<p>lookingforward- I think that there is a difference in a student that is pretty close, or “might get in” applying to a reach school that they have wanted to go to for many years, and students that have well below average stats that only apply to reach schools figuring that they will get in to one of them. </p>
<p>Or applying to all reach schools and one “safety”.</p>
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<p>Once more, with feeling … That depends on where you live. Again, there are vast swathes of the country where parents / gc’s / kids don’t think twice about having the big-fish aspire to the state school and where the Ivies (etc) really aren’t on the radar screen.</p>
<p>Put another way, for every smart, affluent suburban MA/NY/NJ/PA/VA/DC/CA kid whose parents think that they are Ivy bound, there are probably 10 or 20 other equally-smart kids in this country who don’t have anyone around them who would ever put an Ivy on their radar screen. So that’s why this doesn’t strike me as a huge “problem.” It’s more important, IMO, to get the word out about the better schools to the parents / places who don’t know about them, than to worry that an affluent kid didn’t get to realize his Ivy dream like a dozen of his classmates did. And I say this as the parent of affluent kids, LOL.</p>
<p>My philosophy is that our kids should attend the best school, with the greatest fit, that offers the most $$$. That could be our state flagship or an Ivy. </p>
<p>It is crazy to ignore all the great lesser known private schools out there that may be willing to offer merit aid.</p>
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<p>Yes to an extend. At the Cornell info session, the admission officer said. “2400 SAT and 4.0, we have plenty of those. If you can play tuba and our band needs one, you are in.”
He went on to explain that not everyone needs to have high SAT/GPA. They are looking for students to form a diverse class and who can succeed at Cornell.</p>
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<p>Yes, and New Haven remains so, today.</p>
<p>Lookingforward, your post only illustrates the problem with the high school GC situation. Kids apply to college only once. How the heck are THEY supposed to know that their app is dimadozen in today’s atmosphere? They don’t.</p>
<p>I think the top colleges ought to make an effort to educate the GC’s as to the standards and difficulty and I think they do not because they want to have all of those apps and that percentage acceptance for the rankings.</p>
<p>A school with only 5% RD acceptance like Harvard who is still sending out advertising material to the top SAT scorers, who may or may not have access to valid information regarding selectivity, is simply not playing fair with the kids in the applicant pool, imo.</p>
<p>davh01:
Unfortunately, with comments like the tuba one, there are parents who will take him at his word. We have a generation of kids who were shunted to oboe or euphonium or whatever someone thought would be their ticket rather than excelling to their ability at the things they loved (or even being allowed to find what they loved) and finding the fit according to their actual academic and interest temperament.<br>
We read these threads where students are saying, essentially, the last 6 years of my life were a waste because I didn’t get into schools x,y and z. Maybe they’re right if they only chose or were allowed to chose classes and activities with their eyes on the prize.</p>
<p>It is not a great difference what UG kid ended up going, the cheapest the better, the free i the best. The difference is in what student will achieve, including personal growth, in these most important 4 years of his life. There are Honors colleges at every place and they are filled with valedictorians, many of them form private prep. who went there because they rely on their work ethic and not the name of UG. they have achieved the same as their peer at Elite colleges. Actually many of them ended up at the same places after graduation as Ivy/Elite graduates. It is all up to a student, relying on prestige of college might not bring results at all and in many cases it does not.</p>
<p>MiamiDAP- remind us again. Did your daughter go to a state school and where is she now?</p>
<p>One interesting point is that the states who don’t think about the Ivies have a greater chance of admittance and the kids from areas with Ivy fever have even smaller than average chances.</p>
<p>Tuba is just shorthand for the fact that “community” needs can sometimes “tip.” The kid still has to be academically in-range, have some achievements, good essays and etc.</p>
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<p>It depends on what you think is a worse error – disappointing a kid who applies and doesn’t get in, or missing out on a “diamond in the rough” who doesn’t seriously think that Harvard is a place for people like him. Look, this is simple Type I vs Type II error (or alpha vs beta error). Colleges can choose to minimize one error or the other in sending out mailings (etc), but they can’t choose to do both simultaneously.<br>
The more they mail to identify those diamonds in the rough, the more they “artificially excite” the Fairfax County and Short Hills crowd. Obviously they think it’s worse to miss out on the diamond in the rough than to disappoint some hopefuls. I personally happen to agree with them, but that’s neither here nor there. What’s the solution – stop mailing, and have Harvard on the radar screen only of the Fairfax County and Short Hills crowd? How is that POSSIBLY a “better” solution?</p>
<p>^^^Totally agree with Pizzagirl. Besides, who doesn’t have “access to valid information regarding selectivity” in this day and age? In any case, the anger and disappointment anyone feels over a college rejection ought to be transient. Also, to quote from Casablanca, none of this “amount[s] to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” It really, really doesn’t.</p>
<p>“It depends on what you think is a worse error – disappointing a kid who applies and doesn’t get in, or missing out on a “diamond in the rough” who doesn’t seriously think that Harvard is a place for people like him.”</p>
<p>That’s making me chuckle, and I’m really tired right now, so that’s quite a feat. If you really think that the reason Harvard is attempting to get even more people to apply, encouraging them in any way in order to find that elusive “diamond in the rough,” that cracks me up. I’m sure it has nothing to do with trying to keep that #1 spot, climbing to the top of the selectivity lists. They just can’t find enough accomplished kids to apply!</p>
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<p>Oh, the melodrama of the capitalized Possibly… LOL.</p>
<p>As I said in that same post, the top schools either need to educate the high school GC’s as to what an actually qualified candidate for Hahvaad admissions looks like, or stop mailing out the advertising circulars. </p>
<p>Absweetmarie, it may not amount to a hill of beans to you, but if you really believed that you wouldn’t hang around CC. So thank you for playing. When kids have piles of rejections, it is because they have been ill-advised. When they have no financial safeties it is because they have been ill-advised. If you believe this is unimportant, I think you are wrong. </p>
<p>And, yes, thank you busdriver. That post about the diligently searching top schools searching for that burried diamond in the rough out there, somewhere… oh, where could they be HIDING? made me laugh, too.</p>
<p>Harvard doesn’t have a clue who is receiving their promotional mail, they simply have a mailing list drawn from reported test scores. They may hone that down somewhat by zip code – but other than that they are simply marketing to a large set of potential targets, knowing that the students they want to reach will be among that set. </p>
<p>That may be an inefficient way to do college marketing… but I’m not sure there is information available to them sufficient to narrow their market in a meaningful way. They could, of course, forget the mass mail entirely … but at least at this point, that’s still an important component of marketing for most universities.</p>
<p>Harvard’s “brand”—independent of any other quantitative superiority it has—is enough to keep it on top in people’s minds, if not in all published rankings. Besides, whatever. They can send promotional material anywhere they want and to anyone they want. Doesn’t make them predators!</p>
<p>poetgrl: I stand by what I said. It really doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, regardless of how obsessed I may or may not be with the sturm und drang of College Confidential. I do not think it is unimportant that some people are ill advised. But if we are talking about reasonably well-educated kids who overshot or didn’t create broad enough lists, I would bet that things work out okay in the end for most of those kids in the college search sweepstakes. If someone has data that prove me wrong, I’m interested to see them. This is not to minimize real socioeconomic problems that keep some bright kids from achieving all they could educationally. But if we are talking about kids with 2250 SAT scores whose college application lists are skewed, who might have to attend a safety or, gasp, drop back and punt … Yeah, not a hill of beans.</p>
<p>And, by the way, are these kids and their parents really not accountable for their own reactions to glossy brochures from Harvard? I mean, come on. When I get a mouth-watering catalog from, say, Room and Board, I am tempted. I dream of what my condo could look like with a couch that hasn’t been scratched to smithereens by cats. But what I can’t afford, I don’t buy. I know how advertising works. I don’t blame the company for sending me the catalog.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter how many times you add another paragraph to your post, it won’t change it.</p>
<p>The kids are being badly advised because the application process has changed.</p>
<p>If it had not changed, the waitlists would not be getting increasingly longer each year. </p>
<p>I also try not to say something on a forum I wouldn’t say to someone’s face. So, if you believe you would sit across the coffee table from these parents and tell them that this does not amount to more than a “hill of beans” … </p>
<p>carry on.</p>
<p>Actually, poetgrl, I would make the “hill of beans” point to someone’s face, reminding that person of the context in which it was uttered in Casablanca, against a backdrop of a world at war. I get that people are disappointed, and I do feel for people who have been disappointed. I do not think a rise in dashed Ivy hopes (or dashed any-kind-of-dream-school hopes) constitutes a national crisis. </p>
<p>I am not an unkind person here or “in real life.” I have lots of friends who have gently chided me about the extent to which the search for my own child’s school has preoccupied me. The feedback has been justified. </p>
<p>I added the other paragraphs because I had already posted one without seeing the comment you directed at me in the other post. Is this a problem?</p>
<p>poetgrl: For what I would imagine is the vast majority of kids, the GCs are not providing advice. That’s not what they do at most public schools. They do class registration, troubleshoot problems, fulfill transcript orders, fill out the student profile and attach everything to the common app hopefully on time. They are not out there handholding most kids. If a kid has a parent who is forking over $90 per app plus score reports for a list of ivies and similar schools the parents might have done their homework more thoroughly. The kids may have been ill-advised, but I don’t think it’s the job of the colleges to provide tutorials to guidance counselors or the job of guidance counselors to shape every kid’s list when their charges number in the hundreds. Parents know their kids, and anyone with an internet connection has the resources to poke around and get some facts. Yes, times have changed - this isn’t the days of picking a school out of a giant catalogue in the career center.</p>
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<p>Nor do I, nor did I say that I did, frankly.</p>
<p>But, kids facing the end of dreams, whether the dreams were realistic or not, is more than a “hill of beans” to me. 
Actually, there are entire gradations between “hill of beans” and “national crisis.”</p>
<p>I think it falls somewhere on the line of “life lesson.”</p>
<p>Life lessons are important and deserve to be treated with respect. JMO.</p>