsewhere.</p>
<p>Also, applying after December 15 means absolutely nothing. As does applying before December 15. If I were working at Harvard, I would assume that every single one of the top candidates in the pool had already been accepted either to Yale or Stanford, or to any combination of Chicago, MIT, Caltech, Georgetown, BC, depending on interests.</p>
<p>Applying after December 15 sometimes means lack of effort in writing good essays and self-preparation in 2 weeks.</p>
<p>“Harvard really doesn’t care what other colleges a kid has applied to.”</p>
<p>I am not sure about Harvard but Princeton does care.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/university-news/2002/07/25/princeton-officials-broke-into-yale-online-admissi/[/url]”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/university-news/2002/07/25/princeton-officials-broke-into-yale-online-admissi/</a></p>
<p>I AM sure about Harvard. Regarding Princeton, that story is pretty old, and you didn’t have to catch people at Princeton hacking Yale’s files to know that they were concerned about yield then. I once saw breakdowns of Princeton admissions from that period that showed that above a certain level there was a negative correlation between higher SATs and chance of admission RD. Princeton was absolutely looking for people who weren’t going to be admitted to Harvard or Yale, at least some of them. But I don’t think that’s still true.</p>
<p>I am sure ALL schools care about yield, just to different degrees, even Harvard. However, there are some kids, all schools would take a chance on them. I would think the kid mentioned in this thread should have fitted into that category. JHS, why you are so SURE about Harvard not caring about yield?</p>
<p>It is puzzling why H and P did not accept this kid, I wish there is a way to find out.</p>
<p>As far as applying after 12/15, I do not think that matters. S was accepted by Yale SCEA. He then applied H, P and MIT after 12/15 and was accepted by all of them.</p>
<p>If Harvard math department indeed played a role in Sergei’s rejection, it would be his interest not fitting well with the focus of the department, not because of his talent unrecognized. I have seen graduate student applicants expressing interest that is not covered by any of the faculty members in our department from time to time. Those applications are generally unscored and will not be discussed.</p>
<p>The following scenario has been suggested, which perhaps makes the most sense of all: Sergei really wants to go to MIT. Sergei’s mom really wants him to go to Harvard or Princeton. Sergei has lots of friends in the Math Department at Harvard (and may have contacts at Princeton as well, but his friends at Harvard surely do). Sergei asks his friends to help him – if Harvard or Princeton accepts him, evil Mom will force him to go there. His friends help him get what he wants.</p>
<p>As a side comment on whether this is plausible, it is noted that relations between the Math Department and the Admissions office at Harvard are especially close, because the Director of Admissions is married to a tenured math professor. </p>
<p>So whereas I don’t believe Harvard would reject anyone because they thought he might choose MIT instead, I do believe that Harvard would reject someone as a favor to the math department.</p>