Yes, it’s broken. So many great kids rejected, deferred, waitlisted at target schools only to wait and pray that someone will take them, totally losing all confidence in themselves. It’s brutal.
That said, if every school had a perfectly transparent process, and accepted students that all had very similar levels of achievement/aptitude, there would be a complete lack of academic diversity at each school.
The imperfection of the process might be the perfect process of maturation; dealing with success, failure, problem solving, adapting, all the things. then…come in the parents, consultants, friends of the program, Lori Laughlin and we ruin it.
IDK. All to find out ur kid could’ve learned everything they really needed in a 9 month bootcamp for $15k. But now they owe $250k in loans they paid for a degree in religious studies that is not helping them get to management at Starbucks.
Sorry, got off topic. Yeah, the process is broken. Open to suggestions 
In some cases, even the in state public schools have become out of reach or at least unpredictable for high stats students. True there are a lot of colleges, but when students are told to do more, work harder, take on more challenge, they fairly expect to see some reward in the admission game when they do so.
That’s in part because the curriculum is fairly standardized and since you have to take U or M level courses in grade 12 to get admitted to university, everyone is taking courses of a similar rigour (or at least they were until IB and AP became more common). It also helps that students mostly apply for direct entry to the major so have to have taken fairly similar core courses making it easier to compare apples to apples. Canadian universities are also not trying to “craft a class”.
Also while you didn’t need straight A’s back in the days when I attended, you pretty much do now. An average below an A- is not going to get you in and for the most selective programs you’re going to need an A+. I think you greatly miscalculate how competitive university admission has gotten in Canada with so many students gunning for majors that are professional or pre-professionally focused. Nursing, Engineering, CS, Psychology, Health/Life Sciences, and Business are all highly competitive admits at most schools and many now require supplementary applications. Throw in grade inflation and you have “quasi-esque” US style admissions sans the requirement for standardized test scores.
Now if your interests run more to general humanities or sciences, then admission is not so difficult. Most will be strictly grades based, but you’re still probably going to need at least a A- average. though.
I’m going to preface this with a disclaimer: I’m replying to your comment, but not specifically at you. My own kid said pretty much the same thing when they got deferred from a school where their stats were comfortably at or above the 75th percentile on the CDS.
I don’t like the idea that college admissions are some kind of reward given to kids for working hard and doing a lot in high school, because the inevitable corollary is that if they don’t get the reward, that work was wasted. And I just don’t think that’s true.
I prefer to think of it as working hard for its own reward, and (secondarily) to keep opportunities open. Kids who try hard in school get all sorts of rewards besides grades – they learn how to study, they learn how to struggle and (sometimes) fail, they learn that their hard work sometimes gets them extrinsic rewards. If it also ends up getting them into a competitive college, great! But that isn’t something they should expect.
But to put my attitude in context, we don’t ask our kids to do anything just for the sake of getting into a competitive school. We do expect them to take the most challenging versions of the base academic subjects, but their electives are their own, and all activities are optional. Getting into college has always been an afterthought in our family, not an end goal.
I actually agree with you. Reward is not the right word. Because like you said, there are other benefits (learning for the sake of learning). I said in my post we had an inkling going into the program that it might actually hurt chances from point of competition so clearly that was never the lesson in our family either. I don’t have a good substitute for the word though. The point is that you shouldn’t have to apply to 15 schools only to get into one and not even your in state school when you’re clearly a high stat kid and you’ve done everything you should have and demonstrated your knowledge and then some.
Parents don’t even know what’s in the application folder of their own kids, at least not the letters of recommendation. I know there may be some exceptions to this.
Kids are applying to more and more and more colleges every year. In my opinion, the colleges are trying hard to protect their yield. Of course, it’s sort of guesswork, but that’s what’s happening, I think. Thus the large amount of deferrals in the early round. They are making offers to students they think will actually come.
One of my kids was a musician and only applied to seven colleges. He vetted his colleges based on the applied teacher on his instrument, and advice from his orivate teacher here.
Kid two is a data driven kid. She had three criteria for her colleges, and only wanted to apply to colleges that met her criteria AND where she had a strong chance of being accepted. She was spot on and had those three acceptances by Christmas.
Every kid who applies to 20 colleges will only attend one. I think it would help everyone if students didn’t just fill up every spot on the common ap because they can.
delete
I think part of the problem is parent expectation. Being over the 75th percentile for a school is meaningless if the acceptance rate is 30% or lower. That isn’t a safety. There are plenty of schools that are auto admit or accept 80%+ of their applicants. Many have rolling admission. Go visit those schools first. Find one that your student can love and apply early. That takes the pressure off.
The more broken part of the process is that high achieving kids are gunning for the same twenty schools. Parents can help mitigate that by being more realistic and making sure kids know that college admission isn’t personal. A “rejection” doesn’t negate hard work and all the learning that went on in HS. We can all do a better job of managing that message.
Another problem is the grade compression and lack of class rank in many high schools. A friend thought he was top 6%, and auto admit for UT at our unranking private. He wasnt in the top 30%.
To me it’s not about what happens after you submit the application, it’s about how and when the process takes place. While the process is supposed to be holistic, I feel like it’s not "whole"istic. It practically discounts most of your senior year, which is the culmination of the high school experience. Rather than the high school experience being a time to learn, grow, experiment, and implement, the last two years (which would be the most important if high school were truly for learning) becomes about the application process.
While my kids did very well in the process (meaning they picked schools that were great fits for them and got in) so much of what made them truly great applicants wasn’t even on the application because it took place later in senior year (obtaining a certification in an area they were going to study, leadership positions, research, study in very specific subject areas). For kids applying to “highly ranked” schools, those would be strong data points for AOs to have for comparison and to differentiate students.
To me, it would make more sense for students to apply after they’ve fully completed high school. Require that students wait one year to apply. Allow a year to work, explore, volunteer, job shadow, research and put together an application that is more than about your first 3 years of a 4 year process.
Once again, a quarter (or now probably more) of high achieving HS seniors use college consultants. This data has been available for 15 years . It is neither new nor specific to Harvard. National Study Shows Dramatic Increase in Hiring Private College Counselors Study by Lipman Hearne places percentage hiring educational consultants at 26% of High-Achieving Seniors; Number Affirms IECA Internal Reporting | Newswire
And not all of those high achieving kids who used consultants got into Harvard-most did not. But of those who did get into Harvard last year, a high percentage used consultants.
It is the same number who use consultants, regardless of where they matriculated.
This is eye opening: “ The percentage of students at top universities who used professional help with applications is estimated at 50% to 70% for the most competitive universities. Unfortunately, sources on this aren’t as concrete because the data is so difficult to pull from students.”
One thing that’s broken is some parents’ expectations. Just because your kid got a high test score and has epically good grades doesn’t mean that it’s a guaranteed ticket to the primo colleges of the land.
Our kid applied to 7 schools. 4 of those were rolling admissions schools with auto-admit criteria AND Kid met the auto-admit criteria. The other 3 were LACs that hardly anybody has heard of…Kid applied as test optional. Those schools had 35%, 45%, and 50% admit rates according to last year’s Common Data Set. Kid had a 3.22 UW GPA at end of 11th grade.
If your “must have” criteria involves anything in the top 50, for example, then you will likely
end up disappointed.
Yes, also because it was a whole different game 30 years ago; I can’t tell you how many times Ive heard from random adults that I can go wherever I want, why would anyone reject me, etc. because of my high grades and test scores. But, my extracurriculars are just okay, so I’ve actually gotten rejected or accepted with no scholarships from most schools so far. The adults are shocked, because they expected good grades and test scores to be the golden ticket. I wasn’t as shocked, because I know that doesn’t matter as much anymore.
As I mentioned on another thread, no, I don’t think the system is broken. There are plenty of colleges to go around. There are many options that can be affordable.
Things that are broken:
- lack of understanding of how holistic admissions work for both students and adults, including a lot of high school guidance counselors.
- being able to afford college. There is no magic money.
- societal expectations and peer pressure.
- social media and its pervasive fake messages about how happy everyone is at their dream school. You don’t see the kids on TikTok who only got into their safety, or the kids who are lonely in their dorm room.
- parental understanding of college financial matters and failing to set financial boundaries until late in the game.
- unlimited numbers of apps for those who can afford it, when those who can’t afford it are perhaps unaware that fee waivers might be available, etc….
- wealth gap, a problem that can’t be fixed by anyone here.
- Perhaps the most important thing: creating a realistic list of colleges that are affordable and attainable. More apps ≠ more acceptances if all the schools are reaches and matches, with no safe schools.
- so many more broken things, I’m sure.
I’d love to see all high schools offer “college-bound” workshops for parents and students. The lack of knowledge out there is a true obstacle for many students who are unaware that they could have better options. Luckily, some people find this site and others.
What they don’t understand is that almost the exact opposite is true: a kid with “a high test score and epically good grades” but no hook and no packaging has almost zero chance of getting accepted at the tippy-top schools. This is where some CC parents may drop in to say this isn’t true, that their kid did get in with nothing more than being a nice bright kid. But then you find out later that their kid had a private college consultant, or was tutored by local PhD students the parents knew, or spent summers at the Johns Hopkins CTY, or had a mother with an advanced degree who stayed home to devote herself to their education, or was from Alaska but still had the funds to tour multiple elite schools in the lower 48. All of which is great…but not the same as just a nice bright kid getting accepted on their own.