<p>And yet … IRL, I know kids who go to top 20 schools, who are unhooked / not athletes, URM’s, legacies, etc. – and they indeed are “just” nice, BWRK with some interesting EC’s. There is a real disconnect for me between the real world and the students on College Confidential who have perfect scores, GPA’s and cured cancer over the summer.</p>
<p>Harvey Mudd? Wasn’t he that guy who fought with Captain Kirk on Star Trek? :-)</p>
<p>I went to Case Western Reserve University… I used to get:
“Is that a military school?”</p>
<p>Thanks for the laugh Pizzagirl!</p>
<p>I agree that if nothing else there should be a very honest direct conversation between the parent(s) and the student.</p>
<p>We had this last year, were very specific, and yet when the financial subject came up again about a month ago S had completely misunderstood what we told him-and I don’t know how but he did. I am going to put this in writing so it is very clear to him.</p>
<p>What we told him was we could afford to pay the entire cost of him attending our state university. If he wanted something else he was going to have to figure out how to finance it-with our knowledge but no additional money. In other words, he can go to a fine school and graduate free and clear. We also told him the offer would remain to pay that amount for him wherever he chose to go-only he could decide if the school he wanted to go that might cost more was worth it too him because he was going to have to pay it.</p>
<p>He said the other day if he wanted to go to X school it would be hard because he would have to pay the entire amount himself. I asked him where he ever got that idea and he told me we said if he didn’t go to state school we weren’t going to help him-which is not what we said.</p>
<p>I am amazed at how a pretty intelligent young man could have possibly misunderstood
this.</p>
<p>The school guidance counselor is very nice but she has a lot of other kids she is working with-plus after seeing incompetence all over the place I am not trusting anyone to know all the things that may help him. I am fortunate I am able to understand some of this and the rest I can figure out with the help of friends, and CC of course!</p>
<p>My D was very surprised when I told her (the summer before senior year in HS) that any grad school would be on her dime. She wasn’t resentful - it just hadn’t occured to her that she might have to pay for any part of her education!</p>
<p>Re post #777
</p>
<p>I have been involved and focused with the college admission process for 10+ years now, and I have yet to see any published data anywhere that gives a an acceptance “rate” for “hooked” applicants, unless applying ED is considered a “hook”, and I’ve never seen any published data that correlates SAT/ACT scores of admitted/enrolling students with any particular “hook” and/or acceptance rate. The data I’ve seen is the other way around – the colleges publish test score ranges of enrolled students and you can extrapolate where a student stands within the class by the range – for example, you might see that 50% of students have scores about 700, that 40% have scores in the 600-690 range and that 5% have scores below 500. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s your assumption but not supported by data. </p>
<p>My observation over the years has been that the most salient factor for elite admission is either athletics or some other outstanding accomplishment, or class rank. I see kids of all races, including white and asian, who are vals/sals of public high schools getting admitted to Ivies & Ivy caliber schools and none have the sort of test scores that are boasted about on CC. Admissions professionals say that they look at scores in “context” and I assume that means, among other things, the context of the school – that is, that they look at the school’s demographics and the profile of scores, and that they look to see whether the students scores are on the high end for their school/peer group. (Around where I live, I think that equates to about a 1350 score on the math/CR sections of the SAT, maybe 2050 overall – at least that’s what the elite-admitted kids generally have. I’m in a state where the NM cutoff is currently around 218 or so; there are many east coast states where the cutoff is around 221. I think NM cutoffs are a good way of figuring out what the “context” is for a public school in a particular state; I assume that the ad coms would tend to expect to see higher from students attending elite preps). </p>
<p>The example provided above was twins who are in the top 10% of their classes and have ordinary - not exceptional – EC’s. Top 10% generally isn’t good enough for Ivies coming from a public school, other than an academic magnet – its probably fine coming from an elite private. But the Ivies want to see LOR’s along the lines of “this kid is the smartest in the class and consistently excels” – and an academic record that backs that up – it doesn’t sound like the twins in question will have that. Instead, it sounds like their LOR’s will be more along the lines of, “these kids are bright, conscientious kids who work hard and are a pleasure to have in class” – which is great for most colleges, not enough to make the Ivy cut.</p>
<p>But the one area where I don’t have much experience or predictive ability is when money is a factor. I’ve seen the other end of it: fabulously wealthy kids who are lazy, poorly motivated, and seem rather dull in comparison to other students who happen to be attending those schools – but I don’t have a clue as to percentages or how those kids happened to get in, because I don’t have the inside information as to what strings were pulled or how much their parents donated to the colleges. The top schools also have fabulously wealthy kids who are smart and ambitious, so the presence of a few who are rich but appear academically unqualified doesn’t give much insight into percentages as correlated to SAT scores either.</p>
<p>The vast majority of students admitted to Ivies and other elite colleges are extremely capable kids, but do NOT have some sort of amazing array of hooks or accomplishments, such as having discovered the cure for cancer or authored best-selling novels or winning international acclaim. Most are either VBWRK’s (very bright well-rounded kids) or VBLK’S (very bright lopsided kids). There are a significant number of really amazing kids attending Ivy League colleges, but not enough to constitute a majority of students.</p>
<p>My DDs attended a HS that regularly gets kids into some Ivy’s and other highly ranked adn well-reputed schools, so excellent yet realistic advising.</p>
<p>DD had 5 schools on her list including UVA, UC Berkeley, Vassar, etc. Along the way the athletic director at Stanford invited her to apply, Stanford had not been on her list, but has an excellent team in her sport. DD had played on the USA team so she was appealing.</p>
<p>Imagine everyone’s surprise when she was denied! She was top 5 in her class, met the 1400+ old SAT thresh hold, amazing ECs & awards, and essays that were uniquely her.</p>
<p>GC said she was the best applicant the school had submitted to Stanford in over 25 years and he would recommend students in the future not bother applying there. DD got into every other school on her list.</p>
<p>Ironically, when Cal played Stanford the team coach asked her if she was interested in transferring 
She told him they had their chance! This was before the middle class protective finaid and we learned from NYU/USC that we were too equity heavy for Profile aid before those new policies, so that denial was probably a blessing.</p>
<p>Anyone can be declined, even if they are a fit for the school and even if invited to attend. But, also, any parent can be unaware of the fierce realities of the situation until they have gone through an application cycle and seen it in action for their own kid and the other kids they know well. I made many mistakes for my D1, but did wonderful CC research for D2 & D3.</p>
<p>
That’s really a mistake for the GC. Just because your d. didn’t get in doesn’t mean that others might not – especially with the athletic factor added in. It sounds like your d. was invited, but not very actively recruited – and so its quite possible that in between the time of the invitation and the admission decision, perhaps some other highly qualified students with the same sport also decided to apply. The coach might like to have every athlete admitted, but the ad com may be looking at it in a more numbers based way: we already admitted 5 stickball players, we don’t need any more this year. In that way – the “hook” could have turned into a detriment, as in “she plays stickball really well, but we’ve got enough stickball players – what else can she do?” – and they come up empty not because your d. lacks other talents, but because she mistakenly thought stickball was her her entry ticket and wrote her essay all about the life lessons she has learned from playing stickball – when instead she would have been better off to submit the essay about the summer spent volunteering in Outer Mongolia. </p>
<p>Of course it can be anything else: coming from Patagonia seems like a great hook, but not in the one year when a dozen Patagonians happen to apply. Or the admission director announces that the admissions numbers are coming in too heavily skewed to one gender, and encourages his staff to focus on trying to balance out the class by admitting more males – and gives the rah, rah, let’s find some guys speech the morning that your d’s application hits the desk. </p>
<p>Anyway: my point is, its a mistake to discount a person’s chances of admission because some other similarly situated person did not get in. Going back to the twins – I think that if they want to attend Ivies they certainly should apply – the only issue is that that, like others, also need to be realistic about overall difficulty of acceptance and have a good array of safety schools as well.</p>
<p>When people ask me where I want to go, it usually goes like this.</p>
<p>“I want to go to Rice!”
“uh, where is that again?”
“Texas”
“…Oh. Have you ever been to Texas?”</p>
<p>let’s be real: the gc was probably just consoling an upset mom. let her have the moment.</p>
<p>
Several people have mentioned this thread. Does anyone have a link? Searching didn’t help me much. :(</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/192395-no-acceptances-one-kids-story-year-later.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/192395-no-acceptances-one-kids-story-year-later.html</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/47867-were-picking-up-pieces-but-what-went-wrong.html?[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/47867-were-picking-up-pieces-but-what-went-wrong.html?</a></p>
<p>CalMom- very good points,in our case the school had had kids applying to Stanford every year and not getting in yet HYPBC etc were admitting some of those same kids. I think what he was trying to say was that she happened to have a really great well rounded app plus the hook in athletics and still was not admitted. His comment was more in the genre of, “they just don’t ‘get’ our school” He felt it was a waste of the $75 since no one gets in; in prior years he could find a weakness here or there on an app, but DD was really strong on covering all the bases plus stellar LORs (he’d read them); what he was really saying is, “why bother with S when other schools do appreciate our applicants?” I don’t know if he followed through on that statement.</p>
<p>Nope, no pouting or even sadness, S was not on DDs list, it was an interest developed through the AD/coach who she connected with when playing on the national team. We did not need a moment, HSR, but thank you for offering one, that was thoughtful, had I been sad. ;)</p>
<p>The point was more, a GC who sends kids to top schools every year honestly thought she was the best candidate in years and was wrong, so how could the parents of the twins really understand the true competitiveness of the HYP application pool.</p>
<p>Just tryin’ to use our experience as an anecdotal example of the seeming abritrariness of the situation even for well-qualified applicants and those two seem qualified, but there are weaknesses.</p>
<p>I understand how the GC would have felt, because it does seem that some colleges have some sort of bias against certain high schools – there are anecdotes all over CC about high schools where students regularly get accepted by Harvard, but never Princeton – and neighboring schools where they all get accepted by Princeton, but never Yale. </p>
<p>It certainly would be worthwhile for the GC to tell future applicants that “no one has ever been accepted to Stanford from our school”.</p>
<p>My point is simply that the arbitrariness that you note goes both ways… some day a kid from your d’s former high school will get accepted to Stanford, despite being an objectively weaker candidate than your d, and to the utter surprise of a g.c. who feels that the applicant doesn’t stand a chance. </p>
<p>Part of the reason for the arbitrariness is that the overall applicant pool is different from year to year. Institutional needs and priorities change – and <i>different people</i> make the decisions each year (there is turnover in admissions staff). </p>
<p>The mistake that people make is to view the admissions process as if the applicant is being measured on an individual basis against an objective standard – which would be true of non-elite, non-competitive admissions - but not in the realm of elite admissions. That is, the GC can know that admissions to the UC system requires completion of certain courses and a certain index score calculated by considering GPA along with test scores – if a student is “UC eligible” they are certain to get a spot, although not always at the campus of choice. So a GC quite rightly would expect students who meet the standard to get in, and students who fall short of the standard to be turned down.</p>
<p>But in elite admissions, the vast majority of applicants are well-qualified for admission, and the vast majority of them are turned away. And no parent or gc has any means whatsoever of ascertaining what the competition might be. So a person who is qualified for admission should not be deterred by another’s experience – you never know – but at the same time, no matter how well qualified that person is, they should never be over confident.</p>
<p>By the way, I have a little bit of indirect experience with Stanford’s athletic recruiting – I know a kid who was an athletic recruit – and that kid knew, for certain, that he was attending Stanford in September of his Senior year, well before most students had even submitted their applications. So at least in some sports and for some players, there is an early, early admission system in place for coveted athletes.</p>
<p>PS: DDs sport was not a money sport, equivalent to stickball, so coaches could not demand a spot for a player, but rather only ask nicely</p>
<p>Do you really just smile and nod? I think I am just going to make up stuff. Out with some co-workers last night, albeit some I didn’t know very well and when one heard where S was considering said “Oh, he’s just going to get ****** down there”. Now I wasn’t sure if he meant drunk or have a lot of sex. In either event I didn’t really know what to say.</p>
<p>^^not sure I could’ve smiled and nodded at that one - I probably would’ve been speechless!</p>
<p>this happened just this afternoon: D2 and I ran into another HS parent, a casual friend. after the usual pleasantries the conversation went like this:</p>
<p>OtherMom to D2: what year are you now?
D2: I’m a junior.
OM: MySon is a senior now. He’s starting applying to colleges. He’s looking at the Ivies and similar schools.
Me: oh, really. what schools are on his list?
OM: Stanford, Columbia, Duke, and UPenn. he won’t apply ED anywhere though because financial aid is really important to us.
Me: <a href=“trying%20to%20be%20very%20gentle,%20probably%20shoulda%20just%20smiled%20and%20nodded”>i</a>* wow. great list. is he looking at any other schools?
OM: well, he’s number one in the class and his test scores are really high.
Me: oh, I know he’s a great student. but <a href=“wincing%20in%20a%20sympathetic%20way”>i</a>* there are sooo many kids like him applying to the same schools.
OM: well, he’ll apply to <a href=“nearby%20tier%203%20school%20where%20he%20would%20automatically%20qualify%20for%20large%20scholarship”>i</a>* and <a href=“tier%202%20LAC%20right%20here%20in%20town%20two%20blocks%20from%20home”>i</a>*.
Me: <a href=“thought%20bubble:%20oh,%20but%20there%20are%20so%20many%20great%20schools%20who%20would%20love%20a%20kid%20with%20those%20stats%20and%20would%20give%20him%20loads%20of%20financial%20aid%20and%20where%20he%20would%20be%20academically%20challenged%20just%20like%20at%20the%20Ivies.%5B/i%5D”>i</a>
Me: so how is the app process going? fall is such a busy time. does he play a fall sport?
OM: no, but he works out all the time. (to D2) have you seen S? he’s looking really buff. he’s always been good looking but now he looks fabulous. he has an 8-pack.
D2: um, no, I don’t see him very often.
Me: well, we need to run.
OM: (without missing a beat) we’re so excited. D (grade 3) just got into the gifted program!
Me: um, that’s great. well, see you soon. bye!</p>
<p>Crazy Ed, my neighbor: “I just killed three people and buried them in my garden. My cat told me to. He likes cheese.”</p>
<p>Just smile and nod…smile and nod…</p>
<p>^^ The correct response should be smile and run!</p>
<p>From GeekMom63: <<@Dinmor - I don’t know, I really love Lirazel’s (#427)
“Girl: So where are you going to college, Lirazel?
Me: Harvard.
Girl: But you’re totally stupid. You ask too many questions in class.”>></p>
<p>Sorry for the late reply, GeekMom. Yes, also brilliant. And BTW, fellow 5C’s mom here–Pomona '14 kid. Greetings!</p>