@londondad You asked how universities I worked at distinguished between thousands of incredible candidates. The truth is that in most cases it was utterly subjective, if not random. Some cases were “easy”: candidates who won major, exceptionally competitive scholarships like Intel and Gates Millennium. Or composed a symphony that was performed by a major orchestra (this happened once). But in most cases the ‘admitted’ and the ‘rejected’ candidates were hardly discernible. I also found that what often happened is that Adcom’s looked for reasons NOT to admit a particular candidate.
And never forget the importance of the first reader. Their comments and ratings are critical. It’s luck of the draw if a candidate’s situation and essays resonate with the person(s) who read their file.
Unfortunately, college admissions do not recognize that the bottom 50% at the top boarding schools are better students and better prepared for college than the top 5% of most public school kids. If college admissions recognized this, they would admit more of these kids and have to do less remedial education (writing, in particular) come freshman year.
Not necessarily. I’ve encountered plenty of college classmates and undergrads at other schools who graduated in the top 20% or better from respectable/elite boarding schools who crashed and burned or otherwise struggled academically in undergrad.
Moreover, not all private day/boarding school students…even those in the top 20% have excellent writing skills.
One older college classmate who was top 15-20% of his boarding school and accepted as a legacy to one Ivy before opting to attend our LAC wrote so poorly on the workshopped seminar papers we passed around that my 9th grade teachers would have given it an F…assuming they didn’t pointedly tell him to restart the entire paper from scratch.
And I consider myself to be a barely passable in writing skills. However, I was astounded at how even some elite boarding school graduates attending Ivies/peer elites had worse writing skills than I had as a 17 year old college freshman.
And there was a Columbia undergrad who mistook me for his US History survey TA and threw a temper tantrum at me for giving him a C on his essay. Upon reading the first two pages of it, I didn’t hesitate to notify him that IMO his TA was being overly generous. If he had passed that very same essay to my 9th grade public magnet HS teachers, they’d have awarded an F…assuming they didn’t accompany that with yelling at him for turning in such a crappy essay and in a few cases, ripping it up right in front of his face.