Thanks UCB!! And Linda… That helps
@hzhao2004 , your kids are too young to know what they want, but you are “guiding” them by considering moving out of state to a super competitive district on the East Coast? You said you are already in a decent district in the Midwest. That is not guiding, IMO. That is forcing them by giving them no choice. If your kids are too young to know what they want, how do you know they will be happy in such a school district? By all means, if you are moving for a job relocation or whatever, you have to do what’s best, but moving out of state solely for a school district seems extreme.
@blossom This group has 3-14 APs, 2010-2400 SAT, 31-36 ACT, 3.6-4.0 GPA (median 3.98) with many other factors reported. Changing values in any of them matters little when teacher/other adult’s evaluations are in. Presumably recommendations and essays match well.
47 "Actually, Dartmouth does not fill half of its eats ED."
I don’t think Dartmouth fills any “eats.”
But if you are referring to “seats” instead", yeah, you are right. The exact Dartmouth ED percentage is 43.18996%
FYI, I said that the Dartmouth/Penn/Duke/Vandy band of schools get half their class from ED. The actual numbers are Penn 54%, Duke 47% and Vandy 51%.
So I was wrong in all cases. None of those schools get exactly 50.00000% of their class from ED.
My sincere apologies for being so imprecise.
: )
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Actually if you want to increase your child’s odds for 1 specific Ivy then move to Philadelphia and have him/her attend a public high school. Or you could research if Boston gives similar for Harvard/MIT, Chicago for U of Chicago, NYC for Columbia, etc. Might find some bump but probably not like the Philly/UPenn one.
53 "Then why even mention "holistic" when every thing has to be Top 1%?"
Because when playing this game, the top 1% is really not all that special. It is a math thing.
The top 1% of U.S. HS students is about 50,000 kids per year. The top 15 colleges enroll about 25,000 students a year in the aggregate. About one third of those students are admitted while being outside of the top 1% (athletes, legacies, URMs, other hooks, etc. etc. etc.). So the available seats for unhooked 1%-ers is really more like 15,000 seats per year.
Being an unhooked top 1%-er (in terms of grades and test scores) gets you a lottery ticket to play the game.
Also, recognize there’s a pretty big variation within the top 1%. A 33 ACT score puts you at the 99.00 percentile. A 36 ACT score puts you in the 99.96 percentile.
@northwesty I don’t think this contradicts your point at all, but I wanted to get a little statistic-y. 
*About 3.5 million students are expected to graduate from high school in 2016–17, including 3.2 million students from public high schools and 0.3 million students from private high schools
In fall 2016, some 20.5 million students are expected to attend American colleges and universities, constituting an increase of about 5.2 million since fall 2000 (source).*
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
So 1% of 3.5M = 35K, and of the college bound it’s about 20K.
Of course the 33% increase in less than 20 years shows how much more competition there is, solely from a numbers standpoint (in addition to the other influences).
Post – That makes sense. FWIW, my stats are from the admissions director from a top 15 school. His 50k, I believe, is kids who were top 1% in terms of grades OR test scores. So that would be a slightly larger pool. But probably a pretty good approximation of the number of kids who are aspiring to and competitive for this level of schools.
The vast majority of top 1% HS students do not apply to any top 15 USNWR colleges, and many top 15 USNWR colleges do not place anywhere as much emphasis on top 1% as do many persons on this forum. For example, MIT has one of the highest average math SAT scores in the United States, probably only second to Caltech. They pay special attention to math ability, so you might expect that top 1% math scores are critical, yet an admissions officer for MIT writes the following on their website. Note that the 740 score they are referring to is 97th percentile, well below top 1%.
Valedictorian is not a particualrly meaningful title. Our school’s Val was denied at all Ivies she applied to, as well as A couple of other top 25 colleges. She had a stellar SAT score, 8 APs, great grades of course. She was accepted at a lot of other great schools, and attends one of the top LACs in the country. Our class Sal attends MIT. She was an semi Finalist in a prestigious science competition. She was denied at at least one Ivy and another Top 25 school. I know the Val very well, but the Sal, not so well. I am guessing the Sal probably had a stellar SAT score also. The big difference between our Val and Sal, is that the Sal was very involved in some intense ECs and the Val wasn’t. The main point though is they were both denied from any Ivies they applied to, as well as Top 25s except MIT, of course. I think we all need to believe these AOs when they say they practice holistic admissions. If there was a guaranteed method for getting into Top 25s, I reckon someone would have come up with it by now.
If you want a way into UChicago, send your kid to one of the Chicago public schools, and get a job with the Chicago PD or FD.
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/pdfs/2016-police-fire-form.pdf
What matters?
GPA.
Test Scores.
A hook, be that “hook” based on culture, disability, gender, etc. (“affirmative action”), connections (parent’s alma matter, family a big $$$ donor, famous family/child), or abnormal achievements (kid founding a $1 million netting company at age 14), a sports hook, or a hook based on “diversity” (what state you’re from, and if the college has accepted too many people from your home city/state" that year).
Hook, hook, hook. And more hooks. Find a hook, and you have a chance at getting in. A hook is what differentiates 2 people with the same test scores and GPA-- one’s from a horrible neighborhood, or one is a sports player they need to recruit, or one’s family donates $$$ bank to the family, or one’s family is a famous celebrity or politician, or they have an affirmative action hook, etc. etc. etc.
What are ordinarily called “hooks” are generally characteristics that cannot be changed by the student, with the exception of being an athlete good enough for the school to recruit as such. Some can be changed by some parents (e.g. a really huge donation, but that means that the parents have that amount of money to begin with).
For most students, acquisition of “hooks” is out of their control.
I expect most of the application matters for colleges that use a holistic approach, more than just stats + a hook. You can get some insight to what colleges consider important from what criteria they mark as important in the CDS, what criteria admissions officer’s mark as most important in surveys, what is said on college websites, etc. For example, I used MIT as an example in my earlier post, so I’ll do so again. Both MIT’s CDS and MIT’s admission website indicate that a criteria is more important that any of the above for admission – “the match”, which is defined largely in personal qualities and character, and is identified by a combination of non-stat criteria found within the application. More specific details are at http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/match .
@Postmodern And let’s not forget the big increase in international applicants. Add them to the admissions pot. Plus whatever number of candidates you end up with for that top 1% I would imagine it would break down around 50-50 male-female. @data10 puts the number of seats for unhooked kids at top schools around 15,000 - for any given student, divide that by 2 - half for males, half for females.
Bottom line it’s a lottery ticket, crap shoot, whatever - And even if you “win” it might not be the best path for you (see Malcolm Gladwell) or it might not be affordable.
@orphan a disability is NOT a hook. Gender is not a hook, though for some Ivies, it helps to be one or the other. Brown has about 20% more female applicants than male, so you can bet the females they do accept are pretty special. And I also don’t agree that it’s a lottery. There are definitely people who will have the odds more in their favor. But there is a huge proportion of applicants who THINK it’s a lottery, and they buy a ticket just in case.
Agree with @Data10 and @Lindagaf . At the top schools, most all competitive applicants have similar GPAs and test scores, so that is NOT what makes any one student stand out. These schools build classes, and select students they want, that will make an interesting and diverse class. Be an interesting and desirable applicant. Stand out. Be interesting.
I think what most people want to know is what matters the most for those 80% of applicants that have very similar characteristics but only make up a smaller percent of the class.
If you had unlimited access to all of the data I’m sure there would be some interesting observations. Like maybe Brown accepts a large number of kids from Democratic Schools, or Yale accepts deeply involved community service kids, etc. We’ll never have that kind of access but it sure would be cool if we ever did.
It seems like if you don’t have a ready-made hook (recruited athlete, legacy, super rich, etc.) you’ve got to make one of your own. This is what the essays are for. The self-made hooks aren’t as valuable as the ready-made ones, i.e. they won’t give you a pass on bad grades/scores, but they can pull you out of the middle of the applicant pool and/or off the waitlist.
Making a hook can be viewed as grasping at straws.
For highly selective colleges, “ready-made” hooks won’t give one a pass on bad grades/scores, either.