What exactly are individual top colleges looking for?

TiggerDad
Wed, 07 Jun 2017 01:02:18 +0000

@PurpleTitan - Those figures are actually from Daniel Golden’s “The Price of Admission,” which Frank Bruni quoted in his “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be.” While quoting those figures, Bruni thought them as conservative figures. Whatever the actual figures, the point was that we know at least 50% of what these elite colleges want.

@melvin123 - I don’t know whether my son’s case was an exception (I doubt it), but he started preparing for college applications starting, as compmom suggested, in the second semester of his junior year. Of the seven colleges he was admitted to, he had never set his foot on any of their campuses prior to submitting the applications. Of the seven, he was only interviewed at two. I was never a believer in college visits for the sake of exhibiting “demonstrated interest” (I’m always amazed at how much money people are so willing to spend on something of questionable value unless these visits are conveniently overlapping with family vacation itineraries). As once an Ivy college interviewer, I never gave much weight to the interviews, either. In fact, I gave up interviewing once I figured out that I was basically wasting my valuable time.