Yes, this article from MIT remains some of the most useful framing I have ever seen:
It sounds to me like the OP’s kid actually did follow the advice as to activities in that article, but that is then leading up to this:
But what if you don’t get into MIT?
Well, you may be disappointed. But you learned everything you could, so now you’re smarter; you were a positive member of your community, and you made people happy; and you spent high school doing not what you thought you had to do to get into a selective college, but what you wanted to do more than anything else in the world. In other words, you didn’t waste a single solitary second of your time.
Applying sideways, as a mantra, means don’t do things because you think they will help you get into MIT (or Harvard, or CalTech, or anywhere). Instead, you should study hard, be nice, and pursue your passion, because then you will have spent high school doing all the rights things, and, as a complete side effect, you’ll be cast in the best light possible for competitive college admissions.
I’ll just add that although some kids may not see it yet, soon enough they will learn that much more important than the specific college you attend is how well you do, the choices you make, the experiences you have, the opportunities you make the most of.
Kids who have followed the sort of path we are describing in HS are very well-prepared to do it all again in college. And that preparation is itself well worth the effort.
This was my kid’s experience, that the spike (music) mattered more than anything else. But it was something at which kid had excelled since third grade, that only became more and more intense, due to kid’s love of it. Still, kid played town sports until high school, and also played backyard sports and video games with friends - it wasn’t only the spike. But did pretty much no non-music high school activities. Virtually all honors and APs to the max, but not to the level of achievement that your kid has shown.
At their tippy-top, I would say that virtually everyone kid has met has shown extremely high “spikey” achievement in at least one area, above and beyond excellent academic achievement overall. I do recognize some legacies who seem less brilliant than the others, although still nothing to sneer at, and kid says that some of the athletic recruits are at a different intellectual level. There are very few well-rounded high achievers, without a particular spike in achievement.
When kid saw their admissions file, I think that what stood out most to them was consistent high achievement under adverse circumstances (severe and challenging family illness plus pandemic issues), plus the extraordinary spike achievement. All evaluators said they wanted feedback from the interviewer. All noted the high spike achievement. And it was in something that the school wanted. We don’t know how other schools would have gone, because kid took the ED/EA to the tippy top and didn’t bother submitting the other apps.
At this point, your son has the very high achievement that is the “base” that the top schools want. He could still set himself apart in his essay. And if he did his ECs well, because he genuinely wanted to do those things, that should come across, too.
I’ll just suggest again reading that thread I linked about the Yale student who saw their file. In their case, it was their personality as reflected in recommendations and their interview that really stood out to their readers, not something achievement oriented.
I’ve seen the same basic thing in other similar threads before. And I think it shows that there are in fact many different ways to stand out.
I would ignore the internet “noise” and carry on. He is on a road to success. I asked about comparison to his classmates, because many of the competitive schools apparently read applications from a given HS together. If he can stand out within that group (which may come down to essays, LOR’s, and length of EC involvement rather than a spike), that should help him a lot…
My daughter’s hs valedictorian had a 4.0, 10 or 11 APs and DE m 36 ACT.
Applied to 16 of the top 20. Got in none. Accepted NYU full pay. Goes to U Tennessee.
The profile your student created is awesome and they should be proud.
They, not the school, will create their long term success.
I laugh. My old college gf almost flunked out of our mid level private. Psych degree. Been an entertainment vp since 28 years old. Crushes me career wise - prob $500k plus.
It’s about your kid.
If someone says no, that’s their loss, not yours. He should be proud.
The error was you allowed a dream school. Never allow a dream school. All schools have warts - bad roomies, profs, food - whatever.
Your son got himself this accomplished. If he keeps working hard, the sky is the limit whether he goes to UMN or MIT.
Is this heartbreaking for you, or the student? Is heartbreaking the right word? I ask because there is a false idea, especially here on CC, that a student who works really hard deserves to go to a college with a single digit acceptance rate. Probably 99% of applicants to all the most elite universities work really hard. There isn’t room for all of them.
Parents and students should keep at the forefront of their minds that hard work and dedication pays off in life, not just by getting into Stanford. We see kids here on CC every year who feel that, because they didn’t get into HYPSM or whatever and only got into the honors program at their state flagship, that all their effort is worthless. THAT is the narrative that is heartbreaking. Getting into HYPSM doesn’t guarantee anything in life.
There are Stamps Scholars, Coca Cola Scholars, Jack Kent Cooke Scholars, Questbridge and Posse Scholars who can blow the pants off many Ivy League students. A lot of those students attend schools many people don’t consider super prestigious, such as U of O, or Barry U. Maybe they attend a smaller college, like Denison or Swarthmore, which are not household names to most people.
There are many ways for your student to succeed in life. I suggest that above all, you let your child enjoy their childhood and not view his college process as “Ivy League or Bust.”
It is hard to see our kids disappointed - I went through this last year. At the same time, kids need to know that admissions decisions aren’t personal (how can they be since they don’t even really know you) and that they have no control over what a school’s institutional priorities are in any given year. Unless a student is hooked in some way (legacy, recruited athlete, child of major donor etc.), admissions to the tippy top schools are hard to predict. When 95% of applicants are denied, the odds are against you (and even if your odds are 5 times the average, you are still more likely to be rejected than not). If your child hasn’t identified a couple of target/likely schools that they would be enthusiastic about, it isn’t too late to add a couple to the list.
I will just note that one of the things I learned going through all this with my S24 is that no matter what sort of messaging I had about topics like college choice, college admissions, and so on, that isn’t going to stop kids from also listening to their peers sometimes.
So as a parent, I think you can try to be informed, consistent, supportive, and so on, as best you can. But at least I couldn’t entirely protect my kid from stress, anxiety, disappointment, and so on. I could just put whatever weight I had on the more positive side of the emotional scale as appropriate, and the rest was really out of my control.
I have 1 son that was/is a high stats kid. He is currently a Senior at a highly selective university. He had a very unique EC for a STEM major (and a high level of accomplishment for that EC). Still, while he applied to most of the US News top 15, he was accepted into 1. He was also accepted into just 2 schools ranked between 16 - 25 by US News. That is it.
Admissions to these schools is truly a black box. It involves “shaping a class” and the whims, preferences and biases of people your child will never meet, much less know very well.
I think your child will be accepted into at least 1 highly selective university. If I am wrong, is their academic and professional life over? Of course not. While there are advantages to attending highly selective schools, the truly special people on this planet find a way from many different avenues.
In my opinion, it is challenging to parent really driven/high achieving kids. They will set their sights high, they will have great achievements. But at some point they will “fail”. They don’t get the lead in the play, they don’t win the race, they don’t get into the dream school.
I know I used to put great effort to help smooth over my son’s disappointments. It hurts as a parent to see their pain. But it is so important for them to figure out to process and get past their disappointments. It is right for them to be sad, frustrated at times. But how they move past the “failure” is the greatest achievement they can make. Because in my opinion, the biggest stressor in life is needing to maintain perfection.
There are two or three students with the OP student’s general profile at every high school in America with class sizes larger than a couple hundred. Ultimately, there are probably around forty thousand spots in the freshman classes at the T20 schools a lot of folks here obsess about, a couple thousand of which go to international students with a few thousand more earmarked for recruited athletes. Meanwhile, there will be around 3.6M graduating high school seniors next Spring, more than 25,000 of which will graduate as valedictorian.
A generation ago, the access ways to our most selective academic institutions were very few and narrow for all but about 10% of the population, there were a third less kids, and the arms race of making extracurriculars (which are supposed to be leisure) an immensely important part of every high achiever’s profile hadn’t gotten in to full swing. It was a little more understandable in 1995 to say that a kid with top of the line grades and course rigor, top .5% test scores and unique extracurriculars should get into one of those Ivy type schools if they wanted to. If we’re going to treat admission to an “elite” college as an achievement to notch on a belt or validation for something (which Lindagaf eloquently labels a mistake in the first place), then the least we could have done was expand the definition of “elite” to match today’s numbers and circumstances. In other words, we should stop imposing our own outdated concept of what schools are uber impressive to get into on today’s kids living in today’s world of college admissions.
If your kid’s school is sending a number of kids to Ivy+ schools then the school’s guidance counselors are probably your best source of accurate information on your kid’s chances. They should be able to tell you how similarly situated students have faired in the past, and IMO that is a fair question to ask.
One parent above suggested that “coming from a school that has a lot of Ivy admits certainly helps” but I am not so sure that is the case. Such HS’s tend to have an overabundance of not only highly qualified students but also students who are legacies to many of these tippy-top schools or who have other special admissions considerations (athletics, high level awards, etc.) and that makes the odds even longer for those without such advantages.
On the other hand, such schools tend to send a relatively high percentage of students to excellent, elite schools that aren’t considered Ivy+ but are comparable in every other way except for Ivy+ prestige. As others suggested, the trick is to try to set aside prestige and find such schools that are a good fit.
I’ve always struggled with the “dream school” dilemma but I think in many cases its OK for a kid to have a “dream” school especially high stats kids. It shows they are vested and driven and opinionated on their future - all characteristics of most high stat kids.
The risk, for some is disappointment and if your student has never experienced disappointment this one could be a bitter pill. I think that many kids have experienced disappointment and are not as fragile as we assume.
Both may kids had “dream schools” (Stanford for one, Johns Hopkins for the other), and both were admitted, but they new the odds and prepared for plan b, c, d, e,… And, to their credit they both were used to disappointments - one from competitive chess the other from competitive soccer.
IMO the issue is that so many parents think their kid is ‘high stats’ because they have straight A’s or a high test score. I’m not sure where things currently stand, but last I knew it ~50% of HS grads had straight A’s. And the vast majority of those students aren’t ‘high stats’ and wouldn’t be competitive for highly rejective schools.
IMO again, it’s important that parents help their kids have a healthy viewpoint on admissions and “reframe the narrative” as @momofboiler1 said…different kids handle the stress and denials differently, and it’s important to recognize that. It’s also important that parents not let their kids see the stress the parents themselves might be feeling about admissions.
“…the issue is that so many parents think their kid is ‘high stats’ because they have straight A’s or a high test score…And the vast majority of those students aren’t ‘high stats’ and wouldn’t be competitive for highly rejective schools.”
Excellent point. In my unpaid (usually unsolicited ) giving of advice to parents new to the process, I often counsel them to figure out where their kid really sits compared to their peers, instead of assuming a GPA that would have been a standout when you were in high school means the same thing today. Which is hard to do when so few schools have class ranking anymore.
I’ve heard too much grousing from parents of kids in our highly educated, highly entitled area about how Johnny or Susie had a 4.3 GPA and took as many honors and AP courses as “regular” ones at the local high school (which, back in the day, would send 20 kids to the Ivy League annually and still outperforms most schools), and they didn’t even get in to…gasp…Virginia [or insert school of similar prestige/selectivity level that the parents thought was already insulting when their college counselor told them that was the ceiling]. I want to say to them "Dude, your kid was in the second quartile of their high school class. They were NEVER getting into [_____________], even in 2017. It’s not the Woke demon that kept them out of Vandy or Berkeley or wherever.
I’ve seen the same on CC. Not all 4.0’s are created equal. A lot of people don’t even seem to acknowledge the distinction between finishing in the top 10% of the class with straight A’s at even very good public schools and finishing in the top 10% of the class with straight A’s at a college preparatory school with selective admissions. We’ve been told numerous times by kids who’ve transferred from our very well thought of public to the nearby private high school that the AP courses at the former were easier than the honors courses at the latter (which caps how many AP classes a student can take). So talking about a 4.0 student with 10 AP’s under their belt, without further context, can be seriously misleading. There are literally hundreds of thousands of that general profile finishing high school every year.
We routinely have kids coming out of our $75k boarding school into our public and being crushed by the workload. They think it’s going to be “a stupid public school” where they can finish on top of the class and realize nobody is cuddling them at a public and A’s are earned by hard work. My son attended both. Loved the private for all the reasons. Private was much less work and much easier to get grades.
There’s a reason they’re called “college prep” schools. The median graduate of them is better prepared for college than the median graduate of the median public high school. I say this as the proud product of a public high school and large proponent of public education who looks askance at a number of aspects of private schools.
I am tired of this attitude that A’s earned at privates are worth so much more than at publics. This might be true at some schools but isn’t universally so at all. And specifically berating top publics as in “they think they are all that but they don’t know how stupid they are” attitude.
Reminder that CC is supposed to be a welcoming and friendly place.
And this is not the thread to debate private vs public education. Further posts will be deleted with out comment.
) giving of advice to parents new to the process, I often counsel them to figure out where their kid really sits compared to their peers, instead of assuming a GPA that would have been a standout when you were in high school means the same thing today. Which is hard to do when so few schools have class ranking anymore.