@Pizzagirl Post #52 I think a good public HS counselor will get inputs from all of the child’s teachers and the parents to try to write a personalized rec. We have experience at both a large, top public HS for older son and a smaller, less known private HS for second son. Both counselors solicited inputs. I agree that the private school did a better job with the whole college process than the public school did, but both counselors were excellent and did try to tailor recommendations around my children’s strengths. Of course, I couldn’t read the recs, but I just got that sense from our meetings with both of them. I was probably more proactive and involved with the school counselors and teachers than many parents, as I was a regular volunteer at both high schools.
@DHMchicago OP – UCLA is wonderful! No disappointment there. But, you mention that you don’t think you would be more interventionist in the college process with your upcoming child than you were with the first. I guess I don’t think like that. This will be your second child’s first time through HS and the college process, whereas you are more worldly and now have the first child’s experiences to draw from. Your advice and guidance could be really helpful to your second child.
We got phone calls about missing info from schools that weren’t legacies.
Our GC’s base their recommendations based on two teacher letters written junior year, the parent brag sheet also written junior year, and they probably have access to the two senior year teacher recommendations. They know what the kids do for ECs in school and whether they’ve won awards for the school. I think they manage to look like they know the students a lot better than they do.
“In my travels, the real “Hook” in selective admissions is sports. It moves the needle like few other hooks do. Like it, hate it or whatever, I think that’s the real big one.”
Exactly correct.
As noted upthread, the studies have quantified how big various hooks are. African American is the most powerful hook. Followed closely by recruited athlete. A ways back comes Latino and legacy, which are about the same strength.
Assume garden variety legacy status takes a well-qualified kid from 10% chance of admission to 30% chance. Glass half full – that triples your chances – YUGE! Glass half empty – your rejection chance is still 70% for a kid that is in the top 1-2% of all college applicants.
Tripling your chances, statistically, is way way more than a feather on the scale. But it isn’t a brick on the scale either. Seems like it is a firm thumb on the scale for kids who are otherwise well-qualified for admission.
Legacy dummies used to get into these schools back in the days when Ivy League schools had overall acceptance rates in the 30-40% range. But no longer now that such schools have overall admissions rates of 5-10%.
My guess is that statistically the amount of legacy boost is pretty constant over the years. But the underlying admissions environment that the boost is applied to has changed radically. So today’s legacies (like all applicants to these schools) have to be much smarter than in the olden days.
@planner03 Post #513 Did your son get into all those 20 schools?
To partially answer your essay question a while back, I just looked back at my son’s 21 printed applications – Ugg. (He did NOT get into all of those…)
Duke, Cornell, MIT, and Penn all had an essay that basically asked “Why do you want to study XX and why at our school?” (Brown asked this question too, but he ended up not applying.) Some asked for a little more substance within the same essay, in 500 or 650 words. Duke’s, on the other hand, was crazy short. MIT also had a short question about “Which department or program at MIT appeals to you and why?” From what I could tell, the UC schools and Vanderbilt were the only Top 20 ones he applied to that did not ask that question.
Other strong engineering schools that my son applied to (Carnegie Mellon, USC, GA Tech, Lehigh, RPI, and WPI) also had essay versions on the same theme “Why us.” Even UVA’s essay questions had links to their specific campus culture, although they were more a little more creative. (Harvey Mudd, Tufts, and Wake Forest also had the question, but those dropped off son’s short list. Actually WF did not have eng, but we visited anyway because son’s counselor told him they were looking to beef up their comp sci dept.)
Aas @Pizzagirl inferred, you can still interweave a bit of personal interest in and knowledge about a specific college even in essays that don’t overtly ask “Why us,” so the essays don’t appear totally generic. I am not sure how much difference that makes though. Smaller LACs may notice more of those details than larger universities?
“I think a good public HS counselor will get inputs from all of the child’s teachers and the parents to try to write a personalized rec.”
Of course. And what percent of all public schools in the US have sufficient staff to enable a GC to get input from teachers, parents, etc and for the GC to actually know who the kid is? I would guess maybe 10-15% at most.
Our public HS counselor had about 250-300 kids assigned to her for everything under the sun and not just college, but she managed to do a good job. Maybe it was helpful that my son and I were fairly visible contributors at the school. I don’t know.
" … I actually believe it would have if he had applied ED …"
+1 to this concept (not nec at Duke, but many/any other TT schools)
I have heard same from HS and private GCs - and it makes some sense if you think about it. All else being equal, adcoms like yield and legacy admits who are otherwise qualified in all respects are good for business from the university’s point of view. In the ED world, you’re taking the yield risk off the table and also in a smaller (though more qualified) pool.
Full disclosure, DD was am ED ivy legacy admit, and our view through the process was it made a difference for her (both legacy and ED) vs others from her HS applying to the same school.
@TallTim, definitely agree, and I think it also applies to SCEA (albeit to a lesser extent since you aren’t required to take the offer - although probably 80%+ will). Given that almost no one except a recruited athlete with a likely letter or someone with their own Wikipedia entry can feel highly confident that they’ll be admitted to a tippy-top college, even if they’re a legacy, the logical move is for a legacy (assuming they’re qualified) to apply early to the legacy college for the best odds (and I think at Penn, for example, if you don’t apply early, you lose your legacy preference).
@planner03 said, “How many of the “tippy top” schools even have a “why us” essay? HPY don’t, and I only remember S writing them for Penn and JHU out of his 20 applications…30 minutes of combing their websites for morsels and a sprinkling of bs and he was done.”
Actually Yale does have the “why Yale?” essay. I think all 9 of the ‘top 50’ level schools my son applied to last year had this essay.
But I agree this prompt is a little silly. How can an applicant tell 8 different schools that they are his/her dream school? I guess it is a further level of ‘displayed interest’ and maybe an indicator of how well they’ll do writing a paper the night before it’s due after having read only 25% of the material!
@pickpocket Pretty funny! Writing essays under pressure with limited information is probably a good skill for the real world. My son wrote most of his supp essays the day they were due.
Maybe that’s why he didn’t get into a few of those reach schools. But, I kind of doubt it.
@3girls3cats , very interesting post. Thanks for that information. Agreed … in a sea of speculation and “you gotta believe” assertions, it’s helpful to hear what adcoms think. It makes sense that the counselor letter would factor in heavily.
the one bit of advice I’ve been given over and over and over and over, by college counselors, school counselors, X ad coms, coaches … everyone you can think of in the process, is that rigor of curriculum is a big deal. there are competing theories to that, and one of them is the “big school” theory that your numerical GPA is what matters most, because nobody navigating through 10s of thousands of apps is going to scrutinize your transcript. They don’t have the time.
When your review is more manageable from a number of apps to resources standpoint, it’s reasonable to assume someone is going to figure out if your 3.9 is made up of weight training, sign language, PE, teacher’s aid and some regular classes vs. a kid with a 3.1 who has had straight rigor. In the latter case, I know of hooked kids who’ve been admitted to very selective small to medium private colleges in the flat B range, and even with good test scores, many admissions types I’ve talked with would explain that with, “rigor” as the difference maker.
Whitman, a noted consumer of my kids’ HS IB program here in Seattle, admitted a kid with a 3.2 GPA last year and good, but not off the charts, ACT numbers. Unhooked too. But he was a full IB diploma kid (and full pay, which at Whitman helps as they are need aware), and schools like Whitman know what it takes to do that … even if only to survive that.
I think one big reason for the focus on rigor is that it is supposedly one of the most powerful markers for likely success in college … which stands to reason.
Don’t assume they won’t scrutinize the transcript. Maybe this is a difference dependingon the level of colleges. Fitzsimmons has said it’s one of the first pages he turns to. They can notice all sorts of things.
I don’t really assume anything because Big School U was never a target interest for any of my kids, which I supported and support.
But come on … how does UCLA process 100,000+ applications while managing resources, which I’m told continues to be a challenge among the UCs. A Harvard ad com in some Atlantic article I read a few years back acknowledged that he and his staff could barely do it with less than 40,000 apps.
They sort the applications initially - putting those who obviously dont have the grades and scores in reject piles .
Then they move on to read the apps of those “qualified” to be considered.
The percentage that don’t make it past first cut, ime, is far larger than many assume. Don’t be fooled by comments that 80% are “qualified.” It means they could, in theory, handle the courses. It doesn’t mean 80% get all that far through the process. It’s one reason I nag abut knowing what you’re applying for.
Again, this is only based on the input of 4 admissions officers, but in the workshop I attended, they showed how they very quickly run down the school profile and then look at the transcript. They want to see when advanced coursework is available to the student, how many advanced classes can be taken at one time, how many classes are offered, etc. If it’s a school that they already know, it’s even quicker. If what they related is to be trusted, they absolutely do look for rigor and evaluate the transcript within that context. It was swift and almost automatic to them.
I have no idea how the UCs handle their admissions. Those seem like a universe unto themselves.
“If what they related is to be trusted, they absolutely do look for rigor and evaluate the transcript within that context. It was swift and almost automatic to them.”
UVA’s alumni association has a legacy admissions counseling program that my kids have done. Part of that program is having the alumni liaison “score” the HS transcript in the same way that the admissions office does. It takes about 60 seconds. Pretty amazing how quick they can do it.
I don’t know what UCLA does with its 100k apps, but UVA definitely does this for their 30k apps.
A friend of mine set me a link to a book that is relevant to this discussion. The author was an admissions officer at Duke about 15-20 years ago, I think. She describes the admissions process there. Basically, it consists of 3 rounds. In the first round, applications are read by a reader and an officer. Applications that are clear admits are “auto-admits”, while applications that are clear rejects are “auto-denies”. In the second round, the rest of the applications go to a committee that makes the final decision in most cases.
However, for legacy and development candidates who get rejected (either as an “auto-deny” or a committee deny) there’s yet a 3rd separate round where a number of these candidates get admitted.
The 3rd round process as described is not very pretty. I think Duke (at least at this time) had a reputation for very aggressively courting influential alums and/or donors. I don’t think things are this extreme at other elite schools. I also hope that Duke has reformed things too.
Also, I think the author probably injected some sensationalism into her description and she has her own biases, so this is probably an imbalanced account. However, I’d guess that there is a lot of truth at its core too.
Anyway, here’s how the author describes the 3rd round (edited for brevity and clarity, emphasis added) …