<p>I really appreciate that you guys have been respectful in this round of posts. Disagreement is not a personal attack, no, but accusations of arrogance were. Thank you for moving past them.</p>
<p>You can’t vouch for this personally, but my “why college X” essays were especially strong. I had a recruiter at Pomona call and praise mine; I got accepted at Vassar after incorporating some campus lore and naming specific classes; and at Penn, which considers interest too, I was named one of the top 86 applicants. I can totally understand that a college will wait-list a student who doesn’t write an inspired “Why us?” essay, but writing is my strong suit, and I was genuinely interested. In retrospect, I had one weak Swarthmore essay (not “Why Swarthmore?” but “What unique contributions will you bring to the Swarthmore community?”). Because I had that hole in my application, I chocked the wait-list decision up to that.</p>
<p>Grinnell and Kenyon were different in that they did not provide an opportunity to submit a “Why us?” essay. They had no Common App supplement at all. My GC definitely did not screw me over; we have a very close relationship and if they had called, he would have let me know. Maybe he would have let slip that I’d received a Penn likely letter if they had called, but they definitely did not.</p>
<p>I would understand the Grinnell and Kenyon wait-lists if I had written uninspired essays. But as this was not an option, they received the same application accepted by Princeton. I recognize now that I should have contacted Grinnell outside of my application, but Grinnell never once tells applicants any of this. You can check their website’s guide to applicants yourself:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.grinnell.edu/about/offices-services/admission/apply/us”>http://www.grinnell.edu/about/offices-services/admission/apply/us</a></p>
<p>The only step I didn’t take was requesting an interview, but that’s clearly labeled as optional, and it is not strongly recommended except for home-schooled students. Plus, I knew that there was not the slightest chance of there being Grinnell alumni in my area. Not even big universities had alumni in my area. The schools that show interest in their applicants reach out to them on their own accord, and even though no school had alumni in my area, a Princeton alumna drove thirty minutes to meet me halfway and a Penn alumna interviewed me via video chat.</p>
<p>I didn’t live in the right area where I could have been interviewed, but I don’t seem to have done anything wrong. My decision from Kenyon was especially disconcerting because I did travel a very long way to interview. Further, Kenyon allows students to submit supplementary material to an online portfolio, which I filled up completely. The theory that my wait-list is a product of not demonstrating interest is tenuous but possible for Swarthmore and Grinnell, but it is not a viable explanation for my decision from Kenyon.</p>
<p>Congratulations to @intparent’s daughter for being accepted to Kenyon with very high qualifications. I see that yield protection is applied inconsistently, but there’s no denying that it exists, and my case proves that it can happen even to students who bend over backwards to show interest.</p>
<p>To answer @SDonCC, Princeton rejects students with perfect scores, grades, and great ECs because they believe the students they are accepting are better. There’s a random element in this process. Mistakes are made. I heard from a close friend of mine that the valedictorian at her school, the best public high school in my state, will be attending Yale because she was rejected from Princeton, which was her dream school. Conversely, I was accepted at Princeton but rejected by Yale. Totally random. What’s clear is that extraordinary achievement helps the student’s case, and those with the highest international distinctions are all but guaranteed a seat in the most exceptional of cases.</p>
<p>This is different from Grinnell for instance, who sometimes rejects students not because their perfect test scores and great achievement are deemed not quite good enough, but because they are deemed “too good” and the student is seen as having a low chance of matriculating. Both Grinnell and Princeton are clear that they look for high test scores and achievement, and both generally hold to this promise, except at Grinnell an applicant’s strength can work against him in a tiny fraction of cases. This is never disclosed to the applicant, and demonstrating interest (which Grinnell makes hard by not allowing students to submit a “Why Grinnell?” essay, or an online portfolio, or scholarship applications) is not a sure-fire way to side-step this bias.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t think it okay if Princeton rejected a perfect-scoring olympic fencer who plays violin at Carnegie Hall and raised $20,000 for a women’s shelter because “surely this kid would choose to go to Harvard instead.” Had they rejected me, however, I would have been perfectly fine (if a bit disappointed). Similarly, I would not mind if Grinnell had rejected me or my friend if we were borderline applicants for Grinnell’s relatively high admission standards. But we both exceeded it, and exceeding it was a big component of our rejection.</p>
<p>Normally, students aren’t harmed by this because they get into a better college anyway, and I wasn’t harmed too badly in Grinnell’s case (though my friend was, in losing one of his six shots at a college, and I was financially harmed by the same policy at Kenyon). Nevertheless, the assumption that students are not hurt by yield protection is in some cases plain wrong. I really feel guilty for recommending Grinnell and Kenyon to my friend, because he could have spent those two shots much more wisely applying to more selective LACs or lower top 20 universities for which he would have been a good academic fit. I don’t want what happened him to happen to others, hence tip number 4 of my original post, and I don’t want other students to get pushed into the financial straits I found myself in after visiting Kenyon, hence tip number 2. Tip number 1 and 3 no one takes issue with.</p>
<p>I’m just wanting to help.</p>