What are your stats and which Ivies accepted, rejected, deferred or waitlisted you?
You will probably have better luck using the CC search function, with a search like:
asian accepted decision results
and then Ctrl-F through the pages with “Asian”.
Hi, I know quite a few Asians who are going to Ivies. One of my friends goes to Dartmouth. He only got a 1450 on the SAT, but his GPA was 4.67 and he got 4’s and 5’s on all his AP tests. I think he is pre-med. The other girl got into Dartmouth ED this year, and her ACT is 33. I don’t know about her GPA. I also have two friends who are going to Stanford (I know it isn’t an ivy but). One got a 1500 on her SAT, and the other got 1580. They both had good GPAs; one of them was salutatorian.
Yeah…1580 still deferred. scores dont mean much, especially if you are asian
@bertieprc Scores don’t mean much period. Sadly, many students and parents still think that a very high score is a big deal. Not anymore. The Harvard Club I work with had fewer students admitted EA with very high SAT scores than more modest ones. Financial circumstances however DO matter. Harvard and all the Ivies are aiming for economic diversity and so they do take into account economic circumstances and how these may have affected a candidate’s preparation. Lower- and middle- income Asian students are increasingly well represented thanks to the new financial aid policies.
With approx. 3,500 perfect Math and 2,700 perfect verbal scores and about 1900 students accepted at Harvard, SAT scores certainly won’t get you in. They are meaningful on the low end, but once you’re at/above 1530-50 or so, you’re just in a generic “good test scores” group and you move on to the other categories for evaluation. 1580 isn’t going to move you way ahead of a 1530.
@RichinPitt This is true in general, but maybe not in one specific sense. During the recent lawsuit, it was revealed that Harvard used a metric called the “Academic Index” which reduced GPA, SAT/ACT and SAT II subject tests to an integer from 1-9. CC won’t let me link to it, but if you Google “academic index calculator”, you can find a site that claims to replicate the computation. To get a top AI score, you really do need something very close to a 36 ACT or 1600 SAT and 4.0 UW GPA. Now whether or not there are a real difference in acceptance rates between a “9” and an “8” is another story, but it’s probably better to be a “9” if possible.
After certain level of GPA and test scores, I don’t think these stats matter that much at all. For example, I don’t think 3.9 vs. 4.0 GPA matters that much, as well as 33 ACT vs. 35 ACT or 1500 vs. 1570.
If there was a way to tell who took test once and prepped himself/herself and who spent hundreds of hours at prep centers and took multiple attempts.
The admission landscapes have changed over the last couple decades. By the time my son was applying to colleges, one thing that I was aware and fully convinced of was that, after a certain academic threshold has been crossed, it’s all about what sets the applicant apart and unique from the rest when it comes to the admission chances at tippy top elite colleges. As an Asian-American parent, I see too many fellow Asian-American parents all around me still believing in and practicing by the old paradigm of the traditional mindset that puts premium on academic scores. A good friend of mine was so sure that his daughter with the perfect GPA and SATI and II scores would get into whatever the colleges she applies to that he encouraged her to submit her applications only to HYPS and a couple of top LACs. The family was fortunate enough to have secured just one admission offer from one of the two LACs.
What sets the applicant apart and unique could be anything from the standard hooks, i.e., URM, recruited athletes, development cases, etc. etc., but for those unhooked applicants, a certain level of talents and leadership qualities. In some rare cases, you don’t even need “a certain academic threshold” when you possess a unique quality that a particular college deems highly desirable. David Hogg is the latest example. Harvard wanted him – probably more than Hogg wanting Harvard – in spite of 1270 SAT score. Of course, then there are the likes of Jared Kushner, a solid “C” student but with a rich dad.
But for Asian-American applicants without any hooks, such as my son and many others eyeing the top admission prizes each year? I had posted this elsewhere in the past, but it’s worth repeating. When my son was a sophomore in high school, he had expressed to me that he wanted to “go for” the valedictorian honor. I could tell that he was unnecessarily stressing himself early on with his ambition to get into a top college. Knowing that the perfect GPA and test scores weren’t necessary, I immediately told him to forget about it and continue to develop his unique quality as a violinist and his love for tennis. One thing that I made sure to keep critically important in his high school years was to make sure that he gets to enjoy all the sweet things that high school years bring: homecomings, school plays, proms (he went to 3 of these), dating, parties, etc. His fellow Asian-American friends wouldn’t dare to participate in any of these “unnecessary” and “unproductive” activities that detract from their focus on raising their GPA and test scores.
His fellow Asian-American friend graduated valedictorian while my son graduated 6th in his class with 3.93 unweighted and 4.64 weighted GPA. His two "B"s did him in, LOL. At the school’s formal ceremonial gathering to fete the graduating class, those graduating with the perfect GPA were honored each with a special plaque as well as those with outstanding academic performances in English, History, Chemistry, etc. The only time my son stood up was to perform his violin for the crowd. For his “punishment,” we went out and celebrated at a very fine restaurant afterward.
As soon as his ACT, SAT I and II scores indicated that he had crossed what I considered a “threshold,” I discouraged him from retaking any further tests. I’m sure most of the students who graduated higher in the class standing had better test scores than my son. Instead of spending any more valuable time, effort and money devoted to tests, my son was busy with his “other” life as a violinist, which he started at age 5.
When the admission results came in, none of the students above my son’s class standing were offered admission to any Ivys or top 10 USNWR ranked colleges. My son’s high school typically has only one get admitted to an Ivy, MIT or Stanford at best every two years. For my son’s college list for his applications, we carefully chose those with the focus on undergrad education, so he had on the list 3 LACs that we really liked and some selective research universities that are richly endowed to take care of the quality of their undergrads, including a mixture of Ivys. Of these, he was offered admissions from all LACs, 3 Ivys and 1 other research university, all ranked within top 10. We ultimately chose the one that had a great focus on undergrad education and the best FA offer.
The reason for revealing some of these personal details is that I’m not one of those Asian-Americans who believe that there’s some sort of insidious and intentional racism targeting Asians to keep them out of the Ivy gates. I’ve had enough personal experiences dealing with pain and suffering from racism in my over 4 decades living in this country, too many to recount and my own professional career came to an early end largely because of it. I’m also not saying that there are no flaws in the current admissions policy in the Ivy and other tippy top institutions. I cringed when I read about Harvard’s assessing applicants of Asian descents with low “personality” scores. It was an OMG moment when I first read it in disgust. To me, however, that has more to do with racial stereotyping, subconscious bias and lack of cultural literacy as opposed to a structural and institutional racism the way the Jewish applicants had been subjected to in the 20’s and the 30’s.
As an Asian-American applicant, how was it possible that my son secure his place in 3 Ivys, 3 top LACs and 1 other research university, all within top 10 WITHOUT stellar test scores and perfect GPA? How was it possible that none of those students above in his graduating class standing with better GPA and test scores were able to secure even one Ivy spot? That’s because, as I stated at the very beginning of this post, the admissions landscape has changed. The tippy top elite colleges are now fully aware that possessing a perfect academic stats isn’t a good indicator of future leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, etc. They can certainly become excellent sheep but not a sure bet to great things. When it comes to academic qualifications, all they care is that the applicant won’t struggle mightily once on campus. Even for those rare 1270 SAT student, Harvard doesn’t care if Hogg drops out now that he’s associated with the name, Harvard. Harvard has always whored itself this way. For the ordinary applicants, whether Asians or not, the changed admissions landscape means the applicant needs to possess a unique quality that set him or her apart from the rest in a meaningful way to secure a spot in the college of one’s choice. Asian-Americans make up 22% at my son’s college, many of them with unique and highest level of accomplishments as musicians and other fields. Many of them seem to have one thing pretty much in common: not so bright, like my son, but talented and unique in some way. That’s how they got in.
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It’s never about academic achievement or personal talent but about adding to diversity of all sorts and meeting institutional needs. Don’t ever take your rejection personally. You can work hard to be all that and more but you can’t control how dice is being played any given year. People who think they made it to one because they were somehow better than others, are delusional.
@TiggerDad +1. I would tag your post with both “agree” and “helpful” if I could.
@TiggerDad I agree with most of what you say, but I see a contradiction here. Your son, as well as other students “with unique and highest level of accomplishments”, obviously worked very hard to get to this level in music or other areas. In fact, I’m not that competent in music but I believe that reaching a reasonably high level in music requires much more work and practice than a perfect test score or a perfect GPA. This doesn’t seem to me to be the same as just “enjoying the high school years”.
In my view, it’s not that you don’t need a perfect GPA or test scores to get into the ivies, it’s just that these numbers are not considered impressive achievements any more compared to other things applicants excel in. They just need to be high enough to show a necessary degree of general academic ability. Looking around, I see that athletic achievements are given the most weight, and I think Asian parents may be starting to catch up on this. (We’re not Asian but my son has tons of Asian friends.)
I can see why you see a contradiction. However, there really isn’t. My son’s high school years weren’t a pleasant walk in the park, for sure. The greatest challenge for me as a parent was time management and then stress management, both for me and my son’s. I’m sure his fellow musicians at his college – seemingly all with pre-college Juilliard, NEC, Colburn, etc. backgrounds with about a dozen concerto competition wins under each of their belts – and their parents have sacrificed tremendously since young age. All throughout high school, my son’s schedule for his loaded IB school work, community service, EC’s, including Taekwondo competitions and varsity tennis tournaments, and his weekly lessons an hour drive away, another hour drive away for his weekly youth symphony rehearsals and concerts, a daily practicing violin, traveling around the state and the country for violin competitions and other events – they certainly don’t seem to leave any room or even a breathing space to include his social activities. But my son has a gregarious personality, and he just had to have his social life going.
The most frustrating and stressful thing for me was managing his time, especially being sure to get a decent sleep (he eked out extra sleep during our 2-3 trips a week an hour drive away, so he got two hours of sleep during each of my drives), and managing his stress level. He often had to forego his daily violin practice, and I gladly exchanged his violin practice for his maintenance of social life. We often had to apologize to his private teacher for not having prepared at all for the whole preceding week, but he fortunately was very tolerant and understanding. After all, my son wasn’t the only high school student that often showed up to his lessons unprepared. Just about all of his high school students in his studio ended up at HYP or Juilliard and NEC.
Something had to go, of course, and it was often his violin practices. In his middle school years, he practiced about 3-4 hours a day and was able to manage his academics and social life, but once in high school, he only managed about an hour a day of practice at best until he hit his junior year. That’s when he started to “wing it.” He was pretty much a well established violinist by then that he was able to get away with hardly any daily practices. It also helped that he didn’t want to become a career professional violinist by then. Still, in his Jr. and Sr. years, he only managed about 5 hours of sleep a day. When he told me one day in the first semester of his Sr. year that he decided to join the regional volleyball team on top of everything else going on his life, I almost pulled out all of my hair and had a primal scream. Until then, he had never indicated that he was even remotely interested in volleyball. After all, Asians can’t jump. We’re vertically challenged. I relented in the end thinking that the tournaments are going to be held locally. When I found out much later that each tournament was going to be held about an hour drive away… my resentment as his private chauffeur/dad reached an all time high (no, my son still to this day doesn’t have a driver’s license. We didn’t have the time).
Going back to the OP’s topic, yes, Asians are catching up to the changes in the admissions landscape. Many of them are still stuck in the old paradigm but many others are now fully cognizant of what “it takes” to get through the Ivy gates. It’s now a very familiar scene with Asians represented in multiple sports, as you noted. I see more Asians in the music scene, however, especially with string instruments more than any other kind. It’s typical to witness at any youth symphonies to see Asians dominating the string section. In fact, I believe that the National Youth Orchestra of USA (NYO-USA) is actually practicing quota on Asian string players. If the NYO-USA’s audition for string players is done strictly by skill levels alone, i.e., racially blind, then the NYO-USA would look more like NYO-China with the front string section all looking Asian. It’s interesting to see how NYO-USA’s auditioning process works quite similar to the admissions at elite colleges. The state of CA alone has enough talented Asian string players alone to fill the entire NYO-USA, but the organization has a need to fill the orchestra with geographic and racial diversity to make it “look” like the USA, not an Asian country.
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@yucca10 - I totally disagree that years of practice in music conflicts with enjoying the high school years. My daughter finds stress relief in her music. She’s in the practice room almost daily at college because it’s decompression time for her. It was the same in HS. She’s also the kind of person who thoroughly enjoys performing and never stressed out about competitions or recitals. She adored accompanying the choir, leading music rehearsals in theater, etc…It was 100% fun for her.
I think it totally depends on the kid!
@TiggerDad Even if you’re “not one of those Asian-Americans who believe that there’s some sort of insidious and intentional racism targeting Asians to keep them out of the Ivy gates.” Do you see even a hint of a problem in Harvard scoring Asian applicants lower than any other group on the purely subjective “personality traits” measure?
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
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http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1843141-race-in-college-applications-faq-discussion-12.html#latest
I always find your posts to have much wisdom, but this is the one thing that we would not allow my kids to do. Of the two, my older one never functioned well with less than 6 hours of night per week. My younger one doesn’t need much sleep, but he is a bit of a workaholic, and this is the one place where we laid down the law: Lights out by 11:30, and he gets up past 6:30AM.
I cannot disagree with you on this. I was extremely cautious about my son’s overall health during his Jr. and Sr. years, and having a good night of sleep each day is a critical factor in maintaining one’s health. In spite of the fact that we resorted to “catch up” on his sleep during each of our two hour trips, but I was fully aware that that wasn’t an ideal solution. My frustration as a parent stemmed from the fact that my son kept finding new interests without his willingness to drop what’s already on his full plate. Even after all the admission dusts were settled, he still felt that he lost out on pursuing his interests to the full. That’s the sole reason why he opted to take a gap year to spend every hour at his disposal to pursue whatever the personal interests that remained unfulfilled. Primarily, that was his interest in experimental music-making that was outside of his classical training. Even during his high school years, he’d often go downstairs to the basement past midnight to make music of his own imagination. That was his way of dealing with the stress. After his first semester of college, which went very well, he called one day to thank me for allowing him to take what turned out to be a critical gap year.
In college now, he’s getting more sleep than ever.
I will be as honest as I can here. My kid didn’t have any “passion” (except for the League of Legend addiction which thankfully lasted only one year) which so many elite colleges ask an applicant to demonstrate, and it never occurred to us that our kid would even want to apply to one of HYPSM. But having gotten into an Ivy myself with a 3.0 GPA in high school, I knew from my own experience that perfect GPA and test scores are not needed; instead, something that sets you apart is the key. For each applicant, this something can be different, and you may not be able to come up with that something. Essentially, our non-STEM, non-musical, non-athletic kid learned to develop a focused interest EC area based off his unique life experiences that exposed to him to different languages and cultures. In fact, only high school classes in which he got A+s were in language classes. Although he didn’t hate his high school, he didn’t love it either; but he hung in there academically (but really didn’t study that hard compared to other high stats kids because he almost always slept before 11:30 PM) getting many A-s and several B+s in AP STEM classes and pursuing ECs in both high school and outside high school. If luck had not been on his side, he could easily have finished his high school with 5~6 B+s. He was around top 5% GPA (3.9 GPA) wise and had 2160 SAT and 33 ACT (but he somehow became NMF). He applied to just 5 colleges: Stanford REA as well as Berkeley, UCLA and 2 Honors Colleges with merit money. He got into all of them. I wanted him to attend Honors for almost free, but my wife was adamant that he attend Stanford which was number 1 choice of our kid, so he’s attending there now as a full pay.
I am here to tell you you don’t need to play music or participate in athletics or have 35+ ACT or 4.0 GPA to get into one of HYPSM. What you need to do is to somehow set yourself apart from other applicants. For our kid, that was his life experiences and effort he made in being “advanced” in 4 languages including English. We never had him learn language to get admitted to college, but we believed early on in the value of being able to speak multi languages and being familiar with many cultures over excelling in academics.
I am the first to admit that there were at least 15 to 20 students at my kid’s high school who had higher GPAs, but none of them got into any HYPSM. In fact 70 kids from my kid’s high school applied to Stanford and also Harvard, and no one got in except for my kid. Unfair? Yes, in some ways. But I am confident that my kid’s application was more memorable than other kids’ applications. Still unfair? Yes, but that’s the way admission works. And it’s perfectly fine to get denied from top colleges because it does not mean you are less smart or less deserving.
Our kid is enjoying some courses at Stanford and managed to get a summer internship abroad using his language skills. I don’t even know what his GPA is; I hope it’s around 3.5+, not 2.9 GPA like his dad. lol Our kid won’t even tell us. lol Anyway, I myself would have been perfectly fine with our kid going to Honors College for free, but at the same time, I understand why our kid wanted to attend Stanford.
In retrospect, our kid was lucky in this sense: what if there were many kids who spoke 4 languages and had 4.0 GPA and perfect test scores who applied to Stanford? I still think our kid had a chance because he wrote some essays that showed what mattered to him.
Also, I urge all high stats Asian-American kids to apply to at least one Honors College because you will never regret graduating from a college debt free. Our kid had several good back-ups even if he were rejected from Stanford, Berkeley or UCLA – that’s the part I wish to emphasize. As long as you have good backups, you can let chips fall where they will and go forward. It’s ok for you to go for a homerun but make sure you get on the base first.