Yeah, I don’t know how many it really is, but based on what I’ve seen, I’m willing to accept the downward direction.
Okay, think of the strongest applicant you’ve ever known personally. How many of the top colleges (HYPSM) did they get accepted to?
“Of course they picked harvard, the only people who apply to ALL 8 ivy leagues are prestige chasing.”
You know, Harvard’s yield is usually just over 80%. So 4 out of 5 students admitted to Harvard pick Harvard. This all-Ivy admit pool is acting exactly the same way as the larger pool of Harvard admits. So it seems like a stretch to read ill motives into this group, unless your point is to insult all Harvard choosers equally.
“Exactly. That is why I said “essentially random”.”
The “many” “tippy top” admissions directors have disappeared from your claim. As long as we’re clear about that.
No it has not. Not at all. Several others have chimed in with quotes that are almost identical to the ones I listed. What I am saying is that those many quotes from tippy top ad’s, in my opinion, show that the process is not substantially different than one that is chosen at random. As long as we are clear about that 
ETA- Maybe a better term than random would have been arbitrary, but I was responding to a post that used the term random. That is why I added the word essentially.
I really don’t think we are that different in our view of how the process works. I am just apparently poorly articulating what I mean.
@JustOneDad I mentioned yesterday that the strongest candidate I have ever heard of from our area (sans an URM hook) did not get into a single HYPSM school.
Well, that’s not surprising, I guess. If you follow @PurpleTitan there’s only a hundred or so of them which makes them pretty rare. But, does that mean you can’t even imagine such students exist?
I’d say the admissions process is far from random. A few years ago Stanford publicly discussed their cross admit data. This data showed that 44% of the students Stanford admitted received an offer from at least one other HYPSM school. This is obviously much higher than the 5% or so you’d expect if it were random. And remember that a lot of students that Stanford admitted didn’t really try to get another offer - maybe they were admitted REA and didn’t bother applying elsewhere, or maybe they were one of the 13% of the pool who are recruited athletes and committed to Stanford in the fall (I think it’s fair to say that a Stanford recruited athlete would be a good enough athlete for the other schools, though they’d have to clear a higher academic bar at the other schools ). Personally, I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out that as much as 55%-60% of Stanford’s class could have gone to another HYPSM school if they had wanted to. I know most of my kids’ college friends seemed to have gotten at least one other acceptance.
So this is a sample of almost 1000 students for whom being admitted to HYPSM is obviously far from random. For another, more selective, data point, look at the schools that students such as RSI or IMO participants (or similar programs) end up going to. From the data I’ve seen, I’d say many of them have a > 80% chance of being admitted to at least one of HYPSM.
Admissions officers at highly selective colleges often make statements like “we could have admitted a class three times as big of the same quality” or “there’s not a lot of difference between the candidates we admitted and those we rejected - a lot of it’s random”. I’m sure their statements have a lot of truth to them, but I’d bet there’s also a bit of polite fibbing going on too, as well as an attempt to quell the mob of applicants who would otherwise swamp them with questions about what the schools are looking for. To paraphrase Mr. Justice Potter Stewart, they may not be able to precisely define what they’re looking for, but they often know it when they see it - and “it” isn’t doesn’t involve getting another 20 points on the SAT.
@JustOneDad I can imagine incredible students (and know that they exist). What I have a hard time believing is that because of the huge pool of kids with exceptional stats, ec’s, gpa’s etc that there would be a large (even 100) group of kids that would stand out enough to give them a 90% chance of admittance.
Let’s assume that a school uses only the data that I just referenced to make admissions. There is no way there would be 100 kids that stand out. There would be thousands with stats that were indistinguishable. That means a kid would have to stand out in a very significant way because of their essays, interviews, and other “softer” attributes.
Again, I could be wrong, but I have a hard time believing there are that many kids out of that huge pool who are markedly different in their interview skills, or essays, or whatever. JMHO.
As I understand it, students receiving “likely” letters have a near 100% chance of acceptance.
There are many ways to stand out beyond just stats + having good essays and interviews. For example, one obvious group that stands to colleges from an admissions standpoint is recruited athletes. I’m sure there are well over 100 exceptional recruited athletes with a very high chance of admission. There are also plenty of students who excel to a similar degree in out of classroom areas colleges value besides just sports.
At the MIT admissions seminar they said this about the acceptances they send out: 10% of those acceptances go to students who are shoo-ins. Those students have done such interesting and exceptional things or had such exceptional experiences that MIT and probably many others want them. I met one of those students at Campus Preview Weekend - a girl from Wisconsin who had been accepted to Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and some others. According to her mother she had from an early age been fascinated by and was already doing work in geology and geothermal power. Her mother had not participated in any of her daughter’s applications and was rather bemused at all the colleges they were now going to have to visit before she could make up her mind.
“10% of those acceptances go to students who are shoo-ins.”
Yeah, when you read lots of applications, there’s a sub-group within the top students that stands out. I’ve had a few over the years where I see the documents and meet the kid and something just goes “Ding ding ding!” I never give them an estimate of their HYPSM odds over 50%, but that’s to protect myself – everyone I’ve ever told that they have a 50% chance has gotten in.
I’m trying to figure out how the Boston Globe discovered this group. Could we edit the headline of this post to read, “Of students who bragged to the media about being accepted to all the Ivies, 80% chose Harvard?”
In addition, this is not a representative sample, even of those who were accepted to all the Ivies, I presume. Under FERPA, I’m at a loss as to how to identify such students, unless they speak up.
Any intern armed with a modicum of Google skills could have found them and a couple more. There were plenty of stories in local and national press about them. And speaking up they did to complement what plenty of others were saying about them!
Bill Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s admissions dean, said in an interview several years ago that every year there were something like 200 applicants they deemed “WOW” (for “walk on water”) applicants, and who were accepted essentially without discussion. I would think a good portion of that group could get accepted everywhere they applied, and I would also think that for various reasons Harvard does not get an application from every student it might view that way.
I’m reasonably sure that the great majority of students in the WOW class can find their way to a Harvard application. After all, it’s Harvard.
Yep, I’d say probably a majority of the WOW classs would apply to H. There are some who do not apply because they are ignorant, some who just love a school so much that they just ED there (though probably not a lot of those), and a bigger group who do not apply because they would be full-pay but H is unaffordable.
I’ll give you “lots”, JustOneDad, but I’m not sure at all it’s “the great majority.” I’ve known a few kids I would put in that category who never applied to Harvard, mainly because they wanted to go somewhere else (Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, an LAC), got an early acceptance there, and didn’t bother applying elsewhere. (Some kids do, but others don’t.) In my world, people are pretty focused on colleges with traditional Establishment prestige, but I’m sure there are brilliant kids out there who never think of going someplace besides their state flagship (or maybe in other cases Notre Dame, or BYU, or Liberty), or who don’t want to go far from home. The real prodigies – the ones who wind up getting their MD/PhDs from Harvard at 21 – tend to go to college where they can commute from home; no one comes to live in a dorm in Harvard Yard at 12.
I know quite a few kids, maybe not quite WOW class who perceived Harvard as not good enough in engineering/CS, had the misperception (IMO) that Harvard only has super competitive students who don’t know how to collaborate, or just plain like the school down the river better. My son’s best friend was a double legacy at Harvard, but he went off to Yale.
There are kids that do have 90+ chances of getting in, the only thing this is validated after they get in everywhere. There’s no other way to test it out.
I am not certain that the term “majority” really applies here. There are a number of students who simply are not in love with spending 4 years on the East Coast – no matter the reputation of the school. There are a number of students who simply are not attracted to the research university model. There are students who have religious interests. There are students who want to balance athletics with education.
There is no doubt that Harvard still sits on the pinnacle of education, but fewer than 2,000 enroll every year as UG, and claiming that this includes a majority of the WOW students is a stretch! They get their fair share but at least a dozen schools also land their own WOW – and obviously not necessarily the same guys!
As a simplistic example, how many would have considered Andrew Luck a WOW candidate? And how many schools would Luck think he might have attended? Same for musicians and plenty other specialists.
It’s not that Harvard is not good enough but that there are better choices for the discerning candidates in a number of programs.