I’m not saying that it’s better, just that it is what it is.
Another problem is that, even if my D is accepted into the top college, it would never be celebrated as HER ACHIEVEMENT. She won’t be able to through her fists into the air as say, “Yes, I did it!”. I feel sad that she won’t have her moment of triumph.
She applied to a very good magnet HS school. Was told that her stats are not very good. Ok, fine, we understand. As a naïve girl, I called admission and told them that she would like to withdraw her application (if her chances are slim, anyway) and apply to a different school. I was asked to wait, and within few hours she received a “likely acceptance” email. Later, she was accepted. Triumph? Ney. Sleazy feeling of a used car dealership.
BTW, magnet school is very nice, and kids are great, and teachers are great. Admission s@@@@
California- every year lots of kids who don’t have a clue about any of the things you are obsessing about get admitted to elite U’s in the US. Some of them come from small towns with sub-par HS’s which have zero AP classes, and some of them come from big cities but they attended a sub-par HS and instead of Math Olympiad as an extra curricular, they went home to put their younger siblings to bed while their parents closed up the dry cleaning store or diner they own.
Holistic admissions- as practiced now- is designed to level the playing field despite the fact that field is not level. I know the history and have read Karabel et al, but as practiced today, the goal is to make sure that a promising kid from nowheresville South Dakota gets his/her application read with as much seriousness as the top kid at a HS in Atherton or a prep school in LA.
That’s all. You can’t ascribe evil motives to a system which you don’t understand. YOU are getting confused by all the messages. That’s because you’d rather rant against the system than try to understand it.
your D will be fine. You may need Xanax by the time you are done getting her into a college in the US, then transferring to the UK, where- guess what- the system isn’t perfect either. Your D’s plan to major in Spanish (when that’s her first language- which means that her achievements in her heritage language won’t give her the boost that it would if she grew up speaking Russian and THEN learned Spanish) will fall off the rails if she gets to Oxbridge and decides she wants to “read” politics, law, or medicine.
So our system may stink in your eyes- but it sure provides a lot of options for the typical American teenager who is not ready to commit to a profession at age 17.
I have many family members in Europe- some Oxbridge grads- and you should hear them $%^& about how burnt out they are by age 35 working in a field they grew to hate by the time they got their first degree.
They are honest about it. It’s no secret they have a good football team and value athletics a lot.
Hey I didn’t like it either - the only kids who were ever accepted to Stanford from our east coast high school were recruited athletes. I figured that my kid’s chances of getting in were even smaller than the overall acceptance rate suggested. Other similarly selective schools that are aware of the quality of our students were a better bet. He still applied to Stanford and didn’t get in. No big deal - I think the place he ended up was just about perfect for him.
And all that stuff? APs, grades, scores? They are all important. It’s just that there are so many kids who bring that stuff to the table they are looking for other things as well. And yes, they do make room at the table for kids who for one reason or another don’t have all the numbers, but look like they’d benefit from a college education at a top institution anyway. (Or who might help them win football games.)
You seem to want the schools to tell you very specifically what to do. They cannot do that because circumstances vary, so instead they give guidelines. They are not going to say “APs are very important and you should take 10 of them”. This is because some applicants attend schools which do not offer APs, or have only a few. Again, they do not want to exclude promising applicants from such backgrounds. So they say you should take a challenging program. The definition of that is going to vary between schools, even between good schools. Is it fair to kids at our school that a challenging program would include perhaps 10 AP classes, when kids are your school only need to take 6 (If I understood you correctly to say that you are limited to 3 per year starting in junior year)? No, it’s not fair, but coming out of our environment, a kid who takes only 6 APs probably wouldn’t even have enough rigor as defined by our school to be in the top 10% of the class. None of this is equal or fair and there are schools which on all measures are very different from either of ours. The admissions officers are just trying to compare apples and oranges as best they can.
I personally don’t like the special recruitment of athletes at all. But I don’t feel the colleges are lying about it and no one is forcing my kids to apply to school which we feel overvalue athletics.
As far as those test scores go, they are a pretty imperfect measure of ability even in the areas they claim to test. I personally never got A’s in English but I had extremely high standardized test scores. I am quite sure I outscored basically all the kids who were getting the As I never got in high school. My 9th grade daughter, on the other hand, is a fantastic writer and aspiring author with quite a few awards and publications. She will do well but I’m not confident she will match my English scores. Timed tests are not really her strength. Should the colleges care how many multiple choice questions she correctly answers in a few hours? Or should they care that her teachers rave about her writing? And should they care about her math scores when she is unlikely to take a single math class in college?
no one has ever been accepted at Stanford from my son’s school, in SE Fl. My son was first ever accepted to another CA school. Since then, a few more acceptances.
CA and Ne colleges just don’t know our public schools. The AP courses, and the 5’s on exams, help them understand. What is there not to comprehend?
Stanford admissions has always been somewhat random. I don’t think it’s very productive to focus on Stanford as your dream school, perhaps unless you’ve started and sold a business or two as a high schooler. About 30 years ago when I was in high school, the story was that Stanford admissions worked by having the adcoms throw the applications down a stairwell. All the ones that landed on the 5th step got in.
Our fairly highly-ranked large CA public has mostly only had athletic admits to Stanford. The Naviance plot is very scattered, far more so than all the UCs, MIT, Ivys, etc. It’s not just football that they reserve spots for. They recruit athletes for volleyball, track, swimming, water polo, etc. Stanford is not the Ivy League, so they don’t have the Ivy League’s limitations on athletic recruiting, just the NCAA limitations.
If you want admission mostly by stats, and it doesn’t seem like you really do, look at Caltech.
The ACT score distribution at Stanford is a poor argument. Stanford wants all score reported. Some students may took ACT early on for certain purpose like talent programs or tried the test unprepared. Then they focused on SAT and got admitted with great SAT scores. There are also athletes recruits and legacy admission with lower stat. My D’s classmate was among the bottom ACT tier but got admitted with double legacy.
Honestly, look at the SES distribution at Ivys. It is bad. You come up with an example of a likable kid from a farm in the middle of nowhere … In reality, such kids are NOT the prime beneficiaries of holistic approach.
Look at Stuyvesant. Merit based admission. Lots of kids from poor families.
Look at Harvard. Holistic admission. Very low percentage of kids from poor families.
AP exams were specifically designed to equalize opportunities. To give an opportunity to a kid in the middle of nowhere to prove that he is able to master a difficult subject. The results of these exams (objective measure) are not really appreciated by Ivys. Reference letters from teachers (highly subjective measure) play a huge role in the admission.
Please understand that a well-connected family has a better opportunity to take advantage of “soft measures”, such as recommendation letters, camps, EC, special talents, etc. Poor kids from rural areas have less opportunity for a flashy EC and “author in a scientific publication”. Rich families pay counselors to package applicants. Poor families can’t do it.
IMHO, if you want to help poor kids, make criteria for admission clear and objective. Rich families would always find a way to game the system. It is harder to game a simple, transparent system than a holistic (black-box) one.
I really appreciate achievements of your kids. You are blessed to have great kids!
And the U.S. does have schools with published, clear admissions standards. You will get in with a GPA of x and an SAT/ACT of y.
They are not the moat prestigious schools, but your D is free to apply to them as well. Since you think that getting into a prestigious school wouldn’t be worth celebrating anyway, why not?
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Both, my husband and I are Stanford babies. Our D was conceived and born at Stanford. Yes, it hurts to realize that my precious little genius (my smarter than me!) wont have an opportunity that I took without sweating 
I am grateful to CC community for discussion and support. Good luck to all kids!
Times have changed. Believe it or not once upon a time I got into Penn (and couldn’t afford it) but there is no way under the sun I would get in today with the same profile. There’s also no way under the sun that I would have gotten into Cal where I ended up. It’s just different today and there’s no point lamenting it. Our son comes home with stories of parents who are pressuring their kids around admissions to Ivy schools that are soooooo much harder to get into than they were a generation ago. He tells me that kids are really stressed because their parents don’t get how things have changed. Don’t make your D that kid. She will shine as she is.
OK, what do you define as merit? Should they just admit by SAT scores? So if you win the International Math Olympiad but you missed a question on the math SAT you are not in the top 20,000 of math students in the US and you don’t get in. Is that what you define as merit?
OK so you aren’t great at answering lots of questions in a hurry. But you’ve published a NYT bestselling novel. No admission for you, you don’t have merit because you didn’t fill in the blanks in those sentences exactly perfectly or perhaps the computer that graded your SAT essay didn’t appreciate the sophistication of your writing.
The SAT does measure something but it is hardly a complete measure of academic talent. I don’t know why some people are so very singlemindedly obsessed with it as the measure of merit.
And how awful for American students that colleges are telling them to explore their interests and pursue their passions. How stressful for them! They’d be oh so much happier if they were just told their entire life and family honor depends on a test and they’d better start preparing for it at age 6. That would be so much better.
“I was told that it may be easier to get into US college first, and then transfer to Oxford-Cambridge.”
californiaaa, your D can’t transfer to Oxford or Cambridge- you can only come in as a first year. She can certainly take a year of college courses and then apply- but I don’t think it will be any much advantage. If she has the numbers (SAT / APs / any relevant aptitude tests) and a clear interest in and aptitude for the subject that she is applying to study the only real difference from an application point of view would be the extra maturity that another year would bring. The key is that she has to know what she wants to study: admissions is very focused. As one tutor put it, ‘we just want you to love our subject as much as we do’.
It is very hard to get worked up over a kid with two Stanford educated parents who might have to settle for JHU, CMU, Cornell, Rice, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, or another two dozen or so “elite” colleges which – if her stats are indeed as high as you claim/predict them to be, will be highly probably admits for her.
Around my neck of the woods- Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Princeton- too tough to call. Even if your kid walks on water, the sheer numbers suggest that even a perfect candidate will get locked out due to a MORE perfect candidate who lives in the town 20 miles from you.
But there are dozens of colleges (and I’m not even tackling Michigan, Berkeley, Virginia et al) where the tippy top candidates ought to be focused on.
Perseverating about the unfairness of Stanford seems like a psychiatric disorder given the huge number of other high quality universities in this country.
“Kids are getting confused by opposing massages: Take rigorous classes, but only if your school offers them.”
Well, how are they supposed to take rigorous classes if their school doesn’t offer them? And spare me the “everyone can find a local college.” Sure, if they live near one, and their parents can afford to spare a car for their use.
" AP classes are important, but AP exams are not that important. Dual enrollment is good, but it is irrelevant. Poor kids, I see why they think “whatever!”."
It must really suck not to have a formula for life that you can dutifully fill out.
"Honestly, look at the SES distribution at Ivys. It is bad. You come up with an example of a likable kid from a farm in the middle of nowhere … In reality, such kids are NOT the prime beneficiaries of holistic approach.
Look at Stuyvesant. Merit based admission. Lots of kids from poor families.
Look at Harvard. Holistic admission. Very low percentage of kids from poor families."
Stuyvesant isn’t going to accept anyone other than New Yorkers (by definition, that is its mission, to serve NY). It’s a subway ride away from even the poorest of families in its catchment area. Harvard, on the other hand, is considerably more than a subway ride away from the majority of poor families in this country. The vast majority of poor families in this country don’t give one moment’s thought to Harvard - it’s not on their radar screen.
And Harvard admits that it has VERY preferential admissions for low income kids in its own catchment area in Boston. Every April there are folks on this board complaining that a kid from a crappy HS in Allston, Somerville, or Cambridge got in with a 720 verbal SAT while nobody from their HS in Scarsdale or Pacific Palisades has ever been admitted without a 790.
And really, why shouldn’t they? I don’t have a problem if Harvard “unfairly” privileges poor kids in the Boston area compared to poor kids in any other major metropolitan area in the spirit of being a “good neighbor,” even though it’s not the kid’s doing where he lives. It’s one of those “unfairnesses” that are just part of life.
I also note that it’s “unfair” that some kids are born with athletic or musical or leadership or mathematical talent, but no one seems determined to try to correct for that.