BUT… @lookingforward there are 2000’s students getting accepted from Underrepresented states and 2300+'s getting rejected from NY
And higher stats kids from underrepresented states being rejected. Stats alone isn’t what these schools look for. And there is a huge difference between NYC and the rest of NY state. And then among hs in NYC metro. Geo diversity means the throngs of kids applying to Ivies from NYC will get whittled down. You want to have the stats and then have the rest of what they want. And you learn that from their info, not hearsay.
@lookingforward so what would you recommend a HS junior from a small school with less than 10 kids from NYC to do
Geography plays a minute role in the overall picture. College admissions is holistic and they take everything into consideration. I recommend taking a rigorous courseload in classes that you enjoy, maintain a good relationship with your teachers so you can have two teachers you like write you STRONG recommendations, ask your GC any questions you have and consult with them about things, participate in EC’s that you are passionate about and you enjoy, get the highest grades you can while taking the rigorous courseload, show your personality and your identity through your college essays, and get very good scores/study and work hard to get good scores on your SAT/ACT and/or SAT II tests.
Geography can play a role – albeit, generally very small – in the undergraduate admissions decisions of some institutions, but I believe its importance at the most-selective schools approaches non-assistance. Here’s why:
- East Swampy State University may not have extensive geographic demographics and, therefore, may prioritize matriculation from certain states/regions.
- HOWEVER, this thread concerns Ivy League (and, I’ll add other most-competitive LACs and National Research Universities (NRUs). These schools, in my opinion, are far beyond worrying about “a kid or two from Wyoming.” Rather, they want the most well-rounded and diverse CLASS (not necessary individuals) possible. I cannot imaging Yale’s Dean of Admissions feeling, **“He’s perfect, a piccolo playing, student government president, all-state midfielder, with a 4.0/2400, who won the global Sister Theresa Humanitarian Award, but well have to deny him because he’s from Massachusetts”/b.
I don’t think TT wants you to take the piccolo kid example literally. But any highly compelling kid (for whatever reason- and yes, throw in athletes) will affect the chances of others. How much depends on the who-what-why-where, etc. Geo diversity seems to be something CC is afraid to admit, considering all the threads that say don’t worry or tell how 6 or more got in from one hs they know.
Generally, geo diversity isn’t just about states- it can also extend within states or more local areas. There are exceptions- Stuy gets in more kids. It depends.
That’s why just applying without really knowing what a particular single-digit college looks for is risky. Stats are just a starting point- you have to show you can manage the work at that college. (CC tends to focus on admissions, forgetting that the elites look forward at the four years in college.) But the bar can be flexible. Also, we talk about a 2400 scale and it’s really the CR and M for most majors, then the relevant SAT 2s and AP scores. (Or the parts of the ACT.) Eg, it does little good to have an 800 in writing if you’re STEM and didn’t so well on the M or APcalc.
But once you seem strong enough in the quantitatives, then they look at the rest of what you present.
Another CC idea is that it’s a rounded “class.” Ie, that hey’ll throw together a bunch of unilateral kids or outliers and assume they’ll add up to an interesting community. But ime it’s the individuals. A nice group of rounded individuals, each willing to step outside his or her singular interest zones.
OP,do you mean a small school with lots of kids from different areas (eg, a BS) and ten happen to be from NYC?
@lookingforward no… my school has 10 kids in its graduating class. And yesterday I was talking to a kid from the Carolina’s… who just got into harvard and he told me that they look for a student who has taken advantage of everything that was offered to him in HS. He got a 2090 btw. NO NEW YORKER IS GETTING INTO HARVARD OR ANY IVY WITH A 2090! That was the reason why I started this thread.
@TopTier They do… read the first comment http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-university/1752941-harvard-university-class-of-2019-rd-results-p3.html, and even if they would accept the piccolo player with a 4.0/2400, they’ll simultaneously accept a 3.8/2100 from Idaho…
^^^
This CC reference has been cited serval times as “proof” in this thread. How do we know it’s true? I intend no offense to the specific poster, but just because something is stated on CC does not make it factual.
Not just everything offered by the hs. That can be too easy, the path of little resistance, little vision, little proof of what you’re made of. And what’s that 2090 comprised of, for what sort of major? Don’t rely on what some hs senior says. Go straight to the source, the colleges’ own words, as a starter. Will PM you later.
@TopTier I understand that its impossible t “know” if it’s true but at the end of the day… we can’t know if any of these threads are true. BTW even if it weren’t true I can site you MANY other sources with similar stats that were rejected or waitlisted… while others with “not so similar” stats were accepted
The answer is simple: Yes. (but see the last paragraph). There is more competition applying from NY/Ca (and a couple of other places, but I’ll focus on NY) than there would be applying from Montana. To suggest otherwise is absurd. Elite colleges are looking for geographic diversity. They could fill all their seats with New Yorkers with 700+ scores and A averages. I don’t think the need for geographic diversity matters much to superstar candidates. They will get in regardless of where they are. But for the “almost outstanding” students, the college’s goal of geographic diversity will play a role.
It is a little more complicated than I’m making it seem but not that much more. NY has a predominance of upper middle class families that craft their offspring’s application from the cradle onward. By the time that “almost outstanding” student’s application lands on the admission officer’s desk, the student has had the essay obsessively edited by parents and sometimes even professionals; great earned scores are preceded by high quality private tutoring or other prep beyond what public schools generally offer; summers are spent in extravagantly expensive prep/travel/“do good” programs that come on the heals of elite summer camps that end at 14. In other words, those applicants have been nurtured out of having to do a thing themselves or to ever experience failure or disappointment or to ever step out of their comfort zone. In the past, the path to college was distinctly different for most US students. And while more students outside NY are now similarly molded than in the past, it is still more of a NY phenomenon.
So, to return to an example from a poster " Harvard with a 2050 and few Ecs, no sat 2s, from Montana… MEANWHILE I saw a kid from NY with a 2370, Intel semifinalist, and like 5 leadership roles, Rejected, from New York… So that’s what I mean" I would not be so sure that the kid for Montana isn’t a much stronger candidate then the rejected NYer with the fancy scores and Intel semifinalist distinction, if that kid has the background I describe, which is probable. The kid from Montana (who is far less likely to have been molded as a pre-college specimen) is a better bet. Would you really want the Ivy league schools filled with only the type of student I describe? Would be like staying in a Long Island High School for 4 more years. Who wants that?
Left from the post above: Schools don’t deny this fact. They do admit that geographic distribution is important to them. They also want graduates in every state.
@lostaccount , what if your from NYC, but you don’t have that background? I mean… someone living in union square going to stuyvesant hs is different than someone who lives in Harlem and goes to a zone school. I agree with you completely, but from my POV, its frustrating to know that I might be rejected, but If I came from montana, I’d be accepted.
Unlikely. Few schools, if any, are going to accept a student from Montana simply based upon geography. If you were rejected from NY, you’d likely be rejected from MT.
Just a little bit I’d like to throw in:
My friend who applied to Harvard (he’s attending!) was told by his admissions counselor that 70% of the applicants could keep up academically at Harvard, tons of kids are qualified, it’s just they have a limited number of spots and it’s hard saying who makes the cut and who doesn’t.
The Harvard Crimson had an interesting article recently on regional diversity: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/3/26/regional-diversity-scrutiny/
Actually said kid from Montana is probably the son of the physics professor at the University of Montana and the local veteraniarian who went to Cornell. To the extent the local high school does not have AP Calc BC, there are plenty of distance learning sites that mom and dad signed him up for. Friend is at a HYP and his roomate is from one of those states. His father is the Provost of a LAC located in that state.
Also, Intel is geographically based. Kids from smaller states are in high demand as lab partners by kids from New York and New Jersey.
Plenty of kids I know had access to these resources, they still did not score a 2370 including one kid who did nothing but study. Another who took the SATs 6 times and crapped out at 2000. Yes there are a few prep schools in Manhattan where almost everyone gets in the 700s, whether that is a high quality education or the less academic kids are weeded out by 9th grade and new smarter ones are accepted, no idea. The rest of the state, including Roslyn High School and Chappaqua, do not have SATs that are that high except for the top 10% of kids.
None of the elite schools will take a student who they don’t think is qualified. But it is true that statistics does favor kids from less populated regions. The kid from Montana may be " the son of the physics professor at the University of Montana and the local veterinarian who went to Cornell." But consider how many more offspring of physics professors and Cornell vets will be applying to IVY schools from NY compared to Montana. On the other hand, Ivy League schools accept far more students from NY than from Montana.
Colleges have missions that are dissimilar to summer camp. Summer camp is all about the student experience. It exists for one purpose-to give kids a great experience. College isn’t just about giving students a great experience. It is also about generation and dissemination of new knowledge. One way knowledge gets disseminated is through students. Educated students use their education after they leave the school to impact on their home community. In some ways then students serve as extension of the school. Ivy League+ schools want to impact beyond NY that way. The article posted above about a student from Wyoming is an example.
On the plus side, geography is one of those things you can change. You could move to Montana or Wyoming for that matter. I hear land is readily available. On the other hand, the sorts of educational opportunities and all kinds of other things are not available. That is the downside. From my standpoint there are too many downsides to move to a place like that.
verizonwireless, I understand your frustration but there are other things to consider. Every Ivy League school takes far more students from NY than they do from Montana. If you are dissimilar from the students I describe then you will probably be evaluated differently. Adcoms can discriminate one from the other. This is also where that expression “Life isn’t fair” comes in. You have certain advantages the kids from Montana don’t. You have access to the most culturally rich city in the world. You have a slightly lower chance of getting into an IVY then if you lived in Montana. Most people would say the trade off puts you on the winning side.
In my opinion, it’s not about having “too many kids from New York” but getting “a couple of kids from Wyoming”.
First things first: there were 37,000 applications for 1990 places, 35 of whom posted on CC’s “Official Decision Thread”. There is no way that this is a representative sample.
Second: Harvard reports that they turn down >1000 perfect SAT scores in a year- and about 100 students in a year have perfect scores. In other words, Harvard turns down more people with perfect scores than it accepts. Standardized test scores might get your application cut, but they won’t get you in.
IRL, the vast majority of the students that I know who have been admitted to Harvard make sense to me, whether or not their ‘stats’ on paper are the most impressive. It would be less stressful for applicants if there was a straightforward checklist: “tick these boxes and you are in”- but that’s not usually how it works. That’s why the MIT quote is so great (apologies for not being able to credit the first CC poster that put it up):
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/there_is_no_formula
and this:
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/whats_the_big_deal_about_402