<p>sue22,</p>
<p>I agree. Too much stereotyping going on in both directions:</p>
<p>"I’m not sure why you feel the need to perpetuate the myth that the Ivy League is filled with Skippy and Buffy dilettantes who laze their days away spending Mumsy and Daddy’s money. Kids at these schools work very hard. They work hard to get in and they work hard while they’re there.:</p>
<p>grandscheme, it is obvious that this subject “p***es you off.” But to use your new example (and ignoring the question of how any two human beings can be truly “equal” or interchangeable)–it would depend. One adcom might choose the Latino kid because he is fluent in Spanish and wants to major in Latin American studies, and the college has a new Latin American studies program. Another might choose the black kid because he is the first in his family to go to college, or has an otherwise compelling life story (an example might be one of my daughter’s good friends, who has had to care for his severely disabled mother ON HIS OWN since about fifth grade). And another might choose the white kid because he is a minority in an inner-city neighborhood. (The last story is similar to what my college boyfriend credited for his admission to our elite university–he was one of the only white kids at his rural school in the poorest county in a poor southern state.)</p>
<p>Also, to your point about “diverse” schools–a truly diverse school would not have a “100% non-white population.” My kids’ school is truly diverse socioeconomically, racially, and culturally. And there is no question that by and large, kids who happen to have been born white enjoy more advantages, by and large, than those who haven’t.</p>
<p>yes, by and large, but not exclusively, so while it may seem virtuous, it is a flawed, approach. imo.</p>
<p>So back to your earlier statement, who are all the minorities who have enjoyed substantial advantages in their lives? And what would those advantages be?</p>
<p>I hope you aren’t too invested in the Fisher decision, because I just don’t think it is going to go your way.</p>
<p>eric, I am sorry about your son’s disappointment, but I do not believe that Ivy League or other elite schools are “lying” when they say they are need blind as to individual applicants. They do structure their application process in a way that is weighted in favor of wealth- such as demanding super-high SAT scores and running ED or SCEA programs that are not feasible options for those needing financial aid. But the Ivies are extremely well funded schools that can easily afford to shoulder a few extra dollars in financial aid to students they accept. You son’s rejections from Ivies had nothing to do with need.</p>
<p>Here’s the problem: it is NOT a “crap shoot”. If a student does not have the credentials to make Ivy admission highly likely, then his chances don’t get any better by throwing the dice a few more times and applying to 5 Ivies instead of 1 or 2. Your son received a 7 rejections on one day because you or he or his school counselor misunderstood or miscalculated the idea of a “match” school. The fact that some of his so-called “match” schools rejected him is a pretty good indication that the Ivies were never truly in “reach”. Your son may have fared better if he had applied to only 1 Ivy (we all can dream… might as well buy 1 lottery ticket) – and then applied to more “match” schools because a “match” school is a school where there is a reasonable chance but no guarantee of admission.</p>
<p>In other words, a school where the student has a 30-70% chance of admission would be a “match” - but given the probabilities you would need to apply to an appropriate number of schools to be sure of acceptance. A true match is more likely to waitlist a student than outright reject a student – so too many rejections from “match” schools might indicated that the applicant has misjudged his standing in the applicant pool.</p>
<p>The Ivies are reaches for almost everyone, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has an equivalent, lotto-type chance of getting in. Only a small percentage – probably 25% or less - of the total applicant pool is even in the running. The stats don’t tell the whole story.</p>
<p>I realize that it is sometimes difficult to figure out where a student stands because of complicating factors related to the students accomplishments and academic record. What would the chances be for an Intel Finalist with a relatively weak SAT writing score? We don’t know – that student has a combination of a great strength and moderate weakness that makes predicting chances a little harder. </p>
<p>But the point is, if a student doesn’t have what Ivies are looking for, then they can apply to 1 or 8 and the result will be the same: a rejection. If the student DOES have what the Ivies are looking for, then he may or may not be accepted. Applying to all 8 Ivies might be one way of hedging the bets to increase odds of acceptance – but a smarter way would be to identify which Ivies seemed to be the best fit for the student’s credentials. But let’s say that you have a kid who is in the running for schools that accept less than 10% of applicants, and he applies to 5. Maybe very roughly gives him a 50% chance of being admitted at one of them – still not a sure thing because of the high degree of competition for Ivies. </p>
<p>It wasn’t a “crap shoot” --it’s simply a matter of more students applying than spaces available. If you apply for a job for which you are well qualified, and you are interviewed along with 5 other candidates – if the job is given to someone else, it doesn’t mean that the whole thing was a crap shoot or that you were discriminated against in some way – it just means that the employer ended up preferring the other applicant. </p>
<p>I do agree that your son will be attending an excellent college. I just wish more families and more students would recognize the merits of schools like Miami in the first place, and target their applications to the excellent schools where they are likely to be admitted, rather than throwing away application fees at prestige schools where they have no realistic chances in the first place. Students who take that approach usually end up with multiple acceptances, and often some very good comparative financial aid offers. They don’t gripe or complain about the unfairness or unpredictable nature of the system because they did their research at the outset, and they were able to make a realistic and objective self-assessment. </p>
<p>That doesn’t mean that the student can’t apply to a reach or two, but it does mean that the student should be realistic about expectations and target accordingly.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is a load of malarkey.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>All URMs get a huge leg up in admissions. Not sure what your point is.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How? Show me. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I said “IN THEIR LIVES,” not “in admissions.”</p>
<p>If you want to contribute to the discussion, you might try a little harder to make cogent points.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>While that is an interesting premise, Occam’s Razor suggests that your son and you simply underestimated the odds of getting in to one of the most elite schools. When one looks at the acceptance rates at these schools in the 6-15% range, it seems quite doable for a kid whose ACT/SAT and class rank is in the top 3-5%. What is rarely considered, however, is that the applicants for these colleges nationwide do not follow a normal distribution curve – I would not be surprised if one-third or more of the applicants are among the top 1% in the nation. The competition is truly that brutal.</p>
<p>My son is from Chicago, is white, and needed significant financial aid (a $50,000+/yr subsidy). He was accepted to 4 elite schools and is currently attending Brown. He was also rejected by a couple of top schools and wait-listed at the least competitive of the group. I do not believe his rejections were due to being white or needing financial aid; it just seems to me that someone else, rightly or wrongly, was deemed a better institutional fit for those schools.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s what makes it a crap-shoot.</p>
<p>As someone who just finished their junior year at an Ivy League school (also hailing from the Chicago area), I am pretty convinced that admissions are a crapshoot for most people, although there are definitely qualities (some unexpected and some which vary year by year) that they are looking for. However, I think something people forget in the whole application frenzy is that admitting a student to an elite school is essentially taking a risk, and like all risks, sometimes things do not pan out. While many of my classmates continually inspire me with their intelligence and character, there are many others who are simply underwhelming. And no, I am not singling out legacies, athletes, or minorities, I am talking about the average student who was admitted. Maybe they were the top of their class in high school and president of a major extracurricular. However, this does not always translate to success in college. Many of these kids burn out, many are unable to compete upon leaving their comfort zone, and many are just unwilling to think beyond what was asked of them in high school. All of this is a result of a flawed admissions process, which like anything cannot predict the future with complete accuracy.</p>
<p>^calmom; The reason to apply to 4 (and other top-tops like Hopkins and Rice) is precisely because it is indeed a crapshoot. Having forgotten probability theory notwithstanding, it seems to me that, as long as one is in range, it is not unreasonable to try a (small) group of reach schools. When your student’s scores and GPA, compared to the data published in the Common Data Set for schools, puts them consistently toward the top of the middle 50% of admitted students (i.e. around 70-75th percentile), that to me doesn’t seem unreasonable if the student says they’d really like to try. Yes a few take gap years but basically you get one shot at this. So with saying, “well, OK, but realize they’re still reaches and you could go 0-for-5” or whatever, imho it’s reasonable. Life is not easy and it’s certainly not fair. Hard as it has been, I think ours has gained important perspective about just how competitive our world is. There are many mechanisms that say do X, Y, and Z and you’re set, you will succeed, when the reality is you could do all that and more and still find yourself well away from anything you might have expected to achieve.
And as you note, my wife and I feel he really hit the jackpot by getting an excellent offer from one of the original Public Ivies, a great deal. Hopefully, rejections at this point will turn into motivation for the future, setting high(er) standards for oneself - but that’s not something you can give your child. They have to get it themselves.
In the end (for this one; round 2 starts in the fall with our HS freshman), while no parent wants to see their child hurt, hopefully they come out stronger. In my case I was just help, encouragement and perspective; this was something he wanted to do.</p>
<p>Her SAT score was that low and she expected to get into Ivies?</p>
<p>LOL</p>
<p>URMs/athletes/legacies/donors/etc. may get in with SAT scores that abysmal. And maybe the occasional person who sparks an interest in the admissions office. But a normal white girl with low SAT scores? Fat chance</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sure, if your focus is getting into a single specific elite school. Even a great poker player won’t win every hand of cards and a successful investor will lose on some stock picks. The idea, as Ericd notes above, is to apply to an appropriate range of schools and let the good luck and bad luck balance out. Because one only gets a single undergraduate shot at this, having a couple of safeties in place is also necessary.</p>
<p>On the whole, I agree with Ericd’s strategy and think that most families which pursue a diversified application portfolio will find that their child lands in an academic environment well suited to him or her, even if it isn’t one’s first choice. I just think most students and parents underestimate how top-loaded the applicant pool is with the nation’s very best students: Brown, for example, only accepts 24% of its valedictorians, 29% of those with perfect ACT scores and 16-22% of those with a perfect score in one section of the SAT. So even those at the very top of the academic range face tough odds.</p>
<p>[Admission</a> Facts | Undergraduate Admission](<a href=“Undergraduate Admission | Brown University”>Undergraduate Admission | Brown University)</p>
<p>The net affect of this highly competitive pool is that adcoms can appear to be fickle and an unusual skill or activity can help an individual stand out from a crowd of candidates with similar academic qualifications. Said skill or activity may impress one committee and not the next, but at least the student will get straight-up yes’s and no’s. There are those who end up in wait-listed hell at 4 or more top schools without getting into any of them; I imagine these candidates actually had stronger stats than many of those accepted, but lacked a distinctive feature that made them interesting and allowed them to get the nod.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>“In range” isn’t good enough for the Ivies. **You<a href=“the%20parent%20or%20applicant”>/b</a> can see it as a “crap shoot”, but the college admissions committee is seeing it as very different task. They are not going to take a weaker applicant over a stronger one, unless that weaker applicant offers them something that serves their institutional needs. That “something” could be obtuse (for example, a desire to improve geographic diversity by accepting more applicants from Montana) – but there will be that “something.” </p>
<p>There are people who go to Vegas seeing it all as a game of chance, and they sit all day in front of the slot machines figuring that sooner or later they are bound to hit a jackpot. They typically lose a lot of money. Or they play craps, only marginally better: still no control on an individual basis, but at least they can consider the odds of the dice coming up with a 7 as opposed to snake eyes. </p>
<p>There are people to go to Vegas with the idea that they can improve their odds of winning money by playing games that improve the ability to influence and predict results, like blackjack or poker. If you are at a poker table with high rollers and you have a hand with a pair of sixes, you could stay in the game to see what happens – but most players would bow out, at least after seeing that other players were raising their bets. </p>
<p>If a player sits down at a poker table and treats the game as if it were a crap shoot – bluffing it out over and over again with a weak hand, knowing that every once in while a bluff works – well, that player might get lucky. But the odds are that the player would lose again and again and again. </p>
<p>I can understand a kid wanting to “try” for an Ivy merely based on where their stats fit into the published median score range, but if the kid (or parents) can’t answer the question, “What do I have to offer this school that is different than all the other applicants?” – then the family is pretty setting themselves up for disappointment on admissions day. It is not a random process – and if you construct an application strategy based on an assumption that it is, then the odds are against you. </p>
<p>My daughter wanted to apply to Brown. I believed she had an outside chance at Yale, but not Brown. I told her that she could apply wherever she wanted, but I was not willing to pay the application fee to Brown. She got her school counselor to sign for a fee waiver and applied. One look at the application form they were using at the time told me that her chances were zilch. She was rejected. That was the only school out of 12 that she applied to which rejected her.</p>
<p>Shame that she didn’t get into…wait a minute, no it’s not because life is not fair. She had access to resources that would’ve made her truly stand out from the group of super qualified applicants that the Ivies get, and what did she do? She chose to remain part of the herd, I have no sympathy for her.</p>
<p>I have a friend whose daughter was rejected ED from a highly competitive LAC despite a ton of APs, an amazing GPA, 2300+ SAT, multiple sports team captainships at a top-10 prep school, and the ability to pay full fare+. Her family and the school were flabbergasted she hadn’t even been deferred. When they dug around a little they discovered a possible weakness-her essay. It sounds like she had written an essay that showed a side of herself not reflected in her application. She was a very serious student, so to lighten her profile up a little she wrote a more humorous essay. Her teacher loved it, her college counselor loved it. After her rejection she had an outside admissions expert review her file. His comment was, “After the first paragraph of the essay I didn’t like this student.”</p>
<p>Apparently the people who knew her read the essay through their own lens, colored by what else they knew of her. The admissions readers, like the outside consultant didn’t have that knowledge so she came off as flippant or otherwise unappealing.</p>
<p>My point is that just because the school or family doesn’t know why a certain student was accepted or rejected doesn’t mean there wasn’t a reason.</p>
<p>“My point is that just because the school or family doesn’t know why a certain student was accepted or rejected doesn’t mean there wasn’t a reason.”</p>
<p>Definitely true.</p>
<p>Sue22. The story that one paragraph on an essay got an app rejected is CLASSIC “crap shoot” proof. You’ve really summarized it quite nicely with that anecdote. Second…in my earlier post about the Buffy and Skippy schools, you neglected to read the reason of the disclaimer…“that regularly…” reject kids with hi potential because they are white. Any school that does that (and there are plenty) deserves the Buffy/Skippy moniker. And, believe me…they arent’ just Ivies.</p>
<p>Sue22. Point of clarification. I didn’t say this. “…perpetuate the myth that the Ivy League is filled with Skippy and Buffy dilettantes who laze their days away spending Mumsy and Daddy’s money.” You did. I just used the phrase “Skippy and Buffy” schools as a moniker for those (whether Ivy or not) that are essentially two-class schools. A) students of color/low income, and B) Kids that can afford $55k per year. That eliminates a huge middle of qualified students that can’t get aid because they’re white, and cannot afford $55k per year.</p>
<p>MitchKreyben-</p>
<p>You may not have said it directly but you certainly implied it. What you said was, “A good student can go to “directional state u” and come out and kick the Ivy kid’s axx all around the block in a career. Why? Because they had to work for it with no sense of entitlement.” </p>
<p>In other words, kids at Ivy League schools don’t work as hard as state school kids and have a sense of entitlement. I vehemently disagree.</p>
<p>You approach financial aid as if it’s an all or nothing proposition. There are plenty of white middle class kids on FA at Ivy and similar schools. As I and many other parents have pointed out many middle class kids come out ahead financially at these schools because they have a higher income threshold, cover full need, and give a higher percentage of FA in the form of grants than state schools. The top schools, in fact, don’t need to accept students based on whether they can pay full freight. Because of their enormous endowments they can admit students “need blind”. IOW, the admissions office doesn’t even see who has or has not applied for financial aid until after the decisions have been made, if at all.</p>
<p>It’s sad that there are a lot of smart, white middle class kids who would thrive at Ivy and other low admit rate schools but won’t get the chance. It’s also sad that there are low-income and rich kids of all races who would thrive at these institutions but will never get the chance. There just aren’t enough spots for all the kids who would like to attend.</p>