<p>The tone sure twisted fast. I’m with the group that says the Aff.Act discussion belongs on the AA thread. </p>
<p>The moment a kid thinks of a most competitive college should be instantly followed by recognition that the odds are against him. I do feel that, if you’re smart/accomplished enough to think you may have a shot, you have to be smart enough to understand there are no givens. To blame your own reduced chances on your race or another’s is, well, grasping at straws.</p>
<p>One thing I’ve said often is that the kid, mummy, daddy, teachers, etc, can’t size him/her up against the competition.</p>
<p>Btw, looking at Warren? She got what she got, decades ago. NE schools have been, til recently, more lax about proofs of NA heritage or expecting engagement with the heritage. I doubt "her word " would tip an admit decision today.</p>
<p>What gets me is how easily folks accept anecdote and some random examples.</p>
<p>The Masters analogy is misrepresented in this thread. The Masters is a professional golf tournament for men that occurs for about a week every April. The tournament occurs on the course of a golf club called Augusta National. The Augusta National club itself did not allow women members until last August. It was one of the only clubs in the US that excluded them (up until 1990- right before Tiger Woods burst on the scene they also did not allow blacks). Last year the exclusion of female members came to a head with the Club’s custom of offering a membership to the CEO’s of IBM, when IBM appointed a female CEO, Darla Moore. Finally last August (2012! welcome to the 21st century…) they decided to allow women, and the first two admitted were Darla Moore and Condoleeza Rice.</p>
<p>They have defended their member policy saying they are a private club and they can do whatever they want, which is true.</p>
<p>Ok, and REALLY funny that as I finished reading this thread (after my above posting) I realized that the “two moms” was interpreted completely differently by other readers. I took it to mean she need more than an extra set of hands to help with the application process. SILLY ME… but just goes to illustrate how different readers may see humor where others do not, etc.</p>
<p>Look at all of the stupidity on CC over this. Here’s some kid with a 2400 SAT, 4.0 GPA, great EC’s, etc. applying to Harvard. Harvard’s overall admit rate is 5%. Why wouldn’t that kid also assume his chances are 5% and swing the bat accordingly with that in mind? The pool is not “the pool of all kids from my high school, of all various abilities” in which case -yeah, you’re the top 5% of the class. The pool is “a bunch of kids who look pretty much just like me.”</p>
<p>A lot of kids with a 2.8 GPA, 1710 SAT, and ECs consisting solely of cutting class and getting high behind the bleachers are smart enough to figure this out.</p>
<p>“It’s not fair how they let in some undeserving, schoomzing president-of-the-student-council type who claims to be part Cherokee. Indeed, it’s so unfair that I don’t get to be his classmate.”</p>
<p>Look, no one seems to want to answer the basic question: If such a significant / meaningful portion of the student body is “undeserving” and only got in due to (pick one) athletics / legacy / development / URM / geographic diversity / the ability to do something trivial like juggle, then why do you WANT to join such an undeserving student body? Wouldn’t you want to figure out where the “better, more deserving” kids wind up and send your kid there? That would seem the normal, commonsense reaction.</p>
<p>If you are a student with standardized test scores and class rank in the top 1% of your school, it’s not all that illogical, absent more specialized information, to presume that you stand a decent chance at schools with a 6-10% acceptance rate, especially if you apply to a half dozen of them.</p>
<p>However, the fact of the matter is that these schools don’t get a randomly-distributed group of applicants; instead the applicant pool is very heavily weighted toward the top 1% of the nation’s students. Students who understand that are more likely to approach the application process with more realistic expectations.</p>
<p>And Lorem- to add to your fine analysis- if you live in a cozy suburb with one acre minimum zoning and your kid is “the finest student I have ever taught” per his bio teacher, and is also on the varsity tennis team and volunteers at an animal shelter, it comes as a shock- an absolute shock- to learn that every other cozy suburb has a kid just like yours applying to the same six schools. Thousands of kids just like yours. And then add in the kid who is winning Intel, and one premiering her concerto with a prominent youth symphony, and the lead author on a ground-breaking study on hormones in milk production which she researched while in 4-H, or a gun buy-back program he created and ran with a local police department for his Eagle Scout designation… and you realize that hey- the talent runs pretty deep here in the USA.</p>
<p>^^ And isn’t limited by SES.
All the perceived advantages to being middle class or higher- the tennis lessons, elite camps, travel, tutoring, cultural exposure- can be less impressive than what some other kid accomplishes on his own. There’s a stereotype that poor kids can’t have the sorts of vision and “get going” of Blossom’s examples. It’s all so much more than hs leadership. Or some fake charity or expensive service trip.</p>
<p>^^The easy complaint is that it’s about skin color. That’s too emotionally loaded. Prejudice talking. Assuming that other kid offered nothing more than skin color. You don’t see apps. You just assume the high stats kids you know or hear of “must” be superior. In fact, each kid gets the same opportunity to present himself thru the app. The assumption that stats is the be-all hoses many candidates. Ime, there is a very close read for "character. "</p>
<p>Sorry. I think it’s completely illogical and absurd to think this way, and in the latter case, it just goes to show that well-to-do moneyed people can be provincial and unthinking. I don’t know why on earth one wouldn’t look at the acceptance rates for elite schools and think - yep, that’s the chance that I, personally, have (or my kid personally has). I wouldn’t see why you’d ever mentally add even one percentage point to that number. It doesn’t make ANY sense. </p>
<p>Then again, I also think no school with an admission rate below, say, 30%, should ever-ever-ever be considered a safety, unless admissions is done on strictly numeric criteria (e.g., SAT scores of XXX are auto-admits). And no top 20 uni or LAC is ever a safety, ever, ever, ever. (And I might extend that to top 30, there is no real bright line.)</p>
<p>Something I read that I found really helpful here on cc was that every HS has a newspaper editor, and a valedictorian, and a student body president and up to four drum majors. While, intellectually, I knew that – I mean, it’s not rocket science – it was eye-opening when thinking about college admissions. When your kid is super-smart or BMOC or whatever, of course you think he/she deserves to get into some top-ranked school. But when you really sit down and think about how there are thousands of each of those things (editor, val, etc), then, come on, how can you really be surprised when your kid doesn’t get in? Sure, your kid has a chance to get in, but so do all the thousands and thousands of others in the same position. And then we’re right back to it being a numbers game! It’s just math.</p>
<p>This. But people here do not want to hear it. They naively believe that their 18-year “investment” in their kid should pay off with a handsome ROI–the window decal in the back of the BMW and the smug superiority that they have been successful parents.</p>
<p>Youdon’tsay, you are right. Also, I don’t know much about statistics but I’m pretty sure it does not increase someone’s odds of admission to apply to 10, 15, 20 schools when each of them has a very low acceptance rate. Each decision is independent of one another. Having a 1-in-10 chance at 10 separate schools does not mean that if you apply to 10 schools you will get into one–correct? Feel free to correct me if my logic is wrong.</p>