<p>Are you saying there are no hooks at Caltech? Or the hooked admits are fewer because they don’t recruit for sports?</p>
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<p>That depends on your definition of ‘hook’. Caltech rejects their shares of kids with perfect stats. They are looking for intense passion and incredible ability in math and science. The ‘hook’ for Caltech may be the activity or activities that show both passion and ability. Btw, given similar credentials in a toss-up, I believe Caltech still tips the favor to URMs and kids from under-represented states.</p>
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<p>FWIW - two percent of the entering freshmen this fall at CalTech (5 kids) were from one Illinois high school. All five were Asian males. And there were three kids admitted who went elsewhere (don’t know their genders or ethnicities).</p>
<p>Caltech breakdown, according to College Board:
40% Women
60% Men
<1% American Indian or Alaska Native
42% Asian
2% Black or African American
5% Hispanic/Latino
33% White
5% Two or more races
10% Non-Resident Alien</p>
<p>If they give a URM tip, it doesn’t help much.</p>
<p>That stuff bovertine posted links for is great! When I entered Yale, 1510/1600 on the SAT would have put you comfortably within the top 10% of students by SAT scores. That corresponds to about 2270 now – sort of the bottom threshold of where your scores shouldn’t be an insuperable problem without major hooks. At Harvard, the equivalent number was 1540.</p>
<p>S1 was recruited by Caltech for a specific hook (personal letter from the head of admissions referencing specific things); the campus paper had an article that fall stating that admissions was starting to recruit more actively for these kinds of things. 2380 single sitting, 800 Math Level II freshman year, 800 Physics, 730 World Hist, 9 APs (all 5s, incl Calc BC soph year, Physics C Mech & E&M, CS AB), 13 post-AP courses in math, CS and physics, leadership positions, significant teaching experiences and was the only student in the country his year with a particular trifecta of major national awards. </p>
<p>Waitlisted!!! We found it amusing.</p>
<p>DH got into Wharton in 1979 with a 1500 SAT, but a 90 average. Former BF got into Princeton with a 1410. I got into Duke with a 1300.</p>
<p>I told my kids that their hard work earned them a spot at the admissions committee table, but did not entitle them to an acceptance letter. Should have been more appreciative at the time that they really focused in on the schools they really wanted, regardless of ranking. Neither one matriculated to the “highest ranked” school to which he was accepted.</p>
<p>Hunt, I don’t believe you can use the stats you posted to argue your point, ykwim. </p>
<p>Anyway, what I wrote was “given similar credentials in a toss-up, I believe Caltech still tips the favor to URMs and kids from under-represented states.” The frequency for toss-ups is low to begin with.</p>
<p>Here is where I got my impression from -</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/california-institute-technology/1210591-caltech-diversity-effects-admissions.html#post13320440[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/california-institute-technology/1210591-caltech-diversity-effects-admissions.html#post13320440</a></p>
<p>I know there are problems with this data - unsubstantiated and small sample space, but it corroborates with other things/rumors I heard from Caltech.</p>
<p>All I’m saying is that Caltech ends up with a lot less URMs as a percentage than other highly selective schools. And since they don’t recruit athletes, how many “hooked” students can there really be there? Caltech was brought up just to show that its score distribution is not that different from Harvard–which (in theory) has a much larger percentage of hooked students.</p>
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It’s hard for me to see how all those hooked applicants are both ‘half the class’ and ‘bring the averages way down’.</p>
<p>Let’s compare Harvard with CalTech.<a href=“emphasis%20is%20mine”>/quote</a></p>
<p>You are quoting medians in your comparison to Caltech, not “averages”. There is a lot of room below Harvard’s 50% median range to let in low scoring kids whose actual scores will have no affect on the median range (once below the range, the score itself doesn’t matter). The actual scores will affect the average though.</p>
<p>I think that these institutional needs are close to half the class. However, at Harvard at least, many of these kids are high scorers who are not bringing down the average or median score. So “way down” is an exaggeration. </p>
<p>I would bet that Caltech’s average scores are above Harvard’s by a safe margin in all three areas of the SAT. And I bet they are even further above those of all the other Ivy League schools with lower yields.</p>
<p>If they are … so what? That proves nothing other than those schools have different admissions philosophies – one very numbers-based and rote, the other taking into account a lot of other characteristics, flavors and talents. God forbid every school in the US should admit like Caltech. Vive la difference.</p>
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<p>That IS amusing. Did you find out later what happened or what they wanted?</p>
<p>Thank You Pizza Girl! I couldn’t have said it any better! It would be boring if all colleges had the same types of students! Variety is the spice of life:)</p>
<p>If anything, my S1’s admission experience showed that Caltech is less number based than most other elites. He got in with a 3.5 GPA, so obviously they saw something beyond the numbers. If anything, his case supports the claim that Caltech admission is more holistic (within its mission of seeking kids with math and science passion, not necessarily quantified by numbers) than many of its peers. </p>
<p>I thought his chance was dismal based on Naviance. Prior to his admission, the lowest admitted GPA from his school for past three years was 3.9. A Caltech classmate got in with even lower GPA and test scores, but was a bona fide computer wiz kid. The same kid was later hired by Apple while still in his freshman year!</p>
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<p>Perhaps, some of these applicants did not demonstrate the type of independence and emotional maturity that these schools were seeking?</p>
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<p>EVERY top school has plenty of 2400 SAT students they reject every year. I fail to see why it’s “disheartening,” unless you believe in the primacy of standardized testing as evidence of merit.</p>
<p>A poster suggested that a big reason why so many “kids over 2250 SAT” are denied is that there aren’t as many open spots at these highly selective schools as people think. Someone brought up Caltech’s SAT scores as evidence that Harvard isn’t admitting (to a great extent) lower scorers to fill institutional needs and I was pointing out that median scores provide no such evidence; you would have to compare mean scores. That’s all I was doing. I wasn’t trying to ‘prove’ anything else. I’m all for vive la difference, especially when it comes to private schools. </p>
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<p>So…
All of DS college classmates (CMU) were also rejects from this same applicant pool. They now know the feeling of rejection and able to move on.</p>
<p>lakes42ks, S1 did not want to follow up. By that point he had acceptances to his top choices and he would not have matriculated there in any event. Suspect the school realized he was a better fit elsewhere (and they would have been absolutely correct). </p>
<p>When S (the math major) said the Caltech philosophy class he sat in on was “too mathy,” I knew this was not going to work. 
Of course, I think the Chicago philosophy sequence he took was a bit more than he expected, too!</p>
<p>S1 and S2 were both at programs where many students applied to the same (uber-selective) group of schools. When roughly 1/3 of the program applies to MIT (S1’s program) and Yale (S2’s program), there was at least some comfort in knowing that even superstars get rejected and that you were not alone!</p>
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<p>I think your analysis is off. In the first place, roughly as many kids take the ACT as the SAT. Certainly there’s some overlap, hard to say exactly how much, but we may be talking about a potential applicant pool more on the order of 3 million rather than the 1.65 million you start with. Second, I don’t know where you got that the Ivies “admitted about 16,000 freshmen.” I’m not sure it’s relevant how many they admitted; I’m also not sure whether you’ve considered that many of these may be cross-admits (often the same student will be offered admission to multiple Ivies). What matters is how many seats there are are the table, i.e., how many freshmen actually enrolled. By my count that number is just under 14,000 at the 6 Ivies, but nearly a quarter of those are at Cornell. Not to say that Cornell doesn’t count as a “real” Ivy; its CAS and College of Engineering are first-rate, but nearly half the enrolled freshmen at Cornell are in other Cornell programs, including some with lower admission standards and some that many Ivy wannabes would not consider to be what they’re striving for. Same for Penn’s School of Nursing and perhaps some other programs here and there at other schools. (Penn is also quite large; just over 40% of all freshmen at the 8 Ivy League institutions are at either Cornell or Penn). So perhaps the number of freshman seats that applicants would consider genuinely Ivy-type seats is closer to 12,000. So right there we’re looking at Ivies taking up less than 1/2 of 1% of SAT- and ACT-takers. </p>
<p>And we know they don’t draw just from the top 1%, or the top 1/2 of 1%. We know because they tell us. We know they go a little deeper into the applicant pool for certain categories of “hooked” applicants; recruited athletes for sure, URMs, maybe a few “development” admits, possibly some first-gens or world-class musicians or film stars or whatever. We know because Harvard, which wins almost all the cross-admit wars and could almost certainly fill its entire entering class with 2300+ SAT scorers if it chose to do so, elects not to do so; in its 2010-2011 Common Data set Harvard reports that 25% of its entering class had SAT CR scores of less 690 (=94th percentile), and 25% had SAT M scores of less than 700 (=93rd percentile). And another 50% of the entering class had SAT M scores in the 700-790 range (= 93rd to 99th percentile). With nearly 3/4 of the entering class not in the top 1% in SAT/ACT scores, that’s going to crowd out a lot of the top-1%-ers.</p>
<p>I think what this clearly tells us is that Harvard is not nearly as impressed with top SAT/ACT scores as most of the rest of us are. Not to say test scores don’t matter. For the unhooked applicant, they can easily be disqualifying. But they’re not a sure path to entry no matter how good they are, even in combination with terrific grades and stellar ECs. At this level it’s just a crapshoot; they’ll take whomever they want, for their own idiosyncratic reasons or for no reason at all, and they’ll never tell you why it was you, or why it wasn’t you. As is their right, of course.</p>