"If you are denied from a selective college, my hope is you won’t question your academic ability or lose sleep trying to figure out what was “wrong” with you or what you “could or should have done differently.” IPs mean admission decisions do not translate to “We don’t think you are smart” or “You could not be successful here.”
I didn’t ask 100 admission deans what words they would use to describe students they were forced to deny based on supply and demand and IPs, but here are my top three answers:
Smart
Talented
Impressive
You won’t see all of that in deny letters. You won’t really hear the voice of the dean/director whose signature is in your portal. But even in disappointment, my hope is you will know all of this is true. Instead of second-guessing or dwelling on things outside of your control, focus on the places where you are admitted. They clearly saw the same match and fit you did when you applied. They probably did not use the words “Institutional Priority” in their letter, but you are one. And that is something to celebrate and be excited about."
It’s not that kind of connections. In fact it’s considered uncouth to the point of sometimes becoming a strike against the applicant to leverage a connection’s name (unless that file was flagged as Provost/Dean’s special purview, which probably matters for a literal handful only.)
However there’s an advantage in knowing what the recommender is supposed to address - which is why highly selective colleges also have blog posts explaining what they are interested in knowing; they also know that less-resourced schools don’t always provide that information and may call with specific questions if something makes them interested. It does benefit Boarding School students but that advantage has decreased compared to 50 years ago due to the various corrective measures applied (hence, it’s still an advantage upper class parents see worth paying for but no longer the guaranteed ticket it used to be).
Finally, most public flagships (from Florida to California to Iowa …) don’t ask for LoRs because they want a class of 5,000+ freshmen and can’t read 70,000-100,000 LoRs on top of processing applications for grades, rigor, sometimes essays…
I think when talking about highly selective colleges, this is just a truism. Almost every sort of criteria they use is easier for a given individual to satisfy if they come from an advantaged background.
The only technical exceptions are “diamond in the rough” policies, where some colleges try to identify a few select admits from disadvantaged backgrounds who they think their normal criteria may be missing. But the statistics I have seen suggest those programs are very limited in scale.
So they all end up with an overall admit pool that predictably skews way more towards advantaged kids. Which is because all their normal criteria point in that same direction, and then these diamond in the rough policies are really just nibbling around the edges of that predictable skew.
Indeed, but I do think savvy high schools that have lots of applicants targeting the more selective private colleges and universities provide a lot of help. Just to begin with, they tend to have much lower student to faculty ratios. They also have all sorts of reinforced norms about class participation. They then may carefully explain to college applicants what these colleges want in a teacher recommendation, and they help those applicants identify the right faculty, ask them in a timely manner, provide information as relevant, and so on. And to the extent necessary, they will support faculty in terms of what to write as well.
But getting back to the OP’s case, just because these high schools are doing everything they can to facilitate good recommendations, that does not mean they have a monopoly on them. And again, I think sometimes a given individual might well benefit from a some sort of diamond in the rough policy that is supported at least in part by such recommendations.
But overall, those really are not taking up a meaningful number of admit slots at any college I have looked at. In that sense, if you are from an advantaged background and don’t get into a college you were hoping would like you, it is going to be way, way more a product of that college simply preferring some other kids from similar backgrounds that year. Whatever is happening with the disadvantaged kids is basically happening in a different “bucket” as they are sometimes called, and no more affecting you than recruited athletes or so on affect you. Not your bucket, so not really relevant to you.
To be fair, OP explained both applicants (his son and the other kid) were in the same “bucket”.
To your larger point wrt LoRs, yes, absolutely.
The key, here, is that there’s double disappointment: the son’s and the parent’s. Helping your child deal with that disappointment is rough … especially if you yourself see him as an awesome kid the stupid college is stupid to miss on (and this forum may be the place to rant because OP knows that won’t help their son but they still have to process their disappointment.)
In the end, the only way to remain positive for the child’s sake is that it was NOT a denial and, even if it were, adcoms know what they’re doing so it may be a sign there’s a better college out there.
Also, key: help the child identify 2 terrific colleges that share some characteristics with desired college #1, but less selective. All of us here can help with that if need be.
(* Yes you may not know they know what they’re doing but you have to trust they do for everyone’s sake.)
I thought the OP was saying the other kid went to a much lower ranked HS.
We don’t actually know what “buckets” this college was using or how it saw these kids. But hypothetically if there was a big difference in how they saw their respective high schools, they could have been seen as being in different buckets.
That said, the point of all this is just to encourage the OP not to worry about these sorts of pair comparisons. Again, we truly don’t know how this college discussed either of these kids, and we very likely never will.
And while a deferral does indicate that whatever bucket the OP’s kid actually was in for this college is very competitive–I agree that should not be discouraging. If you are in that competition yourself, then that means some great college, likely multiple great colleges, will end up wanting you. You just have to make sure you have applied to a good list. And it could well end up this college also decides it wants you, but if not, that is OK as long as you have such a list.
Yes… and such a high school (presumably in a less wealthy area) may well have less grade inflation than a “top” high school with students from more wealthy backgrounds. So that other student’s 4.0 may be even more impressive in comparison.
I think it was another poster who discussed high schools…
OP said “same race, same SES” but of course the different high school would be easy to use as a differentiator and point to.
Generally speaking we all agree: it’s pointless to try and compare applicants from the outside.
Yes this. I think if one laid out my kid’s stats on paper, I could probably easily find 100 kids that were not accepted at his school who would’ve truly believed they deserved to be there more than my son and vice versa on our end if we chose to size up the other students.
I think the bottom line is that while they may all be competitive, there is only so much room. They have to decline students they would normally accept. Sometimes it’s my kid and sometimes it will be another.
The poster didn’t compare anything but GPA’s wherein the student at the lower ranked school had a higher GPa and the known EC’s of one student to the unknown but assumed to be absent EC’s of the other student. How would the poster know the EC’s of the other student since the student attends another school and beyond that many EC’s are not school related? Also while GPA was mentioned, there was no mention of test scores. Seems to me the original poster is putting way too much importance on school ranking and then assumes rigor from rank can be assessed which it cannot.
Even if the original poster’s ranking of the two schools is correct, the poster does not know the rigor of the courses the other student took. Who knows if the student has taken AP courses and aced the exams or if the student has aced college/university courses outside of the lower ranked school?
So yes, letters of recommendation and essays do also factor in and as other posters have pointed out, context matters since people come from different backgrounds etc, but even without these factors, I think it’s presumptuous to assume that the student attending the lower ranked school didn’t have strong credentials that the poster and others here just do not know about.
The advice I would give to the poster is to set expectations accordingly and to apply to schools that will be a good fit from a broad range of acceptance rates. I know a student last year who was deferred from two schools, one of which had been their top choice for years and the other was very high up. When the deferrals came, there was some sting but since the student has not had any expectations of getting in, it was easy to move on and consider the schools for which there were acceptances in hand. During RD, the student actually was accepted to both of the deferred schools and is now attending their top choice.
Have you read the other student’s application? If not, how do you know there is any cause to be perplexed? It might be helpful to just not think about this other student and the confusion you seem to have regarding their admission but instead focus on your own child and their hurt. Maybe you can take your child out for a treat such as ice cream and talk about the other schools on their list and what they might be looking forward to doing at those schools. Also it’s a deferral so your child is not out of the running yet.
Maybe though maybe not. I think the poster is making some assumptions of the other student but doesn’t have the actual knowledge of the student’s strengths or profile. It’s just as likely - perhaps even more likely - that the posters on this thread would agree with the AO’s if they had read the applications of both students. I don’t think these types of statements are beneficial. The schools do not do a head to head comparison in this manner so why is this other student even part of the conversation? The poster is upset as is the poster’s child. The best thing for the poster to do is forget about this other student and focus on their own child. Look for a silver lining such as looking at what opportunities are available at the other schools on the child’s list.
There is that one kid and then there are likely the thousands of others from under-resourced schools that send no kids to Ivies in any given year and whose teachers are unfamiliar with how a reference letter should be written so they don’t include such details. In fact, the teacher will often want to stress the academic merit of their student to show that the student can indeed handle the rigor in a top school so will do something like focus on the 5 that the student got on an AP test which was impressive to the teacher since very few students get a 5 but which would probably read as nothing at all impressive to the school. In fact, the AO’s might think that the teacher doesn’t have much to say about the student since all the teacher seems to stress is the 5 the kid got. It would be wonderful to see how much correlation there is for high LOR rating and the resources available in a given school. I expect very few of the type of rural Kentucky kid you mention benefit from letters of recommendation.
You’d be surprised at how lousy some of the recommendations are from even well resourced high schools! Not lousy in the sense that they trash the student- but lousy because they are uninformative, non-descriptive, and resort to platitudes.
Think of bad ChatGPT.
“Susie is always willing to help out, and is the first student to volunteer to stay late to rearrange desks or tidy the classroom. She has a very pleasant demeanor and has never had any disciplinary issues in my class. She is diligent in the extreme- she got a B on a paper once and insisted on finding an extra credit project to bring up her grades before the final marking period.”
This is not necessarily the teacher being lazy. One of our student’s teachers said she tells the kids not to ask her for a LOR unless they know they have engaged with her in class etc so that she can write an informed one…otherwise it will end up, I guess, pretty much as what you described …and with the same (intended) outcome as you describe.
Sure perhaps but that’s comparing apples and oranges here. Schools that place students into Ivies can recommend which teachers to approach for letters because they have a history of which teachers wrote letters that placed students in top schools. Also I expect the reason a teacher from a well-resourced school would write such a letter is not because they don’t know how to write a write a glowing recommendation for Suzie but rather because they don’t have that much to say about Suzie so instead of saying Suzie is a middling/average student that helps out but really doesn’t stand out in the classroom setting, they write a rather tepid recommendation which is interpreted as such. Basically the gist is don’t expect much of Suzie in the classroom but she’ll be an acceptable student if you need her for your hockey team.
That isn’t the case in the school that doesn’t send students to Ivies or other top schools. In that school setting, there are no students who went to an Ivy so there is no actual guidance from which teacher a student should go to to seek a recommendation. The teachers are also not used to writing letters of recommendation and when they do, they write a letter where the focus may be on the wrong things like the 5 on an AP exam so it reads somewhat like the tepid Suzie letter but was actually meant to be glowing. The issue here is that the student would have had a glowing letter if their teacher knew how to write one but instead the recommendation is now in the tepid pile while other students at other schools where teachers know how to write glowing letters will be looked upon more favorably since their teachers know how to write these letters. This is why it would be interesting to see the correlation of LOR ratings with the amount of resources at a given school. I expect the kids that are like the Kentucky kid you mention will more often than not end up on the short end of the stick.
My daughter had a recommendation from an art teacher that was awful. Not that it was mean but the grammar was terrible, it read like an elementary school child wrote it. Luckily, she gave it to my daughter to submit to the counselor and my daughter asked him not to send it in.
But wouldn’t this be seen in the context of the school profile? If they know hardly any kids do APs at that school and the ones that do tend to get 2 or 3s, for example?
Some school profiles are more detailed than others. My kids’ school profile actually makes the school look better than it actually is, to the detriment of the students and their applications.
No since many schools don’t publish these kinds of statistics. In fact, if most students get 2’s and 3’s there is little reason for the school to put these numbers in a profile. Who would that impress? Profiles are not standardized so schools highlight what they want to unless they’re public and required by law to put in certain information. Even if a school did though, the words in such a letter would not be adequate in comparison to those letters from teachers used to writing these kinds of recommendations. Imagine receiving a letter from a teacher who states the student got a 5 on the AP test while other letters talk about Suzie or Bobby being one of those students that brings a teacher joy, always going above and beyond in the classroom, assisting when needed etc. It just lacks the panache that would make AO’s take note.
Exactly. There is no formula on what statistics should be reported or indeed how those statistics should be computed.