I believe that nobody except an extremely well qualified hooked should EXPECT an acceptance, and that only a rejection should be interpreted as meaning you’re not a good fit for the school.
One thing is sure, you have raised a hard working, brilliant kid. Your family and he should be very proud of all that he has accomplished. I have learned from reading CC over the years to teach your children to " love the college that loves you." Just the right fit for him will be there.
Clearly your son is very bright and accomplished and disciplined. It is understandable to wonder why he was deferred. Your heart aches for your child when they want something and you want it for them. No doubt he will be accepted to many excellent schools. Best Wishes to your son and to your family!
Maybe he looked like a kid who chased prizes rather than pursued psssions? It’s hard for schools to differentiate between kids who build their resumes and kids who are their resumes, but they want the latter.
In any case, he’s certain to be attractive to many other schools, and he has the tools to succeed, so he’ll land on his feet. This disappointment will pass as other acceptances roll in.
If he overstated the accomplishments in music and writing (both of which were self-published) it could have hurt his application. Not saying he did. Competitions are fine but it is nice to see music performed more collaboratively, which I am sure he also did. There ARE a lot of pianists and violinists out there.
I am personally very impressed with all that karate, as I said before. Sounds like a great kid who will do well wherever he lands.
@floridamomof3 and @GreatKid Your kind words are greatly appreciated!
Surprisingly, he doesn’t feel bumped at all at the deferral, he knew it would be a long long shot. He is moving on with applications to other schools where he might have better luck. Hopefully he can get in a school he loves and fits in well.
@gardenstategal " … kids who build their resumes and kids who are their resumes…" well put! I would venture a guess that most kids fall in the middle?
@TimeUpJunior congrats on raising a great kid. A kid who doesn’t NEED Harvard to be successful. And since he lives in the US rather than Asia, there are more than 3 schools he can attend without being destined for a life of mediocrity. There are plenty of schools that would bend over backwards to have a rock star kid like this. They’ll offer merit money, honors college programming, and they won’t care that he wasn’t student council president. Sorry about Harvard, but wow, you’ve got a lot to be grateful for otherwise.
@compmom I chatted with you privately a few weeks back about submitting music supplement, thanks for your advices.
He did not overstate anything. He simply submitted the music he composed and the novel he wrote as art supplements. Maybe Harvard professors were not that impressed after all.
Kudos to you for doing Tai Chi. It demands far more mental than physical control (like karate). Do you do it with form movements or just standing still?
Which other schools is he considering? (sending applications to…)
@TimeUpJunior , I think you’re right. They want it to look effortless, but they want kids who make the effort! I think there are so many ways to “game” the system, and no shortage of services to help you do it, that it has vastly complicated the admissions process. There are kids who will get a perfect score on the SAT with no prep and there are ones who get tutored for years to do the same or close. How exactly does an adcom work that out?
Your son will go far – don’t worry about that. He will end up at a school that wants exactly what he has to offer!
@notveryzen WOW! your words made me feel more warm and fuzzy than the possible H acceptance for the kid, honestly.
I have read many horror stories here on CC about kids like my son who got rejected everywhere. He is doing apps for a bunch of safety schools, ones with honors college like ASU and ones that provide full ride to National Merit Finalist of which he is in the running. What if these safety schools reject him for being over-qualified?
@prezbucky ASU, UW, UNC, Emory, Brown, maybe more.
@TimeUpJunior They won’t reject him for being over-qualified. Generally low-top tier schools like Tufts or Northwestern might do that.
@TimeUpJunior Harvard has 10-15 students each year coming from Oregon or Washington and less than half are from SCEA. Assuming 21% for Asians, there will be 1-2 acceptances from either state. That’s your odds.Some may argue that Harvard does not have a quota for each state, but the number of acceptances from our state is pretty consistent.
If money is an issue, he would get an automatic full ride at Alabama. There are also some top schools that have merit scholarships too like UChicago and Vandy. USC would have been a great option but you are past the deadline for merit.
The overqualified argument really is only an issue for a small number of schools as previous poster mentioned. It’s even named after one of them, it’s called Tufts syndrome. State schools don’t do it.
That’s a decent list of schools as long as you can afford them.
What about a school like Oberlin with both strong liberal arts and a music conservatory? He’s likely to get some generous merit from them. Other places that come to mind are Northwestern, Vandy (as @notveryzen mentioned) and Lawrence University in Appleton, WI.
As others have pointed out, there are a gazillion perfect-score valedictorians applying to HYPs every year. The trick is finding the ones that truly stand out among them by virtue of their teacher recs and what they it is that they can bring to the school. The latter, of course, ties into what institutional needs a given school are (which, of course, is where “hooks” like athletics, geographic/ethnic/racial diversity, legacy/development, etc., etc.come in).
@ReadyForTheWind and @notveryzen It is very assuring to know that the state schools don’t have the Tufts syndrome!
Does UChicago offer merit scholarship? I know Vandy does. We will look more into these two schools. I forgot to mention that he did apply to USC.
@WarriorJ Your math is right on.
UChicago does have merit. It’s rare though. But they do love high scoring kids.
Just want to add that going to a school with a conservatory or music school poses both pros and cons. For a composer who is not in the conservatory at Oberlin, for instance, it is well worth checking to see whether the best opportunities with teachers and performances go mainly to the BM students. Bard and Lawrence would be other schools. USC and Vanderbilt have music schools too.
Has he considered a liberal arts college that does not have a conservatory? I would think that might be a better choice Vassar, Williams, Amherst, Tufts, and Clark would all be possibilities in the Northeast.
UChicago is a stellar school academically, obviously, and the grad program in composition is excellent, which might spill over to undergrads.
Merit scholarships at some level are not that rare at the University of Chicago anymore, Large merit scholarships (more than $5-10,000/year) are still rare, though.
While both the karate and the music are impressive, I think the OP and his son may over-estimate how much Harvard values them. Harvard would care a lot about either if it looked like the applicant was going to be a great public success at it – meaning a successful professional soloist as a musician or an Olympic team member for karate (Harvard does not have a varsity karate team). Thus, it’s almost impossible for Harvard to care a lot about both. Outside of some fantasy literature, it’s not really possible to be a professional piano soloist who is a member of the Olympic team, and it’s certainly not possible to do both while being a student at Harvard and writing novels on the side. Realistically, it looks like his formal piano performance career is probably coming to an end, and it’s not clear where he stands on karate.
So, in the final analysis, he’s a really smart, disciplined kid with great grades, great test scores, and great ECs that indicate he will enrich the environment of whatever college he attends but do not offer certainty of any outsized adult achievement in those fields. That’s absolutely a great thing to be – I don’t mean to denigrate a kid like that at all. Harvard will certainly admit any number of kids with a profile like that, but it will also fail to admit many of them, too.
The question is – where does he show promise? Where does he have a ceiling that’s high enough to be Harvard-worthy, and that he has not yet come close to hitting? If his application didn’t answer that question, then it may not have been as effective as he hoped.
That said – a kid like that is going to be accepted lots of places, and Harvard could be among them. What’s more, I think a kid with that kind of discipline and drive has the ability to turn virtually any college into his own version of Harvard, by seeking out the best faculty and the most exciting opportunities, and taking full advantage of them. What’s great about his education so far – at least so I hope – is not that it will get him into Harvard, but rather that it has given him the tools for success no matter where he goes.