<p>1/3 of 1800 admits is 600 "normal" kids out of 20,000 applicants. 3%, I rest my case.</p>
<p>I don't rate my kids by SAT scores. The subject of the post is what the Ivy league and top 20 schools do. To me, all my kids are very bright. I couldn't make any distinction between them based on brightness at all.
But the schools they applied to did.</p>
<p>Wow after reading some of these posts about kids who go to these Ivy league schools, I am so discouraged! Now I'm wondering if I'm ever going to the States as an international student. Man...</p>
<p>cyborgxxi -- there are many, many outstanding schools in the States besides the Ivy League.</p>
<p>
I couldn't make any distinction between them based on brightness at all. But the schools they applied to did.
I really doubt there's any significant "distinction based on brightness" between a 2300 and a 2350. Of course, I only got a 2270, so what do I know? :rolleyes:</p>
<p>cyborg - I agree with katliamom. The state Ivys are easier to get into - UCs, Michigan. Depends on what you want to study. A lot of schools are looking for a diverse student body. Where are you from?</p>
<p>Lets go back to square one. Assuming that a student basically has test scores that fall somewhere within the 50 percentile posted on collegeboard.com for a HYPMS, other IVY or top 20 school, a reasonably high gpa, is in the top 5-10% of class (not val or sal), but goes to a public high school. I understand that such a student is NOT average.</p>
<p>I was primarily referring to a kid who has 'normal' ECs, no Nobel Prize, not a poet laureate, not an Intel or Westinghouse prize winner, not an athlete and in fact, does not attend 'educational programs' at IVY League schools over the summer in an effort to get a hook. Not an Eagle scout, no awards or prizes other than the normal good student stuff (NHS, Honor Roll).</p>
<p>I posted on the Parents Forum. My D is happy that she has finished the apps and can get back to her youthgroup on weekends and only has to fill out the Scholarship stuff. ($50G+ per year is a big bite out of the pocketbook and I have another D who is a clothes horse and wants to go to college in 2 years - NYU). She would never consider looking at this site.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Lets go back to square one. Assuming that a student basically has test scores that fall somewhere within the 50 percentile posted on collegeboard.com for a HYPMS, other IVY or top 20 school, a reasonably high gpa, is in the top 5-10% of class (not val or sal), but goes to a public high school. I understand that such a student is NOT average.</p>
<p>I was primarily referring to a kid who has 'normal' ECs, no Nobel Prize, not a poet laureate, not an Intel or Westinghouse prize winner, not an athlete and in fact, does not attend 'educational programs' at IVY League schools over the summer in an effort to get a hook. Not an Eagle scout, no awards or prizes other than the normal good student stuff (NHS, Honor Roll).
[/quote]
No. Not with you as the press agent. ;) If that is how the kid is presented, they will not get in. Period. I answered way back at #12:
[quote]
And to answer the specific question , a "normal" kid who can express themselves in such a way that a particular school sees what it values, and what they need, can get in. A run of the mill, half-hearted app will doom them.
[/quote]
If the applicant can't drum up the requisite energy and excitement to separate themselves from the crowd with their app, very good stats will NOT get them in. Nor should they.</p>
<p>This is an application. It's not a "list". Tell us who you are through what you've done. Tell us where you are going through where you've been. Tell us about your exciting future by showing us your meaningful past.</p>
<p>This is not "who has the most EC Volunteer hours". You could have 20 and the other kid could have suffered through 200 but if it left a mark on you that won't wash off, you have something to say that the committee will hear , because that is what they are listening for when they are reading your app. They are trying to find the authentic you. Show them. If they like you that's fine, if they don't- find someone else. You'd have probably been miserable there anyway. As always, JMO.</p>
<p>If that's all there is to the application, as curmudgeon says, probably not. But that's never all there is to the application. There are lots of smart, ambitious, engaged and engaging kids out there who would fit the profile you describe, except that those data are about the 20th most important things about them. Their teachers love them, they are passionate about their studies and other interests, too, their peers respect them, they have a lot to offer.</p>
<p>It also makes a big difference whether you are talking about "HYPS" or "HYPSMC" vs. "top 20" (and whose "top 20"?). Only about 7,000 kids total get to enroll each year at Harvard . . . Cal Tech, and not all of them are chosen on pure academic criteria (as many have said). If you expand that list to a top 20, you more than triple the number of spaces available, and if your top 20 happens to include some state universities (like Cal, Michigan, Virginia, Carolina) -- mine does, USNWR's doesn't so much -- the number of spaces may be more like 30-40,000. (Your top 20 should probably have about 30 schools in it, too, some of them LACs.) Anyway, that's a lot of spaces, and a lot of room for solid, strong kids who want and are ready for a top-flight education. Not that it isn't competitive -- it is -- but the notion that thousands of kids with great credentials like you describe are left out in the cold is, I think, a myth. The American higher education system offers very high quality opportunities to a huge number of kids.</p>
<p>UnivMom, to echo what Curm said.... the best summary of the competitive application process we heard was at Stanford... the Admissions person told the group, "this isn't a deposition, it's an application. Don't fill the page(s) with every single thing you've done since 8th grade in an effort to be complete and thorough. Take the time to figure out the one or two things we really need to know about you in order to assess whether or not you'd contribute to the community here".</p>
<p>Although my S ended up not applying to Stanford it was great advice. He was a pretty regular kid with high stats (but far from perfect grades) who didn't have pages of "normal" stuff on his MIT application-- honor society this; community service obligations that. He used the available real estate to talk about himself and the things he cared about-- and so despite the fact that he never entered or won a robotics contest, couldn't write code in 6 languages, or build a car to run on french fries like all the other mythic MIT applicants, he was accepted. He did good things for the MIT community while he was there and I think is a credit to the U now that he's gone and graduated and works for a living.</p>
<p>That's the piece that's missing from all this talk about "amazing" EC's or hooks or who is a legacy or whatever.... it's not about what the kid can get out of the school (since virtually every applicant has the mental agility to make it through with a degree in some major or other....). It's about how that kid can take what makes him/her special and bring it to the University. </p>
<p>I've told this story before but since I'm an old-timer I'll tell it again... every year in April I run into a disgruntled parent at the grocery store who has an axe to grind against Princeton or Harvard because their kid with a 4.0 and great scores was rejected. They've always got some conspiracy theory brewing (which favors some legacy/minority/Alabama resident... you fill in the blanks) and completely ignore the fact that said kid who spends his spare time playing tennis and downloading music on his IPOD probably wrote the same essay as 2,000 other kids from a suburban town with identical grades and scores who play tennis. And if said kids sense of entitlement leaked through the application as much as it leaks through the parental anger, that kid was probably doomed from the git-go.</p>
<p>These schools, by and large, are very very small. So how many tennis playing kids from Great Neck and Scarsdale and Winnetka and Atherton and Belmont and Bethesda does a college with a Freshman class of 1,000 kids (give or take) really need or want? And why should the IPod loving tennis player get in over a kid who with the same academic chops, has shown some burning passion and heat to fix or repair or discover or heal or beautify or sanctify????</p>
<p>Here's a profile that I think characterizes "normal" kids, </p>
<ol>
<li>You score above 2100+ on the SATs</li>
<li>You have a 3.75+ GPA in rigorous courses</li>
<li>Have 700+ on your SAT II's </li>
<li>You have a talent in the arts, athletics, etc, and have demonstrated this through a consistent and sustained record of accomplishment in your ECs </li>
<li>You can express yourself well with authenticity and passion in your essays</li>
</ol>
<p>... than your chances of getting into one of the top 20 universities or one of the top 10 LACs (as per rankings like US News & World report) is very, very high. This also assumes a requiste number of apps submitted. The profile described above accounts for only about 3-4% of all high school graduates, at best. That is, "normality" is at the 96th-97th percentile and above. </p>
<p>To expand the highly constricted Ivy League list by a multiple of 4, here's a list of schools where, for all intent and purposes, one can get an Ivy League quality education in the Arts and Sciences. MIT and CalTech are excluded:</p>
<p>Harvard Stanford Carleton Amherst
Yale Duke Rice Grinnell
Princeton Williams WUStL Emory
Columbia Chicago Swarthmore Reed
Dartmouth G'town Bowdoin Colgate
Brown Wesleyan Pomona Vassar
Penn Haverford Vanderbilt Texas Plan II Honors
Cornell JHU Northwestern Claremont McKenna</p>
<p>You could probably double this list again and still have a remarkable list of colleges and universities where the properly motivated student, would get a superlative education and where strong, normal students wouldn't have to overly sweat the admissions issue. </p>
<p>This focus on HYPS is crazy and crazy-making.</p>
<p>Actually, although my daughter would love to go to Stanford or Columbia, Wash U (where she has excellent prospects of getting in) and Tufts (she had a 30 minute interview with an alum interviewer/recuriter that turned into 2 hours) are high on her list. They are not Ivy, but have excellent programs in her areas of interest. D wants smaller class sizes and the ability to get involved in research with professors by her sophmore year. </p>
<p>She visited Berkeley and hated it because of the huge (500-800) lecture classes and prospect that small classes wouldn't be available until close to senior year. She wanted to apply to U Mich. As an alum, I told her that her experience at Michigan would be similar to Berkeley. I survived there because I was a Near Eastern Studies student before it was chic and took courses at the 600 level as a sophmore. I remember a freshman history lecture with 600 students. Although I must admit that Ann Arbor is a great place to live and study.</p>
<p>She would not be devastated if she didn't get into one of her first three choices.</p>
<p>Re Blossom's post- I couldn't have said it better! Stats/ GPA, etc.. are in most cases only the first "filter" or hurdle in the college application process- they are not what determines whether a student will be accepted at a given college. Colleges accept people, not statistics.</p>
<p>UnivMom,</p>
<p>I think it is important that we try to break this Ivy versus non-Ivy grip that has many on CC -- parents and students -- in a kind psychological lock. </p>
<p>There are many schools, like the top LACs where some of the quality output measures are much higher (production of Ph.D.s per capita is one) than many of the Ivies. </p>
<p>We need to get away from assessments like the US News & World Report where the principal measures are input measures (how hard they are to get into; yield, etc.) and begin to look at process measures (number of senior faculty who teach undergrads; class size; research dollars dedicated to undergraduate research; number of co-authored papers by undergraduate students, etc) and on output measures like the one profiled above. </p>
<p>Tufts is a great school. Interestingly on an input measure -- mean SAT score, Tufts' is higher than Dartmouth's.</p>
<p>That first filter can be the tough one for some. I review resumes all the time and at least in the job market, if you do not make it through the first set of filters, it doesn't matter what the rest of your resume says.</p>
<p>I suspect that with all of the new only apply on-line college applications, that a warm body will no longer be handling applications that don't make it through that first filter.</p>
<p>Univmom,
Many Top colleges use the "first filter". Only those who make it through have their full application read by a warm body. I don't think that will change [the use of a warm body to make the final Y/N decisions], but there is no way an admissions office staff is going to fully read 20,000 applications.</p>
<p>I suspect the first filter is really when they put you on their mailing list after they receive the exam scores meeting their profile when the collegeboard and act release their lists.</p>
<p>I disagree completely on this. If Harvard or Yale didn't want to read 20,000 applications, all they would have to do would be to publicize what their "first filter" is. They don't, because the "first filter" isn't that tough, and is a sliding scale anyway. I am pretty certain that at least one live person spends a few minutes with each application. </p>
<p>I don't know why they want that many applications. I certainly don't believe it's to enhance their USNWR ratings, or to generate application fees. It must be because they actually look for that one golden needle in a stack of pretty shiny hay, and believe they can find it. </p>
<p>UCLA and UC Berkeley, by the way, get more than twice the number of applications Harvard does. I don't know how many of those get a full read from a live person, but I would guess plenty.</p>
<p>(I have some relevant experience with a similar "admissions" process, where there were over 5,000 applications for about 120-140 "slots". With a staff of about 30, all of whom had responsibilities for many other things, at least two people read every application, and a lot more if there was any chance of acceptance. I spent about 4-5 hours a week on that part of the job.)</p>
<p>please don't try to figure out HYP . Find something unique about you that would make you stand out. But the place to be is Princeton !!!! It is an incredible institution including social life.</p>
<p>"I don't know why they want that many applications"
Well, 1]think of all the $ they rake in application fees.
2] If they did not encourage students to apply, they might not be considered as desirable, "elite" or prestigious, would they? Look at the difference between the # of applicants to U of Chicago and Yale or Princeton. Even though most in the academic world would say there is hardly any difference in the quality of an education students receive at Chicago vrs P or Y, Chicago, in part through the use of it's "uncommon" application, has effectively limited the number of students interested in applying. And in those outside the academic world- like Ivy/ elite conscious HS students and their parents, Chicago is not considered as prestigious a college to attend as HYP. So guess what's changing next year? Chicago will start to accept the Common app, and watch those application numbers [and application fees $] climb as a result .</p>
<p>UCLA and UC Berkeley's applications are strictly number driven. There are no essays involved in admissions decisions.</p>