This is our first time applying. I’m curious whether parents whose kids have applied, feel like they can accurately gauge their kid’s strengths relative to the schools they are applying to? Or are we hopelessly biased and unable to predict?
Have any of you felt surprised by decisions? Or felt like the schools are fairly accurately measuring your kid?
My husband and I discussed this this morning. I will tell you within a week or so! 
We have three kids. The oldest two graduated from Harvard. The baby applied REA to Harvard this year. WE feel like he has the strongest application of the three of them - objectively, his GPA is higher, SAT is higher, and more school leadership, subjectively greater community impact, etc. So, we are generally feeling confident for him - except when we’re not! Because this is an outlier year in so many ways and you can never ever know for sure. Either way, we do know that he will end up at an excellent university.
I think its really hard to predict because, although you know your kid, you really don’t know what the school is looking for. It’s sometimes clear which schools really aren’t a fit, but it seems like alchemy to predict how your kid might help round out the class. Prep schools are particularly tough, I think, because most kids are just starting to come into their true selves. One of my kids was so shy freshman year, he didn’t talk the entire year. Now, as a senior, he’s been told that his classroom antics are distracting to other students.
No. You cannot gauge your child’s strengths RELATIVE to the schools. Because you don’t really know what the school is looking for. That’s what goes on behind the curtain of the admissions office. So…
Yes. You and your child will very likely get all kinds of surprises on M10.
In the end, your child just puts forward their best applications and self, and you all see what schools (if any) that aligned with by way of those decisions on M10.
This is a fascinating question and I have NO idea where other kids who are applying look like so it’s been so difficult to see where my kid might stack up for the elite colleges. I have erred on the side of assuming a REA rejection and prepping her for it, just due to sheer numbers. Perfect stats just aren’t enough, I know that much. Finally, if there is a southwest wind blowing through New Haven on the day the committee finalizes decisions it could change everything! (That pretty much summarizes how I feel about this process right now.)
@mamacrum and @littlerobot : the thread starter’s question was in “Prep School Admission”. It is VERY different from college admissions. REA is not relevant. Prep school admissions decisions are usually released March 10th.
Granted, for those applying to the prep schools with lower admission rates, it can be just as much a crap shoot. M10 sees a lot of posts from kids with “perfect stats” who weren’t accepted anywhere.
@floating123 accuracy varies by parent and what the family is looking for in a prep school. It is good to compare your child’s SSAT’s with a school’s average SSAT ranges, for example. Some people also are blinded by the bells and whistles, or the “elite” reputation of a school, and ignore the culture of the institution and whether it’s a fit. Such people are very disappointed on M10.
My child was accepted where we expected her to be accepted, and wait listed where we worried that at best she’d be wait listed. Andover and Exeter were never on our list.
AH! Not sure how I missed that. Thanks and best wishes to all the kids.
Oops, apologies. I can’t even see the subtitle below it without squinting. I know nothing about prep school admissions! @mamacrum and I had better shuffle off before we needlessly stress out these poor parents!
@floating123: If you stick around long enough and/or read the archives round past M10s (decision day), you will see the folly of predictions. There are so, so many surprises, both positive and negative. In our case, for example, the ADs of two schools gushed over our son and told us what a good fit he was and how they could see him on their campuses and around their tables, but both ended up in rejections. So, the mantra here is to cast a wide net around many schools that would be good fits for your student and your family for the best chances of making a good match and don’t waste any energy on predictions.
I will also add that many try to make predictions when they don’t have a good understanding of how many seats their child is actually competing for. As an example,
the year our son applied to Choate, the incoming class ended up being 112 boys and 112 girls, so he didn’t have a shot at 224 seats; chromosomes limited him to, at most, 112. By the time he matriculated and we attended the AD’s opening speech which laid this out, we realized that our son was competing in a bucket of fewer than 10 seats because the class was broken down by:
Male/female
Foreign/domestic
Domestic geographical
Boarding/day
Full pay/FA
Diversity
Legacy (development)
Siblings
Athletics and other talent (music, academics, etc.)
Various other institutional requirements
And Choate is one of the larger schools. You have no way to gauge how your applicant compares to any of those also competing for those very limited slots in any given year. So, let the predictions go and focus instead on putting together the best targeted application you can for those schools where your student is at or above average and the school values and culture match your family’s. Then, let the chips fall where they may. That’s all you can do.
Let me rephrase this as a hypothetical. Say that a competitive school accepts 100 out of 1000 applicants.
Of the 100 accepted, how many parents were positively surprised? And of the 900 denied, how many parents had a negative surprise? – if you were to guess?
I understand there’s always positive and negative surprises, and that those stories will be overly-represented in forums; but I’m curious how common it might be - again, if you were to guess.
Separately, your story of two AD’s gushing over your son is upsetting. I don’t understand their motivation. In retrospect how have you made sense of that conversation?
Our kids are younger than most here - so they can only apply to day schools. I’m not sure how to calibrate the comments relating to boarding schools or colleges back to day schools for much younger kids. Obviously a boarding school or college is pulling from the whole country, but we’re only looking at the best 2-3 schools in our area (but this can still be very competitive).
P.S. happy to hear from college applicants too! I wrote the questions broadly to include you.
Quoting from above: “Separately, your story of two AD’s gushing over your son is upsetting. I don’t understand their motivation. In retrospect how have you made sense of that conversation?”
I’m assuming by AD we are talking Admissions Director, which could also mean a senior, mid-level or junior person in the Admissions Department.
These 2 ADs at different schools may have rated the applicant quite highly, but at many boarding schools there is normally a several person admissions committee that collectively makes decisions on each applicant by assigning qualitative and quantitative measures or scores to each component of the application. The interview is only one part of the overall evaluation of an applicant. An AD can help one’s candidacy, but usually cannot single-handedly get a student admitted.
Their motivation is that they interview a lot of terrific kids, not all of whom they can admit, but whom they want to encourage to complete their applications. At no point prior to the admission deadline has any AO/AD seen the entire applicant pool, but each has seen many wonderful, admissible candidates who would fit into their communities, and they are happy to encourage and convey what wonderful kids they are. Nothing wrong with that. Again, stay here long enough, read through enough M10 periods, and you will see how common these comments are and how non-predictive they are. You may also get cards and handwritten notes from AOs, and those are not reliable hints of decision outcomes either. The sense you make of it is just what is conveyed – your applicant is a delight and had a great interview/conversation with that AO/AD, as did hundreds of others. Read nothing into it.
For a school with a 10% admit rate (your example), almost every admit would be a positive surprise and no denial would be a shocker, again due to those odds of admission. For the schools with the lowest admission rates, there are no guaranteed acceptances for anyone outside the pool of those very few who are accepted for specific institutional reasons/relationships–and those applicants/families already know who they are. If you are posting here, you are not in this pool.
Where a lot of head scratching occurs here is with applicants who appear to check every box for a particular school yet are denied or waitlisted. The main reason: Too few seats for too many great applicants and no way to know, for any school, what type of class that school is trying to build/round out that year and who any given applicant’s competition is. That’s pretty much the story of every M10. Of course, there are always examples every year, too, of students/parents who are surprised that perfect grades and test scores did not produce the results there were looking for, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise because these schools are not trying to fill their seats with scores but with students who will fit in and contribute to their communities in some special way. The grades/test scores are used only to ensure that the desired applicants have a high probability of academic success in what are very rigorous programs.
On the college side, I would say there are very few surprises as the BS college admissions process is highly curated for success. By the time a BS student is applying to college, that student is well-known to teachers and counselors and the college list is carefully crafted for great results. There are many threads in this forum describing how unsurprising the BS college process is and why.
This is very helpful, thank you. I’m unfamiliar with boarding schools (sorry), so in normal years, do you fly to the school tour it, and concurrently do in-person interview - and that informs your decision of whether to apply? Then I can understand why interviewers would be encouraging.
We are applying to a competitive day school so all applicants are local. So for us, the normal process would start with an open house / tour. Then you’d decide if you want to apply. Only after deciding to apply, would you go for an interview.
Where I’m getting hung up - I think - is that boarding schools are drawing students from anywhere in the country. So for top boarding schools, there should be no problem finding enough students that are in the top 10 or 20 percentile of SSATs pulled across the country.
But here around a medium/large city? I know this school cares about test scores, but it’s drawing from less than 1% of the U.S. population. It seems like a lot fewer people can “check the boxes” to fit in the top 10-20 percentile of SSAT. Conversely, it makes me feel like checking those boxes would put you in “coin flip” territory rather than “crap shoot.”
I think you may be overestimating the significance of SSAT scores for every single candidate. Yes, perhaps schools are chasing, or trying to maintain, an average so they “look good.” But on an individual basis candidates are admitted because they fill roles for the school.
I think, in person (online on CC it is super hard to tell), it is fairly obvious who will get in where. However!! I work with kids so I have a different perspective in making that statement and I have seen a lot of kids and a lot of kids’ work. In my experience parents are fairly deluded about their kids’ strengths. Like, really really really deluded.
It’s possible, given that a day school, by definition, serves the community you live in, that you have a good idea of the kind of kids who have been admitted and attend (because you know many families there), what the school considers important, and how your kid stacks up against that. You may be closer to correct than you would be at a boarding school you have no affiliation with. But…
I recall a friend (applying from a k-8 private school) of a (local) boarding school DS applied to “We didn’t apply there. We just aren’t an xyz school type of family.” They weren’t and in spite of having two kids who ended up at Ivies, they were pretty sure they would just present as the square peg to the school’s round hole. I suspect they were right but I was pretty oblivious to this as we were going through the process (from a public school and with a more limited exposure to this.)
The piece you are missing is what all the other applicants look like. I recall being rather stunned by how accomplished many of my son’s freshmen classmates were. In different arenas, of course. But honestly, I had no idea so many kids with everything from Broadway experience to state championships in sports, to math competition wins were even in the pool because there were NONE of these in his middle school.
I wasn’t terribly surprised at the outcomes, but I wasn’t completely correct either…
Our youngest applied to local private schools as well. We found no difference compared to his BS application process or compare to his older brother’s application process. The local school admissions staff are salespeople, just like the BS admissions people. The results were equally surprising.
There’s not any value in trying to predict the outcomes. Substituting prediction for a solid reach/match/safety approach risks ending up empty handed (or hands full of only rejections) at the end of the process. While all of us who’ve been through the process (sometimes multiple times) have unavoidably tried to make predictions, it really only magnifies the sense of loss(es) on decision day. Better to do your best to avoid predicting and enjoy more of the sense of accomplishment from the wins on that day.
“There’s not any value in trying to predict the outcomes.”
I know this is the right answer. And I am very proud of my kid regardless of the outcomes.
It’s been a hard year to be a first-time applicant, with normal uncertainty amplified by unusual times. I’m hoping to fuss over this a little longer then shove it entirely out of my mind. (But, I don’t always get to choose what my brain fusses over).
I feel for you. I too am a fusser and it’s no fun. I often rely on my non-fusser husband to snap me out of it.