<p>I’d like to add to my last post. Clyde10 indicated these results for his son:
I agree that these are surprising, given his credentials. Was this his whole list? Where else did he apply, and where was he accepted? If this was the whole list, or even the whole list of selective schools, it may just mean that he didn’t apply to enough selective schools. In other words, a student waitlisted at Vanderbilt might be accepted at Emory, or WashU, or Tufts, or Brown, or Penn. With the very low acceptance rates at these schools, it’s not good strategy to apply to only a few, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Epiphany, what you’ve said makes sense and I’m sure that sort of logic is used to sift through candidates to some extent. However, despite your D getting acceptance to Princeton by being a super-intellectual, a lot of times things aren’t done that way at elite schools. You are talking about how people with GPAs that are 0.005 apart are distinguished. I’ve seen non-URMs with 3.0/4.0 GPAs and 1300/1600 SAT’s get into Stanford with no significant awards while people with perfect GPAs and perfect SAT’s do not. And these are people from the same high school. My alma mater, MIT, is doing a lot of strange things as well and I’ve written about that in the past.</p>
<p>Admissions are approximations of talent, work ethic, and future promise. Grades and test scores were rough first-order approximations of this. As with any first-order approximation, there were exceptions which fell through the cracks that made it a bad approximation. (Sen. Paul Wellstone and Nobel laureate Stephen Chu are examples.) So it was changed more and more to holistic admission, a second-order approximation, in order so that these successful exceptions could gain admission. However, in the process of doing this, not only can people like Stephen Chu get in, but also a lot of people that simply are not that talented or hard-working.</p>
<p>I will use the example of Stephen Chu.
The guy used to daydream all day in school, and got mediocre grades because of this. He was rejected from every ivy (and had he applied to MIT, he would have been rejected there too.) A lot of times he would become obsessed with his own little thought experiments, but they weren’t things which resulted in actual results. He went to Rochester and buckled down, went to Berkeley for grad school and eventually won the Nobel Prize in physics. Meanwhile, his brother who had gotten the highest GPA in the history of his prep school, had no major awards but just was a solid professional. On the MIT boards, this has been used as an example of why holistic admissions should look past GPA and SAT in order so that a Stephen Chu should get admitted. My feeling is that by changing admissions so that sub-700 math SAT people or people with bad GPA’s can get in, a lot more people of Stephen Chu’s caliber will be rejected than admitted. And this is because a lot of people that are just not very talented or motivated can get in now because the . So, in other words, the second-order approximation that is holistic admissions becomes less accurate than the first-order approximation. Just to be clear, I am in favor of holistic admissions to some extent. Even Caltech does holistic admissions, but I think there is too much emphasis in admissions in finding reasons to admit a guy with significantly lower stats/grades over those who have performed significantly better. To use another analogy, in the NFL stats (speed, strength) don’t always add up to being a better football player. However, if a running back with a 5.0s 40 yard dash time is taken in the first round, then I would say something is wrong with the process. </p>
<p>When instituting a second-order approximation that sounds good in theory, you should always think about closing the loopholes.</p>
<p>Clyde, what could be missing is truly national or state level accomplishments. My son with similar scores, top 1% of his class and twice as many APs, computer programming experience that was at the same level as college graduates (he took AP Calc as a freshman), work with professors that was cited in published papers and NMF was nevertheless rejected from MIT, Caltech, Stanford and waitlisted at Harvey Mudd. While those results were disappointing, they weren’t a surprise. All of those schools are so selective and have so many qualified applicants you can’t count on them. Luckily he got into Harvard (where a legacy probably doubled his chances to 20%) and Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science School where he is happily finishing up his sophomore year. There are just way too many top students.</p>
<p>But yes, you should approach the process differently next time. For top students, 6 to 8 reaches is not too many and you should find a couple of safeties that you know your kid can live with. EA, rolling admissions or priority applications can be a big help when you have a kid who should be applying to these schools which are so selective you just can’t predict who will get in and who won’t.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, most of the kids who get into HYP from our high school are ordinary non URM middle class kids, but they are all in the top 1 to 2% of the class and have incredible ECs and have often gone way beyond the high school curriculum - not just APs but they’ve taught themselves material or used local colleges to take advanced courses.</p>
Those are great choices to have, and my understanding that Wisconsin is pretty close in selectivity to Michigan. I think your son had a reasonable list, and I hate to second-guess anybody after the fact. But for the sake of others who might be looking ahead to applications next year, I think it’s instructive. The list had three highly selective schools (four if you count Michigan OOS). I think for a student with strong academic credentials, but no “hook,” this may not be enough if you strongly desire a highly selective school. I just don’t think the old advice of “two reach, two match, and two safety” works for students shooting for the highly selective tier. And when you consider that these schools are looking for somebody “interesting,” you don’t know what any particular one will consider interesting.</p>
<p>I know how many uberkids are out there and I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t get into Cornell or Northwestern. I was surprised that he didn’t get into either Vanderbilt or Michigan; especially Michigan.</p>
<p>“But assuming that this is a white male, what is missing at the Ivies–or at least at the most selective ones–is unusual achievement outside the school setting. While I think Eagle Scout is a top achievement (and my son is one), it’s not an academic achievement, and it’s not highly unusual.”</p>
<p>But it should be added, for the reference of future readers, that the Ivies and other highly selective schools do admit a substantial number of students who have high grades and scores and decent ECs, but no hooks and no unusual achievements. But they only admit a small percentage of them–and you can’t predict which school might admit any particular student. This means that such students should apply to these big reaches if they wish, but (1) they should be realistic and also apply to match and safety schools and (2) apply to enough reach schools to mitigate the uncertainty factor.</p>
<p>Well, as someone said, Michigan caps its out-of-state enrollment. I think Michigan out-of-state admission is as selective as one of the less-selective ivies (e.g., Cornell,) so I wouldn’t be any more upset about that than the Cornell rejection. </p>
<p>In general I am sympathetic to posts like this and no doubt there are some people with lesser stats who get into HYP because of stupid reasons. However, I wouldn’t be too angry about this particular case. There are enough people out there with better stats to fill these top places. For example, your son was national merit commended; there is about 8,000 national merit finalists per year and 2,500 who win the award per year. Your son is on the cusp of admission to many of the places he applied. If he sets aside his disappointment and does well at the well-respected places he got accepted, transfer is certainly realistic. From his stats, it does sound like he has the brainpower to really succeed as long as he doesn’t get too disappointed. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t change your strategy a bit for your younger kids. Perhaps read up on cc to see what colleges like to get an activity for the summer of junior year. Also, apply to more schools.</p>
<p>While I completely agree that some people don’t do well in school and still end up as super-brilliant people (I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because of boredom…<em>fume</em>) there’s still no way to differentiate them from the people who don’t do well in school and are NOT brilliant. There is also no way to tell apart the people who ace school and are brilliant with those who ace school and are NOT brilliant.
There’s just too many kids with 4.0’s (or 4.25’s) and 2200’s for about 10 schools to wade through.</p>
<p>Clyde, our experience was that a 2380, 4.56 W, 9 APs, 13 post-AP courses and three extremely competitive national awards (along with a lot of other great stuff) was not enough to garner admission at some schools, including Cornell. </p>
<p>It IS extremely frustrating to try to suss out the decision-making process at some of these schools. All I can say is that S was accepted at the schools where he was clearly a good fit, and rejected/waitlisted where the fit was not as obvious, despite scores, grades and hardware.</p>
<p>For both my kids, I have advised them to have a list that reflects their interests and passions, where the “fit” is clear, that will allow them to grow over four years, and allows for a change in path should that arise. And work on those essays. S1 went through 15 drafts on some of his.</p>
<p>A tale of two students from this year, senior friends of S2. Both applied to Princeton. Both white males. Both full pay. One perfect GPA, rigorous AP and honors curriculum near perfect SAT, accomplished musician who has played with symphony orchestras and at Lincoln Center, started own business or some such thing. The other, pretty much a fun-loving kid, who had a decent GPA (3.7 or so), no real standout ECs, some HS sports, did take a rigorous curriculum, SATs okay, in the mid 2100’s. Guess which one got into Princeton? The second one. When arguing about what it takes to get admitted there are so many intangibles at these schools, that I think the only thing one can say is a kid might have a shot.</p>
<p>collegealum314, laughing out loud at your “Risky Business” update!</p>
<p>It’s been a few pages back, so I will mention again: For the University of Michigan, if applying out-of-state, send in the application as soon as possible. Our local GC was giving kids grief if they hadn’t applied there by the first week of October.</p>
<p>Also, I may start a separate thread on this topic, but will mention it here: The student experience at a large, public university like Michigan, or Illinois, or Wisconsin is highly variable from student to student. </p>
<p>I could definitely understand that a student might feel disappointed, given a set of choices that are no different from those available to people who neither worked as hard, nor scored as well. However, let me emphasize that there are a LOT of different routes to a degree from a large, public university. (My stat mech students worked out that our university had about 33 quadrillion different possible course schedules–true.) So while a really talented student and one who is closer to the average are attending the same institution, they are not really in the same place. The work that led to better scores and grades also pays off in better capability for the future, and a more advanced starting point. </p>
<p>If you look at the list of winners of the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships, Goldwater Scholars, Truman Scholars, Udall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Churchill Scholars, Fulbright Fellows, and Gates-Cambridge Fellows, you’ll see that they come from many different universities. (HYP students are there, but not disproportionately so.)</p>