<p>Finally, I understand. There are only 6000 highly qualified students in the world each year and those are the ones admitted to HYPS.</p>
<p>If anyone has read any of the books by Admin people, they would see it is a luck of the draw in many cases</p>
<p>To claim otherwise...well</p>
<p>NO ONE has the complete, perfect package, even with perfect scores and gpa, something is always lacking, it can't be helped, we just don't always know what that is</p>
<p>It is shear volume of applicants...with one of ten kids getting rejected...the Ivys brag all the time about how many 4.0 1600 they reject, because they are looking for that "something" and on any day, that something can change</p>
<p>If in one day, the applicant pool they are looking at, after the auto admit and the auto rejections, they see 5 kids who have 4.0 2300s, 4 of which were newspaper editors and class prez, and one of which started own volunteer club and wants to study statistics and they need stat students, well, that one may get in and the others, may not</p>
<p>Once you get down to the large pool of very qualified students, it is very much "luck", where they are in the process, if they admin people have read some prepackaged essasys all day and finally see one with some real personality, if they to get some more URMs, if they come from a feeder school, if someone below them in the highschool they really want to take, so they take one from above to "appease" the school, financial considerations to have an effect (no matter what anyone says) and so much more</p>
<p>A lot of people on this thread have been kind of weirdly oversensitive to the OP's language. It's not that "fancy" - they're just words.
Also: people who didn't get in will lean towards the "It's all random" view, and people who did will tend to think otherwise. The truth is probably, as a lot of people have said, somewhere in the middle: some people are not as bright/special as they think they are, and some people "deserve" to get in but are unlucky.</p>
<p>To an extent, I agree with the OP. However, at certain points, the admissions department must consider what they need, as far as geo, diversity, etc. They will even admit this. Nevertheless, the very most qualified applicants will get into the elite colleges, no matter their luck. Also, you really do not have to use 5 syllable words to convince everyone that you are smart (I mean sagacious) and that your argument is well thought out. After all, you got into Stanford. This isn't a research paper...</p>
<p>The people who are saying that luck is not involved are consistently writing that they look at the apps, they decide who deserves to get in, and they then admit those people. The implicit assumption is that the number of available slots for the freshman class is not finite and that they have room for as many qualified people that apply.</p>
<p>Yes and that would be after special circumstances ie development and legacy. Also at some schools atheletic.</p>
<p>Perhaps it the level of luck that people are arguing about. I think we all agree that you have to be lucky and not have them lose your application. The next level of luck is that you get a application reader who sees something in you that they like. The next level of luck occurs when they have totally weeded out all of the truly undeserving and they still have five times more extremely qualified, exceptional applicants than they can ever accept. At this point, I do not think they have a special pair of dice. However, if they chose the one applicant out of the five based on something totally minor such as that person's parents are real-estate agents and the other four applicants have parents who have more technical jobs, then I call it a crap shoot. However, it is not a crap shoot when you consider who got to be one of the five applicants.</p>
<p>This has been used to explain why the colleges are waitlisting more people than they accept. It would be hard for adcoms to reject somebody two minutes after they accepted the guy's clone. It is psychologically easier to waitlist the person than to outright reject them.</p>
<p>(The solution is to look at some of the other colleges and pick a college that is a good fit for you personally.)</p>
<p>The OP implies that some applicants are qualified enough to have been admitted but unfortunately were rejected. However, he/she doesn't mention that some people who should never be in the best schools (even if they have excellent scores) sometimes get in. Case in point: IKI.</p>
<p>I am an interviewer for MIT, and while we are definitely looking for passion, excellence, creativity, intelligence, etc., pomposity is certainly a disqualifyingly negative trait. If I had interviewed such a student and he/she had later been admitted to MIT, I would be mortified that I had made such a blunder as to be fooled by such a ****-head (excuse my French). There is a HUGE difference between self-confidence and arrogance.</p>
<p>The underlying flaw of the OP's conclusion is that it is based on an observation of other students ADMITTED to these prestigious schools. in order to draw a valid conclusion, one would have to look at those who were NOT admitted! If there are just as many (if not more) students with that "spark" in the reject pool, it would show your conclusion is faulty.</p>
<p>I know many people who feel lucky to be going to a particular college. Not only the 'losers' in the game feel that the process is largely random.</p>
<p>Whoa, your plan almost sounds somewhat like the scientific process.</p>
<p>pafather: I agree with you, but after all, he is just an eighteen year old. I DO think that his essay on the application was probably more appealing than his post. I assume it did not have as many five and ten-dollar words.</p>
<p>You would also have to conclude whether any of the "friends" were development, legacy etc.</p>
<p>Let's not flame the OP too heavily, eh? Maybe he came off as arrogant, but there's no point in making excessive personal attacks (I'm all for a few cheap shots every now and then, but blatantly saying "you are a bad person" is a little bit unnecessary). </p>
<p>I think some of you are missing a few damn funny posts on this topic. Case in point: Inanimate|Object's reply a page back.</p>
<p>I must say that I have been quite surprised by the fervor and magnitude of the response to my post. I think a few commenters, spoonyj and ttgiang15 come to mind, got at what I was trying to say quite eloquently (and probably did a better job than even I could).</p>
<p>I agree that to surmise that there is an elect, some genius that deserves to be admitted to these schools, that is somehow intellectually superior, is patently FALSE. But thats not what I claimed.</p>
<p>Based on these friends experiences (and their backgrounds, which from my previous experience with CC would suggest that they would be crapshoots), I had to conclude that something other than a relatively arbitrary, or even variable, process was at work. They got into these schools with surprising regularity. I confirmed this when I went to several of these schoools admit weekends and saw that many other students had been just as heavily cross-admitted. Many were not athletes, URMs, legacies etc </p>
<p>I postulated a hypothesis as to what might explain this phenomenon. It seemed that thhe big differentiator was what I perceived as a very intangible quality, intellectuality, as I called it a thirst for knowledge, a jocular quality, playfulness, questioning.</p>
<p>I made a number of important disclaimiers:
the college application serves as an (admittedly imperfect) tool to decipher [this]
plenty of people who do possess this quality don't necessarily get accepted to Harvard or Stanford. It is no binary whose presence is always openly and readily discerned (as an aside, perhaps one of my most intellectual peers is a student at Georgetown. Do I feel differently about him because he isnt at Yale? NO!)
This is not the only quality top schools look for
I guess what Im trying to tell you is that this is a tentative explanation that would suggest why some candidates do better than others at getting into HYPS. Its not an end-all, be-all theory.</p>
<p>Now, there were some SERIOUS problems with what I wrote. Someguyordudes mockery of my text was HILARIOUS, and correct. I have a somewhat pompous style, but give me a break Im not even in college! Besides, perhaps I employ latin phrases or long words because I find them more accurate, because they add wit and verve to my writing. To attack me for using them seems like a mild form of Pol Pots regime, which singled you out as an intellectual (to be executed) if you wore glasses. An F. Scott Fitzgerald quote comes to mind, but I fear that noting it here would only bring more castigation.</p>
<p>Frankly, I can take criticism of my writing style, but I am DEEPLY HURT when people assume that I am arrogant or feel self-superior because of what I wrote. I intentionally omitted characterizing myself beyond some simple background facts to avoid this. NOWHERE do I say that I possess this spark. PAFATHER, I am deeply hurt that you say I was a mistake. You dont know me. I wonder where you get the idea that Im arrogant. I try to suggest an alternative explanation as to why we see the patterns we do, and you attack me as pompous. You call me a ****-head! WHY?</p>
<p>I get the feeling that some of this anger has to do with a feeling of moral desert thats attached to getting into a top schools. When I mentioned that this goes against some peoples sense of an egalitarian meritocracy, I was speaking of an American kind of merit. We like to believe that with hard work and dedication, passion, anyone can reach any level of achievement. Furthermore, we see elite schools as a kind of top achievement, and a reward for working hard in high school.
I find this odd. Few in Europe would assume that people at top schools are there because theyre better people, or that you deserve to go to a top school. Rather, getting in is seen as a function of some kind of smarts (Im not going to pick apart intellegent vs intellectual here). This is a healthy attitude. Universities are communities of learning, and their task is first and foremost to find people who will contribute to that learning. That means that some people will have it an others wont.
But why do some among us have to attach such moral significance to such discrimination? After all, going to HYPS doesnt make you a better person. I never said it does. I never said these friends of mine are good people, or that Im somehow better for having gotten into school X. </p>
<p>Does it then make me arrogant and pompous to postulate, that you can attribute unto different people different levels of intellectuality, and that top schools might consider such a measure?</p>
<p>Finally, let me address some particular criticisms.
I have nothing against PENN. Both of my parents have degrees from Penn, it is an amazing school. I just didnt list it because among most of my friends, and many other cross-admits I met, Penn was not one of the schools they were deciding between, even when they had been admitted.</p>
<p>Additionally, as to how I know these people: I know none of the 20 I mentioned from IMing. If the web did not exist, I would still know all of them. Small sample size? Yes. But I also know plenty of people who werent admitted to HYP. Im also extrapolating from them. And Im also extrapolating from all the people I met at YPS (no, I didnt get into Harvard. Boo-hoo, big deal).</p>
<p>Finally, I think someone asked why I was posting at 3am. Im in a non-US timezone. No, I not on CC at 3am by my time.</p>
<p>I guess I may have misrepresented myself, but I consider myself a nice and generally down to earth guy who was just trying to say something a little controversial. Reread my original post, and I think you may agree. If anyone wants to email me or send me a PM, please go ahead. Id be happy to talk to you, and maybe convince you Im not an aloof ****-head after all.</p>
<p>I'll be brief, because in fairness the OP did ask for peers, not parents. However, just a couple of observations.</p>
<p>There is some evidence that in the non-"specialty" admit pools, students admitted to one Ivy, or S or MIT, get admitted to at least one other, & often a host of them. This is not just according to Michele Hernandez's experience, but was confirmed when my D re-visited Ivies she was deciding between, & noticed that many of them had multiple acceptances, despite not being mostly development admits (either). Lots of seemingly middle-class folks she saw there, some with 5 HYPSM acceptances.</p>
<p>However, a combination of factors is involved: quality of the student (not crapshoot), quality of the application (not crapshoot), and needs of the school this year (crapshoot). You might be an Admit for the first 2 factors, but be unlucky enough to have an academic, EC, & personality "clone" apply from a different region from which the school is seeking to recruit students. Worse, your "clone" may be from your region! Either situation could jeopardize your admissions chances, & you cannot know that in advance.</p>
<p>pafather, I agree with dufus. I think the OP was impressed with the level of intellectualism encountered among peers, but it was somewhat awkwardly expressed, due to age. Probably the app. did not reflect such an attitude.</p>
<p>And I also agree with anyone that feels that mistakes are made (people admitted & non-admitted) in every admissions office. I'm not making a comment about the OP (truly), but I have seen a number of people be admitted to Stanford (for example) who frankly should not have been. Ironically, this year I saw them choose someone with LESS intellectual spark (but slighter higher GPA & SAT) over someone with intellectual & personal spark overflowing. Oh, & the person they did not admit (W/L'ed) was URM; the person admitted was not.</p>
<p>I thought it was sine <em>qua</em> non, but then I only took 2 yrs of Latin.</p>
<p>Thanks, Frenchbaroque! I appreciate a barometer of sense and rationality without superfluous emotion. Thanks for your calm.
As an aside, it is sine qua non, but i thought i'd hazard sine quis non. qua is the ablative singular, quis abl. pl. In the specific sentence i was referring to several items, not one. really, though, i'm just playing with latin and it may be something one doesn't do. Think of mine as akin to a datum/data distinction...</p>
<p>I think the reason people assume you're a dickhead is because you're throwing around so many buzzwords and trying to sound so intellectual. It's really a turn-off and as you can see, it has irritated your audience. I mean, really, look at some of the phrases you use:</p>
<p>"I agree that to surmise that there is an elect, some genius that deserves to be admitted to these schools, that is somehow intellectually superior, is patently FALSE."</p>
<p>"I postulated a hypothesis as to what might explain this phenomenon."</p>
<p>Nobody talks like that. Whether or not you mean for it to, it comes across as arrogant, like you're trying too hard to look smarter than the rest of the world. At my school, we're actually taught to not cram in so many SAT words to our essays because it makes us look as though we're TRYING to impress. It's off-putting and annoying, and I would say most of us paid more attention to that diction and the attitude it conveyed than what you were actually "positing".</p>
<p>A little bit off-topic, but what's a "development admit"?</p>
<p>At least to me, it seems that there are a number of people on CC who have a viseral reaction against words like "lottery", "crap shoot", and "luck" being applied to the process whereby there were accepted or hope to be accepted to college.</p>
<p>I think it is rude to walk up to somebody and say that they were just lucky to get into Stanford, and the whole thing is just a crap shoot anyway. I also think it is stupid to say that because it is obvious that only the best people get into Stanford.</p>
<p>However, I also think that the people who object to the word "luck" being applied have to understand that CC is about helping people apply to college next year. When it comes down to four people who all have the same SAT scores, the same gpa/rank, all wrote outstanding essays, and all have worldclass EC's; and there is only room for one of them, then luck is involved. IT is truly sad when brand-name consciousness has made the system into this.</p>
<p>The book College Unranked, by the Education COnservancy is a great book. It is a book of essays written by Admin people, educations, college administrators and more. It is very enlightening.</p>
<p>What is a recurring theme is that most often, the schools do not make huge errors in who they take, BUT, they often say no to kids they should not have. </p>
<p>They say that most of the time, the students they pick do not "fail" at the school, but a few may not have shined as much as one they shouid not have rejected.</p>
<p>Why were some picked and some rejected? All the reasons listed in the above posted. One author says "its not you its me"...it often has nothing to do with the applicant, its what is needed by the school at that very moment in time, what has occurred in the days before, what balance they need.</p>
<p>So in that respect its a crapshoot for the applicants, but not for the school. Its more like a coin flip in many cases. </p>
<p>During the process, you have a kind of bell curve, you have a certain number of applicants who are auto no's and auto yes's, then you have this huge amount in the middle, who are qualified, each have their own plusses and minuses and who need to be weeded through...so during that process, it is a bit of luck. Sure, you will have a group of kids admitted everywhere (almost) and who get to choose, and they will be the ones you see, but there are tens of thousands who, while probably deserving to make the cut, didn't because the team only needs so many players</p>