The Ivies are very competitive schools for admissions. But so are a number of other universities.
I think the key is to have a varied application list that includes some schools with more likely admissions (and perhaps costs that are affordable, especially if you don’t qualify for need based aid).
So you believe that each school has selected the “best of the best” and that there are no equally qualified candidates who didn’t get selected?
OP, you are correct that there are candidates who don’t get an admit but who are just as qualified- not just in a high schooler’s mind, but to the adcoms. The issue is that building a class at an elite is much more than looking for a bunch of high performing valedictorians, then spinning a wheel til the list is made. The easiest “gate” to understand is geographic diversity. Ie, they can’t take all the great kids from one hs, town or area. Or trying to ensure admits include a variety of majors. Then, there’s more. And with the sheer volume of top kids, these colleges can cherry pick. (Different from a real lottery.)
If Harvard ends up with 6000 finalists (for roughly 2000 admits,) that means 37,000 kids get culled, along the way. No way all 37k were equally good. Sometimes, CCers focus on the “win” or the supposed devastation of not being admitted. I like to think what a bright kid can do to increase his/her chances of being one of the ones who makes it past first cut and toward the finalist pool. It’s not simply about being top dawg in your own hs context.
That may apply more to the most competitive colleges, but we were talking about those.
Successful admits are not a homogeneous group. The “last” student admitted at a given selective program is not as qualified as the first one selected, particularly at the tip top schools.
There is a core group of exceptionally qualified individuals, probably numbering no more than a few hundred each year at the very top.
After that, there is a group of a few thousand highly gifted individuals, also in great demand. By the time these applicants have been allocated, you can see from the numbers that hardly a quarter of the available positions at the top universities have been filled.
It’s the next group to which the “lottery” analogy begins to apply. Some of them get admitted to fill out the classes, but many don’t, leaving them to be the “top” students at the next tier of colleges on down …and so forth.
Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said for my corner of the world, and I suspect for a few other “corners” as well. In some [regions] adults actually believe that both the process and the results are random, literally, and thus one “might as well try.” That “random” or “lottery” aspect includes the belief that the committee “might not notice” a C one semester, a 3.7 gpa, or a 2020 test score. (Not an exaggeration; I meet them all the time.)
Nor in what I see, epiphany. The Common App and things like CC chance threads encourage many to take that chance without kids even really knowing what the college looks for. They fill out the app assuming their hs successes are all it takes. But I say, this isn’t about a transfer to another hs, elite adcoms are not looking for a good candidate for their hs. They’re looking at their class at their college, for the next four years and beyond. So few kids can really do a good job on a Why Us? sort of question.
People have powerful coping mechanisms. It’s much easier to believe that random events are responsible for what happens than to own the part that each of us plays.
Post 45 is true. However, that coping mechanism is generally unnecessary unless one feels one must “cope” in the first place. Some powerful and irrational lust combines with blindness and artificial desperation to produce denial in spades.
Anyone really interested in this topic should read the NY Times piece by Kevin Carey from late 2014.
Basically getting into a top school is no more difficult than it was 25 years ago. 80% of the best qualified students get into at least one top school.
Applications per student have risen dramatically so the process has changed, as well as what is considered a top school.
Students are spreading their risk nowadays.
“In total, one out of every 20 Harvard freshmen attended one of the seven high schools most represented in the class of 2017—Boston Latin, Phillips Academy in Andover, Stuyvesant High School, Noble and Greenough School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Trinity School in New York City, and Lexington High School.”
From: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/making-harvard-feeder-schools/
So I don’t think they value geographical diversity as much as Stanford.
So 5% came from feeder schools. That leaves 95%. Or whatever figure it is after athletes.
Geo diversity is about the whole country.
I think the problem stems from thinking of admissions as a contest, which one can “win.”
It isn’t, in my opinion. It’s perhaps closer to planning a party guest list. If you’re planning a party, do you invite your friends with the highest GPAs and test scores? The wealthiest? Or are you likely to try to invite an interesting mix of people, who won’t get into fights with each other? If you invite your aunt, do you invite her ex-husband, who still hasn’t gotten over the divorce?
And of course you should invite the neighbors, and the person who’s invited you to her parties, and the person who’s really good at making others feel welcome. You also invite more than you can really entertain, as you know some will be busy at other parties that evening.
It’s evident that most schools’ applicant pools skew heavily to their catchment area. So the presence of students from those feeder schools is not inconsistent with valuing geo diversity.
There seems to be an inability on cc to get that elite colleges can value a multitude of different things at once. Harvard can value being a “good neighbor” in Cambridge/Boston, and simultaneously value geo diversity. They can value ensuring that the lax and water polo teams are filled ( which will skew to wealthy prep school students) and also value the kid who spends his time in a lab and who does no physical activity whatsoever.
After you get pass the “randomness” of the numbers (SATs, GPA, class rank) per se i believe they look to see what type of person you are through essays and interviews. They want to know how you will grow as a person and move their institution forward. They are not looking for someone with a perfect GPA and SAT that is neurotic and will cope with the pressures of the ivies with a rifle and a perch atop the watchtower at high noon. SATs, good grades, courses taken gets you a place in line but who you are as a person and would be alumnus gets you through the door. If not a computer could select who gets in and who dosen’t.
Sorry wrong link in the earlier post.
“According to enrollment data from the Office of Admissions provided by Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesperson Anna Cowenhoven, 51.5 percent of the non-international students who enrolled in Harvard’s Class of 2018 hail from just four states: New York, New Jersey, California, and Massachusetts. In contrast, those states make up only 23.2 percent of the U.S. population, according to 2014 projections—the latest available—based on the 2010 U.S. Census.”
From
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/3/26/regional-diversity-scrutiny/
The 51.5 number probably doesn’t count a student from the other forty-six states that attended HADES prep schools.
Which is meaningless unless you look at who makes up the applicant pool. If those 4 states account for 23% of the pop but 50% of H’s applicant pool, is it “unfair” that they might make up 50% of the admitted pool?
Absolutely true. Students are also more likely to go to college close to home.
I think it’s a good thing that they just choose the best of the best. Plenty of CCers don’t realize that if your high school typically sends x number of students to the highly selective schools that they may come from a better than average class and the selective colleges aren’t afraid to admit 2x or 3x students from their class.
Given that 41% of the U.S. students in Stanford’s freshman class are from California, it’s a pretty safe bet that Stanford’s total for those four states isn’t far different from Harvard’s. I couldn’t find a recent breakdown of Stanford’s class by state, but a few years ago (class of 2013), 52% of the U.S. students were from California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. If you looked at the four top states, it was 57% (California, Texas, Washington, and New York).
Its also that a western kid may be more likely to matriculate at Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA and a Midwestern may prefer Chi, Mich, etc. Plus preferences among southerners.
You’re quoting enrollment. Doesn’t tell you how adcoms try to build geo diversity.
Well we xposted. But then you lost me, mater.
I’d be interested to see a breakdown of applicants (not enrollees) to these schools, e.g. what % from each state, % international and which countries, % by demographics, children of immigrants, etc. I suspect a high % are children of immigrants and international applicants. There are close to 1m international students in the US, about 50% are from China, India and S. Korea alone, countries that worship at the altar of our elite schools. Most kids in my neighborhood have zero interest in going back east to go to school, even many of the top kids. If they aren’t aiming for the local flagship, most will go for another state school in the west coast or Midwest. The tippy top kids usually aim for Stanford. I only know of one kid who went back east, to BU, and only because she has extended family in the Northeast.
In post #41 you said geo diversity was one of the ‘gates’ for applicants. But geo diversity doesn’t factor into the admissions process at Harvard.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/4/1/staff-admissions-regional-diversity/