<p>“One year I had a student with a near-perfect SAT score and straight A’s. [...] reread his essays and frankly, they were just a little more boring than the other kids. So I cut him."</p>
<p>"One night, I got food poisoning at a restaurant in Buffalo. The next day, I rejected all the Buffalo applications."</p>
<p>Interesting read but most of them are hardly surprising. Essays are known to play a massive role in the process, private schools are chosen for their experience in the process many times, and no one likes helicopter parents.</p>
<p>I just started seriously looking at colleges and didn’t know some of them so I thought there would be others in the same boat! And from what I’ve read, only top colleges put a big emphasis on essays, others just look at your GPA and ACT/SAT scores then skim your essay (also mentioned in the article). </p>
<p>Admissions are random and ad coms are just normal people just like us, and I’m sure that all the power they have can make them power trip some times although that’s probably not a problem for most. Plus few colleges are that transparent about their admissions. A lot of it just comes down to how the ad coms are feeling that day and how much they like you, which is pretty subjective and luck based. To a certain extent, the whole process is based partially on luck.</p>
<p>However, “Former admissions officer, Ivy League university” who said they had no idea what the orchestra wanted was pretty obviously not in contact with the adcom people at Northwestern and Rice. Those folks know what their orchestra wants. It comes down to how seriously a university cares about the quality of its orchestra. At some schools, recruiting musicians is almost like recruiting athletes.</p>
<p>@theanaconda:</p>
<p>There’s luck, but it’s not completely random. Some colleges care how much love you show them (through visits, essays, etc.) Also, how much people like you is certainly subjective but isn’t luck-based either. When you get older, you’ll realize that.</p>
<p>@206377:</p>
<p>At a state school (and certain privates striving to go up the rankings: Vandy comes to mind), it’ll be a lot about stats. At private elites and many LACs, it comes down a lot to your essays and recs. They really want kids who they like and think will make them proud and have done their research and shown that they want to be there. In an ideal world, an applicant hits all those criteria (as well as have super stats and ECs and accomplishments, etc., etc.). The top privates and LACs can fill their whole class with kids like that. Many other schools, not so much.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan
it obviously isn’t completely random, I never said that, I just said luck is a significant factor.
and how much somoene likes you can be based on luck in 2 senses. One based on what mood they are in that day (monday morning, personal issues ,etc), and who gets your application (ie someone who will like you or someone who’ll dislike you because it varies from person to person). </p>
<p>You said “admissions are random”. Then you said “it obviously isn’t completely random, I never said that”.</p>
<p>In any case, yes, there’s luck of the draw in who reviews your apps, though I believe many elites have more than 1 person review.</p>
<p>And I disagree that luck is as significant as you think. For borderline cases, yes, and for strong cases at the superselective schools, that’s an element, but many apps pretty much don’t stand a chance.</p>
<p>What’s the takeaway from this? I think students applying to selective colleges that use holistic admissions need to realize that the decisions can be affected by factors you can’t control (and that you may not even know about). So what do you do about it? First, you write the best essays you can, and put together the best overall application you can. You do things to show interest, like visit if you can, go to the website (and sign in), etc. You do not make a pest of yourself by e-mailing a bunch of questions that you could answer by reading the website. And, you apply to more than one or two reach schools, because the results are unpredictable. (They aren’t random, but they may appear random, because you can’t see inside the black box.) Also, make sure you have some match and safety schools.</p>
At least from everything I’ve read, at the top 20 selective colleges including HYPSM and the little Ivies, your file will be read by a minimum of 2 Admissions Directors (sometimes 3). The reasoning being that yes, it’s possible for one Admissions Director to have a bad day when they read your file, but the chances of two (or more) people having a bad day while reading your file is not likely. If one reader doesn’t like your file, but one does like it, your file then gets bumped up to the director of Admissions who makes the final decision. </p>
<p>FWIW: At colleges that receive in excess of 25,000 applications, Admissions offices often hire additional temporary file “readers.” These readers could be professors, part time faculty, or graduate students who are employed to be the 2nd, 3rd or 4th reader of files in addition to the Admissions Officer responsible for your region. So, I don’t think that element of “luck” is really valid. </p>
<p>^^This is correct at the elite level in holistic admissions systems - there are checks in the system that are supposed to prevent one person from knocking you out, hence the two-person review. If both say you’re a good candidate under such a system, that’s generally an admit, if both reject, that’s generally a denial, so you could run into some bad luck that way, but I think most admission officers realize the nature of their jobs and try not to have very many “bad days”. Ties go to the admission committee as a whole or to the director.</p>
<p>There are also probably some internal checks and post-admissions reviews and anyone admitting or rejecting too many candidates in opposition to the committee decision is probably not long for the job.</p>
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<p>I don’t think the “Would I like to hang out . . .” position is at all inappropriate. In fact, it sounds like a shorthand way of saying what a lot of Ivy-League publications already say. (William Fitzsimmons, for one.)</p>
<p>Some years ago, an admissions director named Richard Moll published a book on this stuff. He happened to be the admissions director when I applied to Vassar. His philosophy at the time seemed to be, Let’s build a class of the most interesting, disparate people we can find. And it worked. We WERE interesting. There was always someone to talk to, and class discussions were never dull.</p>
<p>Seriously. If you think of good grades and test scores as a kind of prerequisite, what else would the extra curriculars and so on add up to?</p>
<p>Are you interesting? When your classmates look back after 30 years, will they remember you? – What’s wrong with that?</p>
<p>My first thought: Oh crap, I’m a white girl from Jersey…</p>
<p>My second thought: I don’t think most of this is that crazy or “dirty;” it may shock those not in the know, who don’t realize that just getting all As and a good SAT score doesn’t make you an automatic-admit to Harvard, but for the CC crowd, most of this is old news (or probably school-specific in the case of that line about not knowing what the orchestra needs). </p>