<p>I think she should just be happy and go to where she was accepted (maybe U Mich might have accepted her?). If I was a job recruiter, I probably would see a person with a 4.0 from USC with a fun personality, passion, and will to work as more desirable than a person with a 3.5 from Columbia who’s all smarts and boring.
People want to work with happy hardworking people, not boring genius’s. End of story</p>
<p>Oh, I forgot to mention. My parent’s real estate agent’s assistant went to Harvard. They ended up firing the real estate agent.
On the other hand we also know someone who didn’t even go to college and is a gazillionaire.
Not to say I wouldn’t love to go to Stanford… but I want to go for the course’s and environment, not rank on some list.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That is naive point of view. </p>
<p>It’s not hard to figure out what a college’s agenda & needs are. They are varied and details change from year to year, but the information is not hidden. </p>
<p>Example: my daughter had strengths and weaknesses. We identified one quality which we assumed to be her greatest strength – and one that set her apart from others – which I will call Factor X. Factor X was correlated with a specific academic subject (X). Most top colleges have well established X departments, but at the time my d. was applying to colleges, at most schools department X was seriously under-enrolled. We looked at enrollment data, figured out how many students were majoring in subject X each year, and figured out the size of the tenured faculty teaching subject X. A college can’t function very well unless it can supply students to fill the classes taught by its tenured faculty. </p>
<p>Some highly selective colleges on d’s list were discontinuing the X major and accompanying department, so those colleges were dropped from the list. Other colleges had very strong but and seriously under-enrolled X departments – so those became target colleges. A handful of colleges had strong X departments and plenty of students (Brown fit that category) – so in that case, X would not have been a tip factor) </p>
<p>My d’s admission was never guaranteed, but it’s a pretty good bet that her application at targeted colleges was flagged or given a boost because of Factor X. </p>
<p>More important: she knew what to write about in an essay that would grab the attention of the ad coms. It didn’t matter that her test scores were at or below the 25% mark; it didn’t matter that she had a serious academic weakness in an area unrelated to X - the point is that she was good at X, and she knew which colleges were in need of students likely to study X. Obviously each college had multiple needs, and perhaps the need for students with quality Y or Z would supplant the need for students with quality X. But the point is that d’s chances were enhanced. </p>
<p>I’d note that the college that my d. attended assigns each incoming student a faculty member as an advisor. My d’s assigned department was the chair of the X department – that tends to support the idea that her admissions file was flagged in some way.</p>
<p>Obviously, the whole point is that each student is unique, so whatever factor makes them stand out is going to vary. But the point is the same: those students who are able to identify which colleges are most likely to be receptive to what they offer, and who structure their applications to highlight those qualities - are at an advantageous position relative to applicants who fail to do that. Students often make the mistake of focusing mostly on colleges particularly strong in their areas of interest – which is great if they get in, but it also means that they are competing against applicants with exactly the same set of strengths.</p>
<p>Calmom. </p>
<p>You make many valid points. All of the good research you did on schools in order to ensure your daughter’s admission was valuable I’m sure. The point I make, which you will not concede…is that if a student of color submitted apps to the same schools, with same test scores EC’s and grades…the student of color would have beaten out your D (assuming of course that she is not of color). </p>
<p>The lone tie breaker you cite is this: “More important: she knew what to write about in an essay that would grab the attention of the ad coms.”</p>
<p>If that statement is true, then you are either an insider to each of the adcoms…or you should open your own essay coaching business and become a gillionaire. Why? No one else on the planet has made the claim that you’ve just made. </p>
<p>I don’t think I’m the one who’s being naive here. Clearly your offspring has stellar grades, EC’s and test scores and therefore it was not going to be a stretch for her to get into great schools. I believe that you’re missing the fact that this conversation is about kids who are on the bubble. We get it, your daughter did a great job. We’re happy for you. Now on to the discussion.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I guess you aren’t very well read, or at least haven’t been at this long enough to be familiar with what is available. I’d love to be able to take credit for the ideas of others, but I didn’t invent this concept. </p>
<p>I’d credit another CC’er with the basic “template” that guided our approach – also too many years ago for me to remember which one, but the nutshell was that the ideal college application was framed in a way that the ad com could describe the applicant with a two distinctive adjectives or descriptive nouns, such as:</p>
<p>“tuba-playing chemist”
or
“arabic-speaking sculptor”</p>
<p>The idea is that the details are what make the application memorable, and you want something distinctive (“high scoring valedictorian” won’t work) and very easy to relate or summarized. </p>
<p>This rule of thumb pretty much works in other contexts as well, such as job applications or advertising. It’s closely analogous to an “elevator pitch”.</p>
<p>To give credit where credit is due, the name of the book where the approach I described is laid out in much greater detail is “Winning the College Admissions Game” by Peter Van Buskirk, published in 2006. Van Buskirk is a former dean of college admissions who conducts workshops for high school students and their parents – part of the workshop is that he hands around a set of mock college applications, provides a very short time for everyone to look through them, and then opens it up for discussion as to which of 3 or 4 mock students will be accepted for a single spot.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No, the point is, she didn’t. She had excellent grades but a transcript that was very weak on math and science (no math beyond algebra 2, only 2 years of lab science - public high school), not many AP classes, an ACT score of 28 & SAT scores (around 580 math, 620 CR) that were below the 25th percentile at the schools she targeted and which accepted her. Her class ranks was good – raw GPA was about 3.8, weighted 4.2 at most. </p>
<p>My whole point is that the colleges are NOT looking for kids who look like every other applicant, only better. They will end up accepting a lot of those, but it’s sure is a lot of work for anyone to play that game – test prep, piling on APs, etc. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t know what you mean by “on the bubble.” </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m quite sure that students “of color” with better test scores and grades were turned down from my daughter’s choice schools. There wouldn’t have been any students with the “same” EC’s --that’s the whole point – or certainly not more than a handful in any given year, and the odds of those students applying to the same schools are relatively small. There probably were some whose ECs were similar and potentially more impressive – d. certainly wasn’t the best or most amazing. But she followed her own path. </p>
<p>You are expressing a loser’s attitude. You have decided that if you (or your kid) fails to “win” it’s because the system is unfair and others are being given an unfair advantage. You’ve added a healthy dose of racism to the mix – but the point is the same – you have decided that you have no control whatsoever over the process and essentially give up before you’ve started. </p>
<p>No one can guarantee admissions results. That my daughter’s app was fairly sure to get noticed doesn’t mean that she would have been accepted. She was deferred with a EA app to one reach school, admitted in the spring – she was ecstatic at the deferral because she had expected to be rejected outright. We can’t know what the ad com was thinking when they deferred her, but maybe it was, “Hmm, we need more X majors but this one’s academics and test scores are iffy; lets hold off and see if we get anyone stronger applying in the spring.” – and maybe we were lucky and no more potential X majors applied. </p>
<p>But I seriously doubt that anyone was thinking, “Hmm, we need more X majors but this one’s white. Let’s hold off and see if any prospective X majors of color apply.”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Calmom speaks wisdom, but I wonder if this is too subtle for many to understand unless they have spent a lot of time on this board. It is not a crapshoot – it’s both having the desired portfolio elements and tying together the package that is distinctively you with a nice bow. It’s much harder to reject a person who visually leaps off the page than to reject a collection of random stats.</p>
<p>Here’s the end process: your overworked regional rep, sick of reading applications by the hundreds, sees something interesting in your app that makes you memorable. At some point, your regional rep will have 15 seconds to summarize you as a person in committee, make a recommendation and perhaps fight for you or swap favors to get you in. What can you you do and how can you present it so that you “come alive” off the page as a person rather than another set of stats? If you can figure that part out in a way that matches your unique combination of features, then you’ll be golden. You probably won’t achieve this goal at every school you apply to, but you will very likely get accepted to the school that is the best fit, whether you knew it when you applied or not.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is crapshoot less the shoot! Where are you getting this stuff from? The secret diaries of adcom members?</p>
<p>No, LakeClouds, this is known as common sense. Of course all the 2390s and student body presidents and seven AP classes and newspaper editors and varsity athletes all blend together. You need something to make you stand out and be memorable. People who don’t get it think that means “find something odd for the sake of being odd.” People who do get it understand that it is about creating a story that isn’t the usual yawner of “good student, good scores, does something EC-wise.”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m sure that 90+% of these students “create a story” about themselves and it’s insulting to the vast majority of students to claim that they are too ignorant to do so. It would be interesting if those with such “interesting” stories would post them on this thread for CCers to judge for themselves.</p>
<p>Give me an example of a story that makes you stand out. Race, achievements in rare ECs or specialties that public schools don’t offer, careful framing of activities, geographic diversity? Chances are that kind of story is beyond anything that most bright, high achieving kids can come up with on their own, beyond anything normal circumstances can grant them. </p>
<p>For most kids, doing their best and taking advantage of all the resources available to them translates to being “2390s and student body presidents and seven AP classes and newspaper editors and varsity athletes”, because, guess what, these are the only options accessible to most students, if not less! So for the vast majority, it’s the luck of the draw, too many students who have done their best in their high school careers vying for the few spots. In what way is this not crap shoot?</p>
<p>It’s not “create a story” – it’s LIVE a real, independent life, and then TELL YOUR story. </p>
<p>No one is interested in a made-up story that reflects the student’s attempt to please the ad com at a school that they’ve selected because it’s prestigious. </p>
<p>They are trying to assemble a diverse class of students who have shown initiative and dedication in a wide variety of arenas. “Diverse” isn’t a matter of race or geography – it’s a matter of a diverse array of background experiences and interests. They want actors and poets, musicians and painters, future mathematicians and physicists. anthropologists and teachers and philosophers and historians.</p>
<p>CC seems to be full of youngsters who plan to go into “finance” and whose definition of success is a perfect 2400 on the SAT. </p>
<p>I realize that this concept is probably obtuse to parents of those youngsters: if your kid has spent 4 years selecting from the menu of options offered by his school, trying to sign up for as many AP courses as possible, get the best grades, best SAT scores, and aim for leadership positions in the school-based EC’s, such as running for student body President or becoming captains of their athletic teams… then it’s probably hard for you to understand what your kids are competing against. Those kids are smashing successes who have proven that they are really, really good at doing high school. </p>
<p>The problem is that they aren’t applying to a bigger and better high school. </p>
<p>The elite colleges will end up admitting a certain number of students who did really well in high school who will turn out to be lousy college students. They probably can’t avoid that, but when they see a student who is clearly strongly interested and accomplished in a given area, it’s a lot easier for them to picture that person doing well at their school. They are also going to want to select students who add value to their school by filling important niches, whether or not the students end up excelling academically.</p>
<p>I hear you, calmom, but put me as one of those people who have less faith than you that college adcoms can accurately spot students who will end up doing the best at their school or who will truly excel in their careers. Or that they can tell the difference between a resume that’s carefully crafted by a well informed adult, versus one where the student himself went above and beyond to “show initiative and dedication in a variety of arenas”. I suspect for some successful applicants it’s a mixture of both. </p>
<p>In that selection process you described, there’s an element of subjectivity to it, a sort of intuitive feeling for which kids will do well in the fundamentally unpredictable future. It is this clearly undefined “art” that people object to because one can all too easily see how it can be manipulated, how it turns down particularly applicants due to reasons that are all too subjective and unfair. If it is otherwise, I see no reason why colleges would not be more concrete in their description of the admission process. </p>
<p>In adcoms’ own words, they can fill a class twice over with the same applicant pool and not lose any quality. Within that pool of all qualified students, don’t you agree that there’s a high degree of pure chance as to who gets picked.</p>
<p>Yes, of course there is chance. But I do agree with calmom, et al. that there are ways kids can stand out and improve their chances in the process. In her daughter’s case, it was the sincerity of her interest in studying X in college. In others, it is a life story or special talent or unusual geographic origins or whatever. Getting back to the OP, the problem with the girl who wrote the letter was that she was just like every other kid reaching for big-name schools. There was nothing to differentiate her, yet she assumed that would not be a problem because she had been told she was “good enough” to get in by those who knew her.</p>
<p>calmom is also right on this point:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The Ivies don’t need more students who aspire to work on Wall Street. In fact, they probably need fewer of them.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>They aren’t “concrete” because they aren’t looking for a single type or standards. </p>
<p>Maybe a school is accepting 1,800 students with the goal of filling a class of 1,000. If they would publish the reasons they accepted the students, there would probably be at least 500 different categories of reasons. (Some would get lumped together, like recruited athletes - and maybe some would have overlapping reasons). </p>
<p>If you want “concrete”, have your kid apply to your state university. They typically have very clear standards as to what they will accept.</p>
<p>“In that selection process you described, there’s an element of subjectivity to it, a sort of intuitive feeling for which kids will do well in the fundamentally unpredictable future. It is this clearly undefined “art” that people object to because one can all too easily see how it can be manipulated, how it turns down particularly applicants due to reasons that are all too subjective and unfair.”</p>
<p>How did you pick your spouse or best friends? Did you have a set of objective criteria? Or did you go with who attracted you, at levels that can’t be quantified?</p>
<p>“hear you, calmom, but put me as one of those people who have less faith than you that college adcoms can accurately spot students who will end up doing the best at their school or who will truly excel in their careers.”</p>
<p>Then they’ll go to a different, non-Ivy college, and excel there. The problem …?</p>
<p>“It would be interesting if those with such “interesting” stories would post them on this thread for CCers to judge for themselves.”</p>
<p>Judge what? I could articulate what my kids’ equivalents of “tuba-playing chemist” were. But I won’t post them, both for privacy reasons, they aren’t my stories to post, and more importantly, what is that going to accomplish? They were the right stories for THEM and THEIR lives, but aren’t blueprints for others to copy.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Van Buskirk has spoken at my sons’ high school on several occasions (he speaks nationally) and really simplified the entire process in terms of presenting yourself as a candidate who stands out from the masses. I’d recommend hearing him to anybody who has the opportunity. I know we’re not allowed to post commercial links but a quick Google search will show you where he is speaking in the coming months…</p>
<p>How sad, to want the “recipe” so bad so you can assure that you bake your kids with the right ingredients and right temperature to assure the Very Perfect Outcome in Life!
Guess what, folks, there’s no recipe for life. Deal with it, and get over it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, this is a widely held view. Yet a lot of the same people crying foul over the “unfairness” of the admissions process are happy to defend the practice of guidance counselors at fancy schools putting in a call to adcoms or otherwise pulling favors to get their kids off the wait lists.</p>