@Oberyn There are scores of middle class kids at the Ivies. Their financial aid policies are now so generous that you can have a parent making a very good salary and still get an almost full ride. And they are need blind, so you don’t “edge out” anyone.
As a white kid who went to Brown, I do find it funny how rejected candidates often claim it is because they were white. Go look around any Ivy. They are full of middle, and upper middle class, white males. I got into Brown but was rejected by Yale. Guess I was discriminated against…
I saw this ridiculous news piece a year or two ago about a URM girl who had “racked up more than $3 million in scholarships.” Her father was pushing her to apply to more schools so she could beat the “scholarship” record at her school. Financial aid is not scholarship. Crazy.
I think saying people are clogging the waitlist is silly. Schools don’t start calling waitlists until after May 1 regardless. My D was deciding between two not-at-all Ivy schools, and she wavered until April 30. That was her prerogative. That is all students’ prerogative.
Precisely, @garland , even Harvard and Stanford admit several hundred kids more than the number of places in the class. Duke admits twice as many students as it expects to enroll because it knows that most of its admits will have multiple elite acceptances. So many threads have complaints that kids are “taking some other kid’s spot” or that they should decline “so a kid can come off the wait list” – that’s just not how it works. They look at their acceptances on May 2 and decide whether they need to admit off the wait list. Often, they’ll wait until mid-summer to see how much “melt” there is (kids who decide to defer and take a gap year or who got off someone else’s wait list or who just put down double deposits because they couldn’t make up their minds). The young lady is not harming anyone by taking her time with her decision.
Also, did it ever occur to you folks commenting on URM and SES benefits and potential unfairness to “average kids” that newspapers and TV stations have very little interest in reporting on the middle class/prep school/ magnet school kid who got into a huge list of elite schools? Success stories about people who have overcome odds are newsworthy, small town kid-made-good is also a common story. Every year, tons of white and Asian-American kids get into all or most of their lists, but it just doesn’t make an interesting story. Thomas Jefferson High School, a public VA school in the DC suburbs known for its rigor and competitiveness, is heavily Asian and sends an astonishing number of kids to the super-selective schools – and yes, according to my high school classmate whose upper-middle class Asian American daughter went to Harvard from there this fall, some of the kids apply to all of the Ivies (plus most of the other elites) for bragging rights. But those kids generally don’t report their results to the newspapers.
Hardship and legacy aren’t hooks without the rest. A lot of kids who chase the golden ring can’t seem to fathom that there’s more than stats that makes one special. Or a handful of hs club titles. Or some “passion.” Any old essay and “My teachers love me.” And if their whole apps don’t impress, it’s got to be those pesky URMs. For heaven’s sake, mind your own apps.
Closed-minded is deadly when applying to a tippy top. Some kids/parents are quite under-informed. Someone points something out and they respond with, “Yes, but,” or some anecdote or some media article. Or with barely concealed snark. I wonder how many complainers can even answer a Why Us in an intelligent and impressive way.
These kids who get into multiples-- it doesn’t matter what color or SES. What matters is they are empowered, activated, open to new experiences, as well as hard working and successful. And their apps show it. And they do it without Mummy and Daddy paying for enrichment, driving them to ECs, or checking their portals. Yes, a lot of the amazing URMs have had some mentoring or have been through pre-college awareness programs. It’s a huge mistake to assume your own situation trumps another’s.
Some of these “grown up in hardship” kids blow the socks off the kids who have been groomed and coddled.
There’s another thread about helicoptering and I’m amazed by the number of parents who are proud that their kid has never done a load of laundry, pushed a vacuum, made a bed. “It’s his job to get good grades and do his sports/EC’s. I’m in charge of supporting that”.
Well guess what- there are kids out there who have been doing the cooking and cleaning for the household for years… AND getting the grades, AND doing meaningful EC’s. When they need a book at the library, they take the bus. When a younger sibling has a dentist appointment after school and mom can’t leave work early, they take the sib to the dentist.
Financial aid wise yes. But admission wise is a different story, in that most of these schools have half of their students not getting financial aid, meaning from families with $200,000+ income or high wealth. Also, even if they admitted only those who would get maximum financial aid, the total number of students they could admit is far fewer than the number of students in PA, IL, etc. who would be left out wondering if they could afford their own state universities.
For some reason these “All 8 Ivies” stories have really caught on with the popular press in the past 2 or 3 years… And the only thing even more predictable than those news stories are the resultant posts on CC saying “How could anyone in his/her right mind even consider applying to all 8 since they are all so incredibly different from each other that students attending Ivy X are not even considered to be the same species as the students at Ivy Y? If students from those two schools mated they’d produce sterile hybrid offspring - like mules.”
The reality is we are talking about young people - at an age when they are near their maximum in resilience and flexibility, and thus most of them can flourish quite nicely in nearly any school setting, be it urban, suburban, or rural. Not every kid is so narrow or fragile that she/he can’t handle the social and cultural gulf between New Haven and Hanover.
And on the academic side, there are plenty of majors that all 8 of the Ivies (and many other schools besides) do pretty well - majors such as English, History, Math, Chemistry, Biology, French, etc. None of the Ivies is sub-par in any of these types of majors.
So if you’re a kid who wants to major in say Math, but you are poor and will need generous finaid, but you are talented and want to go to a top college with great professors and with a good reputation that will set you up nicely for graduate or medical school. Then any one of the Ivies probably sounds like an attractive option. And to increase your chances of getting into at least one of the Ivies you elect to apply to them all. Next thing you know USAToday is doing a news story about your incredible admissions achievement.
Some of the kids applying to all 8 may well be prestige whores. But not always. In some circumstances it can be a perfectly logical choice that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with collecting “trophies.”
No one is going to know about it unless the kid or the school alerts the media. There must be kids who get into all eight who don’t send out a press release, no?
Didn’t take long to prove my point about media links. Notice the article focused on scores and essay, just as most CC. They skipped the “more.”
Try to wrap your head around this: “Some of these “grown up in hardship” kids blow the socks off the kids who have been groomed and coddled.” Just try.
And it’s not only immigrants. Those kids may have aimed at more. But not all poor kids lack family drive.
Nope…not buying it…you don’t apply to all 8 because your “poor and need substantial aid” and other wholesome reasons. But, if you want to believe that, you do you, I still be skeptical and the world will keep spinning.
I’ve known plenty of kids, including one of my daughters, who applied to all 5 HYPSM schools, not because they wanted the glory of getting into ALL of them, but because they were hoping for the opportunity to go to ONE of them. (And all 5 of them are very strong in their intended major.)
It’s not that big a stretch to apply to all 8 Ivies for the same reason.
