<p>I doubt if the admissions people at Rice or Columbia or wherever see themselves as ‘random.’ Each school is trying to create a well-balanced class of people along their spectrum of applicants. That means they are balancing lots of variables that go beyond test scores. They all know that most of their applicants would do fine at the university. Outside of the top 2% of applicants, who would basically get in every year, most other acceptances are a crapshoot. I know plenty of people who went to Harvard because they didn’t get into Duke, or who went to Hopkins Med School after getting rejected at second-tier schools, etc. There are just way too many solid applicants for a limited number of spots. Archon is an excellent applicant who, if he applied to Rice 10 times, would probably get accepted a bunch of times. But he, like most everybody else, isn’t a lock. And wouldn’t everyone agree that Rice’s admissions people would be trying to fill their class with the best possible people–what kind of games would they be playing if they took people who they honestly thought were worse students??? Maybe they’d reject someone who they KNEW was going to go to MIT or Caltech and who was just trying to wrack up acceptances (my fancy high school would occasionally warn off colleges about such aplicants), but they wouldn’t think this of anyone outside of a really special applicant.</p>
<p>cleareyedguy, there was a great post a while back about exactly that. </p>
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<p>I would quibble about two things with the above post.</p>
<p>First, my hunch is that underrepresented minorities don’t all come from fancy private schools. Some are probably affluent enough to have gone to such schools (where they spent most of their schooling as one of a handful of ‘others,’ which is not a particularly enviable position) while another, less prosperous, group was recruited to these private schools because of exceptional promise. I don’t have the data, but my hunch is that the bulk of URM’s are from public school. The above inference is similar to the one that assumes incorrectly that the vast majority of Duke students attended elite prep schools–and that just ain’t so. The underlying assumption is that students at these private schools have a cake walk to get into Duke, and by extension, a cake walk into a prosperous future. My impression of the most ‘elite’ private schools is that they primarily offer the opportunity get exposed to intense academic pressure at a young age, and, if you don’t wriggle into the top half of your class, you may end up at a LESS elite college than you would have if you’d attended the local public school.</p>
<p>A second concern relates to the number of special admits. While Duke does seek out power forwards, rich people, etc., it should be underlined that you have to be among the top 5 power forwards in the country to gain acceptance and, as for money, your parents would have to be really, really rich for it to make a substantive difference. Being a starter on your basketball team (and being second-team all conference) will help your application a bit, while being the child of prosperous parents is probably less helpful than being the child of parents who didn’t go to college. Anyway, they are looking for special talents, geographical diversity, and the maintenance of relationships with certain high schools, but it’s not so programmed that the student doesn’t make most of the difference. And, as for whether or not admissions offficers have taken classes in statistics, etc., well, all I can say is that they can take all the classes they want, but they are still dealing with applications turned in by teenagers, and that their predictions for future success are unlikely to ever be more than fairly good.</p>
<p>My advice is–don’t fret at this point. My son had incredible stats also, and was deferred by Rice early action (non-binding) but accepted by Duke, Vanderbilt, Wash U St. Louis, and everywhere else he applied. We are from Houston and I hear that the admit rate for white males from our area is about 19%, but if you are from an under-represented state like Idaho, your chances are much higher–?45% (don’t quote me on this because I can’t recall the stats exactly but that sticks in my mind). The big issue with Rice is that it is a much smaller school (2500 total undergrad), so they just don’t have as much room in their freshman class and have to be more selective. They are also into a diversestudent body, and although you indicated you were Asian, there is a heavy Asian population here and probably quite a few at Rice–smart kids like yourself. I get the idea from Rice that you have to be really unique to appeal to them, not just good stats. Good luck. Don’t count yourself out.</p>