When D17 was a junior, part of “Junior College Night” (parents and kids attend together) was a mock admissions review of in small mixed groups of parents + kids, facilitated by a visiting admissions officer. You know the drill: 4 fictional candidate files, only 1 admit slot. The files are all great in different ways, different hooks. Right before the deliberations end, you get an “update” from the development office that the uncle of one of the candidates (the one everyone is probably least enthusiastic about) is planning a $10MM gift, so that kid gets the accept. My recollection was that everyone (kids and parents) hated that session. Most of the kids were good sports but were visibly shaken – lots of stomach clenching and eye rolling. I noted that when College Night rolled around this year for D20 the session had been removed from the agenda. Phew!
But I had to laugh just now when my cousin texted me from his D20’s NYC private school: “WTH? I’m in College Night evaluating 4 fictional applicants to a fictional University. At the end of the night we vote to admit one, waitlist a second, and wreck the dreams of two more. This is messed up!”
Can anyone sell me on this being a helpful exercise for parents and/or kids? Are there better and worse ways to carry it out? To frame the outcome? Does it manage expectations in a useful way? Make it more concrete? Any similar horror stories from your kid’s school?
The only value I can see is to illustrate to students and parents that safety schools are a must. No matter how strong the applicant, admission is never guaranteed.
My D’s high school just talked about how there are other variables besides grades and scores in the process. Same message but done in a much more relaxed way.
I like ours. Yes, the kids and parents get to see first hand what a competitive process it is, that people weigh factors differently, and that it isn’t always fair. That’s an accurate depiction of the process, and I was glad to have my kids see that. Part of life.
I agree that it is a meaningless attempt to inject “reality” to the process. The little play is likely no more real to the kids than the statistics. Maybe if they brought in an admission officer who would present actual cases (identifying characteristics removed, of course), that may a good idea. But to have a mock review by mock admissions officers of mock applicants, resulting in a mock result is no more than a fable with a moral, and will be treated as such.
Worse, for some, the moral may be “it’s no use even trying, because at the last moment you will be rejected in favor of some rich kid whose daddy gave a lot of money”. I mean rich legacies do get a good boost, but being bumped specifically because an under-qualified kid who was accepted because, at the last moment, their parents gave a very large donation, is not a common situation.
I found these to be extremely helpful at my daughter’s school - but there wasn’t any sort of confounding variable like a big donation at the end. Nor was there a “decision” beyond the votes of the participants – but the college admissions officer did provide input as to why things that seemed to be attractive on the surface didn’t always work. So one example I remember was a prospective athletic recruit who was great in her sport — but her financial aid status was a problem. I don’t remember the details – but the point is that if admitted she would probably not end up attending – perhaps because the hypothetical college couldn’t offer athletic scholarships, but the fictional athlete was strong enough to get admitted at colleges that could throw extra money at her. So it wasn’t a question of whether the school was need-blind, but rather as to the impact of factors that affect yield during the RD round.
So this gave me a much better understanding of how admissions looks at candidates – and it helped to structure a successful application strategy for my daughter, both in terms of targeting schools and in later shaping the application.
I think the wild card of the mega-million dollar donor is something of a cheat which undermines the purpose of the exercise. For one thing, development cases are evaluated separately - it wouldn’t be a matter of an ad com sitting with a bunch of applications and then changing their view when they found out about the money. Instead, those cases are essentially removed from the committee process altogether - it is a decision that would be made directly by the admissions director.
And of course none of the parents or students attending those sessions have the ability to fill that rich donor slot or compete on that basis – so what’s the point? The value of the exercise is to convey a useful message: here is what the process looks like from the viewpoint of those making the decisions, and here are examples of things that work to make an applicant stand out and look more attractive, and here are some factors that you might not have considered but which might end up hurting an applicant. So to make that work – each of the fictional candidates should have a profile that is relatable to the students and parents who are attending the session. That is – even though the applications are fictional, you should be able to readily imagine each as being students from that school.
So I guess the message from the OP is that these things can be done well, or these things can be done badly. The description in the OP is a good example of what not to do.
The point is to understand the reality of competitive college admissions. Too many students and parents think that if they have some sort of magic number ACT or SAT score that admissions will be guaranteed – and they often end up disappointed in the spring when they are turned down from schools while classmates they see as less-qualified get accepted.
I have been to two of these. One was a Tufts roadshow that was at my son’s high school. The other was at a Wesleyan event for alumni and their high school juniors. The formats weren’t identical, but they did share important characteristics: they used redacted files of actual applicants from the previous year, they didn’t use that annoying development surprise at the end and once we voted on who to accept, they told us what the actual results had been.
I found them useful. I went in knowing about holistic admissions and that it’s about more than just grades and scores, so there weren’t any huge surprises or great revelations, as there might be for someone who doesn’t know anything about it. But the mock process gave a real feel for some of the complexity of the process, for how different factors balance against each other, for how hard it can be to pick among good candidates.
I think a well done program can be a useful experience for both parents and students. If the choice is available, I’d definitely opt for a program run by an actual college admissions office over something the GC’s come up with. The Wesleyan program obviously isn’t available to the public, but I know Tufts insisted that the program being given at my son’s high school be open to everyone. If you’re interested in attending one next fall, I’d suggest checking out Tufts’ website to see if it’s offered near you.
the one done at a local school is 3 out of 10 gets in, and one of the three is the son or daughter of someone who has a building named after the parent. The thing is that the 10 candidates do have profiles (gpa, sport etc) and get sorted based on the strength of their application and the wealthy applicant info is the last data point, similar to OP’s experience. That applicant had one of the lower GPAs, was like 8th or 9th in the ranking, and then moved to 1 after the development office chimed in. Most people laughed, as in this case two other kids did get in.
Like @millie210, I’ve been to two, one at a college and one at S1 and S2’s h.s. Similarly, neither was an eye opener for me, but I could see some value in demonstrating how difficult the choices among strong candidates can be, and I know that for some parents at the college-run event, it was a dose of useful reality (particularly regarding how many other superstar kids were out there). The h.s. run one, though, was way less nuanced and seemed to be more of an anxiety ratchet than a help for many parents in the group, much as the OP says.
I wholeheartedly agree with this:
It’s not meaningless for everyone, as illustrated by some of these lists. I think people here tend to forget that parents and students are approaching this college journey from different perspectives and levels of experience. What you may find pointless can really help others.
Ours was run by actual college admissions officers who had come to visit our high school. Much of the value was their candor in addressing the students present in how they evaluate applicants. While the parents likely expected it, the students seemed to take the advice more seriously coming from the admissions officers, rather than from their parents.
I can only say that every HS counselor has families every year who just won’t listen to reason. Creative ways of getting the point across are necessary.
“At the end of the night we vote to admit one, waitlist a second, and wreck the dreams of two more. This is messed up!”
I think that one of the problems is that we encourage the “I always dreamed of going to XXX college” mindset, especially for highly selective colleges. Being rejected from any school should not be “wrecking one’s dreams”. Not getting into any college is one thing, but not getting in to The One, is something else entirely. Almost all kids will be happy in a wide array of schools, and shouldn’t get all of their hopes and dreams tied up in any particular one, not even a safety school.
Being rejected from a particular school should be disappointing, not devastating, and we, as parents, should have that in mind when preparing our kids for college applications.
Perhaps it makes the parents (and students) realize how hard it is to get the one spot out of 4, or out of 10 if we are talking Ivy. All the apps are deserving, but does the AO go with the kid who has been in band for 4 years, volunteers at the Red Cross, builds houses at Habitat on weekends or the kid with a gpa that is 0.2 points higher? Do they take the perfect test score kid or the class president?
“Wrecking the dream” is an unnecessarily inflammatory phrase given the difficult situation these AdComs are in. There’s no malice or focus on the losers, but a hard allocation of resources between similar candidates. I’m with the poster above who thinks the rich parent deus ex machina is a cop-out. Most of the kids who miss out on a dream aren’t getting displaced by a new library, they just didn’t rise above the crowd enough to stand out. That’s hard, but it’s what they are facing: less Disney, more Bros Grimm.
Fifteen years ago, my oldest child and I went to a program run by AOs at Columbia, NYU, Fordham, and Barnard where they did this. (My memory is that only the parents participated; the students were doing something else at the time.) There was no last-minute donor. The files were all real files with identifying information removed. We got to see the basic application, an essay, a transcript, and one recommendation.
It was by far the most valuable hour I spent in all of my children’s college processes. I got a strong sense of how parts of an application could support or undermine other parts. In my group of parents there was surprising consensus about which application was strongest after we discussed all of them, although only half of the group would have picked that one by themselves. The group dynamics were very powerful. The exercise also made me realize how important things other than mere GPA and test scores could be.
The applications we were reading were not superkids by any stretch of the imagination. None of them would likely have been admitted to Columbia, NYU or Barnard, even then. But the exercise completely changed the way I thought about my kids’ applications.