Reflections of an elite legacy parent

Parents Forum
421

Good insights and thoughtfulness here. What do you guys think of the philosophy that all admits at these elites are essentially recruited “athletes”, just not all for sports; that each applicant needs to think of himself fitting in and contributing to the organism the same way a cornerback or coxwain would? That each prospect should “get themselves recruited” in a way, and if they can’t maybe that isn’t the place for them?

(by “get themselves recruited” I don’t mean contact department people for tips or pre-reads, I mean research to the point where you can prove to them in your app you have something rare to offer).

This approach also puts the “2290 on my SAT should I take over” stuff to rest also, right?

422

@DeepBlue86 There’s no doubt that the quality of how an application is put together is a factor when all things are “equal or quasi-equal” among a few applicants when only - say one can be admitted. The question is where that factor stands on the priority list AO works with. Sure, half of the applications can be excluded for consideration for a number of reasons including a less than coherent totoal package, but to make decisions among the other half? I say how an application is presented is a fine tuning tool. Now, you can always go back and find faults with an application that failed to get someone in, but more likely than not you will with a successful application as well. It goes to show how subjective the review and judgement could be. And AOs are aware of it. They’d rather follow “protocols” and use more objective criteria to make as many decisions as possible before starting the fine tuning. It’s human nature and it’s out of the consideration of logistics. AOs are hard-working people but they are human (and young professionals in many cases).

423

@postmodern, that exact question has been driving me nuts for the past year. Kid 1 is an athlete, and over time it became very clear that his particular package of skills was perceived as valuable by some schools and not so valuable by others at the same athletic and academic level. In the athletic world, this is accepted as normal and no one rails about the unfairness of Harvard prioritizing height in their corner backs (to use your example) over speed, while Yale looks for the exact opposite. In that world it is simply taken as a given and you move on.

Now Kid 2 is not an athlete, and outside of some very broad strokes (location, size, etc) it is proving impossible to determine what schools are most likely to value her particular skill set. And yeah, I get that schools will have an institutional touchstone. But then again, I have seen a jillion college websites saying they are looking for kids who have shown a high degree of academic success, are intellectually curious and want to “make a difference”. Really? That’s a shocker. I haven’t seen a single website that says “We are looking for straight grinders. If you buy adderall by the gross, never left your house except to go to school or a select few designer extra curriculars and are the type of student who took the SAT a dozen times to raise a 1530 to a 1550, this is the place for you.”

So while I do not understand the “unfairness” argument and believe that colleges should be about a whole lot more than assigning a point value to standardized test scores and gpa, I do get the frustration of highly selective schools not being more open to describing what specific types of things they find important when building a class. I understand that Notre Dame is pretty open about both their preference for legacies and Catholic students. Doesn’t seem to hurt them a bit. Not sure why it would hurt Harvard, Yale or Princeton to be a bit more forth coming.

424

"It goes to show how subjective the review and judgement could be. "

I hope the subjectivity was not a surprise to anyone participating in this thread!

Btw, what makes a kid decide he feels more at home at Dartmouth or Williams vs Columbia or Penn? A subjective assessment.

425

@Ohiodad51 , great post, made me smile.

I guess it is because they just really don’t know, and each applicant pool is kinda like high-end thrift store shopping – you have no idea exactly what’s coming in, and almost no idea if you need it. Plus, the mystery fosters the mystique. My favorite book on the subject describes it as “martian blackjack” – you must put your money down and play but you don’t really know all the rules and the martians ain’t telling.

I guess that’s why those in the know say the essays are so important, so kids can sell schools their version of their 40 wearing pads. Maybe it helps to think of it that way. I don’t know!

426

“I do get the frustration of highly selective schools not being more open to describing what specific types of things they find important when building a class.”

Because it would be gamed. Oh look, they prefer student council presidents over newspaper editors.

There isn’t one “type.” This newspaper editor sounds fascinating; that one sounds boring.

427

There are lots of “elite” type schools that would be happy with the high gpa/high scoring “grinder”. Your kid has the stats for Harvard but not the magic/secret sauce? Practically a walk-on at Vanderbilt, Davidson, Furman, Emory, Tulane, Lehigh, and I could go on for ten minutes.

The “specific things” the top tier elites are looking for change every year- which is why parents looking for a formula are doomed to frustration. One year you’ve got a bumper crop of talented kids working at the Crimson- the next year the talent pool is a little sparse. So your adcom’s have their eye out for the next generation of Crimson editors, photographers, news commentators, ad sales people, etc. One year you’ve fielded the strongest debate team in the last 20 years- two years later, your starts are ready to graduate. Etc.

The kids come in and out- the institution needs to maintain stability over periods of years. So you aren’t on the hunt for every single thing every single year.

You gonna pick your kids EC’s 10 years in advance to match some institutional priority in Cambridge, MA when your kid turns 17? Good luck with that. Unless your kid is both amazingly talented AND amazingly malleable.

428

I don’t really buy this notion that top universities (let’s say among the Ivies) are looking for anything different from each other in terms of “fit” in their applicants. They all even say they are looking for the same things, as @Ohiodad51 pointed out: academic excellence, passion for a subject, demonstrated leadership, yada, yada, yada.

It’s not as if Dartmouth only wants skiers, or that Brown only wants quirky artists. I don’t even really buy @al2simon 's conjecture in post #236 that Penn would look less favorably on a ‘pure academic’ while U Chicago would look less favorably on a ‘pre-professional’ app. I think all these schools want a cross section of all these types, so long as they demonstrate exceptionalism in some way.

I will of course acknowledge that religious schools, historically black schools, technical schools, and art schools certainly do consider their own mission in judging candidates. I’m not talking about those here.

If I am incorrect, please give me some real examples.

429

Are you sure it works that way,@panpacific? I’m not. I think the following is more like reality:

Let’s say the two “toll-free” apps I described are given a first read by the same adcom, and they’re the first two she reads that day, the first day of “reading season”. She thinks Toll-Free #2 is terrific - perfect GPA and scores, president of a club or two, with a compelling personal story told in a distinctive voice, such that she believes this person will do fabulously at the school and go on to make a mark in society. When she read Toll-Free #1’s app first, though, she wasn’t floored - perfect GPA and scores, clearly very good at school and tests, maybe involved in some clubs, but nothing really compelling in the app, which reads like the person isn’t very comfortable talking about themselves, just describes the activities they’re involved in and paints the essays by the numbers, nothing that really gives her reason to believe that the person will be successful outside the lab, and it could have been written for any of 20 universities. She knows she’s going to see a bunch more like it in the thousands of applications she’s going to be reading over the next couple of months.

She then reads many more apps that day, most of which she throws out right away on the basis that they can’t handle the work, some others just seem middle-of-the-road - perfectly acceptable, but nothing that blows her away; she gets to some recruited athletes and other special cases, where she knows her input is less decisive. Finally, late in the day, she finds a kid who’s an absolute gem, great stats, and the app just pops - this kid is exciting, with a riveting personal story, she feels like she knows him, and is confident that he’d be a campus leader, particularly on this campus. She really wants to see him here. When she’s summarizing her work at the end of the day, she thinks: Toll-Free #2 is a shoo-in and bumping him up to the next committee level is a no-brainer, but experience tells me that we’re going to end up denying roughly half our toll-frees and although Toll-Free #1 had great stats, I don’t feel comfortable arguing strongly for him; I’m going to let him be denied without pushing him up to the next level, because there are other applicants I want to use my bullets for, like Gem, where I think I can make a more compelling case. I’m also going to be reading apps all day for weeks, so I know I’m going to find a few more Gems that I want to fight for.

I think it happens something like that. If so, the app is critical.

430

Doesn’t change that much from year to year. They may be graduating a bunch of classics kids and need to refill or need the bassoonist. Or have a new program/new funding and want to fill it. We know, it’s public, that many top colleges are now trying to increase the number of guys in some humanities. But the core wants, afaiac, remained stable.

Ohiodad, you get around to reading H’s what we look for?

431

Or sometimes people are just interesting. What were you looking for in your spouse? Did you have a list of criteria or did you just date people til you found one you clicked with? Do you think those you didn’t click with were “bad” or just not interesting to you - but might be interesting to someone else?

432

@DeepBlue86 Something no one told me not to say but somehow I felt I was not supposed to say, but what the heck - In a prep school I have personal experience with, some college counselors, the ones who have been working in that role for many years in particular, are notorious for doing their screening of the Ivy applicants from the school. The first thing they ask? “Are you legacy?” (Note that they don’t ask “are you writing good essays?”) If the answer is no, some/many would be told there’s little or no chance. Now, are they always right? No. There are students who are not discouraged by their words and apply anyway and get in almost every year. However, these are CCs from a top notch prep school that has true connections with those colleges. When they believe hooks trump essays, I think we should believe them. A disclaimer: I don’t believe hooks is “everything”. Even my kids’ experience doesn’t support that notion. But I have to say from what I’ve learned over the years, the ultra selective college admission process is not so mysterious to me any more - that’s not to say it’s not difficult to predict the outcome for any individual - nonetheless the process as a whole is not mysterious.

433

@blossom, on the micro level yeah, obviously the institutional “needs” of the school change year to year, as they do with athletic recruiting. But in athletics, it is easy to tell that Princeton is graduating a bunch of defensive linemen, not so easy to tell that Amherst is losing their three trombone players. And I get that some of that is simply not knowable, I am not saying it all should be. I am just saying that having gone through one side of the process and now going through the other, I get the frustration.

But my larger point is not about institutional needs, but rather what I would call institutional ethos. It is the what makes Princeton different from Harvard (other than the orange) question. Sure the easy stuff is there. Geography, one arguably more focused on undergrad than the other, etc. I know why one recruited my son and the other didn’t. But I do not know why one non athlete kid may be admitted to one and not the other. But I bet the ad coms at least like to think they are looking for some different things. Why not say what they are?

I just think that Penn, for example, could be maybe more open about looking for kids with a more pre professional focus (assuming that is true). And to also address @Pizzagirl’s point, of course if Penn came out and said that they viewed their mission as “preparing the next generation of leaders in the world of business, law and medicine” they would see an immediate and huge influx of applications from presidents of high school investment clubs, John Marshall Society chairs, etc. To which I would reply that is where the rubber meets the road, and it is manifestly the job of the admissions staff to ferret out the pretenders from the contenders.

In fact, isn’t that we are told they are doing already? Isn’t holistic admissions about determining which kids truly have the intellectual or other talents valued by the University, and which simply “guessed right” in the particular stew of ECs and high school courses for that specific school? If the ad coms are that good at what they do, then why the mystery? It seems at least arguable to me that if some of the uber selective schools were more open in what types of kids they sought to attract year over year you might see less shotgunning of applications because the process would not seem so randomized from the outside looking in.

@lookingforward, nope I haven’t looked at Harvard’s what we look for. I know they generally look for larger, slower (relatively) offensive linemen while Princeton looks for slightly smaller (again relatively speaking), quicker offensive linemen :). But Kid 2 had no interest in Harvard at all so I don’t think I have ever even been on the web site. I have looked a lot at Vassar, Wesleyan, Brown, Tufts, Kenyon, UChicago, etc, etc though. Am I missing something?

434

What says a.kid can’t plan his hs activities? They do it for academics. Tons of bright stem/premed kids look for relevant ideas to test their interest and gain some experience. The problem is more that common advice seems to want to hit some lower common denominator. “You don’t have to, just find some passion, don’t pad.”

435

I get your point. But then again most of us have a type, and over time we are drawn to partners who share common attributes. That is kind of what I am talking about.

436

Blue, read the Fitzsimmons NYT article.

They comment as they go. Each kid as an individual.

437

" If the ad coms are that good at what they do, then why the mystery? "

What mystery is there? You keep wanting a roadmap, a formula. This is a human process. What catches the eye of adcom A may turn off adcom B. So what? How is this different from dating, friendship, hiring? You can’t always lay out specific criteria. Things come along and you like them and they aren’t predictable.

438

Ohiodad, didn’t you ask why Harvard can’t be more forthcoming?

I don’t like the notion of formula but do feel strongly a kid or parent can get a good read on what certain colleges look for. The problem seems to be people don’t believe it.

439

Bingo, @Pizzagirl

440

@Pizzagirl, I don’t get how you think I am looking for a roadmap. I think I have been pretty clear about that, frankly. But I do assume that Yale prioritizes certain exhibited traits maybe more than Northwestern, and visa versa. Not sure why it would be a bad idea to be more clear about those things. Again, and keeping somewhat with the original point of this thread, neither Notre Dame nor MIT seem to suffer from what appear to be clear positions on legacies. Why would other schools?