<p>Well, I'm in the throes of this with junior son and already am wondering what to do differently with ds2. I would love to hear what everyone learned.</p>
<p>So, she'sonherway, which is your dd2 -- URM, athlete or legacy?</p>
<p>I get you. Key things for us:</p>
<p>-Understanding colleges do have quotas for high schools
-Understanding that a bottom of the class legacy can trump the val
-Understanding there are a ton more development candidates today
-Understanding that high schools push candidates for their own reasons
-Understanding playing down activities that suggest affluence--today McDonalds beats banking internship</p>
<p>I don't know about some of the above but I dont agree that colleges have quotas for his, especially when in a class of 125, six are currently attending Boston College and I think another two or so were accepted but went elsewhere.</p>
<p>Not saying the quotas are low Moda, at DD's school with 80 in a class for example, the number at HYP was pretty consistently 6. But considering there were usually more than 6 legacies at each, the unhooked had virtually no chance.</p>
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Understanding colleges do have quotas for high schools
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<p>This is just not true. Yes, top colleges probably do compare applicants from the same high school. It seems almost irresistible for admissions officers to avoid drawing comparisons between applicants who have been hatched in the same incubator. But our experience says they do not impose quotas on the number of students they'll accept from a given high school, even a very small one. Case on point: Last year, two colleges in the HYPS group accepted two kids (same two -- neither a legacy, a URM, a developmental admit, or a recruited athlete) from my son's miniscule graduating class (under 30 kids). And it's about as far from a feeder high school as you can get. </p>
<p>Schools are not going to set arbitrary quotas on acceptances when there are multiple desirable candidates from the same pool.</p>
<p>Unless the former adcoms were outright lying to us, the top colleges do have a limit they will take from the so called feeder schools. And oh the irony! It's the feeder schools they limit today with the number going down all the time and under newer admissions directors. 2 from a small school does not surprise me.</p>
<p>wjb, the tendency against multiple admits from the same hs is a tendency, not an absolute, and I think the quotas are probably more rigid at the more "elite" hs and prep programs. "We've already taken three from St. Witherspoon's, we better leave #4 and #5 for Princeton." </p>
<p>Post #320 from SOHW has some good stuff. I'd highlight #3 and the first #6.</p>
<p>I'd also have a tangential point to the second #6: if at all possible, visit colleges in your student's junior year. The reality of visiting may totally re-order application priorities. If you wait until acceptances are in, you may be dismayed when you actually visit and not have applied to some of the right "type" of schools that were better fits in reality. Anecdotal case in point: D (and we) were pretty focused on traditional research Uni's. It was only after visiting some top Uni's on D's list and taking a look at a couple of the LAC's just for kicks that the pendulum swung hard towards LAC's. </p>
<p>I understand that money is finite and for many [me included] more finite now than it was a year or two. Still, the expense of a couple of college search and application trips sophomore and particularly junior year (we started with one school during 9th grade just to get a conceptual toe in the water) is but a pimple on an elephant's butt in the total four-year scheme of things. 9th & 10th grade trips can be more casual, doubled up with vacations into a geographic area but Spring vacation of 11th grade is an opportunity for intense research you won't have again. (Visits during the summer aren't the same thing...there are seldom enough "real" students for your student to talk to and with which to otherwise gauge a campus.)</p>
<p>What I would do differently is NOT hire a private counselor and waste my money. Other than that, with my recruited athlete son, I would have insisted he take more school visits (though remembering back, he just didn't want to go through it because he made up his mind very early). With my other son, I would not change a thing. He had his challenges in high school, but what he presented to the colleges on his applications was a true version of his quirky, brilliant self and he shocked the pants off of everyone with his admissions results. He is the reason I now believe that admissions officers are real, live human beings who are looking for the best in their applicants. I also now believe that essays can make a difference, but that SAT scores are a HUGE factor, even at schools that state that GPA/performance in high school is more important. Unlike a prior poster, I think as soon as a kid hits 2200 on the SAT, no further testing should be done. If anyone reading this has a younger HS student, my best advice is to prep for the PSAT and become a NMSF.
Demographics are changing and it will be easier to get into college from this point forward. If I had any more kids at home, I would encourage personal growth and forget about gaming the college admissions system. Or maybe, due to new economic restraints, I would be gaming it even more. Parents have to do what they can and let it rest with the kids and the colleges. One thing that did help my son with admissions was my obsessive love for CC. What I learned here (and from links from here) helped me guide my son through the process. People here knew tons more than the HS or private GC's.</p>
<p>Thedad, you got just right how it was done years ago. For the prep school parents and those interested, here's what happens today:</p>
<p>Top big city and boarding prep schools have a very similar makeup to that of top colleges. They are highly selective based on the SSAT among other things, they have big endowments and give lots of scholarships drawing kids from all backgrounds, they are chock full of legacies at top colleges and the prep schools themselves and they recruit athletes, low income kids and the Country's top URMs. On top of this you have the kids of many of the multi, multi millionaires created in the last 2 decades.</p>
<p>In the old days the head masters of these schools would call HYP and a few others and tell them which of his boys they'd be getting that year. As colleges became more diverse, that of course started to limit the number of kids they could take from these schools. Today, with the desire to have kids from every point on the globe, every income level, etc., the numbers they are taking from 'feeder' schools has gone WAY down.</p>
<p>So when it comes time to apply to college you have a group that all wants the same dozen schools and the vast majority are qualified or legacy/development.</p>
<p>Depending on the year and how many hooked kids are in the class, there may be no room at all left at the inn for the brilliant kid with no hook who would have easily gotten in if he had gone to the local public school. </p>
<p>To complicate things, prep schools have their own interests. Number one is to have a higher ivy admit rate than their competitor schools. That's how future students will judge them. If St. Witherspoon's has a 28% rate to ivies and St. Grottlesex has a 32% rate, they'll be higher in the all important prep school rankings! They also need to take care of the people who have, or they think will, give big dollars to them. </p>
<p>So they manipulate things. Johnny valedictorian is talked into applying ED to Penn because there's a 'space' there and they already have 4 legacies, an athlete and 2 URMs who want Harvard where Johnny really wants to go. If your parent is a legacy at one of the schools, you're told that an ED application there is the thing that makes sense. Of course this is a generalization, but one I saw happen at 3 different schools and know many people who've encountered the same at many others.</p>
<p>The unhooked who are not top of class have little chance to find a 'space' at any ivy or AW. They'll go to good schools--Bowdoin, Colby, Carleton, Hamilton--but usually not to the real school of choice they would have gotten into had the playing field been level.</p>
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there may be no room at all left at the inn for the brilliant kid with no hook who would have easily gotten in if he had gone to the local public school.
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<p>I am in no position to assess the validity of your explanation of how the college admissions game is played at prep schools, and I am in a hurry right now, but I must respond to the quoted statement. When it comes to admission at HYPSM, and places like Brown and Penn too, there is NO SUCH THING as "the brilliant kid with no hook who would have easily gotten in from the local public high." "Brilliant" is simply not a guarantee at these schools. Nobody gets in "easily." Period.</p>
<p>I don't think the validity of this is in question by anyone in the prep school community. For me it was just not understanding how much the game had changed because of the composition of the prep schools today and new wealth in the US. </p>
<p>Being well aware of what it takes to get into top colleges, I assure you, these same kids at a different school would get into schools they can not get into from the prep school without a very good strategy.</p>
<p>I would suggest that you read The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges -- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates by Daniel Golden. It was a true eye opener for me. </p>
<p>When you take into account the amount of legacies, athletes, and URMs admitted who clearly do not have the credentials to get admitted without those hooks - a LOT of brilliant students are being left out because they are taking the beds/spots of those who deserve it.</p>
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Being well aware of what it takes to get into top colleges, I assure you, these same kids at a different school would get into schools they can not get into from the prep school without a very good strategy.
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<p>Unfortunately, while you are right about the change in college admissions at SOME prep schools, you are grossly underestimating the difficulty of getting into those schools for unhooked public HS kids. WJB is correct.</p>
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<p>Bessie, you seem to be contradicting yourself. If the SAT scores are so important, why would you not restest 2200?
I you do not mind sharing - where was your S admitted?</p>
<p>I absolutely love and appreciate hmom5 honsety.
Personally I have no experience in the prep school community, but the knowledge gained from readings and the gut feeling tells me that hmom5 is right on the ball.
However, I still do not understand how hiring a consultant would have helped in the admission process of an unhooked, no legacy kid from a prep school? Yes, you can try to downplay the wealth, you can not underline certain aspects of the kid life, but after all he/she is still going to be an unhooked , prepped child. Other than transferring a kid to a publlic school...
What is a developmental candidate/admit?</p>
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What is a developmental candidate/admit?
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<p>See quote below from WSJ; here's the website.
How</a> Lowering the Bar Helps Colleges Prosper - WSJ.com </p>
<p>"What makes Duke and Brown, among other institutions, stand out, is the way in which they ramped up and systematized their pursuit: rejecting stronger candidates to admit children of the rich or famous, regardless of their ties to the university.</p>
<p>"Both schools had a behind-the-scenes power broker, a go-to man for prominent parents seeking to fast-track their children's applications. Duke had Joel Fleishman, 72 years old, a wine connoisseur who sits on boards of companies run by Duke donors and the parents of Duke students. At Brown, the contact was the late David Zucconi, a barrel-chested ex-football player with a bone-crushing handshake, a booming Bronx accent and a resemblance to actor Jason Robards.</p>
<p>In the world of higher education, children of the rich and famous are known as "development cases," pursued by presidents and fund-raisers often to the dismay of admissions staffs. Duke landed the children of fashion mogul Ralph Lauren and other corporate titans. Some of them became major donors, helping boost Duke's endowment from 25th in 1980 ($135 million) to 16th in 2005 ($3.8 billion)."</p>
<p>hmom5 -- I had a pretty good window on some of the issues you are discussing, because my kids attended both the local private school with the "best" historical admissions record (based on elite colleges and universities) and the local public school.</p>
<ol>
<li> There was no one at the private school who would have gotten in anywhere "easily" from the local public schools. The middle and bottom of the classes at the private school and public school looked very different, but the top 15 kids or so -- the ones who might be candidates for HYPS or similar colleges without hooks) -- were indistinguishable. Well, not indistinguishable -- many of the public school kids were much stronger in math and science (emphasized more there), much more driven to succeed, and some had incredibly compelling personal stories (as in the kid who immigrated from a civil war zone at 14, dirt poor, English her fourth language, who went from a 400 CR SAT I to 700 in 18 months). The private school kids gave themselves much more slack (and were happier people for it).</li>
</ol>
<p>Anyway, the top kids academically at each school would have been competing to be the top kids academically at the other school.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>That said, the private school had much better admissions results than the public school. Part of that was no doubt because it had much richer students. A big part of it was that its good students applied to a much wider range of colleges, and so competed with each other less. It had much better, more strategic college advising. And, one way or another, when colleges took risks (not HYPS -- they didn't take risks), they tended to do it with scholarship students at the private school, not slightly imperfect public school kids. Now, did the private school do less well than 10, 20, 30 years ago? Of course. But it still had a substantial advantage.</p></li>
<li><p>You are not entirely wrong about how counseling is manipulated at an elite private, but the colleges don't always play ball. In my son's private school class, there were 6 Yale legacies who applied SCEA to Yale. Yale took one kid from the school SCEA -- a completely unhooked, non-legacy, humanities-oriented Asian, who is a wonderful person, but far from the gaudiest member of the class on paper. All the other Yale legacies were later rejected or waitlisted, but some were accepted by Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, and Princeton. So . . . not chopped liver. Another Yale legacy who was a nationally ranked (single-digit) athlete was politely told by Yale not to bother applying, and went to Dartmouth ED. A similar thing happened the year before -- Princeton rejected a three-generation legacy outright ED, who wound up at Harvard. But Yale had accepted a double-legacy who was clearly the top student academically in the class.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>At the public school, Harvard and Stanford accepted a completely unhooked Asian math/science kid whose peers considered him their most brilliant classmate, but who was ranked #7 in the class. Yale took a higher-ranked legacy who was demographically indistinguishable from the legacies at the private school (where her two older siblings had attended).</p>
<p>Anyway, my point is that the elite prep schools are very sophisticated about admissions, and get excellent results comparatively, but don't come anywhere near controlling the process. And I don't believe any student is disadvantaged by going to a stronger school.</p>
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The unhooked who are not top of class have little chance to find a 'space' at any ivy or AW. They'll go to good schools--Bowdoin, Colby, Carleton, Hamilton--but usually not to the real school of choice they would have gotten into had the playing field been level.
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<p>It is impossible for me to think that anyone attending an east coast prep school is not already playing on an extremely well-elevated field. And while there will always be the truly wealthy (aka old money), the current economy should bring at least a few high rollers down to earth (especially as more and more wealth managers are exposed as crooks). New money is probably not going to hold the clout it has in recent years because frankly, gluttonous jet-setting new money is going to dry up simply because they spend far more than they save. Old money is old for a reason and some of the most frugal people I know are also the most wealthy. I read just a short time ago that some school's development offices are finding themselves mid-project with backers backing out. </p>
<p>However, we need to really remember that all of this talk about the relative fairness or inequity of college admissions is really referring to 10 or so top schools but there are a lot of great schools out there that do not seem to be on the central radar of those posting on CC.</p>
<p>For us, our "mistake" if you will was walking onto Dartmouth's campus on a lark during a visit out east in the summer after sophomore year. :-) How can one not hope to fall in love (although he didn't fall in love with Princeton in the least). In any event, we actually visited several schools-- all great schools -- but clearly different in their geography: Rural, Suburban, Urban and a little different in size and focus. The intention was less about a particular school, but more about what kind of school he might want to attend. The upside of this trip was he saw schools he liked (and loved), but more importantly he learned what it might take academically to get in. I believe this trip alone, more so than any parental lectures or come to Jesus moments, inspired my son's junior year academically. </p>
<p>Look, there are certain things way out of our control as parents. You can send your kids to great schools, pay for tutors and counselors out the wazoo, but the bottom line is the kid has to perform in his classes and on these exams. Motivation is much more effective if it is internally motivated. A kid cannot control his family income, ethnic origin or even his God-given talent on the fields or auditoriums. But he can choose to pick up that AP Bio book to get his lab done or go into meet his calc teacher to make sure he understands the material. Ultimately, dreams have to come from within. And if those dreams don't materialize, well... kids learn resiliency which is a huge gift in life.</p>
<p>I think you can game the system at some level, but at what cost psychologically? Five or six years ago it was all the rage that you had to have service learning and trips abroad to show your international connection. Now this is seen as tricks of the wealthy to game the system and the advice is to not overload a resume with activities that might emphasize family wealth. While I am not sure what this might mean for my current freshman in high school, what we are telling her is to find things she loves to do and involve herself. Her job right now is to love learning and do the best she can in all her endeavors.</p>
<p>While a degree from HYP may not be in any of my kids' future, they will attend some great schools regardless (and to be fully honest, they have made some great connections through their current school that seem to benefit alumni all the time regardless of college matriculation). And as my son has recently started to point out... there is always HYP or even the Big Green for graduate school! And we'll start this roller coaster all over again!</p>
<p>I disagree with much of what HMom is saying about prep schools and how they approach the process. My kids went to private day and boarding schools and I have a lot of familiarity with the process through my own kids and friends. What HMom says might be true of the elite 5 or so boarding schools, but I found the process to be very focused on what was right for the individual student. My son's prep boarding school absolutely did not sweat increasing the Ivy numbers. It was made quite clear to the parents that the right fit for each kid was going to control, and the staff spent a lot of time checking out schools themselves- such as Kalamazoo, Gettysburg, Knox etc. A number of kids did wind up at Ivys and top LACs, and good advice was given about one's chances and how to best approach the application process. The year my son applied 4 from his graduating class of 100 got into Penn ED- 2 athletes (who had the academic stats), 1 minority and 1 strong, unhooked kid.<br>
To me, the main thing to do is to back off the view that these top colleges are so important that one has achieve admittance at any cost. I was actually excited when my son (on his own) identified University of Georgia as a safety he would love to attend. I looked into the place and was all ready to order up the sweatshirt because it looked so wonderful and fun, but he got his ED to Penn.</p>
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To me, the main thing to do is to back off the view that these top colleges are so important that one has achieve admittance at any cost.
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<p>So true, MoWC, so true.</p>
<p>"To me, the main thing to do is to back off the view that these top colleges are so important that one has achieve admittance at any cost."</p>
<p>Some people see it differently, due to their personal experiences and environment. Some work in fields where the only kids they see getting an interview, much less geting hired,into their firm, and other similar firms, come preponderantly from a tiny pool of elite colleges. And these positions offer among the highest remuneration in America for people who cannot do things with a ball. They want the best for their kids, including opportunities to enter these high-remuneration professions that have served them so well. So, from their perspective, they do in fact see it as that important.</p>
<p>Plus, those same people are in professions where to get a piece of business one does not just sit back, submit a proposal and see what happens, one proactively uses every angle and edge one can find to steer things in your favor. That's how they conduct themselves at work, because the business demands it. It is a successful approach for them, so they inevitably carry it over to other enterprises. Winning a highly coveted college slot becomes, from their perspective, analogous to winning another important piece of business. So they use the same approach, pull out all the stops.</p>
<p>Plus, the money involved is not a huge issue to them, they might drop more than that on one of the three vacations they are going to take this year.</p>
<p>Ditto people who live in some very wealthy communities, with huge concentrations of professionals who themselves graduated from one of these same few schools. They don't wish their kids to experience "downward mobility". This day and age, with the admissions % declining, legacy status not meaning what it used to, and yes, seeming quotas applied to their elite school systems, with a lot of seemingly great kids not doing as "well" as one might have expected- they look at what else they can do. In their communities, it does seem, to them, to be that important. Plus, in these same communities, a lot of other people are doing it to; it is sort of an accepted common practice there.</p>