Well for me that whole story just does not add up, so I simply would not have responded to the thread. You need to be at least 18 to work on an oil rig and the vast majority of those jobs do require at a minimum a high school diploma. And what teenager or 20 year old do you know that would ever use the term “Hey guys and gals?”
I looked up that thread with the community service boaster. If someone does so much community service, their heart probably really isn’t into it (and everyone, included the intended beneficiaries, can probably tell).
The “Homeless to Harvard” poster needs to get over himself. However, if CC were to institute a weekly Speshul Snowflake award, he might be in contention for that honor! 
If I were trying to come off as slightly facetious, I might. 
Source: Am 20.
…but she still ended up at Cornell or Penn?
@OldFashioned1, LOL! No, she ended up at Wellesley, still an elite school, but my point was that no one can assume they’ll get into a top school just because they have top stats!
@tigerrocks13 - Sorry if you find the occasional reality check ridiculously negative.
I saw on one of your own threads in which you got a more than a tad defensive when a well-meaning person advised that you not put the cart ahead of the horse and said “Good to dream but also plan for alternatives so you aren’t disappointed.”
By the same token, I saw you post this on a kids’ chances thread:
“Not trying to burst your bubble, but UVA is about a 1 in a million shot. Those numbers are below average for everything there. Va Tech is definitely a match, though, and the other two are probably safeties.”
Which is it? Bubble-bursting or being ridiculously negative?
In general, I find most people to be genuinely helpful and have learned a tremendous amount from frequenting the site. That said, I don’t usually look at “Chance Me” threads.
@LoveTheBard Where in this post did I say if someone has no chance, don’t tell them that? I said if their stats don’t match up then tell them they don’t have a chance… that was the case in the UVA comment. I’ll admit I was more defensive in my earlier days on here because I was naïve. Regardless, the person who made that comment did not seem to know much about the admissions stats and whatnot if I remember correctly. But that’s beside the point. That’s an anomaly where the person just gives iffy information. However, this post was more about the people who give the right information about stats and whatnot but act like a star student is stupid for thinking Ivy admission is doable.
ooooh, snap!
@Massmomm , that’s where we part company, and that’s why I replied to your original post in this thread. Your use of Stanford as your example is to focus on the most extreme case. Stanford is so frickin’ hard to get into now. You just said that “no one can assume they’ll get into a top school just because they have top stats!” I disagree with that depending on how you define “top school.”
Wellesley is a top school. Bowdoin is a top school. Neither is as hard to get into as Stanford, but they’re still top schools.
If a kid has “top stats”, they’ll get in somewhere in the “elite” category. Sure, not guaranteed to get into Princeton, but they’ll get into a terrific and highly selective school unless there is something wrong. Btw, with “high stats,” I assume there is requisite rigor in the curriculum. My experience anyway is that rigor goes a long with with many schools.
There was a poster here who went about defining the average kid who gets into H, and the hypebole was something to behold. According to this mom of a kid at UMass, the Harvard kids are the kids who’ve started companies legitimate charities that go on after their involvement ends, they write their own computer programs that are subsequently purchased by tech companies, their works are published, etc. etc. etc.
Sure, Harvard has those kids, but Cheese and Rice, there are plenty of people who are there who did nothing even approaching that in high school. I happen to know many of them personally.
My point, put succinctly, is that, yeah, it’s hard, but it’s not always that hard. My example from several threads ago: Stanford took a kid with a 3.7 in my kid’s IB class. Non-athlete, no special talent. I’m confident he had stellar test scores, but that year Stanford took him over kids with better grades and test scores likely in this kid’s range. My kid was one of those kids.
But my kid got into a bunch of top schools. Just not Stanford.
I agree with @MiddleburyDad2 and some others here. There are a handful of schools like Stanford that are so competitive that no student can feel reasonably comfortable of getting in, but those are the exceptions to the rule for a super high stat, top EC candidates. I would also say that with yield protection and just the luck of the draw, you can’t really count on any one particular very competitive school even after that very top tier, but you can count on the probability of getting into some if you apply to a reasonable spread and have the right facts. For example, a male candidate with a top GPA at a high performing school including a bunch of AP’s, 2300 SAT, impressive leadership positions, good athletic and arts mix, etc. who applies to a broad range of NESCAC colleges, most of which have admit rates below 20%, is reasonably likely to get into some of them – perhaps not any given one, but when the dust settles some of them. My S got into all but one of his “matches” and some of his reaches, even though we defined his matches as up to schools with ~15% admission rates (admit rate wasn’t the only criteria; for example we defined Williams as a reach despite having a slightly higher admit rate, but we have access to Naviance to see where the typical GPA break was for his school). His “safeties” had admit rates around 30%. Meanwhile some other frequent posters here have told students to consider ANY school with a 30% rate a reach no matter what a student’s facts are. Which i don’t agree with. A student with great facts who applies to 2-3 schools with a 30% admit rate is likely to get into all of them and extremely likely to get into 2-3. That’s not a “reach.”
This is some very good advice right here, put very succinctly.
Depends on how you define “elite”. To some having to go to Cornell, the community college of the Ivy League, is a huge embarrassment. Is UCLA elite? Michigan? Rochester?
With 36 or 1600 extremely likely but 31 and 1400 are not high stats as some presume for some of them to be a sure thing.
There are lottery schools which admit lower score/lower GPA students based on their holistic process. However, many of the 30% or below schools (unless they have a Tufts syndrome) consider 99%ile kids as the best available and admit them. They do give a lot more value to scholastic achievements in their process and would not weight the other aspects of the application as equal value.
There are a few students who are pretty much guaranteed to go to Stanford if they want to. Malia Obama was probably a sure thing. The next McCaffrey son who is a 3x (or maybe 4x) legacy and who plays 3 sports can be pretty sure that if he wants to go to Stanford there will be a scholarship and admission waiting for him (one brother at Stanford, the others at Duke and heading for Michigan so he may not want Stanford). I bet if one of the Gates kids wants Stanford, Bill can make it happen.
The rest of us mere mortals? Very tough road.
One of Gates’ kids is there.
^^See, a sure thing for some.
“Depends on how you define “elite”. To some having to go to Cornell, the community college of the Ivy League, is a huge embarrassment. Is UCLA elite? Michigan? Rochester?”
Well, call me the common man, but I would say those are pretty elite schools. This may surprise some of my CC friends here who think me an elitist snob, but I’d never refer to Cornell as a community college in any context.
So, sure, it depends, but I’m not worried about informing those most obnoxious of people. You can handle them for me.
It’s all relative and all the terms are subjective. That said, anyone referring to Cornell or UCLA or Michigan as community colleges is just a jacka$$. (and to be clear, I’m not calling the poster that, but the “friends”)
@citivas , agreed.
@citivas But, but Cornell has a double digit acceptance rate!! And Michigan is a state school! How will some parents ever explain it to their circle of friends if their student has to go to schools like that?