<p>Some folks rationalize it that way, but I think in reality only a small percentage actually believe that an HYPSM education will be demonstrably superior than say that provided by the next 20 or 30 ranked schools.</p>
<p>What I think really drives much of the HYPSM lust is ordinary human competitiveness. Humans are a competitive species. Everyone wants to win. Competition pervades nearly everything we do. And in the full-contact sport known as College Admissions, winning First Prize is for many people defined as getting admitted to HYPSM.</p>
<p>^^ I agree. what also drives the frenzy is the parents’ own ego. How thrilling to tell everyone at work, or a cocktail party, junior got into Princeton. He must be brilliant! Takes after his dad!</p>
<p>I’m not so bothered by kids complaining about the unfairness of the system after they’ve been deferred or rejected. In many ways they’re right. It must be awful, working your butt off for 4 years, trying to figure out what this or that ivy wants, getting straight A’s and near perfect scores, then have a classmate with lower everything get in. I understand that person had something desirable, but good luck trying to find out what it was. </p>
<p>What irks me is super selective schools inundating kids with mail, painting this picture…you must come here or you won’t be happy. Then they reject your butt and brag about their low admit rate</p>
<p>Sorry, I don’t think that percentage is so small. If it were, every one of the merit awards at Wash U, U Chicago, Vanderbilt, Rice, etc. would be snapped up. (Well, not every one; awardees can only accept one, and some students have multiple offers.)</p>
<p>In my spot of small-town Midwest, the percentage that chooses any Ivy at full cost over other top-20 with significant merit money is small, but not zero. I think the percentage of students/parents who live in large urban areas with hyper-competitive schools is quite a bit larger. I don’t think it can be explained away by reference to ‘competitiveness’.</p>
<p>“I find it sad the amount of time and emotional capital these kids are spending on the whole process (including posting on these college admission boards). Maybe it is the rural environment - but the seniors I know (even the ones w/ great stats, applying to top schools) are getting their appls completed and doing regular high school/teenage activities. They know they will be going to some college in the fall and they want to enjoy this last year w/ their friends.”</p>
<p>Sounds like the kids I know. I don’t know that I’d call it rural, but it’s kind small town.</p>
<p>I may get flamed for posting this, but there are kids who get accepted to Ivies, who don’t even know they exist until late in the process. My daughter and her best friend were both accepted to Yale yesterday. Neither of them had uttered the words “Ivy League” until the mid-point of their Junior year, when they started looking into where they might aspire to apply. </p>
<p>They both just lived their lives, worked hard in school, and were oblivious to what any adcom might look for. I suspect both of them submitted naive and unsophisticated yet sincere essays. Neither of them studied much for standardized tests: I know they went to about 4 hours of math review before the SAT and that’s it. </p>
<p>We live in a place where the selective college process is not well-understood. I joined CC this fall, and was stunned at the hyper-involvement of parents in the process, and in the obsession with selective schools by the students on the forum. It was a new world to me. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate what I learned on CC and because of some very helpful parents, was able to understand much about the admissions process. But the escalating preoccupation with college admissions over just being a kid is astounding, and I think, damaging to our children.</p>
<p>Given the results of these girls’ applications, I wonder if adcoms are also more intrigued by the unpolished, genuine children who are clearly not running on the admissions treadmill.</p>
<p>And as I suggested in my last post, I believe that the apparent willingness of many high school kids, and their parents, to essentially give up on being a kid while in high school, in favor of developing what seems (to them, anyway) to be the most impressive resume possible, is driven to a large extent by a fundamental misconception: that the quality of their college experience (and perhaps the rest of their lives) depends upon their being admitted to one of a small handful of schools. Only if you labor under the misconception that a high quality college experience is a very scarce commodity would you be willing to invest so heavily - in time, effort, anxiety, etc. - in the process of trying to gain admission to one of those schools.</p>
<p>(By the way, in response to your concern about being “flamed,” etc., speaking for myself, I’m not against the Ivies. [My son, who didn’t even consider going there until his senior year - and didn’t visit until after being accepted - now attends Harvard.] What troubles me is the monomaniacal Ivy-or-else obsessiveness that one often seems to encounter these days.)</p>
<p>I don’t believe CC is a microcosm of what’s going on out there with most high school kids. There might be a “monomaniacal Ivy-or-else obsessiveness” on here, but I don’t think the vast majority of college-going kids have their hearts set on an Ivy. I know my son doesn’t. I think about 25 kids in his school’s senior class applied to an Ivy.</p>
<p>That said, I absolutely agree that the whole marketing game of the Ivies and other schools stinks. Yield wasn’t something I was aware of until I joined CC, so thank you all for the pre-emptive reality check for when my sophomore starts getting mail from 1,001 colleges that are sure he’s a perfect fit for them, sight unseen.</p>
<p>I can feel for the kids who really want to go to a certain school and get rejected, Ivy or not. No one likes to be rejected, be it for a raise or a promotion or date with the cute guy you’ve had your eye on. So, (((hugs))) to the kids.</p>
<p>And when a dad says, of my kid was accepted to 4 ivys, he could in fact be lying…it happens all the time, people lie, exagerate…quielty boasting my pattoty…</p>
<p>My son was rejected yesterday at Stanford. His reaction has little to do with any expectation he would get in – he knew what the odds were. He’s disappointed because he liked the school, likes California, really, really hoped to not have to do more applications over winter break and…he put so much time and energy into the application. Once you put that much time and energy into something, of course it’s disappointing not to get it. Last year another one of my kids applied for scholarship money – it was a large amount of money being awarded to high-achieving students with a particular illness. The deadline was the end of finals week and it was as much work as a college app. She ran around during reading week getting letters of recs, etc., spent two exhausting days at airports (bad weather grounded her) trying to get home all the while working on essays and so forth for this scholarship – all after finals, papers and packing and storing her stuff. She arrived two days later than scheduled and started a job the next morning. She was literally finishing up the app in the car while I drove her. By then she was invested in winning the scholarship and not getting it felt like “Gee, I sure could have lived without that stress.” I think that’s how my kid feels now. They get invested – how can they not? And, let’s face it, it’s not like they can quietly apply and take their chances with no one knowing. They have to go to teachers, counselors, etc. and how great can it feel to have other people knowing you tried for something and didn’t get it – whether it’s a job or a scholarship or anything else in life. And they are, after all, still kids. I’ve been an adult a long time but I don’t like feeling rejected. I disagree with the person who said the kids don’t know what rejection is like, etc. or don’t see it coming because they think they are so smart. Yeah, my kid did well – but he worked really hard to do well, it wasn’t handed to him. He had every reason to apply to a reach school knowing the odds. Knowing you might get rejected doesn’t make it less likely to hurt when you are rejected. And the system isn’t perfect. Ask any kid at one of those elite schools if they don’t think there are kids there who shouldn’t be compared to kids they know who didn’t get in.</p>
<p>I think for many of these kids this is a painful but VERY VALUABLE life lesson. Most of these kids will get into terrific college that may turn out to be better for them. But being rejected by the school with the name that will be instantly recognized by everyone everywhere for the rest of your life is a bit of a slap upside the head for kids who have always succeeded at everything they do. Life is not fair, may as well get a taste of that truth at 18.</p>
<p>We could debate the value of a LAC (no teaching assists, smaller classes, direct access to professors who are more interested in teaching than research) vs large well known schools ad nauseum. But frankly, I think my son is getting a better education at his LAC than he would at Harvard. I don’t think spending his frosh year in huge lecture classes, being taught by grad students, and having profs and administrators who are more interested in teaching than research would be a good fit for him. However, there is something to be said for having “Harvard” on your resume for the rest of your life. (Sorry, didn’t mean to dis Harvard, but these are some generalizations with a nugget of truth to them that people who are blinded by the Ivy names don’t realize).</p>
<p>The trick is to get these rejectees to see the whole picture, not just the name.</p>
<p>As many of you know, my son had a miserable freshman year at his ED Ivy. This year is going better, but he still thinks a LAC might have been a better choice. His first year teachers were almost all horrible, his classes were huge and he found the place lacking in intellectual stimulation. This year he made some good class choices and changed his living situation. Having his laptop ripped from it’s power supply and stolen from his room two weeks ago right before finals was the low point, but he’s bounced back. Yeah- some of these kids who have been rejected or deferred may wind up “thanking God for unanswered prayers”, as the song goes.</p>
<p>“I don’t think spending his frosh year in huge lecture classes, being taught by grad students, and having profs and administrators who are more interested in teaching than research would be a good fit for him.”</p>
<p>Did you mean “more interested in research than teaching”?</p>
<p>I think that’s what she meant. I’ve heard Harvard is working on improving the huge classes thing, but for my son, none of the Ivy League schools sounded like a comfortable social fit, so he gave them all a pass. Not everyone would be happy at his tiny LAC in the middle of nowhere, but <em>he</em> is and that’s all that matters to us.</p>
<p>To turn this into an Ivy-vs.-LAC issue, in my view, kind of misses the point. The more important point, I think, is that many kids, and parents, seem to labor under the misconception that there is this small group of schools out there - *however they define them<a href=“whether,%20say,%20Harvard,%20Yale,%20Princeton;%20or%20Swarthmore,%20Williams,%20Amherst;%20or%20Michigan,%20UC-Berkeley,%20etc.”>/i</a> - that hold the key to their having a high-quality college experience, when the fact may well be that they could have such an experience at any number of schools. If you think that the sort of defeat and devastation that seem to be experienced by so many kids at this time of year is limited to Ivy applicants, just look, for example, at the Swarthmore board (where one recent poster characterized herself as “fuming/hysterical/borderline in tears right now”).</p>
<p>^That was a very large part of the reason that I didn’t include specific colleges in my search. I’m a first-generation college student, and I didn’t know anything about the process. Obviously I’d heard about specific colleges, but I didn’t look at them favorably over other schools…and oddly enough the Ivies weren’t even included in my search.</p>
<p>I was accepted on Wednesday to my 1st choice which is a small California State University (it was important to me to stay in-state if possible)…in fact it used to be a LAC but was recently granted CSU status. I’ll most likely end up there next year.</p>
<p>Honestly, I never understood the Ivy obsession. I feel like I’m going to get just as good of an education at my top choice than I would at HYPMS, for much cheaper and MUCH closer to home.</p>
<p>Congrats to your daughter for her acceptance, but don’t you think that statement is kind of insensitive? I don’t think it’s fair to deride students who worked hard for many years to achieve a goal they always had (ie, to get into one of their top choice colleges). So what if these students knew they wanted to go to XYZ school before they were juniors? Is it wrong to have a dream and to try for it? I don’t think that makes those students any less genuine.</p>
<p>I don’t think she was being insensitive, just questioning. I’ve wondered the same thing. My son’s app was excellent, but not perfect and not polished. He didn’t have a lot of community service, for instance, and it would have been easy enough to pad that but he just told it like it was. </p>
<p>I encouraged him to figure out who he was and then find schools that fit him, rather than skimming the names from the top of a list and trying to fit into them. My favorite book on admissions, Winning the Heart of the College Admissions Dean, had a chapter called something like “Eight First Choices”, about finding an entire list of great-fit schools and not falling in love with one until the acceptances are in hand. I think that’s very good advice and speaks to what epistrophy and others are saying. Of course, that’s harder to do when you apply ED.</p>
<p>It sounds like there are kids who are going for the name/rank without much self-knowledge or even knowledge of the schools necessarily or of the other excellent options. That’s what’s sad–the needless angst about “the one perfect school” when it might not even be the best fit and certainly isn’t the only great option.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s fair to deride students who worked hard for many years to achieve a goal they always had (ie, to get into one of their top choice colleges). So what if these students knew they wanted to go to XYZ school before they were juniors? Is it wrong to have a dream and to try for it? I don’t think that makes those students any less genuine.</p>
<p>I don’t think the post was intending to demean students who have been focused on a goal for 5 years and who are working systematically to attain that goal.
But if a college has 50 billion applications & their intent is to build a well rounded class with lopsided students, they are only going to want so many kids who have been aware and focused on the college as a goal.</p>
<p>Other students- like my Ds for example- who are first generation college, who have learning disabilities, but who also have tenacity and intellect even if it hasn’t earned them major awards are also interesting to colleges, because they add breadth to a student body that may otherwise be full of legacies.</p>
<p>What bothered me was the assumption that kids who have always wanted to attend top colleges are going to be immediately recognizable based on their resumes. Just because you want to go to a really good school doesn’t mean you’re going to be a drone.</p>