I think this was said once on this thread (iirc) but I will say it again because I believe it to be true.
All of us know our children incredibly well and see their strengths and awesomeness. We all hope the schools they apply to will see that as well.
I believe schools do see those strengths and recognize many students are ‘awesome’ and still don’t admit those students. A deferral or denial of admission isn’t a reflection of the person applying. It is a reflection of the choices the school is making to build their incoming class.
I think it is also incumbent upon us as parents to be able to be clear eyed about this process. In some ways, I liken school admissions to selling your house.
When selling a house, many look at the house they chose to buy and live in (and are now selling) and think it is so amazing - it is sure to sell quickly and over asking price. And yet, houses can linger on the market for any number of reasons - priced too high, interest rates depressing sales in general, very specific color/style choices that the owner loved that might not appeal to everyone, etc. etc., etc.
What we might think of as the strengths of our home, a buyer might not be interested in that particular feature. A gorgeous bathroom remodel might not appeal to a buyer who wants a completely different layout of the main living spaces. A fantastic home on a street with 3 other homes for sale that are a little less amazing but priced a whole lot cheaper might lose out to value buyers.
We just don’t know. But what we do know is that it only takes one buyer to love a home to buy it.
For students applying to the top tiers of colleges, the most likely outcome is some deferrals/rejections/waitlists. But you only need one school you really like to accept you. After all, you can only attend one school at a time.
OP, I wish your son the best of luck with the rest of his admission season. I’m sure y’all put as much thought into the safeties and targets on his list as you did the reaches, and he will have options when it is time for him to make his final decision.
Holistic college admissions often don’t make sense to people who aren’t privy to the process and each school’s institutional priorities that specific year. Accepting that’s just how it is will help with all the upcoming decisions too. I wish your S good luck in the rest of the process, and he should not count out the deferral. Control what he can control by getting good grades this semester, staying in touch with his AO, and perhaps sending another LoR (if the school allows)…in summary he should do everything he can do strengthen his app before it’s reviewed again. Here’s one school’s thoughts on deferrals and what to do: "I've Been Deferred." | Undergraduate Admissions
I agree with all of this…the schools this student applies to might not know any of this. These types of situations are what lead some students and parents to call schools to tattle on applicants who they believe shouldn’t be or shouldn’t have been accepted. Some schools have an admissions person who handles all these types of calls/emails because the volume can be…high. I’m NOT saying OP would do that, just using this example of what happens out there IRL.
Part of the issue is the stress we as parents put on our kids. It’d be great if any of us had the attitude of - it’s not a match and move on - without nary a thought.
Unfortunately many kids have been put into this high stress situation - and social media doesn’t help.
As parents and it’s not easy, I wish we could ween our kids off this incredible technology because it’s also hurtful and harmful in helping raise confident kids with good emotional balance.
AOs are humans. Even the two students having the same stat, may end up two different results due to individual preference. Even the same student reviewing by two different AOs, may end up one being deferred and the other being accepted. We will never know why. At the end, each AO makes the decision only spending about 10 min on each application.
So we might never come to an agreement on what really happened in the case of this other applicant. Again, I personally take that as a sign that we simply don’t know, indeed can’t know without having been in the room when they discussed that applicant and decided to admit. Nonetheless I will not insist you should share that conclusion.
But I do think we should be able to agree that comparing this applicant to your kid is not helpful, and not likely to lead to any meaningful insights. And that is for a very simple reason: this college almost surely did not do that (compare that applicant to your kid). So no good can come of imagining what would have happened if they did, because they didn’t.
As a final thought, if this experience is leaving you less inclined to think that the decisions these college make will be “fair” to every individual applicant, that every kid gets exactly what they deserve from each college, and more inclined to believe that these colleges are really doing whatever they see as in their best interests–good. As another poster just said, I think it is good for us parents to be clear eyed about this process, including when we are discussing outcomes with our kids.
But at the end of the day, these colleges can still provide a very valuable service to our kids, educationally and in other ways too. And my feeling is as long as your kid ends up accepting an offer from a college which you can comfortably affordable, which will provide a good education, and which your kid is excited to attend . . . then you have succeeded in the admissions process.
So hopefully even if you, and your kid, end up with a somewhat different and less positive impression of the admissions process than you might have started with, that does not actually dampen your kid’s excitement about going to college. And as parents, I think among many other things, we can try to provide a role model of how to combine a realistic sense of the way the world works while still exuberantly embracing when it ends up working well for us.
Perhaps this other kid is a child of a friend of yours (thus you seem to know so much personal information about him)? You seem to know socioeconomic status, complete financial needs, majors selected, every detail of how this other kid has spent his personal life.
Your kid didn’t have straight A’s, the other kid did. Perhaps the other school is not as lower ranked in the eyes of the AO as you think it is. Based on what you have said, these 2 kids have very little in common and maybe the school decided they wanted to give the other kid a better chance. As in, your kid doesn’t “need” this school but the school felt the other kid would better “benefit” from the school.
You can be hurt and be sad. But as people keep saying, trying to put down other kids isn’t the way to do it. If your kid really wants to go to that school, he should be focusing on what HE can do to move from deferred to accepted. College applications are already too much of a competition. The college made their choice for the reasons they did (maybe they didn’t think your kid would actually go to school there and commit).
Maybe they take too many kids from your kids “high ranked” high school and maybe other kids at his school with a 4.0 applied and your kid didn’t measure up within his own school?
My kid was the 3.3 gpa and yes, a suspension kid who got into a school that “perfect applicants” did not.
In the end I can almost guarantee the AO’s were never looking at your kid vs. that kid. AO’s did not put those 2 in direct “competition” with each other. Only the parents do that.
Typically admissions, especially at top schools, is handled by a team or a committee, and readers. There are several videos available on line with “a look inside the admissions office” (the old classic one was from Amherst, IIRC, but there are several others, showing what happens during reading season.) They are fun to watch. And several will note that academics/ transcripts are the most important thing they look at. It is not ever going to be about an AO waking up crabby and deciding the next application he/she reads is going to get an unduly critical view. And of course you, OP, know that.
As others have said, it’s not a good use of energy to think about what is “fair” or the differences between the candidate that got in and the one who was WL. If your s is still strongly interested, he can send updated info about any new honors, awards, accomplishments etc to his AO, and show (if it matters to that school) continuing interest.
Many years ago, my older s and a classmate of his both applied to the same school EA. The friend was going to be at a game and at that time they couldn’t look it up on their phones. So the friend gave my s access to his application account and asked my s to look at his result when they came out at 5 pm and let him know. Well, that was awkward, b/c my s was admitted and his friend was WL. When my s called him, the friend thought my s was teasing/messing with him. I am sure the friend was equally qualified to attend, but for whatever reason was not admitted at that time. He (the friend) ultimately attended elsewhere, but , thats what happened. The issue, IMO, is perhaps the thread title wording. aAn acceptance, especially at a top school, should not be “expected”. So your s is understandably disappointed, but should not have “expected”, but hoped for a better initial outcome.
The schools will make their decisions based on their purview of the application. I am sure you and your son will have a positive outcome at wherever he lands.
However, GPA is still important at holistic admission schools. At the most selective schools, a 3.75 GPA is likely to be seen as a demerit of an applicant, requiring the applicant to be even more exceptionally good (compared to others who are admitted) in other aspects. Meaning, a 4.0 GPA just keeps that applicant in the game (but itself is no guarantee; all it does is give the absence of a demerit).
Also, if it makes the OP feel better, both my son and another boy in his class applied to Colorado College ED. They had the same college advisor, who had seen both boys’ complete application. The advisor reassured us that my son’s was the stronger application, and if only one kid was admitted, it was likely to be my son.
You know where this is going, right? My son was rejected and the other boy got in.
We weren’t expecting an acceptance – this is my adhd son, and we just weren’t sure how colleges would view his record, or how admissions would go for him. My son ended up at Emory RD, which I only include to say it all worked out well, as I am certain it also will for the OP.
A quick thought on schools admitting high GPA’s to keep their numbers up-
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen evidence that this is “a thing”. Schools that do this, admit high SCORES, not GPA’s. Why? High GPA’s are a dime a dozen- literally there are HS’s with 25 valedictorian’s, all with perfect GPA’s. High scores are what is the scarcer resource.
Any college which recalculates your kid’s GPA using their own scale (not every college does so) is doing so because the alleged high scores typically go down once the HS’s weighting system (some make sense, some are bizarre) and policies on non-academic classes (your “participation grade” in gym is part of your GPA?) etc.
So if this particular college reweights the GPA’s of its applicants, you can take to the bank that they aren’t admitting just on the basis of a high GPA. They can do THAT with a LOT less work for the admissions team. Rack and stack.
The Wall Street Journal in the past has written about colleges which have renewed their focus on high SAT scorers (this was pre-Covid). I recall the Vanderbilt piece particularly. In my neck of the woods, Vandy became a very popular college for kids with good grades, high scores, but not a lot of leadership, EC’s, awards, or the traditional “you need this stuff to get in to a good college”. And I know a lot of kids who went there, did very well academically, but whose somewhat bare applications would not have gotten them in to a peer school at that time.
Given the timeline and the assertion that this is a “top tier school,” I’m going to guess that this application was part of the new “ED0” plan that a single “top tier school” has introduced this year, contingent on participation in a summer session.
So, while I agree that trying to parse why another allegedly-less-deserving candidate got in is generally counterproductive, I would also venture that enticing families to invest both valuable time and significant resources in summer sessions as the price of admission for an early ED cycle is bound to lead to bad feelings when the decision doesn’t go as hoped. (Apologies if I’m making a faulty assumption, but I don’t know of any other path to a “top-tier” ED decision this early.)
That said, the student’s response to the situation, as quoted by the parent, seems very mature. He sounds like a great kid as well as a great student, and whatever excellent school he ends up at will be lucky to have him.
Can you elaborate on this ED0? This is the first time I heard about it and about it linked to an associated summer program. Also, I take it that ED0 would the same as a normal ED meaning it’s binding but just earlier than the norm but feel free to correct me if I misunderstood.
