Would Yale take a flier on a kid?

College Confidential Community
21

@penandink: Selective colleges use test scores to gauge how well an applicant might handle the reading, writing and math work load on their campus. The HIGHER your test score, the LESS likely an Admissions Director will question “If I admit this kid, will they struggle on my campus?”

No college wants to admit a student and set them up for failure, so to reassure Admissions Directors that a student can handle the work load on their campus, a student’s test scores should be safely in a college’s middle 50%. For Yale, the middle 50% is a 34-35 ACT. A student applying to Yale with less than the middle 50% needs to demonstrate they could easily handle the workload on campus. There are several ways a student can accomplish this:

(1) Teacher Recommendations: Will the teacher recommendations extoll the student’s ability in a particular area of study? For example, in your hypothetical, will the LoR’s be proclaiming the student as the best writer to come into their classroom in 30 years? That would certainly be a plus in the student’s favor, AND demonstrate the student could easily handle the reading and writing workload on their campus.

(2) Guidance Counselor: Will the GC be extolling the student’s ability in a particular area of study? Both the GC and teacher recommendation carry much more weight in the application process than an applicant thinks: https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/get-started/video-transcription/whats-the-most-important-part-of-the-application

(3) National or State awards. You didn’t mention these in your hypothetical, but is the student applying with any writing awards, such as those listed under Creative Writing in this link: https://cty.jhu.edu/resources/academic-opportunities/competitions/art_writing.html. That would reassure an Admissions Director that a student could easily handle the writing load on their campus.

(4) In your hypothetical, did the student participate in theater and dance programs outside of their high school? For example, were they involved in a local production of the Nutcracker while still in high school? That would demonstrate to an Admissions Director that a student could handle the rigors of a demanding performance schedule while maintaining their school studies.

I’m sure other posters can come up with additional ways a student with test scores which are below a college’s middle 50% score can demonstrate their ability to academically compete on campus, but I’m hoping you get the idea.

22

Discussing the range of “what Yale looks for” was the point of the OP and is the point of this continued discussion. No amount of research reveals with absolute precision “what Yale really wants.” Of course the statistics and most anecdotal evidence point to certain things being generally true, but the question posed was more about a student somewhat on the margins of those generalities.

You seem to be looking for reasons to diminish the very brief description offered of this student, who represents a type as much as a actual person. It was meant to describe a serious, accomplished student with strong intellectual interests and creative gifts, but not someone who has made curricular and extra-curricular choices solely for the purpose of resume building. The OP invited opinions about the extent to which those choices, along with other factors, limit (or eliminate) any possibility of serious consideration for acceptance at Yale.

Maybe you work in the Yale admissions office? If so, thanks for the lecture and good luck to Yale. If not, then your view that Yale can and does cherry-pick kids who all hit the mark in every conceivable area is another view to be considered in this discussion. Maybe you’re right and it is just as cold blooded and rigidly resume-based as you describe. I thought perhaps Yale was a little more willing to look at many factors, assuming that the applicant met the basic standard for academic preparation and ability. That, in fact, IS “what they say,” even if they don’t fully practice that.

23

It’s a matter of showing adcoms. What feedback a kid gets in hs is from people who know him. Adcoms don’t have that benefit, they’re strangers dealing with 30k+ applications. The app/supp is your vehicle.

“a serious, accomplished student with strong intellectual interests and creative gifts”

This either shows in the app/supp or not. The student chooses the targets, whether to apply and how. The college wants what it wants and does the admit choosing. Activation (and in the right ways) is one of the key points. Not merely “potential.”

“but not someone who has made curricular and extra-curricular choices solely for the purpose of resume building”
This presumes, imo, that there’s something wrong with a variety of good choices, worthy pursuits. That what the student wants reigns supreme- and exclusive.

Fine. But dont expect Yale to reach down and choose a kid who only did what he wanted, if it doesn’t match what they look for. Proceed with caution. I advocate more awareness. This isn’t cold blooded resume focus. It’s real life. And numbers. There’s no guessing or sympathy vote- there are thousands of other kids who did explore breadth as well as depth, did take and master the expected courses, and showed their “potential” through those choices and accomplishments.

Since you’ve phrased this as a hypothetical, reduced to minimal descriptors, we don’t know what rigor (besides some AP- and not even which,) ECs outside theater, what achievements, what rounding, what interpersonal strengths, etc. What assets to Yale and it’s freshman class. Theater and dance won’t be enough.

They read the entire app package.

24

For ecs, depth is important. This hypothetical kid may be just fine in that department. But just because another applicant has breadth, doesn’t mean they were simply ‘resume’ building. I think this hypothetical kid, with the 32, would have a chance if he demonstrates extraordinary writing. But your reasoning seems to go something like this, my kid is truly special and will take advantage of all that Yale has to offer, while all the kids with the ACTs at the 99th percentile and tons of ecs will not.
I do think a 3.85/32 student will be successful at a school like Yale(provided the rigor is there), but I also think there is a definite difference between a 30 and a 36. Both excellent scores, but one rare and indicative of something different.
The other thing to note are the subscores. The 36 in English is fantastic. But does that mean the math is below 30? Top schools don’t like big disparities. They expect the English major to also be strong in math, and the physics major to be strong in English. You see that a lot on CC. ‘I’m going to be a history major, so it won’t matter if my math score is low, or I only took 2 years of high school language’ It matters.

25

Yale is indeed more willing to look at many factors, however I think you are underestimating the level of competition for a coveted spot at Yale. For example: Here’s a kid who was also heavily involved in theater in high school, who was accepted to Yale in 2011. If the choice came down to this student, or your hypothetical student, or my daughter (who was also heavily involved in theater but rejected from Yale), my guess is that Admissions would “hands-down” choose this student no matter their ACT score or GPA. Wouldn’t you? Here’s the NY Times review of her off-Broadway one-act play when she was 17 years old: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/theater/reviews/summer-shorts-5-with-ruby-rae-spiegel-review.html

26

@gibby
Excellent points. The specifics you mention are probably the crucial details here, insofar as any of this matters in this extreme reach. I am trying not to get too much more specific in the description of this student, except to say that the accolades would be primarily in-house (in-school). It’s also impossible to know exactly how lavish the teacher recs are, though they are presumed to be excellent.

Speaking of teacher recommendations, the importance given them in your quote does not seem universally shared. Of course the high school record is the most important part of any application, but I generally see teacher recs listed beside test scores and often other things in the second tier of considered factors (in common data sets and school mailings, web postings). The popular perception is certainly that standardized test scores matter far more than teacher recs, although that might be a false perception.

Thanks again for the useful advice.

27

@penandink: The quote I posted from the college board’s website is from Jeffrey Brenzel, Yale’s retired Dean of Admissions. Regardless of what you may have heard, Admissions Directors really do pay attention to what their high school colleagues say about each student. After a student’s transcript, course rigor and test scores, a teacher recommendation (and a GC recommendation) can tip the balance for a student who is otherwise “on the fence.”

28

@gibby

I agree with you: Admissions would choose this student (mentioned in the NYT). It’s hard to imagine that, with an acceptance rate of around 6%, I could have underestimated the level of competition, but I suppose it’s possible.

@lookingforward When you say “They read the entire app package,” that’s really all an applicant can ask. I think applicants want to know that essays and recs and personal qualities really do matter, along with the two big numbers.

We’ve all heard admissions directors at elite colleges explain that 75, 80, or even 90 percent of applicants are fully capable of doing the work. At Yale, that would mean between 22,500 and 27,000 applicants are fully qualified and able to succeed academically at Yale. Since we know Admissions doesn’t create a priority list of around 25K students, it would stand to reason that they have lots of room to indulge some gut feelings about the applicants; they all come from an applicant pool of incredibly bright, outstanding students. Maybe they stick to a formula or at least a sytem of sorts, but with those kinds of numbers it can hardly be called a science. It’s easy to see why the Powerball analogy comes to mind. Knowing that gives some hope to the kid with less than knock-out numbers.

29

When they say some large percent is capable, that’s all it means. A former MIT rep here once said, for the Old SAT, that any score with a 7 in front shows a kid is “able to do the work.” (For some colleges, the bar is now higher, with the New SAT.)

But in building a community, they look for more than essays, recs and stats. And the personal qualities need to match what the college wants to find, be relevant to that. In the past, gibby and I agreed far fewer than 23k get past Harvard’s first cut. That can be for a host of reasons. Tippy top adcoms know what sorts they want, what makes a kid able to thrive there, engage, make friends, have some impact, and have seen hundreds of thousands in a decade.

If Ms Spiegel, eg, had shown some lack of something, some dubious qualities, poor real life interpersonal skills, whatever, her shot would have gone down. Imo. The more you learn, the more one can fine tune.

Holistic doesn;t just mean the other strengths a kid has. It means the whole. Keep learning. The competition is nuts.

30

@penandink - I’m not sure why this post was moved out of the Yale thread, but I’m glad I located it.

You are clearly a clever, artful and skilled writer. Why do you want to go to Yale? There are many colleges that cater to budding writers, such as JHU, NYU, U of Michigan, U of CA at Irvine, BU, Hunter College, Brooklyn College, Wesleyan, Sarah Lawrence, Kenyon, Bard, Vassar, Skidmore, Bennington, Goucher, U of Iowa, Amherst, Grinnell, and Coe College.

Your alter-ego OP doesn’t reveal enough information that would allow someone familiar with Yale to really say what your “chances of admission” are. But just on the basis of your evident writing skill and ability to engage with all the parents who came at you above with their helpful advice, I’d say you have a shot at admission. But there’s something else in your post, its tone, its implicit indictment of an admissions process that allegedly punishes “(an) applicant who hasn’t made it his/her life’s work to fatten up that resume” that is off-putting, since it reveals a kind of bitterness that is odd/unusual in an applicant who hasn’t submitted an application to, let alone been rejected by, Yale.

And that incorrect and unfair assumption shows that you don’t really know anything about Yale or its students. They are not “resume builders” They are what I’d call “ear;y bloomers”; individuals who discovered a passion for dance, theatre, science, music, writing at a very early age and tenaciously pursued those passions without thinking about whether they would help them gain entrance to “elite” universities. And the majority of them pursue multiple interests with that degree of focus, longstanding commitment and evident accomplishment, that most people will never experience, or just discover a lot later in life, making the latter “late bloomers.”

And even the “early bloomers” have experienced disappointment and rejection multiple times on their different paths towards their various goals. All kinds of rejections that have not left them discouraged, but perhaps a bit more humbled and resilient than those students who never aimed high at an early age, making them more thoughtful, self-critical and even empathetic people, These are the qualities I think Yale AOs look for in their their applicants (in addition to the more conventional ones of stellar GPAs, standardized testing scores, LoR). These are the qualities, as well as an array of aptitudes, talents and social commitments, which they believe these students will bring to Yale and make the college community a better, more enriching place for everyone.

Wishing you the best of luck!

31

Apply to Yale, do your best, and apply to a good range of match schools too. As for being a student with lower stats but amazing essays and LORS, plus deep arts ECs, know that you won’t be the only applicant in that situation, there will be many. And you will be competing with students with higher stats, amazing essays and LORs, and deep ECs.

32

The OPs hypothetical applicant doesn’t need Yale to be successful. I see lots of potential without the Ivy League degree. Seems like he/she has a great foundation for college and beyond.

33

One of the most misleading statistic that AO’s constantly throw out is the high percentage of applicants who can “do the work”. If we look at the most recent CDS of Yale, over 10% of the matriculated students had at least one SAT subscore in the 600’s. In fact, there were students with subscores in the 500’s. So by definition, the AO determined that those students “could do the work”.

As an alumni interviewer, I have had the opportunity to get periodic debriefs from both my Regional AO and senior AO’s about the admissions process. A consistent theme is the importance of the LoR’s. The AO’s are savvy to the fact that essays can be massaged by people other than the applicant, but the LoR is an independent third party evaluation of the applicant by someone who knows the applicant well and can compare the applicant to his/her peers.

For the Yale process, about 20,000 make the first cut with 6,000 going to Committee.

Looking at OP’s hypothetical, if we try to back in some numbers, this is what we see, the bottom 25% make up about 400 of the matriculated students and about 550 of the admitted class. I think we can safely assume that the yield on the bottom 25% is going to be much higher than that of the general admitees, so we are talking about let’s say 400-450 admitted student. There are approximately 200 athletic recruits, not all of whom will be in the bottom 25%, but a good chunk will, add to that development cases and other strong hooks (URM, first gen, low SES, geography), so we see the number of spaces dwindle pretty quickly for a non-hooked kid at the 25th or lower percentile. I am sure there are kids like that who get in, but they are going to be very rare. I also think when we talk about achievement spikes that AO’s will take note of, school level accolades will be a dime a dozen. I would think at a minimum, an applicant would need state level or perhaps city level (if we are talking a major metropolitan area) accolades for the AO’s to take enough note to overcome an otherwise below average application.

All of this having been said, if the hypothetical kid were mine, I’d throw the dice. The chances are 0 if you don’t apply. I’d be sure to have realistic low expectations on this though.

34

It’s harder to talk about the vast range of things a kid can do in apps and interviews that get a negative reaction than the easy ‘win national acclaim’ or ‘write a killer essay.’ But it’s about the whole picture you create.

In general, achievement spikes are not enough, without the rest of it. They can impress, but then what? It’s holistic, not hierarchical. There’s no saying an international award tops other needed qualities.

My concern with the hypothetical here is it shows a limited view of what does matter, that whole. Theres a lot to convey.

35

Regarding teacher/counselor recs. If you are applying from a high achieving or well resourced high school, recs are extremely important. On the CDS, some colleges may indicate recs are not extremely important because they don’t hold it against an applicant coming from a poorly resourced school, where the counselor has a roster of 500 kids to write for or teachers have large classes and/or limited experience in writing recs due to the type of school/ student body. But if you are coming from a prep school, colleges pay close attention to those recs.

36

The consensus here sort of confirms what I suspected: that the [deliberately hazy] hypothetical student in the OP has a very, very remote shot (at Yale), even more remote than most of the 94 percent of fellow applicants who will also be denied. But remote is not the same as non-existent, so it’s worth a shot, keeping in mind that it’s a long one indeed.

I did not mean to imply that most applicants to Yale (or Ivies in general) are soulless overachievers. But I know some who made it a kind of life goal, since middle school, just to get accepted to a school like Yale. As far as I can tell, that is what drives them: external academic success, not real learning. They are great at being students, and work like crazy, do all those extra things, but I just wonder what they question, or what they still want to know. And, yes, I wondered if Yale might also want to pass on some of these kids in favor of… other types.

Maybe the best advice, all things considered, was to look harder at schools known to be more suitable to aspiring writers. Actually, that process is already well underway, and has been for a while. But somehow Yale kept popping into the picture.

I’m assuming most people commenting or even reading here are, or have been, near high school seniors around EA/ED deadlines, including the one that just passed. So you know the pressure, the stress, not just to get materials submitted while school continues full tilt, of course, but just the idea that you should know at 17 what is best. At least on the high school side of college admissions, the feeling is that this system is out of control. Yes, I know; it’s the system we’ve got, so we must deal with it.

I guess that’s really it. Applicants just need to do their best on the things they can control now (mainly essays), and hope that they laid the groundwork for the things they can’t control a long time ago. A little luck wouldn’t hurt, either.

37

The soulless overachievers don’t get perfect LoRs. There’s often a lot that can be read in how these are written. And it’s a mistake to think these kids that appear to us to be soulless are actually leaving teachers with that impression. In general, unless you see apps, letters, and interview reports, it’s risky to assume. (In fact, CC has a deep sensitive streak when some imply these kids aren’t really the whole deal. Many are wonderfully activated, in ways another parent wouldn’t know.)

I’m serious about in depth research of one’s targets. You don’t know how I annoy some. But that’s key. Otherwise, how does one get an idea what self presentation to make? Or what a killer essay is? Or even understand what they want to learn from it?

It’s not just essays that she can control.

What are her “good ECs?”

38

Why would you even want to go to an elite college that has so many “soulless overachievers”?

Btw- the kids i know at elite colleges have a heck of lot going for them and are not just academic, mindless robots. I think the elite colleges recognize this and admit accordingly.

39

I said (above) that I didn’t mean to imply that most students in these schools were soulless overachievers. In other words, they are not, so lighten up. But I know and have known some who attend, have attended or are hoping to attend a school like Yale and who – to me – seem obsessed with grades, scores and resume items. It’s what they talk about; sometimes it seems like all they think about. Which is FINE. And sometimes they do get great recs because some teachers value that striving for academic perfection more than anything else. I don’t begrudge them that; I’m only saying that is one type of good student, and perhaps even this type is a minority. There are lots of others, though.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to ask the original pondering question and discuss it without making some people think this is just bitterness or regret or envy. It isn’t. It was really just about how broad a net Yale casts, not about how undeserving the other fish in the net are.

40

I know. But you still went on to discuss those who are just externally driven. You describe them again, in #38.

They do not matter to your kid’s chances. Her review will be based on her presentation, her plusses and minuses, her effort and understanding, as it shows. Or not.

I have no issue with a kid who rounds out his activities with some for the perceived value. Most tippy tops, in fact, do want to see stretch. Regardless of the motivation, these experiences ARE experiences.

I don’t think you’re bitter. I think you believe in Ms Hypothetical. But it takes more than that to get into a tippy top. Right now, I don’t think you know what that is. So how does she put her best foot forward? Do you have a sense of the attributes Yale looks for? Have you self matched her? That’s more than how you view her potential.

I just want to see you’ve dug a little more into all this, assuming it is worth the effort, to you. Then we can help fine tune or explain.