<p>i found the comment after jager-hyman’s piece particularly sad.</p>
<p>it’s just been very sad reading that and so many of the threads posted here lately by students rejected and wait listed at schools they thought they’d be accepted to. so many who don’t seem to have had viable safeties (ie ones they’d really want to go to); so many who assumed that having stats at the high end of a school’s admitted stats assured success (i’ve said it before-- at selective schools, knowing how you compare to those accepted tells you little – what you really need to look at is how you compare to those rejected!). </p>
<p>i wonder if next year’s applicants will be any wiser? i somehow doubt it – all those who are the best and brightest in their own schools will probably continue to think that THEY will be ones to get the fat envelopes.</p>
<p>Thanks Roger Dooley- I emailed this to my son’s prep school, even though son graduated two years ago, thought it might be helpful articles for the college guidance department to post…</p>
<p>The Jager-Hyman piece was an eye-opener. A couple of days after graduating she was offered the position of assistant director of admissions at a top school. </p>
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<p>Yet, she was making decisions about who should be admitted to Dartmouth.</p>
<p>I don’t mean this as a criticism of this young woman, but of the system. I find it hard to put a lot of faith in a system that puts no premium on life experience, worldliness, maturity. </p>
<p>Indeed, no student should take rejections personally. </p>
<p>Oh, and I particularly like the part about reserving a couple of slots for “creative loners”, kids who hadn’t figured out how to pad their resumes. Or, wait, maybe they know how to pad their resumes but they don’t want to (is that a good sign or a bad sign?), or maybe they deliberately leave them rough in order to nab one of those reserved slots. How is a 22 yr old to distinguish? By taking a guess, I imagine.</p>
<p>Do take in consideration the admission committee is a GROUP of staff members from the college.
Each application is reviewed at least twice, and decisions are reached from a consensus.
(Alright, this may not be certain for all colleges, but I know that this is the general case.)</p>
<p>The adcom above mentioned she was trained by a senior staffer, so she isn’t completely new to the process.
Besides, adcoms HAVE to start somewhere.
I can only imagine that once she is well-exposed to the process, she will pass on her knowledge and experience (as it had been passed on to her) to other, younger members of the admissions committee.</p>
<p>Thanks for posting these. I will be forwarding these links to our high school’s guidance dept. It is really hard for kids and parents not to take rejections personally.</p>
<p>I really don’t think a lot of parents understand how “random” college acceptances have become. There is definitely a sense of entitlement among many parents of high-achieving kids. Our GC told a student she needed to add a safety to her list, and the mother called and “reamed her out” about how she didn’t know anything about her daughter and was somehow prejudiced against her and trying to undermine her self-esteem by telling her to apply to “Safety College.” Turns out, Safety was the only school the girl was accepted to - and she is now a very happy student there.</p>
<p>And many bright but not over-achieving kids fail to understand how intense the competition for college will be - that loafing off for one marking period will leave a flaw in their academic resume that makes it all to easy for a college to put them in the “reject” pile. When colleges have 3 times as many qualified applicants as they need, any flaw in an application just makes their decisions that much easier. Unfair, perhaps, but that’s reality.</p>
<p>This is probably the biggest concept that applicants and their parents don’t understand. It makes the results seem “random” or if you do get in, you feel “lucky.” But it’s not random to the admissions office–they are just working with priorities and limitations that we don’t get to see.</p>
<p>^^^^^
I was at an alumni event 2 years ago with the then-newly-hired president of Lafayette College, Daniel Weiss, who explained this to us about admissions:</p>
<p>Admissions officers are not in the business of admitting individual students. They are in the business of assembling a class.</p>
<p>He went on to state that his previous employer, Johns Hopkins, could have assembled a class that consisted of all brilliant, talented, qualified kids, all of whom wanted to major in Bio or Pre-Med - but that wouldn’t have made for a good college experience for any of them.</p>
<p>That’s when the light went on in my head. Luckily, my son was a hs junior at the time.</p>
<p>I should probably post this on the other thread about kids who were rejected from their first choice schools, but…</p>
<p>It happened to one of mine. He went to our state university. If ever there is a story of making the most out of a huge, supposedly anonymous, environment, he is it. I do not believe that he would be doing as well as he is, at his first choice school. Will I ever know for sure? No. But we would not have been as financially solvent, which means able to relax and pay for other enrichments, and he would have been stressed about financials. Not only that, but the school he goes to now, because it is so large, offers so many activities and opportunities that he would not have had elsewhere. It may sound Pollyanish, and I would have thought so had I heard it two years ago, but things really did work out for the best.</p>
<p>This is all well and good, but since the applicant doesn’t know what the college is looking for, how can he/she begin to know what to do to be accepted? Or even where to apply? No wonder kids are applying to 20 colleges! I thought that was an insane and illogical strategy, but now I get it. If the process is as random as it seems, from the applicant’s end, more applications WILL increase your odds assuming you “get in the ballpark”. Now I get it, one heartbroken kid too late. I’ll know next time!</p>
<p>What happens when a kid works their heart out all through high school and does everything that they possibly can to make themselves the best they can be and then doesn’t fit the “priorities and limitations” of ANY of the colleges they really want to go to? What then? Who cares about “creating a class” when it feels like 80% of the work you did in high school was completely futile? How can you say not to take it personally when one of these articles said that essays are becoming more and more important, an essay is supposed to convey something more personal than the numbers, right?</p>
<p>None of this is new…though it may appear new to people each year as they process through the admissions cycles. Its all classic stuff. Yes, they assemble a class. Yes, the process is governed by people who often have little or NO business experience, often recent graduates of a school who are bleary eyed as they wade through tens of thousands of applications all from kids who were all state orchestra, 4.0, and took 8 AP courses and scored 1350 and higher on the SAT. I wouldnt want their job.</p>
<p>It is what it is. So you spread your risk and embrace your match and safety schools and then once admitted you look forward and not backwards with cynicism.</p>
<p>Its a bit nutty to get too obsessed with any one school anyway. Yes it may have some feature you like, or some program or is prestigious…but its just college and dorms are dorms are dorms at most colleges…and so forth.</p>
<p>Please do not think that people such as myself – who believe we do ‘understand the process’ (kind of )-- are not sympathetic/empathetic with “the kid who works their heart out.” As I said earlier somewhere, it means a different college list strategy: it means different <em>types</em> of colleges, as well as different locations: it means not applying only to your in-state publics (which in many, many cases this year, resulted in multiple rejections of the same student, to all/most campuses); it means different sizes of college & different orientations, concentrations, approaches in a college. Some have different policies & preferences in their applicants. And btw, this is a good way to approach the process even if you consider yourself hooked, rich, a Val, whatever. </p>
<p>No, you don’t “know.” But you can make sure that many levels of difficulty in the list are represented: not just 8 Ivies, or only the most selective LAC’s, etc.</p>
<p>I understand the process but I especially understand how unfair it feels to those who have not been accepted to an “elite” school, though they have worked their butts off. Yes, they weren’t what the school was looking for and that can’t be helped however, their work is being wasted and unrecognized because they are only being accepted to “safeties.” At the same time, there are only eight Ivies and thousands of high-achieving students vying for these places. The best scenario would be students’ realization that schools like Washington U, Duke, and Rice are basically Ivies that are only lacking prestige and funding. These are two aspects that students can help institutions build, and should not be held against excellent schools; most schools have not been in existence long enough to have built a reputation on par with the Ivies.</p>
<p>ohakkila, you are making an argument exactly for what I and others have said. On the one hand, you seem to imply that anything but Ivies are safeties; OTOH you mention non-Ivies that are also excellent schools. Agreed. (with the latter). Too many students take the all-or-nothing approach. A rejection from an Ivy is not evidence of failure, just evidence of a failure to diversify.</p>
<p>should the US adopt a policy whereby the no. of colleges students apply to is limited to say 8?</p>
<p>This will not only allow a student to concentrate more and thereby submitting a more tailored and well-prepared application to the select few colleges, but will also relieve the stress caused to admissions (causing them to be so unpredictable and disappointing) by insanely high numbers of applications</p>
<p>it just doesnt make sense for a student to apply to 20 colleges (not all do but most students apply to 10+ colleges) when all he needs is probably 2 reaches, 2 fits and 2 safeties…unnecessarily high numbers of applications will just result in adcom rejecting over minor flaws or adopting more arbitrary standards to differentiate applicants, putting outstanding but indistinguishable applicants at a disadvantage</p>
<p>this is of course by no means a panacea to the problems that ultra-competitive college admissions have caused…but it certainly helps to provide the adcoms with a little breathing space and thereby making the process a little more predictable</p>
)-- are not sympathetic/empathetic with “the kid who works their heart out.” As I said earlier somewhere, it means a different college list strategy: it means different <em>types</em> of colleges, as well as different locations: it means not applying only to your in-state publics (which in many, many cases this year, resulted in multiple rejections of the same student, to all/most campuses); it means different sizes of college & different orientations, concentrations, approaches in a college. Some have different policies & preferences in their applicants. And btw, this is a good way to approach the process even if you consider yourself hooked, rich, a Val, whatever. </p>