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<p>What do you mean by “self-presenting”? The interview?</p>
<p>In general, the application essays don’t really relate to choice of career or what you plan to do with your life.</p>
<p>The app package, itself. It’s really a series of points of information about the candidate. No kid should assume otherwise. </p>
<p>What the essays (the whole package, actually) reveal includes judgment, perspective, flexibility and a whole lot more. Unlike a hs writing assignment, it’s communicating to a stranger, who only knows what that package “presents.”</p>
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Regarding the Boston Latin discussion, the HS publishes extensive data about the rate of acceptance at hundreds of colleges. One list for 2010-13 is at <a href=“http://www.bls.org/ftpimages/314/download/College%20Admission%20Decisions,%202010%20-%202013.pdf[/url]”>http://www.bls.org/ftpimages/314/download/College%20Admission%20Decisions,%202010%20-%202013.pdf</a> . 93/369 (25%) were accepted to Harvard. The acceptance rate for Yale and Princeton were not far behind, but only 9% were accepted to Stanford. I don’t know how much you can read into this because of the wide variety of different applicant strengths within the school. For example, the table at <a href=“http://www.bls.org/ftpimages/314/download/Accept%20by%20GPA%202013.pdf[/url]”>http://www.bls.org/ftpimages/314/download/Accept%20by%20GPA%202013.pdf</a> shows that none of the students with less than a 3.75 GPA got into a highly selective ivy-type. So if a BL student with a 3.4 GPA applies to Harvard, it’s a safe bet that his chances are far below the overall school average. The much higher HYP acceptance rate at BL than the overall rate might more relate to the vast majority of applicants being highly qualified students with hardly any of the lower GPA/SAT/ECs students within the school applying than being a “feeder school”.</p>
<p>Re: <a href=“http://www.bls.org/ftpimages/314/download/Accept%20by%20GPA%202013.pdf[/url]”>http://www.bls.org/ftpimages/314/download/Accept%20by%20GPA%202013.pdf</a></p>
<p>Wow. Students with <1.99 weighted* GPAs getting admitted to seemingly respectable four year non-specialty universities (e.g. Missouri’s state flagship)?</p>
<p>*based on the fact that the document lists >4.0 ranges.</p>
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This is the key point. My own kids were double legacies at Yale, and had very good stats and some great ECs. Did we think it pretty likely that they’d get into Yale? Yes. Were we sweating bullets waiting for SCEA results? Yes. Did we have a strategy that included other reaches, matches, and true safeties? Yes–and the apps to most of the other schools were already complete before the SCEA results came out.</p>
<p>Of course some students have better odds of getting into H than others. And there are certain attributes that correlate with these chances. If you had the data on the applicant pool, you could come up with numbers. For example, see this chart for medical school applicants that shows medical school acceptance rates as a function of GPA and MCAT score:</p>
<p><a href=“https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/2012factstable24.pdf[/url]”>https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/2012factstable24.pdf</a>.)</p>
<p>With undergrads at elite universities, there are more attributes that come into play and much more uncertainty since the available data is incomplete. But working with available data, I could still do an analysis, apply it to a particular kid, and estimate that the kid’s chances at school X is well above that of the overall applicant pool. </p>
<p>This is basically a statistics problem. Doing this analysis doesn’t suddenly acquire all sorts of negative moral connotations (sense of entitlement, feeling of destiny) just because the results are encouraging and the kid in question happens to be my kid or me.</p>
<p>Mother, it’s a statistics problem for sure. Which means that if I handed you a set of 100 Harvard bound applications, you could make some reasonable predictions about who would get in and who not. And within some reasonable margin, you’d probably do very well.</p>
<p>But to think you can apply the same algorithm to any single kid (your own, or someone else’s?) I think that’s fallacious.</p>
<p>My own kids HS used to get 4 kids into Harvard and 4 kids into Yale and either 0 or 1 kid into Princeton for a very long time. Then one year Harvard took 6 kids, Yale took zero kids, and Princeton took 4 kids. So all of a sudden, the armchair analysts assumed there was new information to be analyzed and ascertained. But the next year Harvard took 4, Yale took 4, and Princeton took 1. And the year after Harvard took 2 and Yale and Princeton took zero.</p>
<p>And so it goes. Why a particular college makes a particular decision about a particular kid is not something you can predict. So you tell your kid his chances are 20% and not 9%. Does that make his rejection less of a rejection? You tell your kid that he’s a sure thing at Princeton because his school took two kids last year and he’s a stronger student than they were-- and then he gets rejected. Is he less disappointed because he should have gotten in by your math?</p>
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<p>THANK YOU. That’s exactly it. Everyone’s falling all over themselves to tell their kids that they really have the 20% shot at Harvard and not the 5% that the commoners have, because they go to Very Special Important High Schools. So what? So the kid has an 80% chance of being rejected vs 95%? Either way, doesn’t he need to be emotionally prepared for the rejection, as best as he can, and not count any chickens before they are hatched?</p>
<p>Anyway, I strongly dislike the “take X kids from my high school” way of looking at things. Because it arrogantly says – my high school is so important to Harvard (whoever) that they set aside X number of spots for its kids. Guess what? For the vast majority of applicants, where they go to hs isn’t remotely an “achievement” or a reflection on them. It reflects simply where their parents chose to / can afford to live. It’s overentitled to think that Harvard “owes” Boston Latin OR New Trier OR (insert wherever) a number of spots. </p>
<p>NU usually accepts a few kids from our high school - makes sense, because it’s local, that’s where a lot of top kids apply, blah blah blah. A year or two prior to my son’s application, they didn’t accept any. What does that mean? Nothing. It meant nothing. </p>
<p>And Hat, to your point – it wasn’t that I thought my son was so “unexceptional within NU’s application pool that he only had an 18% chance.” I think the world revolves around my son and daughter, of course, and any school would be lucky to have their brilliance. It is that I know that decisions are going to be made which are completely independent of them. Maybe when my son’s application came up to be read, they’d had enough of Chicago-area kids and wanted to broaden the pot. Or they might have had enough of earnest upper middle class liberal Jewish kids interested in politics. Or the reader might be tired of seeing yet-another-legacy application. Who knows? So … he had an 18% chance of getting in, perhaps sweetened by legacy and ED … but still, to act as though anything was in the bag? No, absolutely not. We were optimistic in terms of “you put forth your best effort and you should feel great about that,” but not to the point of self-delusion that Yes, You Are Indeed So Very Special to NU that We Can Guarantee That You’ll Get In.</p>
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<p>It’s harder to be in the top 10% of your class if your school is filled with smart, hard-working kids, and it is therefore an achievement that reflects on the kid.</p>
<p>. . . except that I think that the chances of a really strong student from Boston Latin exceed 20% by quite a lot. I will say a few things for Pizzagirl’s point of view:</p>
<p>For one, if the student is applying SCEA, thinking that the odds are low will encourage the student to complete other applications before the SCEA decisions come out. Of course, this is a good strategy in any event, even if the odds are 99% in favor.</p>
<p>For a second, perhaps the student will be happier if he/she thinks the odds were only 5% in his/her favor, and the decision is positive.</p>
<p>I was thinking that in business, it is important to have an accurate view of the probability of success of various proposals or projects. But then I remembered this:
</p>
<p>So perhaps persistent underestimation of the likelihood of success is also a strategy.</p>
<p>The fluctuations in numbers N tend to go more or less as the square root of N. So I would not be at all surprised to hear of 20 students from Boston Latin being accepted by Harvard in a given year, nor 30. I would not be too surprised to hear of 15 students being accepted from Boston Latin in a given year; on the high end, I would be a bit surprised to hear of 35 students being accepted in a single year. When the number of acceptances gets down to 10 in a single year, I would be surprised. Really.</p>
<p>It’s not that I think that Boston Latin is such a superb school. Nor is it that I think that Harvard “owes” admission to any of its students. Nor that a student at Boston Latin who is genuinely better than everyone accepted in the previous year is guaranteed acceptance.</p>
<p>However, unless the regional admissions officer changes, or Harvard changes its preference for public-school students from Boston, or the interviewers change, I think it’s a super-safe bet that Harvard will take 12 students (at least) from Boston Latin next year. </p>
<p>I can’t be arrogant in saying that, because I don’t know anyone at Boston Latin. I wouldn’t consider a Boston Latin student arrogant for saying that it would be a pretty safe bet that Harvard will accept 12 of the students from the class.</p>
<p>And I think the very mindset that “H will accept 12 students from my class” presupposes a complete lack of thinking about a bigger picture – that H (or insert whatever elite school of your choosing) is always trying to diversify, to find diamonds in the rough, to expand its reach beyond the typical boarding schools and upper-middle-class high schools, and that just because you were one of the fortunate ones who landed at Boston Latin / Scarsdale / New Trier / etc. doesn’t mean that you should expect the status quo.</p>
<p>You said something in one thread, QM, about NU not accepting students from IMSA (Illinois Math & Sci Academy). Well, why should they? If part of their mission is to continue to grow a national (international too, but I’ll waive over that for now) student base, why <em>should</em> they keep on accepting the same number of kids from IMSA as they always have? Insert New Trier (very affluent, one suburb away) instead of IMSA if you like. Why <em>shouldn’t</em> they have outreach to poorer public Chicago schools (which is part of their mission) and / or to find the kids from Nowheresville, Mississippi where they’ve never pulled from? </p>
<p>Look, my kid was applying to NU from the greater Chicago area. Do you know how many smart kids in the greater Chicago area apply to NU? Umpteen thousand. Why would I not think that there’s a possibility that would work against him if by the time his app got there, they were sick and tired of Chicago-area applicants? Don’t you think they get sick of Yet Another New Trier kid, too?</p>
<p>Blossom, </p>
<p>First of all, psychologically handling a rejection is a completely different issue than determining the odds of acceptance. </p>
<p>Second, of course any such analysis will be fuzzy, very fuzzy, and it is vital to keep that in mind. Even if the elite universities were using a predictable algorithm to select students, which they aren’t, there isn’t enough data available that would allow deducing it exactly. I would never tell a student they were a sure thing at one of these schools. But they don’t pick their classes by pulling names out of hat, either, and some students really are much more likely to get in than others. And IMO, using the information that is available can help students make better decisions about how to spend their time and money on applications than just ignoring it.</p>
<p>People apply statistical results to individual cases all the time. If you were ill, and there were studies that showed that drug A was more effective than drug B on 80% of the patients and drug B was more effective on 20%, absent any known reason that your own situation was particular in some way that would change the odds, you’d probably start with drug A. </p>
<p>My point, though, was mostly to disagree with the PG’s notion that the mere fact of deciding that your kid’s changes of getting into H is better than 6%, or whatever it is, indicates some sort of negative attitude like a feeling of entitlement. </p>
<p>As far as the psychological aspects go, I’m pretty sure that a valedictorian/2400 would feel worse, in a way, about a Harvard rejection than a rejected 3.3/1800. But what would be the point in pretending that the valedictorian didn’t have better odds than the other one? And fortunately, in real life the valedictorian with a reasonable application strategy would still end up with lots of good choices.</p>
<p>If evaluating your own stats and other qualifications is necessary to craft a good list of reaches, matches, and safeties, I don’t understand what exactly the objection is to trying to do this in determining whether to apply to super-selective schools or not. It might help you figure out how many to apply to, and it might inform your early admissions strategy.</p>
<p>Certainly, overestimating your chances may make you sad. But underestimating them might cause you to aim too low–or it might (as it did with us) cause you to spend a lot of time and money on applications to multiple matches and safeties when fewer would have been reasonable. I don’t really regret the strategy, because it emphasized the fact that we weren’t taking anything for granted–but we could have saved a few hundred bucks, and some time.</p>
<p>Harvard (or any other college) doesn’t owe any spot to any school, (You’d think they owe it to their donating alums but they reject many of those alums’ kids every year!) but remember the quality of the student body at a school like BLS doesn’t flutuate widely from year to year, and Harvard can find a certain number of kids that meet the changing needs of their community every year because BLS has a large enough student body with natural diversity in talents and interests. Yes, the numbers admitted to H may vary from year to year but not to the degree of being completely unpredictable. As a result, if you are a top student in the “usual standards” such as a challenging high school curriculum, top grades, good standardized scores and meaningful EC(s), then you do have a better than average and sometimes significant better chance for H. It is realistic assessment based on historical data, and has nothing to do with “arrogance” or “entitlement”. And I understand that in an average public school where the number of students taken by H is low each year in the first place, it’s more unpredictable year from year.</p>
<p>You cannot predict/guarantee an actual admit. But that still leaves open that some kids, with respect to their holistic offerings (the app package, what it includes, how it is completed, what attributes come through that that college likes) do have better starting odds.</p>
<p>That’s all it is: who’s going to make it through progressive winnowings. In the end, at the final table, the decision belongs to the U. Whether they reject 90% or some smaller number. Whether you are even in the final 3x pool. Whether they usually take 20 from this school or, in the past, liked violists. No one can control for the U’s final choices, which are based on needs you likely are not aware of, competition you can’t fathom. Even if they historically take top x % from some school or schools. Or your stats and achievements are stellar. </p>
<p>That still doesn’t mean you (have to) call it 5%. For some kids, you can simply say, “You’re a legit applicant. You’ve done the work, presented yourself well. You may get positive attention from them and make it far. But, in the end, the decision will belong to the U, a fickle lover.”</p>
<p>Benley, while I agree with you the problem lies in the way ordinary people interpret the numbers. Every year there is general outrage at the local supermarket over our homegrown superstar at a HS nearby who was “denied” at (fill in the blank. Often Harvard but sometimes Y or P). The long time CC’ers here would spend 3 minutes on his or her application and recommend Duke or Middlebury or Wellesley (which in fact is where these kids often do end up attending) and explain the lottery ticket concept, 6% chance, etc. And some of the more outspoken here would also say, “Harvard rejects 94% of the kids who apply- and you will be in that group”.</p>
<p>Why? Our local HS is not Boston Latin or Stuy. It’s not even New Trier or Brookline HS. The top kid sticks out because like in all small ponds, everyone knows who the big fish is. But it’s not generally a Harvard or Yale kind of big fish- which is why the local outrage “How dare they reject our valedictorian who also a champion tennis player and has spent countless volunteer hours at the local animal shelter” is so sad. So having a perfect GPA and taking a bunch of AP’s and doing really well on your SAT’s isn’t getting your kid into Harvard in my town. Or in fact, in many towns across America.</p>
<p>Hence the 6%.</p>
<p>And this focus on the algorithm and “My kid’s chances aren’t 6% they are 18%” is sad when it prevents said kid from getting excited about Middlebury or Duke or Vanderbilt or the dozens of colleges who pay their admissions folks to go on road shows to find kids just like my local Val. High stats, great kid, engaged with the world, teachers love them. </p>
<p>It might not be entitlement to look at your own kid and decide that he’s got a 50/50 shot at getting into Harvard or Yale (which is demonstrably better odds than below 10%) but it is certainly entitlement to assume that Harvard has a big old chart made out of oak tag sitting in the admissions directors office where they log in the number of kids from your HS they plan to take next year. Harvard doesn’t care that two years ago it was 6 and last year it was 4. Next year it might be zero or 7. That’s not what Harvard’s admissions director gets paid to do.</p>
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I think that’s true for the high school my kids went to. But I’ve got to think that it might not be true for some specific private schools, and maybe even a few public schools. That doesn’t really take away from your point, though.</p>
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<p>Yes. Very well said.</p>
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<p>Again, speak for me anytime on this topic, blossom!</p>
<p>Do they still make oak tag?</p>
<p>@blossom: You have just elaborated nicely the last sentence of my last post, and I agree with you, but I think I sort of took on the mission of trying to expel the notion that if you talk about any role your HS may play in the college admission outcomes, then you must be arrogant or entitled. The truth of the matter is that the students in some HS’s have been pre-selected sometimes pretty rigorously already (e.g. It’s incredibly hard to get in a TJ or a Stuy, and the admit rate to a boarding school like Phillps Academy is lower than 15%). With that in mind, one should understand that this is a different pool of students than an ordinary HS. Colleges do know that too. I don’t believe in “feeder schools” (although BLS does look awfully like one) any more, but I believe you are one foot in the door of top colleges if you graduate as one of the top students from these schools, which mind you is no easy task to say the least. It’s not to say a spot is garanteed but the chance is significantly higher than the average and because it’s significant it’s worth noting. And yes, I believe HYP and the like “rountinely” take the top students from these schools. I know many people don’t agree with me or don’t like the idea, but I’m sharing what I know and believe. Having said that, ask the students and parents in these schools you’d be surprised how many would tell you attending such a school actually hurt their chances of getting in a top college. Now, I wouldn’t protest too wildly if you said that was perhaps a little “entitled”.</p>