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<p>Your comparing Harvard’s 7% acceptance rate out of 100 applicants to winning the lottery is a stretch to say the least. As such, it serves no real point nor does it have any bearing on this discussion.</p>
<p>In short, a 7% chance does not equate to a one-in-a-million shot at winning the lottery.</p>
<p>^^^ The 7% admittance rate for HYP or the like is not the same to everyone. For those from the HYP feeder schools that have a decent grade could be 50% chance. For those rich hooked with “johnny Inc.” finance behind it could be 75% chance. For those recurited athletes, it could be 90% chance. However for those garden style public HS students, who’s GPA is under X.XX and SAT score under XXXX, it could be a true lottery, maybe less than one in the million. One that got in because he knows how to play some thing the college is looking for is a far fetched and once in a blue moon story…</p>
<p>I don’t think that ANYONE – not Johnny, Inc. nor a recruited athlete nor an Intel winner nor a kid with the funds to afford a personal college admittance coach – has a 50% chance of getting into HYP. There are just too many kids and too few seats to fill.</p>
<p>Yes, it is possible. I did not pay for it but the following web site listed all top prep school admittance rate:</p>
<p>[Prep</a> Review - America’s Best Boarding Schools 2010](<a href=“http://www.prepreview.com/ranking/us/boarding_schools.php]Prep”>http://www.prepreview.com/ranking/us/boarding_schools.php)</p>
<p>for those in the top 30~50% of those classes, the success rate to be admitted into HYP and the like is more than 50%…as 30% of the student in that prep school was successful placed.</p>
<p>I have no evidence on the recruited athletes etc. but if they are truly wanted, they will get in.</p>
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No, and I didn’t say it did. I said the odds were not as long as the Lottery, but they were still not good odds. Surely you understand exaggerating to make a point. Yeesh. I was later making the point that your statement
was rather silly. For those that win, the chances turn out to be 100% after the fact, whether it was entrance to Harvard or the Lottery. So what?</p>
<p>What is “normal”?</p>
<p>Statistically speaking, a “normal” kid would have an SAT score of ~1500, probably doesn’t study very much or display any intellectual passion, and is your everyday teenager. That being said, HYP does not take your average, “normal” person.</p>
<p>Most people at HYP are just smart kids. There are some freakishly intelligent people who do not appear to be “normal”, but they are only a small percentage of the student body.</p>
<p>To answer the OP’s question, if HYP did take normal kids, this thread wouldn’t even have been posted, because HYP wouldn’t be the elite triumvirate of institutions they are regarded as today.</p>
<p>Getting into HYP is a completely different animal and a whole new discussion topic. Sure, being a legacy, URM, amazing athlete, or freakishly intelligent science olympiad winner are often the common routes to acceptance; however, it is still possible to get in as a middle-class, standard high-achieving student…you just need to know how to game the system, which requires a different type of intelligence. If you are clever, know what the adcoms want to see, and really want to get in, it isn’t an insurmountable obstacle.</p>
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This is how Harvard see the academic quality of the second choice. It is no relation to the chance of applicants.</p>
<p>Now, you put these 2000 to the application pool, instead of throwing them out. How many of the first selected would be re-selected? </p>
<p>The top students from the feeder schools (sending more than a dozen or just one student every year) would be re-selected with the reasonable degrees. Some from non-feeder schools may have the 7 to 100 chance. Some have always no chance.</p>
<p>The premise of this thread is pretty ridiculous, and while I haven’t read all of it, I just wanted to put out there what I know to be true about a lot of the people I live with at Yale.</p>
<p>For some background, I was accepted regular decision to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and UPenn (Brown rejected me; it happens). My GPA was roughly 3.8 (just outside of the top 10% of my graduating class), I submitted an ACT score of 34, and when required to submit SAT2’s, my scores were 720, 710, and 700. I don’t think those numbers alone make me any sort of lock at any of the schools I was accepted to.</p>
<p>I’m not a legacy, nor was I a first-generation college student; my dad has an associates from DeVry, and my mom a BA from a state school. I’m Caucasian, and I was not a recruited athlete. I think this disqualifies me from the ridiculous emphasis on “hooked” applicants that frequently shows up on this site.</p>
<p>The reason I had success in the college application process was that I was clear about what I was passionate about and what I had already done with it. I had a decent resume working in electoral politics back home, had been involved in some economics/government competitions, and was a USSYP delegate (probably the closest thing I have to a “hook”, and there were 103 others, plenty of whom didn’t have the same luck I did). I was very honest in my application about what I cared about, why their particular school was where I belonged, and what I would bring to them if they took me.</p>
<p>My story isn’t unique. No one in my room is a “hooked” applicant like you describe. In fact, of the 30 people who live in my entryway here, only 2 or 3 people come to mind as meeting the “hooked” applicant criteria. Everyone here did very well in school, no doubt, but not everyone was perfect - some had better scores than me, and some fared worse. What does seem to be true is that people had something they were intensely passionate about, and my guess is that is become clear through their application.</p>
<p>I understand people being frustrated by what the application process appears to be - a year ago I was in the same spot, convinced that the numbers I had simply wouldn’t be enough to get me where I needed to be. I decided to sell myself in my application as straightforward and honest as possible, because I didn’t want to get rejected and wonder if the “gimmicks” people often advise would let me down. Instead I saw that despite the difficulty, the admissions officers at these schools really do care, and kids who independently put in the effort to get there can do it - their grades and scores needn’t be perfect for that dream to come true.</p>
<p>If someone wants to follow up (questions about my post, about applications, whatever) please private message me, as I rarely check this site - I’m only on now because my brother has started looking at colleges. I know it’s tough, and it’s easy to simplify it all and say that these select few have a huge advantage, but I think the holistic admissions process works much better than people give it credit for.</p>
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<p>Finally, some sense!</p>
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I really get tired of my quotes being taken out of context. My statement was not directly related to the chances of people to get in. I specifically mentioned that fact in relation to the contention that there are so many students applying that have zero chance of getting in. My paraphrased quote from Harvard, along with a comparison of the stats of the applicants vs. the stats of the admitted students, shows that contention is not true.</p>
<p>However, I still disagree with you. If there are 10,000 people (or 15,000 or 20,000, who knows) that have extremely similar resumes, there is no way Harvard can take them all. Therefore the decision can be and often is rather arbitrary or guided by considerations the applicant would have no way of knowing ahead of time. For example, all the elite schools say they try to have a certain balance in many areas. So maybe a good dancer applies in a year when there are not so many others applying. Or a great oboist. Or other talents or geographic considerations or who knows what that, everything else being equal academically and in other areas (after all, passion is not exactly quantifiable), puts that person in over another. There is absolutely a significant element of chance in the process.</p>
<p>Breuer - I agree with everything you say, but at the same time a 34 ACT (99th percentile) and a 3.8 GPA (and probably a fair number of AP courses is my guess) are pretty high level stats. Someone with a 3.4 GPA and 2000 SAT (or 30 ACT) is just not likely to get in, no matter how passionate their interests. Still, I think your point is the right one.</p>
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<p>Actually, the odds look pretty good to the 7% that made it out of the 100% and sure beats your exaggerated comparison of winning the lottery.</p>
<p>Fallen Chemist is absolutely right, in my opinion. Do some people have a better shot than others? Of course. The applicant with a 2400 and a 3.9 (unweighted, from a competitive high school) clearly has a better shot than the kid with a 3.6 and a 2000. But that doesn’t mean that the first kid actually has a good shot at admission. The sheer number of people who apply means that it’s foolish to assume that you have a decent chance of being admitted. Obviously, some people are admitted. Some of them have won Olympiads, racked up Intel awards, or started local charities. But not all of them have. That doesn’t mean that the Ivies only accept kids with incredible accomplishments, but it also doesn’t mean that their admissions processes really aren’t that competitive. </p>
<p>It doesn’t matter whether or not you think that you have a good shot at getting in, or your attempts to rationalize the uncertainty of your admission by trying to consider how many other applicants are “stronger” or “weaker” than you. It’s true that your application is evaluated in the context of other applicants’ applications, but your specific application to a school is highly individualized. So all you can do when you apply is to have strong academic performance and standardized test scores, be honest and compelling in your personal statement and supplementary essays, and show the schools to which you’re applying why you want to attend them and what you would bring to their community!</p>
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Or let’s even look at your original statement.
So your contribution to this discussion is that admittance to HYP is not unattainable for those that attain it. Are you seriously wanting to continue with that as your rebuttal to my statements? It makes no sense at all as an argument. And to continue to help you in your struggle to read what I originally said, I said it was NOT as long an odds as winning the lottery. What part of NOT don’t you get?</p>
<p>In response to the 1st post: I am applying to some Ivies (Columbia ED!). I went to africa to help a few communities of materially poor, and I did so because I care (about the people as opposed to my Ivy league chances…)</p>
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<p>There are plenty of rural and inner-city poor in this country that need help, but these places are not nearly as appealing as vacation destinations. You may care, but I seriously doubt you, at a high school age, have any useful skills that the locals don’t already possess. Did you design an irrigation system or build a solar array? If all you provided is physical labor, that’s available locally for pennies an hour: you could have employed a whole village for a year just with the cost of your plane ticket to get to Africa.</p>
<p>It may have been a valuable eye-opening experience for you, but it’s the height of Western arrogance to think that you were actually “helping” the locals, other than with your dollars spent.</p>
<p>LoremIpsum - Really. My church has sent people every year to a mountainous, rural village in the Dominican where they have built a church and school and helped get electricity to the village. I suppose your highly cynical diatribe applies to us too. However, not only do we send people down, but we have a long standing relationship with the people there and by having high levels of communication, we know kids with extraordinary promise and can sponsor them for a better education (yes, we also contribute our “filthy” dollars for all the kids to gt a better education). Could we contribute all of those dollars here in the USA? Sure, but by comparison the worst off here are still better off than these people were when we first started, and unfortunately that is still pretty much the case, although the DR people are way ahead of where they were 10 years ago.</p>
<p>I really think “Western Arrogance” has very little to do with it. If the locals have so much capability, why are the conditions the way they are? For the price of a plane ticket one could hire a village for a year? Puhleeze, you sound completely naive as to the corruption over there. Anyway, this will get the thread totally off track. Keep your politics on the political forums, please.</p>
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<p>Seems like I’ve heard this kind of objection before…oh, yeah:
“Then one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, he that was about to betray him, said: ‘Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?’”</p>
<p>But more seriously, I will say that churches send teams to both domestic and foreign work sites. It is probably true that one of the reasons they send teams to foreign sites is for the benefit of the church workers (especially youth). But it’s not to help them get into college, or to provide a vacation. It’s to sensitize them to the needs of suffering people around the world. This may not be the case for commercial ventures that set up work trips, but it’s definitely true of churches.</p>
<p>One factor in admissions to HYP appears to be whether or not anyone else from your HS applied. In my case, I applied to Princeton with a 2340 SAT, straight A’s for all 4 years of HS except for one Physics class, nine AP courses, a 790 and 700 on my SAT II’s, an extremely strong and interesting essay(in the opinion of everyone who read it), lots of clubs and leadership positions, and an amazing interview. And… I got flat out rejected. However, one other person from my HS applied to Princeton as well, and got accepted. She was #1, I was #2, but the margin separating us was extremely thin. Her SAT scores were over 200 points lower than mine, her SAT II’s were very close to mine, her grades were equal, the clubs were equal, she had one more leadership position(NHS president), almost certainly inferior essays, and probably a great interview. We are both white and from middle class families, neither of us had any huge hooks, and neither of us are legacy. She was shocked when she found out she had been accepted and I had not even been wait listed. Moral of the story: if you are a white or asian male who is not legacy and is competing with people from your school who are not white or asian males with similar qualifications for a spot at HYP, you had better start looking at lesser Ivies or other top-20 schools because your chances are not very good.</p>
<p>Isn’t it poor judgment to derive such cynical conclusion from such as small sample size (in this case, just one sample, yourself)? I attend a very selective school and know countless people who were accepted along with their high school classmates. </p>
<p>I also attended a very average high school where few apply to top schools, and I was applying to several of the same, highly selective colleges as my friend, and we were so similar that we participated in almost all the same activities and had similar grades, and in all the cases we were both accepted. Honestly, I fail to see how was having classmates who apply to the same schools a deterrance to your own chance of acceptance.</p>