People aren’t listening to this message because it isn’t true. That it isn’t true should be obvious to everyone who reads this site.
Let’s consider Zoe and Chloe, two highly able students at Leafy Suburb High. Zoe and Chloe are equally able. Zoe and Chloe work equally hard in the classes they are in, and get equally high grades.
Zoe is right there in the rat race. She takes every AP her school offers. She is not an exceptionally strong math student, so she got lots tutoring for the BC calc she took as a junior. She does SAT/ACT prep, and maximizes her scores by taking the tests more than once. She also does several extracurriculars. She is under an enormous amount of stress. She sleeps four hours a night.
Chloe has backed off. She takes some APs, and does well in them, but in other subjects, she does not take APs. She is not an exceptionally strong math student, so she did not take BC calc. She did not prep for standardized tests. She does not do as many extracurriculars as Zoe, but she is equally good in the ECs she does participate in. She uses the extra time she saves by not doing as much as Zoe to sleep, read and spend time with her friends.
Zoe has great scores and is one of the top students in her school as to class rank. She has several extracurriculars. Chloe has good scores, maybe 50-80 SAT points lower than Zoe’s superscore. She has excellent grades in the classes she took, but she is not in, or barely in, the top 10% of her class because she didn’t take enough APs. She doesn’t do as many extracurriculars as Zoe.
Zoe and Chloe both apply to the same 20 top schools. Zoe is going to have better results in admissions than Chloe. No one here can deny this. And therefore, those deans of admissions claiming that more APs, more clubs, more more more, don’t make a difference-- they are lying.
I don’t agree. I think Zoe goes into her admissions interviews displaying physical stress. Sleeping four hours a night for months on end will do that to you. When asked, “Why Harvard?” she can’t think of an answer. She’s under so much pressure she chokes. She looks at her watch during the interview, because she has to make it across town to meet the Stanford interviewer. The Harvard interviewer notes she seemed tentative, tired, stressed and over-caffeinated. Her interviews follow the same pattern; she ends up at her state flagship.
Chloe does not apply to all Ivies; her list considers her unique interests and talents. She applies early to a public university with rolling admission in her area of interest; the acceptance to that university allows her to be selective in applying to a few reaches. She and her interviewers get into a debate about current events–which she keeps up with, as she has time to read the newspapers. In her free time she reads novels, one of which the interviewers have also read. The interviewers write Cloe strong recommendations. At the end of the process, she ends up choosing between universities she likes.
I want to create Chloes, excellent students with balance in their lives. Top schools, though they deny it, are creating Zoes, excellent students under tremendous stress.
Interviews aren’t a major determinant of admissions, @Periwinkle, so while your version is appealing, I don’t think it’s the reality. Also, Zoe will be will prepped for her interviews anyway.
The only quibble I have with Zoe and Chloe is that Harvard is able to get plenty of kids with achievements like Zoe’s who get enough sleep, who didn’t have to do a lot of test prep, and who didn’t need any tutoring. (Let’s call this kind of kid “Doe.”) Zoe does what she does because she has decided to compete with those kids; Chloe has decided that it’s not worth it to do so.
Doe is the kid Harvard really wants. It doesn’t want to replace Doe with Chloe. But it can be hard, on paper, to distinguish Doe from Zoe.
“The “problem” of applying to too many colleges affects maybe 50,000, at most, of the ~3 million kids per year applying to colleges. It doesn’t need a general social solution.”
Agree. It’s super-duper-first-world. There’s nothing “awful” about the kid who really wanted to go to Harvard “settling” for Tufts, anyway.
If Zoe is a high-performing drone, the kind who whines over an A- and brings little to the classroom besides her self-directed achievement, her LORs may be lukewarm compared to a Chloe who shows curiosity and interest, and is helpful to the class dynamic.
I see Zoe not getting into any of her dream schools, and starting out her life fairly embittered. I see Chloe at a LAC starting her life with a lot of promise.
I think @Hunt is right on target. Introduce Doe into the mix, who is an exceptional math student. She can achieve a 1% percentile score on any standardized test you throw her way without any special prep. She isn’t stressed out with a full AP load at any typical average public high school. She can mail it in and make As. Yes there are plenty of these kids out there.
The problem isn’t with Doe or Chloe. It occurs when Zoe and Zoe’s parents decide that Zoe needs to “win” in a rat race with Doe.
I agree with Hunt. Harvard prefers the “Doe” type to the Zoe type (though there are many other profiles they are interested in too). Zoe is driving herself crazy trying to be a Doe; obversely, Harvard is trying to filter out the Zoes from the Does.
Many of the last few posters are bringing a lot of personal baggage to the table. Here’s what I think is going to happen - All three students, Zoe, Chloe, and Doe, will get into a fine school. It may not be their “dream” school, or the one their parents want to be able to brag about, but they’ll all have a chance to get a great education that 99% of the world would kill for. The biggest problem will be making sure they can all afford to attend.
There are some life paths that depend on exactly which “good” undergraduate school one attends, but that’s not the case for 95%+ of people. The particular school the three students attend most likely won’t hold any of them back. It will be other choices the three students make, as well as hard work, natural talent, and luck, that will determine what kind of life they’ll have.
I don’t believe Harvard can’t get plenty of Does, but even assuming that that is the case for the sake of argument … Then where do the Does all wind up?
They wind up “one tier down” (gag on the tiers, but you know what I mean) and then those schools are better places to go anyway because it’s far better to be surrounded by lots of Does than lots of Zoes.
I mean, really – if you REALLY believe Harvard et al is just Boring Drone Zoe-Land (along with the unqualified legacies and the dumb jocks and the undeserving URM’s), why again would you want your kid to go there?
I will easily accept that Harvard et al have Zoes, but they also do get Does too. They wouldn’t retain their allure (either socially or workplace-wise) if all they turned out were Zoes.
Are posters really telling me here that in their own experience, no Zoes are accepted at top schools, because the top schools are fantastic at separating Zoes from Does? It seems to me that the admissions results I hear about on this site, and from my friends’ kids, bely this.
You are correct, no one has said that no Zoes are accepted at top schools. But that’s not the point is it?
I think the point is that there are lots of Does at top schools. My experience is limited, but I am not hearing stories of Ivy greens dominated by zombies. Instead I am hearing about a lot of happy, hard-working, well-adjusted young men and women at top schools.
Does it have to be all or nothing? 100% or zero, to make a point here?
I’m definitely not saying that. I would say that -
Top school admissions officers think that one of their jobs is filtering out the Zoes from the Does. They think they are doing a good job at it. My personal belief is that they do a reasonably good job, but there are easily 10 times as many Zoes in the applicant pile as Does, so the final admitted class still has a lot of Zoes.
There aren’t as many Does as you might think, particularly since few people are fully developed at age 17.
Almost by definition, Zoes don’t have a choice to be Does. They are playing the hand they are dealt.
Even if Harvard does filter out a Zoe, she will still end up at a very fine school. So by employing the “drive yourself crazy” strategy when she is playing the hand she is dealt, Zoe still does well even if she doesn’t win the jackpot. Whether she views that as winning or losing depends on her own personal psychoses. Whether or not that makes a difference in the outcome of her life is also highly arguable.
As an aside, people don’t seem to dispute the fact that there is a much higher incidence of diagnosed mental health problems in the current generation compared to one or two generations ago. I’ve heard many theories as to why this is true; I personally have no clue whatsoever. However, I do not think that the college admissions rat race is what is driving the higher occurrence of mental health problems among the 16-18 year old set. Maybe whatever is driving the overall trend is making these “rat race” participants hyper-stressed.
That is precisely the point. A policy that incentivizes Chloes to turn into Zoes is going to turn a lot of Chloes into Zoes. And it is turning a lot of Chloes into Zoes. That’s a bad incentive, with bad results.
Some who disparage the drones along with other groups on your list do not necessarily view this as a bad thing as in their mind…such groups will ease the curve so they can have an easier time standing out academically which means increased chances at great post-undergrad outcomes(grad school/career paths) while having more time for co/extra-curricular activities, part-time jobs/internships during semester, and yes…time to hang out/chill/attend fun parties*.
That’s in contrast to schools which don’t have much/any legacy/athletic preferences like Caltech which means there are far less less perceived “lower ability” students to lower the grading curve for each class/overall.
If one's attending Harvard, most from what I've seen would be heading off campus to downtown Boston or campuses with great partying scenes.....such as BC, BU, and MIT(Best parties in the Boston area when I was living there).
There is a mixture of Zoes/Does at the top schools. Exactly what the mixture is is anybody’s guess.
And the Does don’t just end up one tier down. They show up in the mix several tiers down. The honors programs at the large publics are full of them.
Some stats. Consider the following schools: Virginia, Illinois, Michigan, Rutgers, Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota, South Carolina, North Carolina, Penn State, Texas, Washington, Connecticut, Texas A&M, Auburn, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kentucky. Approximately 30k honors program students between these 19 schools. Average ACT of each honors program (all 19 schools) is between 32 and 34.