<p>I gotta wonder…what is to be gained by calling a college and complaining about a rejection? In fact, it doesn’t even help one’s kid to approach college admissions or life realistically.</p>
<p>Further…
Our kids, nor us, were mad at any schools that sent rejections because we all approached highly competitive admissions with a realistic understanding that some schools would reject them, even if they were qualified to be admitted.</p>
<p>That’s healthy, soozievt, and I think that you have “super-top” daughters, so that is certainly the attitude that I would advise for other “super-top” students applying to top schools. </p>
<p>Let me preface my next remark by saying that I am not connected with CC, and I am definitely not being paid by them. In fact, I think some days they might make me an offer to go away! :)</p>
<p>However, CC has provided a major, major service to people like me, whose offspring go to high schools where maybe 5-6 students per year go to the very top schools, and there is no realistic local information to draw on. After reading CC for as long as I have, I find that there are very few surprises in the outcomes these days, for me–not so by a long shot back when QMP was applying and CC did not yet have the long record of outcomes.</p>
<p>People in areas where something like Naviance is available and actually useful for the top schools probably recognized the nature of the “game” long before we did. But CC has been tremendously useful to us.</p>
<p>Also, I agree that there is nothing to be gained by calling admissions to complain.</p>
<p>QuantMach, where my kids went to high school, very few students go onto tippy top colleges as well and we also do not have Naviance (or didn’t when my kids attended). The year my D graduated, she was the only student going to an Ivy, for example (others have done so in the past and since then). My other daughter was one of two students applying to highly competitive BFA programs in Musical Theater. </p>
<p>Yes, CC is so valuable to really learn about the current state of college admissions. My kids were well informed as to how competitive it would be and realistically approached the process and did not fall apart when rejections were part of the deal. I’ll admit, they were accepted to the majority of their schools, but understood the odds fully. If we just relied on our high school in terms of college selection and admissions, we’d be in trouble.</p>
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<p>Well, that’s not how it always goes. I doubt there is ANY medical professional who has not at one time or another verbalized frustration about a patient or family member to another medical professional not in the context of a consultation. </p>
<p>And we are NOT talking about revealing patient medical information in a public place. We’re talking about things like this:</p>
<p>“Oh my God. My patient just threw a carton of milk at me because we are out of cream! No wonder her family never visits.”</p>
<p>“Can you believe this? We were running a code on the patient in 109, trying to save his life and Mr. Jones’ wife came INTO THE ROOM and screamed at me that I never brought her husband his warm blanket and told me I am an incompetent idiot! WHILE I was doing chest compressions!!!”</p>
<p>“Oh good grief, my patient told me today that there is no excuse EVER to not get an IV started in one stick. I mean, seriously?”</p>
<p>Those are the kinds of comments I have heard in the break room. You would probably not believe the abuse nurses can be subjected to by patients and their families which cannot be excused away by saying they are under duress. There are complete jerks in the world…and many of them end up in hospitals. Their behavior doesn’t change just because they or a loved one is in the hospital. </p>
<p>Medical workers I’ve known work very hard to remain calm, dispassionate, understanding of their patients’ pain, and professional. But they are not perfect, will never be perfect, and just like everyone else have days where they just cannot tolerate another moment of some of the BS which goes on. They vent to someone who completely understands, and then square their shoulders, take a breath, and go on to give fabulous care.</p>
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<p>The OP’s son probably got over it a long time ago, unless his parent is stoking the fire.</p>
<p>“Also, despite all of my posts, I am not encouraging wallowing in the disappointment. However, I think it is healthier for the student to have his/her disappointment honestly acknowledged, and to have some time to get over it, rather than being forced to drop it prematurely or keep it bottled up. After a little time, the student can look at the other options with a better frame of mind.”</p>
<p>Yes. The parents / loved ones should be facilitating the acknowledgment of the student’s disappointment. Not calling the school and threatening to call one’s senator or what-have-you. </p>
<p>Assuming a rejection letter is kindly worded, what else do adcoms “owe” the 28,000 rejected applicants on an individual basis? </p>
<p>Does McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or Apple or whoever “owe” rejected applicants anything more than a courteous rejection letter?</p>
<p>Northwestern may be getting an unusual amount of parental and GC anger due to a significant change in acceptance rate over a short period. There is not a lot that they can do about that. I don’t know whether the shift in the acceptance rate is acknowledged in the letter of rejection, though, and that might be one place to revise it, if not.</p>
<p>While acknowledging that the type of rejection letter that is easiest on the ego might look quite different for people of different Myers-Briggs types, I think that some of the letters that I have seen directly or have seen posted on CC are much better than others.</p>
<p>QM, I can tell your INFP by the heart you show to the rejected applicants. The parents who are calling and berating the adcoms, however, aren’t exhibiting INFP behavior at all. </p>
<p>And let’s face it. The kind of parent who is calling and yelling obscenities at the adcom, or threatening to call the senator,or whatever, isn’t going to be mollified by the sweetest rejection letter on earth, even delivered with a bunch of roses and a box of chocolates. These people are people who feel justice hasn’t been done, they’re angry about Joey-down-the-block who “stole” their child’s “rightful” spot (just like CC!) and their actions are inappropriate. If they want to blow off steam, they should have a glass of wine, go work out, r take a bubble bath like the rest of us.</p>
<p>And QM -these kinds of parents would be like that whether NU’s acceptance rate was 30% or 3%.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, exactly. This is a mentality of being angry that their kid was not accepted and should have been. It is not the same as being disappointed. I can’t imagine being angry at a school that rejects my kid. Disappointed for my kid? Sure.</p>
<p>Also, does it really matter what the rejection letter says? I mean a rejection is a rejection. I am not sure how many people even read past the first line that indicates rejection or acceptance! Sure, it is helpful to indicate that year’s acceptance rate, which they likely do.</p>
<p>Maybe they could include a few questions on the application that let them determine the Myers-Briggs type, and then tailor the letters to the categories. :)</p>
<p>You are right, though, I can’t understand the people who would call to threaten the admissions staffers, or to use obscene language.</p>
<p>Having worked in consumer mediation for many years, I’ve seen predictable patterns in people’s reactions to disappointment. To keep from becoming too jaded and unwilling to listen to people, our office did have humorous scripts and shorthands to categorize demanding/unreasonable/obnoxious people. It really did help to laugh some and blow off steam. I’m sure it works the same way in college admissions.</p>
<p>I did get a kick out of two different sets of influential and wealthy parents who reacted with indignation–indignation!–when their children were deferred in the early round to a certain Ivy. I have no idea how the admissions office reacted and I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that reaction but we parents at the high school were more than a bit taken aback. The thing is, in both these cases, the intervention worked. I suspect that the brokering wasn’t done with the ordinary admissions officers. Even more reason for admissions officers to complain about over the top parents.</p>
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<p>The Myers-Briggs of the students, or of the parents? :-)</p>
<p>I hate to play devil’s advocate here but I think the drop down list is obnoxious. Maybe they got a lot of angry calls, maybe they got a few and some jerk in the office overreacted. Why does everyone here assume they truly got so many angry calls? </p>
<p>Perhaps we could make our own drop down list of admission offices:</p>
<p>The snobby ones who never answer the phone. Ever.
The techno-dipsh@*ts whose voice mail system bounces you around, to hell and back, and never leaves you anywhere useful.
The idiots who have a campus mail box address on their website and no directions.
The troglodytes who have no water available for thirsty visitors.
The pond scum who lose your test scores and only find them after all the scholarship money has been given out.<br>
The lemon-sucking trolls who accept you in person during an interview and then shred all your information so that you never hear from them again.<br>
The flea brains who put you on a waiting list to a school you didn’t apply to. </p>
<p>Now, let’s say I put this on a spreadsheet, fill in the blanks, and distribute it all around my kid’s school. Obnoxious? Yes it is.</p>
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<p>I don’t think “they” distributed it anywhere. Someone leaked it. A bit different. And frankly, you just did create that list and distribute it. And you know what? If those things did happen to you, then by all means, feel free to tell someone or everyone about it.</p>
<p>They distributed it around their office which I think would be the equivalent of me distributing my list around the school. </p>
<p>And I didn’t make the list because I have a beef with anyone, just to illustrate a point - the point being that maybe everyone here is rushing to judgement a bit about the original list and whether is was a justified exercise in venting steam, or the jerky and irresponsible act of someone you probably wouldn’t want to work with.</p>
<p>I thought the joke was very funny and perfectly appropriate for sharing around an office. I’m encouraged that an admissions dean has such a keen sense of humor – I’ll bear that in mind when I’m coaching NU applications in the future. People who call admissions and use profanity or make threats merit this kind of satire. There is never any justification for abusive calls of this kind, and in my experience, they don’t have anything to do with the predictability of the admissions decision or the kindness of the denial letter. They have to do with the caller being a jerk.</p>
<p>While I understand why the university chose to apologize, I think those calling for the apology or comparing this to the Penn scandal are off base. Reacting to a pattern of abuse from customers with an on-point joke is miles away from publicly exposing a single student’s essay to ridicule. I wish that we lived in a public relations world where a university could just say, “Everyone who calls to swear at us confirms the correctness of the admissions decision in that case. Be sure to let us know which lucky institution can look forward to a lifetime of association with you.”</p>
<p>Prep schools have an effective way of dealing with parental disappointment-they send out the admit/deny letters the Friday on which their two week spring vacation starts. The entire school is shut down for those two weeks, so during that time irate families cannot reach anyone in admissions. By the time two weeks have passed parents have cooled down, most kids have been admitted somewhere else, and the number of “How dare you turn down my kid” and “Admit me or I’ll commit hara kiri” calls drops dramatically.</p>
<p>I used to work summers at a company we’ll call the Jones Corporation started by my father. My siblings and I used to come home and tell stories about the customers who would come in and, not knowing who we were, try to pull their weight by claiming they’d had dinner the night before with the founder (no, unless I didn’t notice you eating meatloaf at my kitchen table) or that they were close personal friends with Mr. Jones (who didn’t exist-that wasn’t our last name). We were unfailingly polite to the customers, but it sure did help to be able to let off some steam after being ranted at by rude or irrational people.</p>
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<p>Definitely not true of the region in which I teach. The independent schools mail admissions letters in mid-March. Our spring break is generally in April. It is critical for the school to be open in the week following because admitted students have only one week to decide among schools and commit. Applicants receiving financial aid have even less time (only until the Wednesday, so we can redistribute aid from families who choose another school. The week after the letters go out is very busy and filled with lots of last minute visits from students who are trying to decide which school to choose.</p>