Chances for unhoked students

Parents Forum
1

<p>I posted a version of this on the Yale forum and it was suggested that I post this here.</p>

<p>My son may be recruited to HYP but if the coaches pass him by, I was speculating on his chances at HYPS. This is not a criticism of hooks, I beleive in hooks! Using a LOOSE definition, here's a list of major and minor hooks which may apply to these top colleges: recruited athlete, legacy, developmental, underpriveleged upbringing, urm, performing arts with professor support, child of faculty, unusual life story, celebrity, influential parents, very good insider connections. I made this list because most applicants won't have any of these characteristics but i'd guess 40% of admits do. Another 20% have great grades/scores and just jaw dropping other achievements and make the adcoms drool over this person. That leaves just 40% of the admits that are from the very large pool of "competitive" applicants. Are these guesses in the ball park or way off? Thank for any input you have.</p>

2

<p>Just about everyone who applies to HYPS etc. is a very well qualified applicant. The schools accept about 10% of those who apply annually. That means 90% are rejected. With those sorts of numbers, it’s very hard to say what makes a student’s application stand out from the others.</p>

<p>I would think if you were the offspring of a president, an olympic medal winner, a Tony or Emmy, or Oscar winner, or offspring of someone who was a huge development donor, that would be helpful…but even HYPS are not going to accept students who are not in the ballpark of what they would expect of their applicants.</p>

3

<p>I think it’s quite possible that the real admissions chances for most students are about half the published chances. But every year top students at our school get into these schools without hooks. Just nice all round top students.</p>

4

<p>It’s not going to be possible to answer the question you asked with any precision, and even if you could the precise answer wouldn’t really be useful for you. So content yourself with knowing that, absent a coach’s support, your son probably has a lousy chance of getting accepted at Yale.</p>

<p>The question you seem to be asking is “What percentage of unhooked, unexceptional domestic applicants are accepted?” You are probably not that far off in thinking that 40% or so of the class fits into that category, but good luck figuring out either the numerator (acceptances) or the denominator (applications) for that group.</p>

<p>There are a couple of groups of applicants whose acceptance rate – if you have identified the group correctly – is close to 100%. That’s key recruited athletes, a handful of developmental candidates, and what the admissions dean at Harvard calls “walk-on-water” (WOW) kids – applicants with truly extraordinary talents, academic or otherwise. (Grades and test scores don’t count. Really.) He says Harvard sees about 200 of the WOW applicants a year, and I doubt any other college sees meaningfully more of them. These groups, however, probably represent at most 15% of the acceptance letters.</p>

<p>Then there are some groups with much higher-than-baseline average chances of success, but nothing like 100%. Athletes with some but not total support, legacies, under-represented minorities. The categories overlap to some extent, but together they probably constitute 30% of the enrolled class. I don’t know what percentage of the accepted class they are, though – probably a little lower than 30%, since almost by definition they have a lower-than-average chance of getting in to an equivalent college. And we really don’t know what percentage of the applicant pool kids like this represent. So it’s really hard to back them out of the denominator for the regular-lkid average.</p>

<p>Then there are international students – about 10% of the class, far more than 10% of the applicant pool, probably a bit less than 10% of the accepted student pool. They have to be backed out of the denominator, too.</p>

<p>And when you have done all that, you should have an accurate calculation of the average admission chances of unhooked domestic students. The problem, however, is that no one really has an average chance. Based on his grades, scores, essays and letters of recommendation, your son would either be very competitive, with far better than average chances, or he would really have no chance at all. You can say that hoi polloi applicants have a 5% chance or a 4% chance, but really that’s the average of one group that may have a 30-60% chance each, and another group that has a 0% chance. And the border between those groups is next-to-impossible to discern. So you really can’t tell much of anything about your son’s chances in the general pool.</p>

5

<p>Thanks JHS for you in depth post. What you said rings true with me. Some applicants may look at the 25%-75% SAT stats and conclude that since they are above the 75th precentile and have a 3.9 or 4.0 with lots of 5s on APs and many ECs then they have a really great chance. I used to think that before doing any research. One reason I posted was for a sanity check on my current thinking. This is why I emphasize to my son the importance of showcasing yourself to the coaches. In his sport, you can’t wait for the coaches to find you. As an aside, I looked at the rosters at HYP for his sport and many players put high school academic achievements in their bio. Most of the time they just list NHS with a only a few national merit semifinalists. I assure you nobody put Intel finalist!</p>