<p>Allow me to know my own son better than you do. You can bet all you want. “No leadership and hardly any EC” is not being modest on my part.</p>
<p>I also know lots of Harvard students. Of the 10 that got into Harvard the same year as my son, one was an accomplished pianist, another was co-captain of the science team. The others were indistinguishable from hundreds of other applicants, most of whom were not admitted, in terms of their ECs. They may have been helped by being from Cambridge, but my S’s current friends, who hail from many different states did not have extraordinary ECs in high school–or indeed at Harvard. They are all very bright young men and women and participate in a variety of activities at Harvard, including orchestra and chorus. One thing they do not do is walk on water or fly around wearing a cape.
There are some superstars at Harvard both in terms of academics and in terms of what they have accomplished before or are accomplishing at Harvard. But they are a minority. The large majority of students at Harvard could be found at Duke, Chicago, Tufts, Washington University, Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst, and many other schools. Indeed, many students who were accepted at Harvard were accepted at other schools, but chose Harvard (see Revealed Preference study). But there are also students who were admitted to Harvard and went elsewhere.</p>
<p>There isn’t such a person as homo harvardianus.</p>
<p>Private schools do not hate Chinese or other Asians. Asians are represented there in far larger proportion than in the general population.</p>
<p>A good third to half of my son’s friends are Asians, though he has never chosen his friends on the basis of their ethnicity.</p>
<p>There may be more to your profile than your SAT scores and GPA. But they do not set you apart from many many other applicants to top schools, including Cornell, and you seem to suggest that your recs were not particularly strong. That would not have helped your case.</p>
<p>The only leadership position I had was a couple of sports captainships. As a matter of fact the only ECs I had were sports. And no volunteering. I had fine stats (800 Math SATI 720 Verbal, 750 Math IIC, 720 Writing, 690 Chemistry, rank was 2/198).</p>
<p>I got into Princeton and MIT, once I got that back I asked Harvard to stop considering me.</p>
<p>Now the captainships exhibit leadership, but I really don’t think that got me into MIT. From what I heard from the admissions officer that let me in was that he thought I was hilarious, and my application actually represented who I was, and he thought I would fit in perfectly and contribute to the school. That’s why he let me in.</p>
<p>I agree that Harvard isn’t looking just for leaders. My son truly had no leadership positions. (One of several VPs of Science Olympiad was it.) He brought other things to the table - a lot of experience computer programming both for fun and working for others. Good results (state level not national level) in science competitions. But he never initiated a thing.</p>
<p>Marite: I am well aware of the fact that Asians are “overrepresented.” That, however, does not help the fact that Asians are held to much more rigid and stricter standards than their Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic counterparts. </p>
<p>Honestly, as I said, I was not too surprised by Stanford, UPenn, and Columbia given my extracurriculars, essays, and recommendations. I had nothing that particularly stood out in those categories. If it were just these schools that rejected me, I would have no complaints, but Cornell? </p>
<p>You can heap on all the ******** you want about how “there are other factors other than just SATs and class ranking” in the college admissions process, but frankly, Cornell is not exactly the most selective Ivy League there is. </p>
<p>Plus, the fact that I was a finalist for the alumni scholarship (scholarship based on extracurriculars) at Berkeley should demonstrate that my extracurriculars was not too subpar.</p>
<p>I apologize for ranting, but when you have several classmates with inferior stats (2000~, 4.0~ weighted) and virtually no extracurriculars (except for the occasional shoplifting and internet scamming) getting into Cornell, you might feel a bit unbalanced as well.</p>
<p>fastMED - You’re entitled to vent. Your story makes my blood boil and I’m white, not Asian. Californiia and Michigan and I think a couple of other states have voted down AA in admissions. Good for them! Given your abilities and drive and the outstanding education you will receive in the UC system, you will make huge contributions to our society and we will all benefit. Over time the private elite schools who engage in thier contorted admissions logic may lose their luster simply because the caliber of their graduates aren’t really that uniformally great. At least not as great as, say, UC Berkleley’s! In not too many years you may very well find yourself in a hiring position, choosing among job candidates from private elite schools and top publics. Hmmm . . . I wonder who you’ll be inclined to go with? Just try to be fair and not hold it against the graduates of the inferior schools.</p>
<p>Marite: Since when was I talking about history? Please learn to read. I was talking about how Jewish people are not affected by affirmative action nowadays while East Asians are. </p>
<p>Anyways, I am done ranting, and I wish all of those applying to college best of luck no matter what the race. </p>
<p>As Candide says, “All that is very well but let us cultivate our garden.”</p>
<p>Come on, guys. We all know Asians face a much higher bar to get into Ivies than other racial groups. Jews did, too, at one time. They complained loud and hard and made their point and it stopped. Asians are entitled to protest unfair policies, as well.</p>
<p>fastMEd: My son’s experience was similar to yours, except he is white and Jewish, had numerous leadership-type ECs (and worked from 10th grade on), and had fans writing his recommendations. And he had legacy status at several of the schools that rejected him. Many of the classmates who got in “instead” of him were Asian. One difference, however, is that he thinks they are terrific, and, while somewhat disappointed, of course, he doesn’t begrudge them their places at all.</p>
<p>Another thing . . . if your attitude about Cornell came through at all in your application, it probably pretty much guaranteed the result you got. I’m fairly sure that kind of thing affected one of my kid’s unexpected rejections, too, from a college that took several seemingly less qualified (and more Asian) classmates.</p>
<p>fastmed. Based on what you have presented I’d have rejected you in a heartbeat. Your writings present you as arrogant, dismissive, acerbic, haughty, uncaring, and entitled. And that’s just on this thread. </p>
<p>From the way you have presented yourself here, who honestly would want you on their campus? </p>
<p>You want to know what was wrong with your apps? Before blaming the Jews for taking your spot you might want to look closer to home. </p>
<p>and mammall, please don’t speak for me. “We” don’t all know “that”. You may erroneously believe “that” to be true. Schools don’t discriminate against asian applicants. They state over and over that they take each student’s stats within the context of their environment. </p>
<p>p.s. to fastmed - “Please learn to read.” To marite? Have you lost your mind?</p>
<p>I guess this illustrates one reason why colleges look beyond test scores to build the entering classes they invite into their campus communities.</p>
<p>the question posed in Post 1…“How is it that even a student with a 2400 SAT and a 36 ACT can’t be 100 percent sure of being admitted to the top colleges in the United States?”</p>
<p>Its not complicated there is more things considered by top colleges than just test scores. Since the top colleges can pick their students from a pool of applicants all of whom are good academically, the college has the luxury of including things like the students character and family background. </p>
<p>Any student with the test scores you have use will be able to get into a very very good school and a top school, if not Yale maybe Duke or Rice, if not Swarthmore maybe Oberlin or Colorado College. </p>
<p>The difference between the education obtained at a top 25 school and a top 5 school will depend more on the student than the school. If fact I can go as far as to say I think, the difference between the education obtained at a top 50 school and a top 5 school will depend more on the student than the school.</p>
<p>Tommybill’s statement is great; I’m not certain you couldn’t double it (at least) to 200 schools.</p>
<p>It used to be that the main difference between Harvard, etc., and colleges farther down the prestige totem pole was the quality of the student body, and therefore the quality of education students got from their peers. That is still a difference, but the magnitude of it is diminishing rapidly because of all the factors we’ve been discussing here. There are too many “Harvard students” for Harvard (or Yale, S, M, etc.) to accept, so they are present in critical-mass concentrations at many more colleges than in the past.</p>
<p>It has been a couple of generations since the Ivy League (and a few of its New England LAC cousins) lost the monopoly on great students. It’s never coming back, and that’s a good thing.</p>
<p>I think many of you are being too harsh on fastMED. This is a young person processing a real disappointment and that ain’t easy. Many of you are lifting out single phrases from his posts and reading much more darkness into them then I think is warranted. In general, there are too many posters on here who are slavish to the current admissions system. Some are products of it, some have kids who have “gotten in” and some are just star struck by it. Many just endlessly fetishize (sp?) acceptance at HYP and don’t seem to question if these institutions really deserve to get our kids and our $200k given the contorted logic of their admissions process.</p>
<p>Sorry, his “real disappointment” is that he is going to one of the great universities of the world with a significant, and prestigious scholarship. Boo-hoo-hoo. And his way of “processing” that awful fate is to assume a posture of racial victimhood. That doesn’t seem too productive to me. In three months he should have moved on to one of the later stages of grief.</p>
<p>I’m not sure who you are talking about in the quoted post. On my part, I have lived six years of my life in a country in which college admission, which is avidly sought after, is based just about entirely on test scores. (The national college admission test there is like taking a battery of AP tests over two days, a lot harder than taking an SAT I or ACT test.) That’s that country’s system (or was, because now the system is changing somewhat) and the parents there have to deal with that system as it is. </p>
<p>The United States system has never quite had a strictly top-down rank ordering of students by test scores (although some state universities have come pretty close to operating that way). Here in the United States, as the recently posted self-reported example makes clear, a college may choose to disregard test scores (or, if you prefer to look at the issue that way, choose to regard other issues) so much that an applicant with high test scores may be rejected for admission by several colleges that, indeed, admit other applicants with lower test scores. Here in the United States each college can set its own admission procedures, within very broad limits. Parents in the United States have to deal with the system as it is, that’s all. We may all (for all I know) wish that the system were different, but we have to deal with current reality. </p>
<p>I think the concern some colleges have with building an on-campus community is precisely what makes those colleges attractive to large numbers of applicants. Of course any applicant is free to do what I did in my generation and apply to just one college, State U. (I wouldn’t recommend applying to college that way, but that is still a viable option in most states.) Families that like to be in the position of comparing offers will have to apply to more than one college–but they get to decide which colleges to apply to, and which offers to accept if they get more than offer of admission. As a matter of worldwide reputation, I don’t expect HYPSM to decline rapidly any time soon (for reasons that JHS laid out quite a few posts ago, in this thread). But that’s not at all to say that any of my children, or anyone else I know who is shopping for colleges, should or will apply solely to those colleges. The main impetus for my posting this thread was just to make sure that any young person who has high test scores (like the some of the young people I know personally in my town) takes a balanced approach to applying to college. Apply to places you like. Be SURE to apply to a “safety” college. While filling out your application form, honestly describe aspects of yourself that may not be related to your test scores, but that help you fit into a college community. Congratulate the other students who get admitted and commiserate with those who are rejected by their top-choice colleges, and bloom where you are planted.</p>