This thread is getting as heated as the one about race in admissions.
Justonemom, why not start a thread without the caveat and see what happens? Obviously, this discussion will not get anywhere HERE. There have been countless threads with similar questions about the Ivy League schools. I think you catch more flies with sugar than with vinegar.
In the next couple of weeks, there will be plenty of opportunities to launch diatribes or send congratulations to successful applicants. CC’s fireworks will soon be in season. You might find it entertaining. But chances are, you already know this!
I would guess the CC community as a whole tend to be more obsessed about the choices of colleges.
People here seem to like to make analogies on this thread (blonde girl, marriage, StarBucks, and so on.) Let me add another one:
The way CCers talk about colleges and their admissions is somewhat like the actors/actress talk about marriages in the BBC’s show: “Pride and Prejudic”: Those well-groomed (well educated offsprings ) ladies/gentlemens and their parents could sit around and obsessively talked about the marriages of these young men/women all day, except that, here, they talk about COA, pros/cons of each college, etc., instead of how many pounds a year Darcy, etc., may have.
CC parents are eager to marry off their offsprings to a “college”, sometimes with a large amount of dowry (tuition and fees) indeed.
Just to throw a joke here to cool us down.
@JustOneMom, you really should start your own thread and/or post in the forums of the specific Ivy schools you’re interested in for your child. Look here: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ivy-league/
Are you interested in all eight of them, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale? Do realize that what might work to increase your son’s chances at one school might not be as effective at another.
And, please, before you dismiss folks here, realize that many of us (like you if I’m reading correctly) attended one of the eight Ivies and concluded that our own kids, who were smarter and more talented than we were back in the day, had very little chance of being admitted. Some of us still encouraged our kids to apply, and some of us had kids who got into more than one, but NOBODY (short of the kid of a US President) should limit his search to ONLY Ivy schools–unless they’re prepared to take a gap year after high school and start the process all over again.
The Ivies are not comparable to Starbucks–anybody who walks into the door of the latter is welcome to make a purchase. That isn’t even remotely the case with Ivy League schools, who refuse entrance to the VAST majority of willing and able “customers.”
Post #314 says:
"As much consideration into a college should be made as in picking your future spouse.
That’s absurd. Sorry if that comes across as rude, but IMO it is really over the top. Yes, it can be difficult to transfer and yes sometimes there’s less financial aid available. But it is by no means as important a decision as whom to marry."
I am comparing the potential of being saddled with tens of thousands of dollars worth of loan repayments with no return on investment, versus getting divorced and having to pay alimony.
Do you honestly think that if someone goes to a school that they don’t enjoy or fit in at, they are going to be able to work hard to get a GPA high enough to transfer in all cases? Or do you think that if the “top choice” doesn’t work out, going to a community college is fine?
Going to college, and which college, is a life decision being made by 17 and 18 year olds, with the help of people who at best went to college when the costs were a third of what they are now. I know many people who were divorced long before four years were up.
If we insist that the OP’s son must have a valid reason to not want to apply to let alone go to any Ivy, or we insist that the OP must have a valid reason to want his son to apply and hopefully go to an Ivy, aren’t we making selecting a college a HUGE issue?
It is not a random issue when so much money is involved. And considering weddings can be 20K - 40K+, the comparison is there in my opinion. Don’t settle for a mate, don’t settle for a college. Go with who you want to, go where you want to go.
The only caveat I have for my picking a spouse vs. picking a college analogy is that a 17 or 18 year old can make the choice NOT to go to college, just as they can make the choice not to be in a long-term relationship. So many on this board go on and on about being “too young to commit to a relationship” if a 19 year old moves in with her boyfriend, but you already DID expect her to make a rational life-changing choice of a college? And maybe switch colleges, but STILL it is a major life-changing choice?
(I have a friend who transferred for several reasons, and it was heck for him to do so, and his GPA and admittance was not an issue. It is somewhat similar to a divorce.)
^^ I am puzzled why a family loaded with Ivy League graduates might want to ask a public forum how to get the kids in! Or is it a case that not applying outside the Ivy League did not … work very well?
But that is none of my business. 
Late to the party. Jumping in to say that my older daughter had a complete shut out on the decision day to all the Ivies she applied to. She had UW 4.0+ GPA taking most rigorous curriculum, very respectable SAT scores (in the range, not top end), great recs, good ECs and went to a top private school in our state. Her GC thought she was a shoo-in for her ED school. It does happen, and wen it happens it is not pretty. Lucky for D1, there was a happy ending. At the end she was able to get off the WL from 2 schools.
There were lessons learned for D2. We looked at a lot more schools outside of top 20. We didn’t fall in love with any school. We kept on telling D2 that we would decide after all the decisions were in. She applied to an ED, and 3 EAs. We also hired a private college counselor to work with her from sophomore year on. I think her application was better crafted and essays were better because of the private counselor. She got into her ED school, but she had all of her apps ready to go to other RD schools if the answer was no.
It is great to have aspirations, but it takes a lot more than grades, test scores, ECs to get into lottery schools (term from CC), and some of those factors maybe outside of our control.
Whoa. You went to an Ivy yourself snd you didn’t learn that there are other great schools out there? That’s not consistent with the majority of Ivy/attending parents, who seem to be quite knowledgeable about a wide variety of schools.
In any case, my guess is that you live abroad and want to impress people who don’t know about US colleges and mistakenly think the Ivy League represents the 8 best as opposed to 8 of the best. There really is little other explanation.
And there’s no “voila” to getting into these schools, which is why posters will tell you - if you like Princeton, consider Vanderbilt; if you like Cornell and Penn, consider NU and WashU; if you like Columbia, consider UChicago, and so forth. Why are you not willing to hear that advice?
@Pizzagirl, You have no idea what my background is. You are not even close. Can we please stop with the personal jabs? It is uncouth.
I take that to mean only applying to schools within the Ivy athletic conference and not applying to any type of safety or school that admits most of high stat applicants. This type of strategy is likely to have catastrophic results. Most knowledgeable persons who comment are not just going to ignore the potential catastrophe, whether they be members of the forum or guidance counselors from your kid’s HS, even if you’d like them to do so.
Last year, a kid on this website claimed to be rejected by all ivies with what he called a “perfect application”. He was a valedictorian with an UW 4.0 while taking advanced advanced courses, and he had a 1600 SAT on M+CR. He later admitted he did not apply to all 8, but he did apply to some of the ivies with a higher admit of the group, such as Cornell. Fortunately, he applied to some less selective colleges as well. As I recall, he ended up going to Stephens.
If you want more information about how to improve your chances of admission to an ivy, I’d suggest starting a new thread instead of hijacking this one, and including more information about your kid in the new thread, such the type of information that would be relevant to college admissions, what your kid has done in and out of the classroom, what type of program/major he’d like to enter, career/post-grad plans, etc. If you are worried about undesired responses, I doubt that they’ll be any worse that what has already be posted in this thread.
Claremont graduate U and Keck are separate from the 5 college undergrad consortium, which has been comprised of the 5 colleges mentioned. So no, the undergrad colleges consortium has not changed. Now back to your regularly scheduled sniping.
They sure haven’t changed in a long time, can we leave it at that? 
@rhandco, I like your post #368.
Since it is indeed a big decision (at least financial-wise), it could be a quite challenging task to work with a 17 or 18 yo who lacks the experience but nonetheless happens to be at a age when he or she least wants to “cooperate” with the parents (i.e., due to their need of seeking their own identity by “separating” from their parents as much as possible.)
It is not easy to say “just let him/her to make the decision” but it also would not work in general by just taking the ownership of this task. (It will be his/her 4 or more years of life and some consequences thereafter as well.)
@oldfort, I heard it is harder for girls than for boys. There is a joke: The boys almost need the protection of affirmative actions these days. No kidding here: The boy (except for the new immigrant ones) who got accepted to an Ivy or equivalent colleges in DS’s class ranked almost 20th but he made it up by getting a great SAT (but not necessarily good at SAT subject tests.) If he is a she, he would unlikely make it at such a “low” class rank from such a public high school. The boys are just in general not good at getting good GPAs as compared to girls. They just tend to have too much “other interests” to distract them and are not as “focus” on making the grades as the girls in general. But the College Board’s SAT comes by to rescue them.
We did not fall in love with any school either and would decide after the results were in. 1 SCEA, no ED, mostly top 20s but we did have the true safety: our in-state flagship whose admission is almost exclusively class rank driven (at least back then.)
@albert69 - I’m not sure that any analogy between colleges and romantic partnerships will be entirely accurate, but I did draw one following two of my elder son’s first college visits. One (NYU) I likened to the girl whom everyone says is “hot,” and he feels he needs to approach even if he’s not sure she’s for him, and the other (state flagship) is the girl his mother encourages him to consider asking out, and whom - after resisting the suggestion - eventually decides she’s okay.
^ Mom knows the best.
It is funny. If we replace NYU with the ivies, and the state flagship with, say, “the colleges that change your life.” (Yes, I read a book with a title like this before.) Your statement is also likely true (At least it is music to the ears for many people.)
OP here.
I am astonished at what has happened on this discussion in the past few days. More than I ever expected, for certain, and the points made have been fascinating.
What I (and my wife and DS) have learned from all this, as well as from other reading we’ve been doing:
- FIT is the main thing we should be looking for. Within the universe of say, the top 100 schools, there will be a school that will offer his desired major, be the right size, have acceptable facilities, have pleasant dorms and dining halls, etc. We are going to look at colleges later this month and will be looking for these factors and try to optimize his college choices based on colleges that offer the greatest number of strengths and least number of weaknesses. We've learned that if he likes Princeton, he'll probably like Vanderbilt too. Or if he likes Columbia, he'll probably like UChicago and maybe U of Penn. If he hates rural Dartmouth, maybe Williams should not be on the application list. So, we have taken the "fit" discussion to heart.
- Regarding cost, our local instate flagships are excellent and certainly affordable compared with full-pay Ivies. Perhaps the honors programs should be considered strongly as they might combine the "elite" student body with the facilities of a huge university and the cost of a public institution.
- I think @gingeroo has a great way of thinking about this question. And @JustOneMom, regarding your disinclination to discuss your insistence on Ivy only, I'd remind you that you are anonymous here. You may have the "Ivy or nothing" in your mind, but as @xiggi, @ubcalumnus, and @intparent have shown, sometimes we need to question the assumptions behind the things we "know"--things that may not actually be supported by the facts. You may not wish to discuss your rationale, but your defensiveness on being questioned (I know--I've been in your shoes very recently) on your assumptions should, in my opinion, at least cause you to examine some of your assumptions and dogmatic positions. As an immigrant, my knowledge of American universities was limited to about five or six schools that have a worldwide reputation, even back home in India. My initial view has been until very recently that only Ivy schools could matter, or be worthy of serious consideration by a talented student.
- DS in question was born in this country, has no plans to return to India, and considers himself American. At his high school, the guidance counselors have advocated looking at (and applying to) a mix of acceptable schools, according to the scheme proposed by several posters here on this discussion. Until now, his mom and I felt that this advice must be surely intended for the parents of less capable students, but certainly not for us/our "snowflake" (I love that term!) Over the past few days, we've been digesting this advice and are realizing that it is good advice and applies to us too. There is simply too much of a luck factor for us to conclude that DS will get in to a specific school just because we feel he "deserves" it. But we'll send in a dozen applications--some to lottery schools, some to less prestigious (ie, lower ranked but still excellent) schools of the same type, and also some to instate flagships. Finally, once the offers are made, we'll decide among the actual options, not hypothetical offers. @Xiggi is right on this.
As before, we thank those who have taken the time to weigh in on this subject.
WOW…obviously you’ve digested well all the material being tossed out piecemeal in response to your original query. Please do us all the favor of a followup post as you finish (or even proceed through) your own son’s admissions adventure. You are clear in your thinking and state well your conclusions drawn. No doubt you will learn much over the journey…which can absolutely be beautiful (as well as trying)!
Glad the OP is back and digesting it all. 
As for the poster who said (among other things)
I’m surprised people are falling for this.
OP, I’m glad you’re moving more to the "fit"side of things. And it sounds like your son has also moved a little toward the elite side of things right? That’s good. I hope both of you keep open minds - he’ll consider the high reaches people recommend and you look at flagship honors or other schools.
Common misuse of pronoun among all parents but make no mistake it will be your son sending in those dozen applications.