Why would anyone feel insulted? I was merely pointing out that families of substantial means, well off if you will, aren’t hunting need-based aid, because they aren’t eligible. I still stand by that. That’s it. 
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You might be right, @itsgettingreal21 and @roycroftmom, but I wonder whether in the UK, where academic studies are more focused and career support less extensive, the STEM students at Oxbridge, Imperial, etc. (MBB pursue these students aggressively) will have much prep beyond reading a booklet and maybe having a mock interview or two.
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That definition of hooked seems too narrow. If a renown university recruits a brilliant composer, violinist, artist and actor, those applicants are just as hooked as any athlete. Any candidate who is recruited or given special consideration because of their demographic is hooked. (This could even apply to true academic prodigies who might recruited by various departments.)
But I’m not even sure what we are debating, These schools have repeatedly acknowledged that they get far more exceptional applications than they can admit. The ones that get accepted got lucky. They aren’t necessarily any more “excellent” than two or three or five or five thousand who got rejected. Are you disputing this? Do you really believe that the kids who got admitted to these schools were more “excellent” than many of the ones who got rejected and ended up at, in your description, Vanderbilt? Or did the admitted students just happen to check the boxes that university was looking for?
- Does living in rural North Dakota make a candidate more excellent?
- Does having parents who attended or teach at or donated to the University?
- Does having a good (but not great) curveball? (The great curveball kid goes to Vandy or professional.)
- Does winning some award that most potential applicants have never heard of?
- Does getting plucked out of the thousands of other excellent candidates for unexplainable reasons?
It seems to me it is a crapshoot. Lots of excellent applicants. Some get lucky, some don’t. Acting as if it is all about merit is just not accurate, and it exacerbates the issues raised in this thread.
(As for these various awards, I’ve honestly never heard of most of them, and I am pretty sure the vast majority of excellent applicants haven’t either. And it is far from clear from your observation that the only reason these particular kids gained admission to two or three of however-many-HYSPetc-schools they applied to. (The thought of these schools being commoditized like this makes me cringe. Stanford and Princeton are not the same thing.). But let’s assume that winning one of these contests increases the odds of admission to these schools . . . my point remains the same. Most of the admissions at these schools aren’t driven by these four awards. Excellent (and some not so excellent) candidates are accepted while equally excellent candidates are denied.)
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I guess you could call it a case of gilt by association.
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I know nothing about math competitions. I am super curious about the impact these math competitions actually have. (Sorry for the diversion). Realistically how many “elite” spots do unhooked math competitors actually fill (how many are there that get high enough scores that it gets them into schools they otherwise wouldn’t get into)? How many “elite” math student spots go to students who don’t participate in the competitions? Are there any spots left for non-math competition kids at MIT, Princeton, CalTech, etc?
It seems like such a niche, low profile culture, and one some kids groom for, for their whole lives. Not that it is much different than honing athletic or musical skills over a lifetime, it is just not widely known about. And it has an outsized impact for those in the know. Makes sense that schools would prize students who do well. The schools don’t have to guess what the aptitude of the student actually is, when they do for the vast majority of math majors coming from all kinds of different schools.
Also - how does the timing work? Is it even possible for a senior to participate in time for it to matter for their college apps? It is wild to me that a student has to know about and prepare for the competitions by the beginning of their junior year. It is like college recruiting for athletics, but the die is cast even earlier, and few people know about it or can train for it because their schools don’t offer sufficiently advanced math. At least with athletes, the existence of recruiting is known and understood.
And what has covid done to the math competitions?
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OMG. I can’t decide if I respect you more or less for that one.
How rich of you.
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Yes. It’ll not get any better because many colleges are starting to close down due to bankruptcy.
Of course there is some luck involved. There is luck involved in any selection process where qualified candidates exceed number of openings. Why folks can’t just accept that and move on instead of lambasting a system that results in rejection of excellent candidates is beyond me.
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The process in the UK is the same. The kids prep just as hard.
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A bit of a diversion, but the IB comments have been enlightening. They’ve given DH insight into the source of most of the yelling in our house. I now understand why I hear him screaming at so many from the various banks/firms throughout the day. He’s cut 3 firms in the last 2 years; they’re dropping like flies. He thought it was just a 20-30 something thing. As a corporate client he’s refusing to train any more IB employees; if they’re assigned to his accounts, they better know it all. He’s been the source of several of the canned relationship managers in the northeast. Please for the sake of our household sanity stop hiring based on soft skills 
He’ll take full understanding of investment vehicles, international markets and regulations, corporate structures, legal, finance and accounting over personality all day long. Leave that for the sales teams.
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I am struggling with statements like "xx% of athletes are admitted " where xx is a very high number. Those applicants represent a small percentage of the athletes who wanted to attend that school-- they are the ones who made it through the recruitment and screening process successfully. At any selective school, the athlete who the coach wants and who has passed the pre-read has essentially gone through the application process and been assured of a good outcome. Athletes who the coach has passed on and those whom admissions just couldn’t sign off on move on to talk to other schools… They don’t become applicants. The acceptance rate should be very high at that point. (Indeed, one wonders what went wrong for the recruits who went through that process and weren’t admitted. )
You can’t compare them to winners of top math and science contests who don’t have that pre-screen (or any other group for that matter.).
Most elite athletes, particularly those with good scores and grades, will find a good college that wants them. Likewise, so will winners of top math and science contests. But not all will get their first choice or even second. But the athlete will know that prior to sending in the application.
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Prestigious national/international academic competitions do make some students standout, but they can only be considered “hooks” for a few who really excelled (meaning they “won” or came close to winning) in such competions. Like other “hooks”, the rest of their applications also mustn’t be deemed deficient, unlike in the old days. Even for schools where academics aren’t weighted as heavily, there’s a bucket for academically highly promising students. Students belonging to the bucket have a much greater chance of admissions. The threshold for inclusion in that bucket is higher at some colleges than at others (often a function of their “selectivities” and desires to recruit competitive students in certain areas).
As for competitive admissions, this was my response on another similar thread; it seems to apply here as well.
“We’ve grown so accustomed as a society to thinking of “elite” college as some sort of payoff for a student’s efforts, that they deserve that experience as a reward; common sense often seems to go out the window.”
As far as athletics go, it’s probably a better comparison to look at the # of HS athletes vs. scholarships. I equate high stat academic applicants to HS athletes like this. It would more akin to kids participating in time and money consuming club sports and expecting an athletic scholarship as a payoff. The big scholarships go to a miniscule percentage of athletes; less than 2%, even fewer are offered full-rides. The athletic acceptance percentages you see are skewed as @gardenstategal noted.
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I think it’s just that kids are simply putting in a lot more effort and pursuing higher-level everything (grades, test scores, ECs, LoRs) in order to get in. Back in the 70’s you didn’t need to do those things to get a spot. It’s an academic arms race that has escalated over a few decades to crazy levels.
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I can’t speak to the 70s but we were certainly focused on those things in the 80s.
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One has to keep in mind junior IB analysts aren’t the only ones Wall Street hires, even though they comprise the majority of new hires because of the extremely high turnover rate in that job category. Since STEM-focused students generally tend to gravitate toward jobs in high tech (or in some cases, quantitative trading, etc.), most applicants for the IB jobs are students in social sciences (including business) and a few in humanities. Some technical and math questions are necessary for this group, but these questions are really basic (from the point of view of either a practitioner or a good math/science/finance student).
Hiring practices of some other Wall Street jobs are very different. Some will probe applicants’ abilities to “connect the dots”, or their abilities to react quickly and correctly, or their abilities to analyze and solve actual problems faced in the capital markets, etc. There isn’t a single “standard” for hiring.
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One of the Level 8 awards I described above is qualifying for USAMO, which stands for USA Math Olympiad (I chose that one because it is the least identifying). Qualifying for USAMO is an intermediate step along the way to identifying the top 6 math students in the USA, who then compete in the International Math Olympiad (IMO). Before qualifying for USAMO, a student first has to do well on the AMC-12 which is open to all students, and then roughly the top 3000 students with the best results are asked to take the American Invitational Math Exam (AIME). Roughly 270 AIME students then qualify for USAMO by 11th grade (12th grade exams are too late for consideration). For simplification, I will leave out the impact of younger students qualifying as that gets messy and stick with the 270 number.
Let’s also assume for a minute that my sample observation of 80% accepted into at least one HYPSM holds across all qualifiers. If so, that’s 200+ USAMO students taking one of the roughly 7400 spots at these schools each year, or about 3% of all students for just this one award.
If I add up the students from the other three awards and attempt to adjust for overlaps, that’s roughly another 60 unique students. Or about another 1% of the class. And that’s just for the specific awards that I know well through my children.
I have often said that elite college admissions is just a game where the rules are kept intentionally vague so that the admissions committee can do what it wants. If they were interested in fair disclosure, the admissions page would say something like:
So to me, the primary fault lies with the colleges for not revealing what the admission rules actually look like. If you say my children were lucky, well yes, they were lucky to have a parent that was able to infer some of the rules, and help them play the game by encouraging activities that they A) really enjoyed, B) truly excelled in, and C) had were likely to result in admission.
Personally, I would prefer a far more objective admission criteria rather than the propaganda that these colleges portray on their websites.
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If that is what they’re dedicating their HS years to then I would say they have the wrong priorities and are short sighted. College is a vehicle, not the end game. One’s “dream” if you have one should be what you hope to achieve beyond college. That is far more dependent on what they achieve regardless of where they go than which college they attend. I think it’s that shortsightedness that contributes to the number of applications at “elite” schools and results in crushed “dreams”.
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Very helpful. Thanks for doing the math for me!
Next question, and I know you can’t possibly know the answer: Are these students the kind that their LORs say “the best math student I have ever taught”? Asked another way, if they weren’t doing the competition, are they students who would stand out enough that they have increased odds at admission just on their own?
More questions: Am I right that the students who do well have been working on it outside of school for years? What is the demographics for students who make the 3000 qualifiers? Is it possible that they are more likely legacies on top of being brilliant at math?
Logically if you are one of the best 200 math students in the country (1 in ~20,000 students), in most high schools you would be the best math student of a teacher’s career. But there’s a lot more concentration than that in terms of the schools they attend, a small number of high schools have kids at that level every few years or even more often. (My selective HS in the UK had students with >1 in 5000-10000 math ability every year, I’m sure multiple selective magnet schools in the US do too)