@QuantMech at #215 and @blossom 's response at #216 are two of the best posts I have ever read on this much-posted-about subject. I don’t see them as inconsistent with one another at all. Knowledge does advance!
My nephew is a third grade language arts teacher at a huge public school in a very diverse neighborhood in a very diverse city. He would fall over laughing at the characterization of his school being “comparatively expensive”. He has a full teaching load in addition to supervising the kids getting special services for reading and language in grades 2, 3 and 4 (LD’s, various accommodations for processing disorders, etc.). He did not go to Harvard, but his colleague (who has a similar teaching/supervisory load but for math) did.
I’m sure in small elementary schools the idea of specializing sounds crazy. Not so much in big schools, Quant- and he teaches in the midwest!
Again- we all extrapolate from what we know and assume that it’s the norm. Which is why realizing that it’s a REALLY big country is important when thinking about college admissions. Not every Val gets to go to Princeton-- there are too many of them, and a large majority of them don’t have the goods anyway, 4.0 GPA notwithstanding.
@blossom I agree with you 100% but I think Harvard is a bad example. I know quite a few recent Harvard grads and they are the least intellectually curious bunch Ive ever run across. They were fixated on getting into Harvard and not much else. They are, for the most part, brilliant and driven beyond reason. Does that equate with success in todays world? More than likely it does, but at what cost? I have one kid at Yale and one who is getting deferred from Princeton tomorrow 
and while, yes, they certainly worked hard on their college apps I am very proud of them because, despite the conventional wisdom about how one gets into places like those, they are well rounded people who went to art museums and aqariums (aquaria?) growing up.
I’m happy not to use Harvard as the example, WCH, although I think on CC it’s often used metaphorically to describe “hard to get admitted to colleges”. And I think the pendulum at Harvard swings-- although it’s been a reasonably pre-professional place for a large part of the student body for generations (not everyone- there are still Classics majors and Art History majors and a bunch of “I’ll figure it out after the Peace Corps” types).
Good luck with tomorrow- fingers crossed for you!
Well as a group these grads complained that Harvard wasnt pre-profesional enough! No accounting offered etc. what a waste of an education IMHO. Thank you, pretty resigned to our fate tomorrow, great kid, perfect scores (literally), perfect grades (literally) great ECs and we know the drill. Older son had what Yale wanted, younger son just a great kid. He will excel wherever he goes but I want him to feel good about all the hard work he has put in all these years. It all good.
WCH- Princeton likes nice kids. Buy a half gallon of mint chip ice cream to stash in the freezer- for either celebration or consolation. Nothing makes a kid feel better than eating ice cream, in December, with someone who loves him for WHO he is, not what he has achieved.
Why is it a recurring theme that high school students feel that all of their hard work will be “wasted” if they do not get admitted to a reach college, or that a safety college is somehow “beneath” them or too embarrassing to mention?
My son doesnt feel that way at all, he would be happy with a lot of schools he is looking at. he already got into a nice state honors program with money. But, Im guilty, Im a human, I love my son and want him to get into where he would like to go. I dont want to go into it too much but Princeton is an excellent fit. After his brothers experience, he was convinced that the Ivies are all about brand and really didnt want to apply to one. His brother is having a great experience but its not “college” in the traditional sense, its a pressure cooker. Then he took a look at Princeton, as he said “I thought I was going to hate it but show me some buildings that have ivy and a great tour guide and Im a sucker for the whole thing”. @blossom, I may just make tacos, who doesnt feel better after a taco?
Well, I’m still learning new things from CC, re blossom’s post #221. I will make a guess that the large elementary school with the specialists at elementary levels is in a large city? It is certainly someplace where the prevailing pattern of elementary education varies quite a lot from the pattern here. We are in a small-ish suburban region with 6 elementary schools, all relatively small. Nobody specializes at elementary level. The area might have had a single large elementary school, but the school board/superintendent/parents (in some combination) decided against that.
When I say that the Harvard students and grads I have known have a very strong focus on success, I really mean Harvard grads specifically, and not the larger “top” group.
Also, I just wanted to add a comment in reference lookingforward’s remark: “If you want in, you should try to understand what it is they seek. Be that sort.” Personally, I’d flip this to say that you [the applicant] should try to understand what you value and what qualifications you have [i.e., what sort you are]. Then look for colleges that espouse those values and seek those qualities, and apply there. This is the best advice I would have to give a student who was asking about chances.
Yet (in my opinion) to identify what the colleges really value is a bit harder than it probably needs to be, because a lot of the information available from the colleges is “much of a muchness.” On the surface, many colleges appear to offer and value the same things. And different routes to different degrees from the same university will provide different experiences, with different qualities being valued along the way. But it would be really helpful if the college literature enabled one to identify the “character” of each place. A few schools stand out as unique, from their literature: Caltech, St. John’s, Olin. MIT and Chicago seem to me to be runners-up in the “uniqueness” category. But others are hard to figure out, without having studied there for a while.
Re blossom’s #216, and the comment “If more kids spent as much time ACTUALLY WANTING TO LEARN-- y’know, reading books, being curious about the world, etc. as they do polishing and strategizing, they’d be in a much better position to get into the college of their choice,” I am 100% on board with students actually wanting to learn. That fits precisely with my view of the university as an institution for the advancement, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. (The budding theoretical physicist can rejoice. )
But I am not so sure that time spent reading books and learning about the world necessarily positions a student to get into the college of her/his choice, if it is one of the “top” schools. It should, in my idealized view. But I am not sure that there is enough “doing” in just reading and learning. Is there? How would you chance a profile like that?
I know that Harvard has said in the past that they reserve 200-300 slots in the class for the most promising scholars of the future. It would be interesting to know who those students have been in the past and what they are doing now. (I know, it can’t be done, it’s a gross violation of privacy, in fact I would object to the publicity if I had been one of those students, etc., etc.–still, if one could know, it would be interesting.)
Maybe the Edward Blum/Justice Dept suit will bring that to light.
One of my kids had two good friends who went to Harvard who could only have been admitted as top scholars of the future, since they didn’t really do anything else, or do anything else very well.
One was simply the smartest kid in my kid’s graduating class. He didn’t have the best grades or the highest test scores (ESL had something to do with that). He barely had any ECs, and not a hint of leadership in anything. He was (is) East Asian, and was entirely STEM-oriented. And modest. But if you asked any of his classmates or teachers who was the smartest kid in the class, he was the answer. My kid, who had better test scores and grades by a micron (they had adjacent class ranks), said “F. just has more RAM and better processing speed than I do, and he can make connections no one else can make. He doesn’t have that much information. He’s actually pretty clueless about the real world. But if you feed him the information, he can do incredible things with it.”
That kid was accepted everywhere he applied, and went to Harvard. A couple of paralegal years after graduating from college, he went to law school at Boalt Hall. I believe he’s practicing law with an American international firm in his country of origin now.
The other was a silver-spoon kind of kid at a top private school. He didn’t have the best grades in the class, and everyone had great test scores. My older kid and her University of Chicago housemate met him at a party when he was a rising high school senior, and they came back and said, “You know who has turned into a really interesting kid? My sib’s old friend P. We just talked to him for two hours. He’s full of ideas, and they are original ideas that he’s done a really good job of thinking through.”
He was a Yale legacy, but was deferred SCEA then waitlisted by Yale. But he was accepted at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford. He went to Harvard, and won a prize for his senior thesis in History and Science. He also had a secondary concentration in VES (painting), and some additional math credential. He took one of those mythically high-paying jobs at a brand-name consulting firm, and morphed over the years through a venture capital firm to Google and now he’s back at Harvard for an MBA.
In other words, from the standpoint of scholarship, somewhat disappointing for both of them. I do think Harvard may be at least in part to blame. I know others with similar stories.
The two Yale friends from the same classes, neither of whom was a pure scholar like the Harvards: one is an MD/PhD, the other is the #2 person at a nonprofit that distributes organic food from small, local producers to urban co-ops and other supermarket-alternatives (after a stint as a Bright Young Person in the Obama White House)…
“Personally, I’d flip this to say that you [the applicant] should try to understand what you value and what qualifications you have [i.e., what sort you are]. Then look for colleges that espouse those values and seek those qualities, and apply there.”
That doesn’t sound like the lemmings rush. In fact, it agrees with my suggestion to (try to) learn what qualities a college offers. And matchng that to your values is also matching yourself to them. A process.
I’d also say, this process should start with what the U says and shows (including the sorts of kids it touts, what they’re doing.) Not, lol, onesie twosie anecdotes. Not hearsay and not blatant speculation. That willingness to explore is a valued quality. As opposed to a form of, “Here I am, not gonna change, take me because…”
In real life, how iften do we get to use a limited few to extrapolate what the whole is? That’s the province of guessing. Do you flip a coin twice and state the results are thus universal?
My major issue with chance threads is how the under-informed encourage the under-informed. Easy example: telling a kid who wrote a few phone apps, he’s a lock for some highly competitive college. Neither the asker nor the responder knows so. Within the context of one high school, that may be impressive. But do they realize tons of kids across the country do it?
Or the idea breadth is padding. Or that your own solitary pursuits (or unilateral) are sufficient.
Be curious.
I know a couple kids from DS’s school who went to Harvard. Asian, extremely smart and driven, had national-level awards in what seemed like a ton of STEM competitions. One of them also ran a school math club, which was very contest-oriented. DS wasn’t happy about this, he was more into learning and doing research. But this is what works. Last year he missed a deadline to sign up for AMC and didn’t think twice about this; this year, after reading CC for a while, I’m making sure he doesn’t. Although I’d strongly prefer that he spends more time reading books, but he has no time for this, period.
Are you saying what these one or two kids did is “what works?” How can you be sure? There’s a whole app, not a short list of awards and club titles. AMC won’t tip in without the rest of what a school wants. Why not try to go beyond what seems (without a view of their full apps) to have worked?
It seems to be common knowledge that winning contests on a national level seriously helps the application. Of course, it may not be necessary and is definitely not enough. Another kid I know won ISEF several years in a row but went to his safety school because he was very concentrated on his research to the detriment of his grades.
What common knowledge? This is part of my larger point.
Ime, relatively few kids apply with national awards. And winning them without the rest of the picture rarely tips. (One rare exception being that H reserve for an unusual sort of producer. But these are exceptions, not the rule.) You don’t have to push him to AMC. It can help more to look for the broader parameters than so invest in one specific.
Very interesting post by JHS #231 (and thanks for your earlier comment). I can add one example, of an extremely promising science student who went to Harvard, concluded that scientists mostly came from the lower middle class, changed majors, and wound up at a name law firm. Of course, law and business both need people with the intellectual capabilities that would make for leading scholars in their fields. But I am sorry to see students deflected from science, if they could contribute significantly to their fields.
lookingforward, I see a difference between the advice to identify what a school of interest is looking for, and then “be that sort,” as opposed to the advice that an applicant should figure out what “sort” she/he is, and then look for colleges that would like that sort. The latter advice should not result in the applicant’s telling a random “top” university, “Here I am, take me with no adjustments.”
On the other hand, everyone has multiple qualifications and multiple aspects of character, and the applications all have page/word/charater limits, so the student has to “prune.” This is where knowing what the colleges are really like when one gets there would be advantageous. It’s slightly easier for students to know that, if they attend high schools that have sent multiple applicants to a particular college, in the years while the current senior has been in high school. This is not to say, “This high school gets x spots.” Of course they don’t. But information about what the colleges are really like certainly comes back to the students at the high school. Then again, part of the information is probably wrong. (I am nothing if not even-handed.)
No.
“Be that sort” who tries to understand, is open to that, able to look, observe, process.
Not mold yourself. Nor contort.
But don’t forget, it isn’t a done deal when you id the colleges that work for you. They get to choose the kids that work for them.
This isn’t rocket science.