Um, I’m not sure what a polygraph would do to help them know your kid…
And I don’t expect them to know theor darkest secrets. What goid would that do? But as was said, they know what Harvard wants and they can find it in the app. So problem solved. They don’t need to change a thing…as I suspect they won’t do anyway.
“And such immigrants may not fully accept advice from multi-generational Americans because such parents(especially upper/upper-middle class White) may have had a history within the immigrant community of lying/misleading older members of the community in order to ensure less competition for their own kids or those of “their own kind” to elite colleges.”
Well, that’s fascinating, given that upper/upper middle class whites (you know, The Enemy According to You) give awesome advice to immigrant families on CC. And plenty of them just refuse to listen or absorb it. Funny how none of us white people on CC are spreading information just to keep “your kind” out. You really do seem to have a dislike for well-to-do white people.
“Incidentally, this focus on merit aid shows how concerns voiced by many parents on CC tend to skew upper/upper-middle class as much has been written which shows merit aid tends to overwhelmingly benefit the upper/upper-middle class as opposed to lower-middle class/low income students”
Yes. Many of us on CC are upper/upper middle class. Get over it.
Feel free to continue being in denial that the behavior I’ve witnessed from such parents at my HS and cousins experienced at their mostly-White upper/upper-middle class suburban school district which happens to be a topflight school district alongside WWP happens.
In so doing, you’re actually part of this very problem whether you know it or not.
Especially with your cut and dried solution of automatically “brooming” applicants who feel it’s important to be admitted to #9 as opposed to #25 without any consideration of reasonable factors contributing to that…such as far greater FA for lower income students which won’t leave them overwhelmed with student loan debt as opposed to #25 which may force them to take on loans due to lack of or different prioritization of FA/scholarship funds.
@ihs76: curious if the results matched the enthusiasm over the supplemental questions. Did she get into the schools where she liked the essay topic?
Greatkids: your second comments seems to contradict the first in some ways. Harvard picked your daughter but similar schools rejected her, even with the same set of recommendations and similar essays.
Reliance on the essay makes it tougher on kids whose strengths are not in writing. A kid could have great ideas, and a strong student, but if he or she is not a good writer, the essay may hurt them rather than help. I think my kids wrote fine essays, but not the strongest part of their applications.
@mom2and So far with an N=2, yes, both schools with <10% accept rates. One acceptance with fun app and one deferred with meh app (non CA school). Few RD apps pending. Couple of schools with ‘boring’ apps never got done.
DS a few years ago was awful at writing his essays. Painful experience for both of us. It really did surprise me how much more personable and fun to read DDs (good) essays were, compared to his.
Some of this may also due to the differences in campus cultures and assessment by adcoms as to whether the applicant may/may not be a “good fit”…including ones influenced by institutional/adcom based biases vis a vis the individual’s application package.
For instance, Harvard’s campus culture is radically different from Brown’s not only in the academic sense(some core requirements vs none), but also in other ways*.
I think some of those mystery results (Into Harvard, rejected from Bowdoin) really are due to kids not making the case why Bowdoin is the right place for them. There’s probably some yield management figuring into the equation, but I think the LACs in particular feel they are offering a different product and want to believe that the fit is there.
I was relieved when my oldest comp sci kid finally spit out a “pretty good for an engineer” essay. It had a good lead, a funny last line, and the middle was kind of “just the facts”. His approach was I’m a computer kid, take me or leave me. Younger son spent a lot more time thinking about what each college might be looking for. (Or in one case taking a wild risk because it was such a reach, he felt his only chance was for them to love a creative approach to the topic - they didn’t, but that was okay.) Luckily I think adcoms probably despite everything, know that some STEM kids will be adequate, but not scintillating writers. And at least you know they wrote it themselves. I assume in the case of my older son, both his school and extra recommendations gave a better picture of who he was.
I don’t see what is so mysterious about getting into some low-acceptance rate schools and not others. At all.
Not a contradiction but the truth about the admissions process. I knew that some may perceive my post as contradicting my prior post, but I don’t believe it to be that way. Admissions offices construct classes and there are an amount of available openings for particular types of students. The admissions offices are doing the best they can do within those parameters, and in my opinion they typically get it right for what they are looking to accomplish. This is why it is such an anomaly when a student runs the table at the most elite colleges. Class construct, student fit etc. I have met some oh my God amazing kids at Harvard and you just could not imagine that they would possibly be rejected any where yet they have been and kids with similar academic credentials and personal attributes will continue to be rejected at elites.
Sometimes I feel like I over share the experiences that our daughter had and we as a family had but my intention is to help people and to possibly bring some awareness to things that they may not have been aware of. (a lot of the people participating here do this of course)
Our daughter wrote about something deeply personal in her primary essay, I was scared it may hurt her admissions success but I was and am so proud of her courage in doing so. We know she touched the admissions officers at Harvard and Middlebury because they told us so. The same essay could have been perceived very differently at other schools, it may have had her come across as damaged goods, but she put herself out there and was authentic. Can essays of this nature be fabricated, of course they can ( I can’t imagine that someone could lack such moral character to do such a thing but I am sure it happens). This is where the LOR’s are so significant. Do they support the rest of the submission/story about a student?
Our daughter was a big fish in a fairly small pond, although our daughters class of 120 kids sent two to Harvard, one to MIT, one to Columbia, one to Vassar, four to Northeastern, one to BC,and several to the McCauley Honors program. Not bad for a rural public school in the mountains! The point that I am looking to make here is that we are all what we are used to, as it relates to our children most of us had or have no sense of just how competitive admissions are at these highly selective schools. We assume if they are a top student at their High School or in their community that will carry over to success in admissions at the elites. Of course that isn’t the case.
As parents it is our responsibility to support our kids as best we can and to temper their expectations as best we can as it relates to the likelihood of admission at top colleges. Do we feel their pain? Of course we do and it is our responsibility to be the realists as it relates to their chances. I had repeatedly told our daughter that she was not going to be accepted at every school she applied to, I told her I was hoping for two out of the eight highly selective schools. I actually anticipated four of eight and was close with three of eight. She was incredibly fortunate, there is an element of luck or chance in this process. That doesn’t mean that admissions offices get it wrong, they get it right for the class they are looking to build.
I cannot imagine how difficult the jobs are of admissions officers at these great schools. I would hate saying no to so many obviously qualified kids. Our daughter admissions office experience (working in as a student) has been amazing. She has seen that everyone there is sincere and kind and takes their work very seriously, the vast majority of them are fairly young. We as a family had an image of the really old grumpy looking man with a big rejected stamp coming down hard on an applicants submission. Thankfully we were not even close. As an aside, she was really taken with how much many admissions officers knew about her.
There is not much that is more personal than what we want for our kids, when they hurt we hurt with them! It is awful when you have watched your kid expend such effort over such an extended period of time and not have what they want to come to fruition. As I had mentioned before we are responsible for managing those expectations and assuring them that no matter what happens they will be fine and can accomplish anything they wish to. They are not defined by where they are admitted. This my sense of all of these things.
Some of you guys type way to fast for me! 
I think I’m jaded when it comes to believing that these admissions committees really know what they’re getting from reading applications. I’ve volunteered to help some kids with their apps, and this has been my experience (only mentioning a couple bc this is gonna be long):
One URM in her CA essay wrote about her divorced parents, living with her mom who never graduated college, and working at McDonald’s during high school 20 hrs a week during the school year and full time in summer because she needed the money to make ends meet. What she didn’t mention is that her father owned the McDonalds and three others, was a millionaire many times over, she only flew first class, and actually didn’t work at all during the school year. Got into uchicago with a 29 act (for which I later learned that she was tutored for a year at $250/hr and got extra time…meanwhile they got me for free as I volunteered) and a 3.2 average (some Cs) with no APs or honors, although she was at a top high school in a New York suburb. Needless to say, I felt duped. To add insult to injury, after the application was done, her father called me to ask about financial aid. I had taken the mom to a financial aid seminar at my kid’s school bc I had little idea of how it all works (we are full pay). And I asked about custodial vs non custodial parent obligations bc she told me that in their divorce decree, he was responsible for only half the tuition, although she works as a receptionist and the dad was well off (no idea how much until I got the phone call from the dad). He called to ask if they could just file under the mom’s salary. Told him no. And then he told me he didn’t want to file bc he’s a millionaire and owner of 4 McDonalds. You can’t make this stuff up.
When helping another kid who’s applying as a physics (interested in astrophysics) and English major, in the midst of brainstorming one of his Yale supplement essays when he was trying to make a connection between his prospective dual majors, I told him that I thought Shakespeare referred to the stars multiple times in various plays. Asked if he could recall any references from his reading. He replied that he’d only read one play for school and actually never reads independently. Not even in summer. Lo and behold, when he sent me his final essay after he submitted it, it references a Hamlet quote about the stars and he claims hamlet as a favorite among all the Shakespeare plays he’s read. Lol.
Finally, in my town, a kid (who I didn’t help) in my son’s class year was accepted to Penn Wharton despite being rescinded from the national honors society for cheating on an exam…busted by his Spanish teacher after his peers complained about his chronic cheating. Clearly, this was not referenced in his app either in his guidance counselor/teacher recommendations or by the applicant himself fessing up.
I still believe that many apps do honestly represent the applicant. But I wouldn’t be surprised if many others, particularly at the top schools where kids may feel more pressured to be bigger than themselves, contain at least some misleading information.
My point should have been quite clear — HS class rank is not as critical as many in this thread have implied, including several of your posts. This does not mean course rigor doesn’t matter, and low rigor B students are regularly getting accepted at elite colleges . Instead course rigor, grades, and the transcript in general are quite important, as they should be. While course rigor + grades are obviously correlated with a particular HS’s arbitrary ranking system, they are not equivalent. There are many cases where they differ significantly. With the generous grading at many HSs, you can have situations where an excellent course rigor 4.0 UW kid has not chance of making it to the top few % in their class, unless they skip all unweighted electives like music/art/… and instead take near the maximum number of AP courses offered. After seeing your comments about rank, another poster in this thread mentioned being worried that having a near 4.0 GPA with good course rigor might not be enough to even be in the top 10% under her HS’s ranking system. I mentioned having a lower rank partially because I took a large number of classes at an external college at a higher course rigor than AP, which did not contribute to HS rank. There are many possibilities.
I was not suggesting that colleges create their own numerical rank, but many of the “elite” colleges we have been discussing do this in a sense. For example, at the time of a the Arcidiacono study, Duke ranked applicants on a scale of 1 to 5 in five categories – achievement, curriculum, LORs, essays, and personal qualities. The achievement and curriculum ratings sounds a lot like an internal academic rank of applicants. Many Stanford students recently had an opportunity to view their admission files and see what the Adcoms wrote about them and rating systems used. They found that readers assign the applicants internal scores in 7 categories – high school transcript, test scores, LORs, non-academic, self presentation, intellectual vitality, and overall. The high school transcript score could be thought of as their own internal version of HS rank, but it is quite distinct from the arbitrary class rank system used at a particular HS. It also indicated that when HS rank is not provided (not provided for vast majority of admits), HS rank gets listed as “N/A” for the readers, rather than them trying to figure out HS rank or calling the GC, as you suggested.
“And they’re choosing their students mostly from the half that offer APs.”
Proof, please.
This a question, not an accusation: when ad coms pick classes that fit and represent their school’s culture, who defines this? Does the board? Profs? Student body? Some ppl working in admissions may have worked in a different Uni the prior year, so…
I’m just curious what group puts together the traits that Uni looks for?
The exact degree of influence from each constituent group within a given private college may vary…but I wouldn’t be surprised if the trustee board, admins, and in places where faculty still have some semblance of power…faculty have the most likely influence in defining those traits.
“The exact degree of influence from each constituent group within a given private college may vary…but I wouldn’t be surprised if the trustee board, admins, and in places where faculty still have some semblance of power…faculty have the most likely influence in defining those traits.”
At some schools you can see what they wish for in who they admit EA. Only 3.8+ gpa’s with 33+ ACT scores. When the hoped-for yield, and regular admission application volume does not materialize, the reality of having to fill the seats for the incoming class causes them to then accept significantly weaker students later in the process. lol
No, YOU can’t see it at all. You as an individual simply do not have enough data points to draw conclusions about much of anything. No one outside the ad com folks can.
However, this means that a mostly-unknowable-to-the-applicant external factor (skill of the recommender) has a significant effect on the competitiveness of the applicant, if recommendations are used.
Suppose two students get recommendations from their English teachers. Both students were outstanding in class (and would be if graded by the other’s teacher), but one of the English teachers writes much better recommendations than the other. So the luck of the draw in getting the teacher who writes much better recommendations is an major external-to-the-student factor in their applications.
^^^ I agree - I’d just add that however well-written (or not) the LORs are, the kid with an A who grade grubbed and made it clear that the points were important than the subject matter will get a chilly rec and the A- kid who cares for classmates and the class material will get a warm, perhaps emphatic rec. The hyper competitive students are often the former.
@pizzagirl “No, YOU can’t see it at all. You as an individual simply do not have enough data points to draw conclusions about much of anything. No one outside the ad com folks can”
Lol, PG, you always make me laugh.
I am glad you have the ability to know what other people can assess, without bothering to learn a single fact. Next you will be claiming that the world is flat, or that Ivies are overrated. lol