<p>I should have been clearer, marite. I do not disagree with any of your points in post 499. I really was tangentially referring to other threads in which you seem to shrug off his admission as something attainable by many others, and as an event which validates the relative unimportance of e.c.‘s or leadership or even perfect scores/GPA’s for HYP. Not really. Your description of him validates that he had one rockin’ Q factor. (And Q beats X anyway, unless X is rare/unique.)</p>
<p>epiphany. Okay.
What I try to argue is that the absence of ecs or leadership or perfect scores or high GPAs need not be crippling if it can be compensated by something else. In my s’s case, the near absence of ecs was compensated for by his strong academics. Of course if an applicant misses too many of these factors, the chances of admission come close to zero.</p>
<p>By the way, I just checked the profiles of the Presidential Scholars for 2005. My S knows two of them (possibly more since quite a lot of them seem to have ended up at Harvard). One fits the superstar profile; the other seems like a great, high achieving student but definitely not of the superstar variety.</p>
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Blue. Are you hearing what I’m hearing? The investment opportunity of a lifetime - six figure undergrad loans to students with absolutely no collateral or proven ability to pay. Ka-Ching!!! I smell money. </p>
<p>You and I know that has never happened. Never will happen. It is urban legend. No UG student without credit history, collateral, or co-signor has ever borrowed $100,000 for UG. But people keep repeating it as if it is true. Much like the ever present refrain that all HYP or other super-selective admits have full-rides from other schools just waiting for them (although there are in fact very , very few full rides granted each year outside of sports, and at private schools the numbers are tiny indeed. ). Or that someone’s kid would have been val at “the inferior school”. It is just as silly to consider the kid a shoo-in for full-ride scholarship as it is to consider them as being admitted to a school that denies over 80% of its applicants.</p>
<p>Yep and my Aunt would have been my Uncle…</p>
<p>marite-</p>
<p>The Presidential Scholar from my school was wait listed by Harvard and not taken off. He won an Intel prize.</p>
<p>The other male nominee was on par with him academically. The lone female nominee from my school is going to Wesleyan (which is not a bad school) but plenty of other girls were higher achieving, had better GPAs and resumes, etc which was reflected in their college processes (Yale, Harvard, UPenn, Stanford, Columbia, UChicago, and Brown), schools the nominee had been rejected from.</p>
<p>Presidential scholars is sort of a weird program.</p>
<p>"Or that someone’s kid would have been val at “the inferior school”…</p>
<p>I don’t think most parents think that. However, many of us are reasonably certain they would have been top 10% at a much less demanding school – not just because of the demands of the academics, but because of the extremely similar & quite accomplished level of <em>peers</em> in the more demanding school. When all of the top 20% of students are one-thousandth of a decimal point away from each other in weighted GPA, it makes meaningful comparisons difficult. (Which is why so many schools have abandoned ranking. See the thread on student rank.)</p>
<p>This is significant only because of the importance of top decile in reviews of apps. However, AdOfficer has somewhat clarified this, & the expertise of the regional reps when it comes to intimate knowledge about school comparisons.</p>
<p>Just editing/clarifiying:
I think it’s silly to move “down” a school deliberately for the sake of attaining a decile or a val rank. What the demanding school provides is much more than a rank; it provides preparation for the college curriculum & success therein. Further, moving “down” can become a Pyrrhic victory if the committee dismisses/reduces the value of a rank at a lower performing school.</p>
<p>SES:</p>
<p>Yes, it sure looks so! The qualities described in the profiles are just so very different. What struck me, however, for this thread, is that two candidates with very different profiles both got into Harvard. I did not take a look at other profiles, just of the two I knew about. A fair number also got into Yale and Princeton many others are attending a huge variety of colleges’.</p>
<p>“It is just as silly to consider the kid a shoo-in for full-ride scholarship as it is to consider them as being admitted to a school that denies over 80% of its applicants.”</p>
<p>You don’t think that HYP mean it when they proclaim an institutional preference for need-based (not merit-based) grants, over loans? (Relative to the level of need, not the level of merit + need.) It was my understanding that if you are admitted, you are funded according to your/your family’s need, including if that means full-ride.</p>
<p>“Full-ride scholarship” does not normally mean need-based grants. It is usually meant to apply to merit, athletic, etc scholarships awarded for other than need. At least, that’s how I’ve always read it.</p>
<p>I don’t see anything in atomi’s post that says loan without co-signer.</p>
<p>The “My daughter does not want to pay back her college loans” describes a situation with high loan, only different is that it is the kid who demanded it.</p>
<p>I guess I’m trying to make sense of such distinctions, Garland, for super elite schools such as Ivies, which are filled overwhelmingly with meritorious students on one measure or another.</p>
<p>OT:</p>
<p>epiphany, what did you say? LOL. I’ll try to do better with my OT comment. Sorry. My comment was about the many posts that say “X got into Harvard. I’m sure he would have (or even he DID have) a full ride to Merit U.” The truth is, the number of merit full rides is tiny compared to the number of slots at the super-elites. Just for fun I started counting the slots at schools I knew something about in the Top 50 LAC’s and came to less than 50 scholarships for full tuition + room + board for about 30 of the schools. Of course several in that number were easy as they had either zero merit scholarships or zero full rides. But there’s probably 50 people posting at any one time that they or their kid turned down a full ride at a top merit school to go somewhere else. I find it unlikely that all of them are being completely truthful. Other than generous state programs that combined with something else provide a cobbled together full-ride (which is still GREAT) - Florida and Georgia for two , or state schools who seek to attract NMF’s, or the rare TCNJ (who has recently revamped their scholarships), there just aren’t very many such scholarships. The most generous state schools may have 100 a year. Some have zero. I’d venture to guess less than 1-2000 straight-up merit full rides in the Top 50 Uni’s and LAC’s combined.</p>
<p>But this was waaay off topic. Sorry. Nevermind.;)</p>
<p>[edit:I guess I was thinking about the recent (and very nice) poster searching for schools with automatic full rides for a 32 ACT with no other criteria mentioned.]</p>
<p>epiphany - For a student from a family of four to automatically qualify for a full ride, he/she would have to earn less than ~$30,000 at Columbia and less than ~$50,000 at Harvard. Both institutions would still require work study and Harvard, I believe, require summer work contributions.</p>
<p>The average middle class family would earn far too much to be considered for such awards.</p>
<p>I know that, ses. I wasn’t talking about the average middle-class family, but the ones meeting those need levels you provided. For those levels, I thought that non-loan funding (but which does include work-study during the year) is the financial aid award of choice, regardless of “merit,” as the student has demonstrated merit via admission to the U. No?</p>
<p>And for at least one U that I know of in that range of elites, summer savings from work is a goal, but the funding is nevertheless adjusted in favor of add’l grant aid if the summer goal is not met. The U recognizes that it’s difficult to obtain uninterrupted summer work in such a temporary employment category as a college student finds himself between terms.</p>
<p>The thing is that very few kids who are admitted actually qualify. Only 60 kids our of 1700 per class at Columbia (and Barnard) are eligible for their OPUS program.</p>
<p>Kids who have parents that work multiple jobs or parents who both work may find that their parents’ desire to give them a better life has placed them out of range for such awards.</p>
<p>What’s OPUS? Is that the National Opportunity Program that is parallel to NY’s HEOP program?</p>
<p>OPUS at Columbia <a href=“http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/asp/programs/[/url]”>http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/asp/programs/</a></p>
<p>Yes. That’s ^^ the Program I assumed was meant.</p>
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<p>First-time or not, the fruits of cheating must have included a lowered grade on an assignment, lowered performance in a class, lower GPA, lower class rank and lowered (or eliminated) eligibility for school prizes. That is punishment, not REWARD. The value of the high school credential is lower than it would have been if the cheating had never occured. In particular, to the extent that the high school transcript is used in admissions, this lowers the chances of acceptance at any college. </p>
<p>The question raised was: what business do the high school personnel have, involving themselves in the applicant’s relationships with third parties (universities in this case) that go beyond the score of the applicant’s relationship with the high school? When teachers, counselors and principals interpose themselves as informants for the universities, that calls into question whether their fiduciary interest is to the student, the high school, or the university.</p>
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<p>The Mathematical Association of America is now tracking the number of high school students who take AP calculus courses before senior year (which is getting to be quite a large number) </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.maa.org/columns/launchings/launchings_05_07.html[/url]”>http://www.maa.org/columns/launchings/launchings_05_07.html</a> </p>
<p>and has formed a special interest group on teaching advanced high school students. For years, high school students who were ready to study calculus early were put off by their schools, with the question, “But what will you take after calculus?” Now the MAA special interest group is trying to develop a variety of answers to that question. </p>
<p>For another look at mathematics besides calculus in high school, see </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/AoPS_R_A_Calculus.php[/url]”>http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/AoPS_R_A_Calculus.php</a> </p>
<p>P.S. Marite is very familiar with all of these issues; I first “met” her in an online forum about mathematics education. I am posting the links for other participants in this thread.</p>
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<p>I see the original text of post # 479 has been restored. </p>
<p>No, I don’t think the “only” result of education from top schools is people who “invariably” end up with the listed outcomes. At best, such a statement is hyperbole. I have met too many counterexamples (graduates of top schools who turned out just fine, in a variety of occupations) to take the statements in post #479 as the last word on their subject.</p>