<p>Allmusic,that comment was obnoxious.</p>
<p>"Rice only enrolls about 1000 kids every year and practically every high performing kid in Houston applies there." </p>
<p>"Rice has so few spots in each freshman class "</p>
<h2>^^^^Again, these mathematical realities have yet to be fully grasped by many "disappointed," "equally qualified" students and/or their parents. There are actually a finite number of freshman seats available in any desirable college, while the numbers willing to fill them seem to be growing ever toward infinity.</h2>
<p>QUOTE: "the only difference I can see was their race."</p>
<p>Key phrase = "I can see." You don't have the applications (and recs, and essays) in front of you; the committees do. That's not to say that in some cases an enormous, compensating boost can be given for ANY hook or tip (including, ahem, legacy). However, the phrase comes up also with regard to non-racial issues, when one student claims to be "more qualified" than another student of even the same category. But parents & students do not determine qualifications. It's not up to the applicants to decide that a #16 student should not be admitted over a rank #2 student. Rank is about numbers (grades), that's all. It's not about other qualities a college is seeking in addition to grades.</p>
<p>(Ever wonder why a "less qualified" (not-AA) job candidate sometimes gets the job over one with a longer list of credentials? It's the persuasive power of the interviewee, the perceived value of their qualities & previous experience & current motivation -- that often lands such a person the job.)</p>
<p>QUOTE: "I'm just trying to have some understanding for the disappointed 90%. The kids who are all terrific, but are scrambling around, searching for some answer as to why they were shut out."</p>
<p>But SS, these disappointments exist now, & will exist next year, for reasons also having nothing to do with URM status. Reasons having to do with finite mathematics.</p>
<p>QUOTE: "I think there is enormous resentment of the leg up a legacy gets. It's just not racially charged, like the URM tip."</p>
<p>^^^ ...and therefore? It justifies more charged anger, because it's racial, not legacy?</p>
<p>"Yes, to a female who was rejected, his admission is tainted."</p>
<p>No....not unless the male was not 'worthy' (qualified). And how do you know that without making presumptions?</p>
<p>
[quote]
I was disappointed though that #16 and #34 and recently found out #22 also were all accepted by Rice. My D is a first generation college student and is#2in her class of 722 students, much better resume than #16, #22 and #34 - my D was waitlisted, they were all accepted - the only difference I can see was their race.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think this is where the disconnect likes. I am willing to bet $$ to doughnuts that the span in gpas between # 16, 22 & 34 isn't that great (out of 722 students this group all still fall within the top 5% of the class). </p>
<p>There are other factors which you or your child may have full access to (recommendations, essays, other extenuating circumstances or hardships that the student has overcome, whether or not they are first generation students and the list could go on) remember students are evaluated in context of the opportunities presented and how well they took advantage of those opportunities. While your D may have a more "favorable resume", the student who works a part-time job to support the family, takes care of younger siblings, elderly grandparents, ailing parents, etc and this is the reason that they may not have an extensive list of ECs are not penalized for having taken care of family responsibilities. There are so many variables in the equation unless you were in the room when the committee was discussing the applicant, there is no way you or anyone else can take them in based on snippets that you heard from others.</p>
<p>Stickershock & good_oleme</p>
<p>Ldmom is correct that when a non-minority student is not admitted they are quick to state that a minority/URM student took their spot when just by the sheer numbers of urm applicatants compared to non-urm applicants state otherwise.</p>
<p>Using rice as an example:</p>
<p>they had 8776 applicants and admitted 2081 (23.7%)</p>
<p>out of the 8776 applicants, 649 (7.4%) of them were black. It would be safe to assume that the number of hispanic applicants were probably comprable to the # of black applicants. Now the black and hispanic pool consist of 1298 applicants (~15%). *** 85% of the pool consists of non-urm applicants.***</p>
<p>Out of the pool of 649 blacks who applied to Rice, 152 were admitted with an acceptance rate (23%) which is comprable to the overall acceptance rate . However, 38 black students (25%) chose to enroll to make up 5% of the matriculated class. If the similar # are used to represent hispanics there are 304 black and hispanics (14%) admitted out of 2081 total admitted students. ** Again, 85% of the students admitted are non-urms. ** So who is "taking a spot" from someone? So if #22 was not admitted to Rice, the chances would have still been slim the GOE's D would have been admitted instead.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Yes, to a female who was rejected, his admission is tainted.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So, SS, all the girls who were not accepted into Pomona feel that all the boys' admissions are tainted?</p>
<p>My question, though, was do YOU feel his admission is tainted.</p>
<p>
[quote]
There are other factors which you or your child may have full access to...
[/quote]
sybbie, I assume you mean "may not have." And of course, I agree and have clearly stated this in a past post. So many people are screaming that URM tips don't matter all that much, and even if they do, what about athletes? Celebrity dunces and their dull-witted kids? Males? </p>
<p>My point is, we all know tips exist, and the disappointed kid will look to the tip as the explanation for his rejection. It's part of life. Nepotism & favoritism is something we all must deal with. That doesn't mean you should be expected to be happy about it.</p>
<p>"^^^^Again, these mathematical realities have yet to be fully grasped by many "disappointed," "equally qualified" students and/or their parents. There are actually a finite number of freshman seats available in any desirable college, while the numbers willing to fill them seem to be growing ever toward infinity."</p>
<hr>
<p>TRULY! </p>
<p>Just do the math for Houston and Rice University and its approximately 750 freshman slots. Houston is served by 24 school districts across 8 counties. Our district is one of the larger ones and we will have TEN high schools next year. What if you assumed each area district only had ONE high school and Rice was generous and accepted just 10 of the top kids from each of these high schools? That is is 240 kids and approximately a third of the freshman class at Rice coming from just the Houston area. This contradicts the mission of a private university that wishes to protect their national reputation.... as is their right.</p>
<p>Now consider that many of the 24 school districts in the Houston area have far more than one high school.</p>
<p>Tips exist. But they may not be the factors that determined whether one student got in and another did not.
The students with better stats and higher rankings may not have gotten the best recs. This is not necessarily due to favoritism. It can be that the ever so-slightly lower ranked student has more of a spark. The student who got in may have written a better essay than the ones who did not (see the thread about the NYT story). The student who got in may have better fulfilled an institutional need such as a particular prospective major or some potential contribution to the life of the community.
There are many factors other than connections and favoritism that can explain different outcomes. It is indeed human nature to focus on tips and hooks as reasons why others get in while one does not. But it does not necessarily make it true.</p>
<p>There is only one group of students whose statistical results are likely significant enough to warrant 'understanding' in terms of the signficance of any given tipping factor.</p>
<p>The child who gets into 1 or 2 Ivies is not so statistically unusual among the highest caliber applicants.</p>
<p>The students worth 'looking at' if you really want to understand the tipping phenomena are the students who got into HYP and then several other Ivies or S or M. And, they had to get into all the schools they applied to. These are the kids who are the real statistical outliers. </p>
<p>I haven't made a study of it, and I probably won't, but my guess is that it is among these students that tipping factors (particularly athletic or URM) are a very highly prevalent feature compared with general statistics.</p>
<p>To best understand any statistical phenomena I think you have to look at the extremes. Or, that is what makes sense to me.</p>
<p>
[quote]
My D is a first generation college student and is#2in her class of 722 students, much better resume than #16, #22 and #34 - my D was waitlisted, they were all accepted
[/quote]
I'd like to add to Sybbie's post and point out that in a class of 722, the #34 student is still within the top 5% - and many schools don't really focus that much on rank beyond the top 10% or top 5% gradations. I don't know about Rice, but if a college is simply considering #1-36 as part being "top 5%", then the specific number wouldn't make much difference. </p>
<p>Also... "much better resume" may be based on a very mistaken assumption. All the time I see kids post here on chances thread with a very long list of dozens of activities and awards they are involved in. If I had posted my daughter's activity sheet, they probably all would agree that they had "much better resumes". My d. had no community service, no top-offices held, no awards -- she really only participated in about half a dozen activities in high school. But she had focus and commitment and had done some things that were unusual-- so I think to the college she stood out as having the "better" resume because it gave them a strong sense of who she was, and an easy way to categorize her. Sometimes when a kid has two dozen activities listed and has done it all: sports, community service, a musical instrument, student government -- the essence of that student is buried underneath the excess. So the kid who has 600 hours of community service but not much else looks STRONGER than the kid who has 50 hours of community service + all those other activities. </p>
<p>I'd be very wary of the idea of a "better resume". Quite frankly my eyes glaze over at what some students post on the boards here and I am not at all suprised when some of the ones who seem to have the longest lists are disappointed in the spring. When kids post in the chances threads, I glance very quickly over all the activities to see if one or two jump out at me and tell me something special or unusual about the kid. I'm sure that ad coms do the same. It's easier when the list is shorter.</p>
<p>SS - maybe your argument would be viewed as having more merit if you gave a little more gripe time to your dissatisfaction with all those other tips.</p>
<p>Furthermore, you still miss the point. Not dissuading a kid from viewing his rejection as something that occurred because of the tips, nepotism or favoritism is a huge disservice. There is no way to point to any individual student and say 'minority tips are why you were rejected' or 'if not for all those legacies, you'd be in'.... Since this cannot be known, for the student to needlessly suffer angst over it is wrong.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It justifies more charged anger, because it's racial, not legacy?
[/quote]
Epiphany, I think the anger is stronger on this thread from the URMs and those who don't want anyone criticizing a URM tip, or being disappointed that they have no tip. I never said that anger over race should be justified over legacy anger. What both tips have in common is this: You have no way to get in on that tip through hard work, as you do for athletics or music.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Nepotism & favoritism is something we all must deal with. That doesn't mean you should be expected to be happy about it.
[/quote]
The people who succeed in this world are the ones who ignore such factors and focus only doing the very best they can, asking themselves "how can I improve?" and "what can I do better?" rather than worrying about perceived unfairness of the process. That is true in every endeavor, particularly true the higher the level of competition. </p>
<p>That doesn't mean that favoritism and unfairness doesn't exist. It's just that the focus on that factor as an "explanation" for every loss is useless and self-defeating. A person can't control for that factor; we do have control over our own attitude and performance.</p>
<p>Idmom, the thread is about a Cuban girl who is hurt by nasty comments accusing her of having secured her successful admissions results through race.</p>
<p>"What could be truthfully said is that they all had something special to outweigh their weaker scores -- which could have been one of those tip factors, but could also be something else. Musical talent. A published writer. Just <em>something</em> that makes that applicant special in the eyes of the college. "</p>
<p>I understand what you are saying (I was one of those special cases that was admitted because of performing arts), however at our hs school we really don't have a performing arts dept of that caliber, nor students. Anyway, the point is, what I wanted to know was- what colleges of arts/sciences are good fits for my sons profile? And the answers were very hard to come by. We were trying to balance throwing a whole wad of cash away on pie-in-the-sky dreams and throwing it away on "safeties." It's almost like building a good stock portfolio within a certain amount of risk, but without having reliable data to go on.</p>
<p>When you throw ED into the mix, the answers are even more convoluted. Colleges that appear to accept 30% may really be in the 5-10% range for BWRK. What would be nice to know, for the majority of college applicants, is- what are my relative chances of getting in without hooks, ED, performing arts, legacy, URM, athletic, etc. Just as a "regular student."</p>
<p>Yes, calmom. Everything you say is true. These are 17 year old kids who are allowed to be imperfect, right? They're still learning.</p>
<p>
[quote]
You have no way to get in on that tip through hard work, as you do for athletics or music.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>My Ss would never get in on athletics, even if they worked extremely hard. They just don't have the physical attributes for competitive sports. And hard work will only take you so far in music. That's right: life's not fair.</p>
<p>"Epiphany, I think the anger is stronger on this thread from the URMs and those who don't want anyone criticizing a URM tip, or being disappointed that they have no tip. I never said that anger over race should be justified over legacy anger. What both tips have in common is this: You have no way to get in on that tip through hard work, as you do for athletics or music."</p>
<p>I think the operative words are "those who don't want anyone criticizing (substitute any) tip." I said in an earlier post that my son was a legacy at one of his admissions. I've told any parent who was interested as well. I don't have a problem with someone criticizing this tip. It's a fact. Is it why my son got in? I don't know, I'll never know. But I'm not going to say I know unequivocably that it did not help him. Let's face it, it's a double standard when you can't talk about or acknowlege certain advantages but can others, like certain tips are "off limits."</p>
<p>doubleplay: I think you answered your question in your post. Probably 5% or less for HYPS. There are lot of kids like the one you described. That is why kids need to look at safeties and make sure they are safety schools.</p>
<p>anitaw: Of the "outliers" I know who got into all the top schools only one was a URM. This person was also female, athlete, spoke several languages and was going into engineering. All of the others just stood out among their peers in what they achieved either academically in the performing arts or a combination of things. Also, I think their essays probably made a difference too.</p>
<p>SS..."the thread is about a Cuban girl who is hurt by nasty comments accusing her of having secured her successful admissions results through race".... </p>
<p>The thread is actually about an "American girl of cuban parents."....Big difference, which further adds to the lack of understanding that many people have about some very complex ethnic issues.</p>