I think all the top 20 colleges have a big contigent of “average excellent” kids, but the odds for them are a lot lower than for ones who are more distinctive. There are many, many well-rounded kids at these colleges.
Not by my definition, @mathmom . When I made the original post, I really was talking primarily about kids who are excellent students but pretty average in extracurriculars. I was then amazed by the many people who posted about their “average” excellent students who were doing mulitple sports, had leadership positions in mulitple clubs, AND had high grades and stats. Yes, I agree there are quite a few of those types of kids at tippy top colleges. But I was thinking of my kid, who participated in clubs and played a musical instrument to a high standard, and had a minor leadership position in one club, and some volunteer work. A student can be well-rounded and be “above average” excellent:-)
I don’t own a definition though. It’s clear that average excellent is open to interpretation.
I agree with everyone in this thread who is saying that “average excellent” doesn’t make them a subpar student, just a subpar elite college applicant, due to their lack of “sparkle.” This student has great stats and is usually “gifted,” but doesn’t have a hook or any dazzling extracurricular accomplishments.
The idea that the ranks of the ivy league colleges are made up of children of alumni is groundless and usually a counter argument to people who note that URM get a huge boost. I don’t know if there are really any true statistics for this especially one that weeds out children of employees . I don’t believe that the children of your average excellent ivy grad, not the children of the rich and famous or big donors, has any significantly more chance of admission then anyone else. I certainly don’t see a lot of legacy mentioned on CC in admits and personally my children had legacy at Penn and Princeton and were admitted to neither. I would like someone to prove this claim before it becomes canon.
@robotrainbow: How much legacy matters depends on school and what round you apply in. UPenn, for instance, is explicit that there is only a legacy boost during ED and none in RD.
At a good number of Ivies/equivalents, regular legacy (as opposed to offspring of someone rich and/or famous) barely matters if at all.
Hurwitz did prove the benefits of legacy, at least to the extent you can prove anything about the college admissions process at highly selective schools. Donors tend to be alumni and alumni tend to be donors, so it would be difficult to completely separate out the legacy factor from the donor factor.
I think your average excellent legacy has a better chance at the top schools, but they still aren’t a shoe in. My niece is a living example of that - double legacy in her class, number 3 in a class of 750, excellent but not perfect SAT scores. Harvard has a lot of legacies, but most of the ones I know who got in, also got into the peer schools like Yale or Princeton.
There is no such thing as average kids to me. Also I don’t believe in straight A student. Why?
Even 2 decades ago, the only time being a legacy provides a substantial meaningful boost is if the applicant has parents/grandparents who were not only alums, but were those who donated substantial sums…such as tens of thousands each year or more. Not a few hundred or less each year.
Or…they also had substantial accomplishments in their profession/field above and beyond their peers(think topflight academic scholars/scientists, Olympic medalist, business tycoon/CEO, political leader, monarch/royalty/aristocrats, notable author, inventor, celebrities* etc.
Absent all that, being an ordinary legacy will likely provide little/any boost above/beyond an unhooked applicant.
- Provided their fame doesn't bring discredit/disrepute upon the Ivy/peer private elite institution in question.
Sounds like they were ordinary legacies who got very limited, if any boost unlike the legacies whose families donated substantial sums and/or had substantial accomplishments beyond “average excellent” in their respective fields.
In short, that’s not what most people IME think of when they talk about the “legacy boost”.
“Being strong enough at a sport to be recruited by the college implies an unusually high level of achievement in an extracurricular (the sport); if the college holds recruited athletes to high academic standards, then they can be seen as similar to other high academic achievers who have a top-end extracurricular achievement.”
But they don’t, even Stanford lowers its standards for athletes along with the ivies. At least the ivies don’t give athletic scholarships so the student has to be really good to get merit aid. As I posted elsewhere, athletes are the least holistic applicants there are, they will enroll, head to the athletic dorm, focus on their sport, go to class and do the bare minimum (and there a lot of universities were class is “optional” for athletes).
“Similarly, 1G/LI students are often heavily disadvantaged, so that achieving a level of academic excellence commonly found at the higher ranks of public and private high schools with mostly advantaged students implies a higher level of achievement due to starting from a position of disadvantage (imagine a running race where several runners cross the finish line at the same time, and then realizing that one of them had a start line that was further back).”
Actually in this race, the runners don’t finish at the same time, sat and act scores for asians and whites are higher than minorities, this from data provided by the college board. So yeah they start ahead and also finish ahead.
“I think all the top 20 colleges have a big contigent of “average excellent” kids, but the odds for them are a lot lower than for ones who are more distinctive. There are many, many well-rounded kids at these colleges.”
I thought average excellent kids were well rounded but didn’t have a hook. Are you saying average excellent kids are just top scorers without strong ECs and essays and not as well rounded as kids that got in to the top schools ( a little easier)? I actually think the unhooked kids at top colleges are more well rounded than the hooked ones.
@NASA2014 - what do you mean when you say you “don’t believe in straight A student’s”? Do you mean you don’t believe in striving for straight As? Because students with perfect GPAs certainly do exist, in fact, the are fairly common. The HS where I teach had multiple kids who graduated this year and had ONLY gotten As.
I think it is valuable to distinguish between what adcoms do to select a class at a super selective school, and anything about the long-term trajectory of 18 year old kids. The reality is when many more people want to go to a school than there are places, you need a way to select them. Our system currently favors precocious kids, ones who are especially focused or driven at a young age, or with a very particularly developed skill, etc. This is after meeting some challenging minimums on regular academic work. Systems in other countries work sometimes focus on detailed high stakes academic tests, with corresponding focused preparation. I am not aware of any studies that show one is better than the other, or whether one can even define better.
I do sometimes wish admissions folks would be more honest that there is a lot of groupthink involved in the current favoring of “pointiness” without any real evidence of why it is more wonderful than any other feature of applicants. I know in my area, pointiness when young is not a particularly good indicator of long term success. But adcoms have to decide, and this is one of the ways they do now.
The idea average excellent is any way bad is stupid, and is just currently not the best way to get into a tippy-top school. I’m sure those average excellent kids who end up at not quite a tippy-top do very well on average.
Well, this is just wrong. The Ivies don’t give athletic scholarships and don’t give merit, so the athlete can be ‘really good’ and it won’t matter, no merit. Not very many schools have athletic dorms any more. Only athletes who are ‘one and done’ (Kentucky basketball) blow off their classes. All other athletes have a minimum gpa to maintain to keep playing and schools like Stanford are not setting up optional classes or classes just for athletes. UNC did that and caused a lot of people to lose their jobs. Name some of these schools where classes are optional for athletes? They aren’t, even at Kentucky, and those athletes who do not do the work flunk out.
Not meaning to speak for @NASA2014 , but s/he may mean the trend of so many HS students graduating with 4.0s and/or being awarded val/sal status(sometimes as many as half the graduating class according to some CC posts on other threats) is more a signifier of rampant grade/award inflation than evidence current students are necessarily higher achieving.
And this has been further aggravated by the increasing uptick in students and/or their parents initiating grade disputes and admins in K-12 and increasingly college from what college faculty/TA friends have observed while K-12/college admins are increasingly opting to give in because it’s the path of least resistance.
@cobrat - you may very well be correct, but to me, there is a difference between “I don’t believe in” (which indicates impossibility) and “I don’t agree with”, which seems to be more of what you are discussing. As a teacher at a high achieving HS I have certainly seen grade inflation, and my own kid’s HS stopped ranking after a Val/Sal debacle a few years before she graduated (actually ended with a court case- parents sued the school over ranking). And while I am not certain that every kid who graduates with a 4.0+ truly “deserves” it, I have seen multiple kids in my 20 year career that do. It IS possible
“Well, this is just wrong. The Ivies don’t give athletic scholarships and don’t give merit, so the athlete can be ‘really good’ and it won’t matter, no merit. Not very many schools have athletic dorms any more. Only athletes who are ‘one and done’ (Kentucky basketball) blow off their classes. All other athletes have a minimum gpa to maintain to keep playing and schools like Stanford are not setting up optional classes or classes just for athletes. UNC did that and caused a lot of people to lose their jobs. Name some of these schools where classes are optional for athletes? They aren’t, even at Kentucky, and those athletes who do not do the work flunk out.”
Well classes may be required, but work is not:
- On March 6, the NCAA released a disciplinary report that the athletic department at Syracuse University engaged in academic fraud over 10 years to keep its academically underperforming stars in the game.
Using the players’ online IDs and passwords, administrators and tutors masqueraded as the players in submitting bogus coursework. This was all allegedly managed by the director of basketball operations who reported directly to the school’s revered head basketball coach, Jim Boeheim.
- We have UNC as well and those are the tip of the iceberg.
As for Kentucky, the schools puts kids on probation and keeps them eligible for the ncaa season, at which point they conveniently turn pro. Most big time college programs also have the athletes take fluff courses in the summer to be eligible for the fall.
This has become a long thread and I have not read every single post. But enough to figure that I have a slightly different perspective than many posters here. First, as mentioned by others, all average excellent students and those in that top category can do well in nearly any school. But top colleges are not really concerned about whether their picks can make it through their program. They want to ensure that the education they provide will enhance the chances that their graduates will make a positive mark on the world. That is a very different goal than selecting student who will make honor roll, Deans List or graduate with honors. Average Excellent students are those who will get good grades and good jobs. Those in the category above appear to have the characteristics suggesting that they are likely to have a bigger impact-not in college but later on.
I’m not sure the average excellent student, as that term is usually meant on CC, and those in the category that are highly sought after by top colleges can be differentiated on the basis of one factor but I do think that they can be differentiated on the basis of their traits. And I think the traits shine through for those in that upper category. Kids in that top category are scholars rather than students. They pursue excellence cause they are interested in mastery rather than interested “getting good grade”. Perhaps that is what a previous poser meant by not believing in straight A’s. That the goal for these students in that top category is often not straight A’s. Good grades are a function of their being totally involved in their pursuits, which means they don’t always get the very top grades because they may not involved themselves in the kind of gamesmanship that getting straight A’s can entail. Of course they want good grades. But that isn’t what drives their pursuits. In fact, some may have slightly lower grades as a result. They are the ones who take that difficult course even if it means someone else will beat them out of valedictorian. They get genuine pleasure out of talking about ideas, or involving themselves in various activities-which they do because they are interested rather than for how they may look to colleges. Other kids know which kids I’m talking about here. Its not about higher scores or grades.
Regarding the post above, except I don’t think any of this can be told by what a kid did when they were 16 or 17, at least not in what adcoms see. I’ve seen no study that shows when tippy-top universities accepted both average excellent students and very pointy ones, that the pointy ones went on to great things and the average excellent ones based on their application were more average in the futures. If such a study exists, I’d love to know about it. Having seen and experienced the shift in college admissions, the move to pointy applicants from well-rounded ones seemed to be a combination of needing to come up with some way to select a class when the number of highly qualified applicants became just too large, and deciding that the current focus on going above and beyond in a specific thing made for a better story than other options. And hindsight doesn’t count. Did adcoms anywhere classify their students in this way, then look where they ended up years later?
This has become a long thread and I have not read every single post. But enough to figure that I have a slightly different perspective than many posters here. First, as mentioned by others, all average excellent students and those in that top category can do well in nearly any school. But top colleges are not really concerned about whether their picks can make it through their program. They want to ensure that the education they provide will enhance the chances that their graduates will make a positive mark on the world. That is a very different goal than selecting student who will make honor roll, Deans List or graduate with honors. Average Excellent students are those who will get good grades and good jobs. Those in the category above appear to have the characteristics suggesting that they are likely to have a bigger impact-not in college but later on.
I’m not sure the average excellent student, as that term is usually meant on CC, and those in the category that are highly sought after by top colleges can be differentiated on the basis of one factor but I do think that they can be differentiated on the basis of their traits. And I think the traits shine through for those in that upper category. Kids in that top category are scholars rather than students. They pursue excellence cause they are interested in mastery rather than interested “getting good grade”. Of course they want good grades. But that isn’t what drives their pursuits. In fact, some may have slightly lower grades as a result. They are the ones who take that difficult course even if it means someone else will beat them out of valedictorian. They get genuine pleasure out of talking about ideas, or involving themselves in various activities-which they do because they are interested rather than for how they may look to colleges. Other kids know which kids I’m talking about here. Its not about higher scores or grades.