<p>Gibby:
</p>
<p>And had your daughter applied in a different year, or from a different region with a different regional rep, or had her application come up at a different point in the process at one or more of HYP, she might have been admitted to all three, or none, or Princeton rather than Harvard.</p>
<p>How much randomness you see in the process partly depends on whether you look at it from the perspective of a member of Harvard’s Adcom, or that of an applicant. When my son who’s now at Harvard was applying to college, we figured his chances were best at Princeton (where he was a legacy), somewhat lower at Yale (where he was also a legacy), and much lower at Harvard (the toughest of the three, and no legacy status). He was wait-listed at all three, but in the end, only Harvard said yes. Why H but not P or Y? It’s a mystery we don’t expect we’ll ever decode. For all we know, it might as well have been random.</p>