DH and I went to Michigan. DH owns very few articles of clothing or vehicles that don’t have an “M” on them somewhere. No kidding, our son’s first words were “Go Blue” (well, “GBoo”). We took him to Ann Arbor often. He liked Michigan and he applied, but he always saw it as “our” school, and it was never top of his list. He applied to humor us. But, kidding aside, we really would have loved to see him there, much much more so than a military academy. I was only partially kidding above when I said we’ve never fully recoverd.
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I totally relate to this. I went to a T10 LAC on very generous financial aid, and it was such a transformative experience for me–I always wanted to be able to give that to my kids, if they wanted it. The fact that it is unlikely my children would be able to get into my college or similar doesn’t bother me so much, but I do feel badly that I cannot afford to send them even if they do get accepted. I’m a public school teacher in a high COL area, and while I have been saving in a 529 since they were born, I’ve run the NPCs & it’s just not going to be enough. I know that I chose my career, could have gone into something higher-paying. I knew that I wouldn’t get rich as a teacher. But also when I started my career, teachers in my district could buy a small home in the district & afford to send their kids to a private college. That is no longer true, and hasn’t been for many years now.
What makes me feel better is remembering that my personal college experience was so transformative in part because I grew up in poverty. My children have not, and they have already had a much more enriching K-12 experience than I did. I’ve been able to afford music lessons & a few summer camps & some fun vacations. I cannot give them an “elite” college education, but I’ve been able to give them so much already.
It’s also helped to start researching & visiting colleges that I CAN afford and see that those schools are transformative for so many kids. Some of what 20-year-old-me thought was special about my expensive LAC can be found in lots and lots of places. My kids won’t be able to access everything I loved about my college. But they’ll get a lot of it.
OP, I think many parents grieve not being able to give their children what they themselves had–I certainly do. And it’s frustrating to see these schools that our society views as “the best” become more and more restricted to the very wealthy (see the most recent Chetty study on the wealth advantage). But I feel certain that our kids have many good options in front of them.
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As stated already… And Michigan was also my example… In Chicago Michigan is a strong target school. Many, many families from Detroit areas live here. Young kids in my area wearing gear etc. They have gone to games when growing up. Etc etc. Many really still want to go there but many now don’t get in, especially being out of state… I assume some see it as their parents school which it was my wife’s. It was also the best school for my son that went there but he was well aware to have back ups.
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This is a beautiful and important way to frame this situation. Thank you.
While my experience isn’t this (I went to SDSU, my D22 goes to UCLA, my S26, who knows, but he hates heat so it’s unlikely he will head to San Diego), my thought when I first read this thread was about how I grew up with a stay at home mom. She was the best—super involved, always had homemade cookies, always room parent, went on all the field trips, etc. When I became a parent, I thought staying at home was the only way to be a “good” mom. But that wasn’t my reality. I had built a good career, i made as much as my husband with good prospects for the future, my husband didn’t want the full responsibility of supporting us financially, and we lived in a high COL (where I also grew up). So I continued working and I had a really hard time with it. But as the years have gone on, I see that I’ve been able to offer my kids something I didn’t have, that has made a big difference in their lives: I found a way to work from home most of the time since my son was born, so they saw me working. They saw me be the person I at work, we talked about what I did, why I liked or didn’t like it. They saw me get promoted, negotiate tricky situations, travel to cool places (and use those miles to take them around the world). I may not have been at every school even, and they may have packed their fair of lunches and listened to some work calls on the way to dance class or rock climbing practice, but they turned into great people that I’m really proud of. They also saw two parents divide housework more evenly, juggle their jobs and being present, and they saw me always choose them when it mattered.
OP, you have given your kids so many things you didn’t have, so much so that they will never think about the loss of a school opportunity as a loss at all. They willhave different opportunities and they will amazing.
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You have been a terrific example to your kids, and especially your daughter!
This holds true in the top tier of school districts or private schools that are geared toward highly selective college prep. In many, many places, however, even high performing kids are not simply tracked into paths that are competitive for a T10. Most public schools and their guidance counselors are geared toward the state flagship level, and may not even have much experience with kids who apply to T10 schools (I’m thinking most areas between the coasts outside big cities).
When my kids were younger, an older colleague said of our school district “it’s great for kids in the middle (to above average) but not so great for those at the bottom or top end.” I didn’t understand it at the time because our schools offered far more APs than I could take a generation ago, but APs don’t distinguish you at all for T10s.
Holistic admissions is supposed to take the school’s rigor into account, but I suspect for T10s, a student from a “lower rigor” school generally has to have a hook, which may be an EC that their parent had to work to find, drive them a long way, get them into at a younger age etc. which the public school may not do anything to actively promote or facilitate.
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Why do you suspect that?
I again note the Harvard admissions lawsuit information suggested otherwise. Meaning that information indicated that a Harvard applicant could get the necessary “2” scores on activities/athletics without such extraordinary measures, but instead by being a standout and eventually leader within the context of important school activities.
Anecdotally, at our competitive public school in the Bay Area, rigor is designed around APs and geared toward UC admission. The kids who get into ivies or T10s are most often (not always, but mostly) sports recruits, especially rowing, baseball, volleyball, sailing. These are expensive sports that our community has built impressive local private programs to support (if you weren’t learning volleyball when you were 5, you won’t make the travel team when you’re 15–that kind of stuff). Lots of parental involvement happening. Of course those kids are top students too, but the awareness of what it takes to land at a tippy top school certainly leads to parents steering their kids toward these activities.
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Becoming a recruited athlete is indeed the one common path that most resembles what some people seem to think characterizes admissions in general (an extraordinary EC path that parents put their kids on from an early age, usually well before high school).
I know I keep going back to this, but the Harvard lawsuit is our best “inside” information on these subjects. At Harvard, recruited athletes got a 1 for athletics, and that 1 combined with meeting their academic screening requirements for recruited athletes all but guaranteed admission (I believe over a 90% chance at that point). And that was around 10% of a Harvard College class.
But almost nothing else in terms of ECs worked like that. As in, only about 2% of a typical Harvard College class got a 1 grade for some other form of EC. And the admit rate for EC 1s was only about 50%! This is hard to model, but likely about half that pool had academic 2s, and then some of those would also have had personal 2s and didn’t need the EC 1, and some were hooked in another way and so didn’t need the EC 1.
So unhooked people who got an academic 2 and personal 3 and EC 1 probably made up no more than about 0.5% of a typical Harvard College class. And in fact that applicant pool’s admit rate was probably less than half of the rate for applicants who got an athletic 1 (aka recruited athletes).
So again trying to get your kid into a college like Harvard through any sort of non-recruited-athlete EC “hook” (defined as something that would distinguish you from the far more common EC 2s such that you got an EC 1), was much, much harder. And the vast majority of a typical Harvard class did not follow such a path to admissions.
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I again note the Harvard admissions lawsuit information suggested otherwise. Meaning that information indicated that a Harvard applicant could get the necessary “2” scores on activities/athletics without such extraordinary measures
I mean anecdotally, of the 3 unhooked Harvard graduates I know, all had won major awards or done something that would make you go ‘yeah, I’m not surprised they got in.’
I’d be weary of what the document says because it was very vague.
There are gradations within each score (2+/2/2-) that were not broken out during the lawsuit nor did the lawsuit reveal the acceptance rates for each gradation.
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So the nice thing about having access to the Harvard lawsuit information is we don’t need to rely on anecdotes.
That said, “done something that would make you go ‘yeah, I’m not surprised they got in,” is a pretty broad category, particularly once you have the benefit of hindsight to help you.
Like, in one of these recent conversations, a person related the story of the captain of the varsity football team, who was not good enough at football to be recruited, but who also was at the top of their class academically, and is now attending Yale.
I for one am not surprised that happened. But being captain of the varsity football team is something that happened within the context of “normal” school activities.
And I have encountered a lot of anecdotes like that, and indeed know about them from our high school (which admittedly is a very good private HS, but still not one of the most famous ones). There are plenty of unhooked students at these colleges, from our HS and others, who “only” had near-perfect grades in the hardest classes available, very high test scores, and also were varsity captains, debate team captains, student body presidents, and so on.
And with the benefit of hindsight, that isn’t necessarily surprising in each such case. But their top activities were still within a “normal” high school context. They just excelled in both academics and those activities, and then likely got really good recommendations and such too.
I agree the information from the Harvard lawsuit is not perfect, and indeed cannot be perfect because their process ultimately includes subjective factors.
But I would be even more wary of relying on anecdotes and rumors and conventional wisdom and so forth from parents and such who have no access to inside information at all, but believe they have nonetheless cracked the secret code.
Indeed, that is a recipe for confirmation bias. If a person is strongly predisposed to believe T10 admissions does work, or should work, a certain way, including because they have already invested a lot of family resources in that theory, then they will tend to focus on whatever anecdotes or rumors or conventional wisdom or so forth that reinforces that theory. And discount or reinterpret or so on any evidence that suggests otherwise.
And not that I can do much about this, but to the extent some parents are not letting their kids be normal outstanding kids because they believe they have unlocked the secret formula for success in college admissions, if they are doing that with nothing more than such poorly-sourced conventional wisdom to support that strategy, that is a significant issue to me.
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I think the difference in perspective may be due to the different high schools our kids are coming from. I live in a suburb of a large Midwestern city. Our local public school is excellent (dozens of NMFs, multiple AP and IB options), yet it is quite rare for an unhooked kid to get into an Ivy+ from our school (except for UChicago if, and only if, the student applies ED, in which case a couple unhooked get in every year.) The results from the 2 expensive privates in our metro area are very different – many more Ivy+ admits. This is despite graduating classes 1/10th the size and only a small number of NMFs. And these privates are in no way “famous”, I doubt anyone outside of our city has ever heard of them.
Are we really to believe that the playing field is level? That the lack of top results coming from the public is fair because they just must not measure up on “personality.” Paint me cynical, I guess.
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So the nice thing about having access to the Harvard lawsuit information is we don’t need to rely on anecdotes.
But that’s not true at all.
The information released wasn’t all of it (some was redacted and others weren’t released to the public).
In fact, that’s my entire point. The information that was released was incredibly vague and without context, did not provide much info at all.
It’s clear that Harvard used gradations (2+/2/2-) to differentiate between different 2s on the scoring - that info wasn’t released publicly on what the differentiating factor was.
Furthermore, the information released on the personal rating was also incredibly vague. Therefore, one absolutely has to use anecdotes in the interpretation of information.
Information is not useful if there’s no context or elaboration on what the info is showing.
Don’t disagree that the entire context of the H lawsuit admissions data wasn’t released. But, how exactly is any of that data from 2009-10 through 2015-16 useful at this point, for anything? We just started the 2024-25 cycle, so this data is a minimum of 9 years old. Harvard’s admissions process has changed since then, in some ways dramatically (e.g, Test optional, changing rubrics, application volume).
I’m noticing that the question posed is:
I’m not noticing that the question asked for debate on Harvard admissions, so I’m assuming there will be no further off-topic posts.
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I think that kids from “known” schools have an easier time getting admitted to T20s. Our public HS in MA sends anywhere from 10-15 kids to T20s every year, including some Ivies/ MIT. Sometimes there will be a recruited athlete in the mix, but most admits are just outstanding students with typical HS ECs. At some MA public HS the numbers are much higher (Lexington comes to mind).
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I’m ok with it since they are A students while I was a B student - so they will be going to better schools than I did.
But has your college become more selective so that students now need to be A students in high school in order to be admitted there?
Every college in the top 100 has become more selective since they’re seeing 10x as many applications than when I went to school. I’m just glad my kids have the stats where they should be able to get into higher rated schools than I did.
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