The polite response here would be that you are suffering from confirmation bias, and I’ll leave it at that.
I would be the FIRST one to say I am well off. It’s a matter of definition, one that you clearly do not understand.
Might I remind members of the forum rules: “Our forum is expected to be a friendly and welcoming place, and one in which members can post without their motives, intelligence, or other personal characteristics being questioned by others."
and
“College Confidential forums exist to discuss college admission and other topics of interest. It is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else… If a thread starts to get heated, it might be closed or heavily moderated.”
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/guidelines
The 2 users debating have been here long enough to know the rules, do I am once again putting the thread on slow mode until tomorrow.
I see the opposite more often: people who are at a minimum “upper middle class” positioning themselves as the hoi polloi.
I think few people share your definition of well off.
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Math competitions are not “almost needed.” With the possible exception of MIT, the overwhelming majority of admits at highly selective colleges do not do these competitions; and certainly do not do well enough on them to have a strong impact on admissions.
For math, the first thing the college will look at is transcript – getting high grades in math and taking the highest level math courses offered at your school. As far as out of classroom activities, your imagination is the limit. She might tutor kids in math, be involved in activities to support math/STEM in lower resourced areas or similar to get more girls into math/STEM, get involved with math at the local college by taking classes beyond the levels offered at your HS or related research, doing summer work as an intern in a position that relates to her planned career and involves doing a lot of math, etc. As I recall one college (don’t recall which one) mentioned one of the admits had a social media page for his calculator, which solved related math problems.
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I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “let her enjoy math for the sake of it.” Do you mean let her participate in math competitions even though her scores are as you say “not stellar”? I’d suggest she makes the decision about what ECs she participates in and finds something that she enjoys. As mentioned in my post above, there are lots of math-related options besides just competitions that compare scores.
Are you assuming that tech colleges will not value her because she didn’t receive a top score in math competitions? Or because she is part of a less represented group in math/tech?
Highly selective tech schools are exactly the ones that are likely to give her a boost in chance of admission for being part of a less represented group… I certainly would not avoid them because of perceived disadvantage compared to other similarly selective colleges. I posted some example admit rates earlier in the thread, which are repeated below. Some of the listed colleges below have been quite explicit above favoring women.
Cornell Engineering School – 16% of women admitted, 6% of men admitted
Harvey Mudd – 29% of women admitted, 13% of men admitted
MIT – 12% of women admitted, 5% of men admitted
Caltech – 11% of women admitted, 5% of men admitted
CMU* – 23% of women admitted, 13% of men admitted
*Overall is listed. I expect the admit rate ratio to vary widely by subschool
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Same to my daughter. She pursued more solitary math pursuits for her own pleasure/education where it didn’t matter that she was part of a (seemingly) counterculture.
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Yes, I meant she enjoys the work of trying to prepare for math competitions, the puzzle or whatever of solving the problems despite not placing high. I wonder if that is the best use of time sometimes (surrounded by families that strategize everything), but absolutely yes she makes her own choices. Also yes, I assume that the tech schools have many students to choose from with great contest scores (I know her school will have some), students who are spending all their time on math and are very high level, and perhaps their value to those colleges is higher. But these percentages are encouraging (although still small!). She says she would like to take the AMC this fall and qualify for Math Prize for Girls, and be able to go and have a weekend of math just with other girls. But, there are some really excellent ideas here for other avenues to engage with higher math ideas, and I’m going to mention these to her.
Kinda for the record (Team USA at the International Mathematical Olympiad).
Luke Robitaille is a rising senior and since he’s come onto my radar, you can assume MIT Admissions is aware of him.
There’s one notable person who is at Ohio State. We of course don’t know exact reasons but the MIT-IMO community thinks they know why or perhaps the person has spoken to teammates.
Of course the "as many or more gold medalists… turned away… " comment would include internationals but internationals are in a different bucket than Americans.
I don’t want to get all nerdy with Bayes Theorem/conditional probability but in layman terms, there’s a lot of people with not only IMO gold medals, especially Americans. You’ll find a lot of these people as Regeneron STS Finalists and other things, so it’s hard to isolate on just one accomplishment. That being said, I reiterate,
- Great grades are necessary but insufficient,
- Doing well in >1 field is important (one trick ponies don’t fare well with MIT Admissions)
- The better you do across multiple fields and contests, the better that reflects
Americans who have these correlate quite highly with success at MIT and therefore have decent chances.
Bad grades … not even an International Mathematical Olympiad gold medal will save that person. (Therefore it is not a silver bullet.)
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Very interesting, but this is the six top American’s each year (all boys.
) DoesnT really seem to have much to do with whether 200 have an 80% chance, or whether the next 1000 have a 40% chance, etc.
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These competitions are excellent ECs for some students who’re deeply interested in the subjects, but they shouldn’t be viewed as stepping stones to an elite college. The odds of winning such competitions at national/international levels are much lower than those of admissions to even the most elite colleges for nearly all students. It’s also no surprise that some elite colleges want to recruit the few students who can demonstrate their exceptional talents in some of these areas (exceptional in the sense that no amount of prepping for even some of the best students in those areas is sufficient to produce winners of some of these competitions at the national/international levels).
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You may be misreading their “vibe”. Living below their means is the true hallmark of an upper middle class family, IMHO.
I believe “top” university admissions and financial aid offices know who’s “well off.”
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Thanks for posting this. I wasn’t aware of just how much of a lock that MIT has had on these olympiad winners recently. I only know of a couple at this rarified level over the past 10 years and they both went to Harvard.
Just to add Re: science fair a bit…
Although the overall effect of the COVID pandemic has been bad, it forced ISEF to put more details about the science fair projects online, not just the abstract for each project.
All presentations for ISEF 2021 are available online on Project Board:
Unfortunately it requires an account to see the projects 
Your daughter can check the projects in the Math category that reached the final level of ISEF and see if that would be an interesting activity for her. It is very different than math competitions.
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Back to the original question. Yes, it has become extremely competitive, and no it is not unsustainable (double neg for emphasis). That’s like saying the no one will try to get to the NBA since its so hard to get there.
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Some sources, such as https://www.solomonadmissions.com/mit-admissions, suggest that all applicants are rated on a 1-5 scale in 3 categories – academics, activities (ECs), and interpersonal. Typical admits do very well compared to the applicant pool in all 3 of these categories – rather than just having stats + academic contests. I realize that being on the level of the 6 kids representing the United States in IMO does provide a large boost in chance of admission, but these 6 kids are not typical admits. The more typical admission path does not involve national/international level academic contests.
That said, I wouldn’t take the above source as gospel. The summaries for other colleges suggest that they generally get the basic ideas right, but often get the details wrong and draw incorrect conclusions about how the basic ideas are used.