Agree with @lookingforward post #53…Blossom is 100% correct, but this is CC.
This site is about experiential research. What did others find when they had interactions connected to schools? A lot of Ivy grads are very successful. They are smart, driven people. Many who post here connect success to the schools. That’s not wrong, but also far from the only paths to success.
How many college offer true need blind admission policies to all aplicants irrespective of their financial need. Since ivy league school can boast that they offer the policy if a students is admitted. Thus more and more student apply increasing demand. Few other top colleges can match it like MIT, Standford and thus these colleges attract rich and poor because of prestige. It is not gonna change anytime soon.
It would be interesting to know how CC decided that the current set up is good for kids applying to college? Or is it good for the site and issues relating to searching/traffic/hits?
The Ivies dont offer FA “irrespective of need.”
Or maybe they are just flexible?
This sentiment is offered frequently. Then April 1st when there is an onslaught of broken hearted students mourning their rejections from schools they felt were the perfect “fit,” they are told to suck it up and “bloom where they are planted” because “fit” is a fallacy.
CC is a bubble; the majority of 17 year olds have no idea how to select a “fit.” Most are not doing extensive college visits all over the country, nor do they have access to college counselors or other informed advising. It is natural to be drawn to schools with name recognition.
I haven’t read any responses Cvalle.
I appreciate the sincerity of your post, but I am not sure this is any kind of new problem. In the four years I’ve been on CC, kids wondering if they are “good enough” for HYPSM is normal. I suspect it’s been normal for many years, probably coinciding with the rise of the Common App. This best ways to counteract this hysteria are for parents to stop pressuring their kids, or for parents to ensure their kids have perspective and balance (probably the single most important step to be taken), or for school counselors to steer kids to colleges that are realistic, or for teens to stop worrying about peer pressure (which will never happen, of course), or for us here on CC to give kids realistic advice. I’m sure there are lots of other positive ways to counteract the pressure.
Let’s also remember that there are a LOT of kids who have zero interest in those tippy top schools. My son is one of them. So far, he has no true reach schools on his list. I suspect he will get into almost every college he applies to, and as a result, his list isn’t long. He will probably apply to 8 schools, tops. We don’t notice kids like that so much on CC, because they are probably not as stressed out as the kid posting every bit of minutiae about his life and freaking out because he got one C as a sophomore.
In the local GCs’ large meetings about the college application process, the GCs are advising students and their parents that the students should not apply to any of the “top” schools, because that only leads to disappointment. I am not sure this is better.
Well, no, it’s not better.
But there’s a lot of misinfo out there. Includes those on CC who go gaga for stats and a few great sounding ECs (and just tell kids to check the CDS,) who tell kids they’re a lock.
True, some posters are realistic. But every so often there’s blowback against them, others advocating niceness and encouragement. Getting in is about your 3.5 years of hs and your app, not some one or two shiny aspects. Or the ones who insist it’s mainly about the essay and a sad sack tale. Or the complaint it’s a crapshoot, while advocating kids…take a crapshoot.
It’s not very realistic. I don’t see it solved by moving Ivies into a general category.
I’d love to know how many of the “omg, high school kids are so stressed out worrying about getting into an Ivy League university” come from one of ten zip codes. My guess is that it’s a high percentage. I live on the East Coast, in an allegedly prestige-hungry region, and I have to be honest- the HS kids in my neighborhood right now seem far more obsessed with whatever some Kardashian is doing or whatever J Lo or a handful of major leagues sports stars are wearing to some awards ceremony than they are getting into Dartmouth.
And although I haven’t heard Quant Mech’s comment it wouldn’t surprise me. There has been a “dumbing down” or cult of low expectations that I’ve seen in the last few years which I am wiling to bet is far more prevalent than ivy fever (except for the aforementioned zip codes). The media doesn’t need to write about HS kids who cut class and smoke weed instead of studying for their AP Physics exams. That narrative is old and tired. But finding the kid who stays up until 3 am in an effort to gain a percentage of a point on the GPA so Princeton will get excited- that feels “newer” (I have no idea why). But that still doesn’t make it a large scale social problem or phenomenon.
My town library? deserted on weekends, except for the elderly and the new immigrants at ESL, or the less recent immigrants studying for their citizenship tests. The travel soccer leagues and the endless basketball clinics and the “My five year old has a private pitching coach” places? Stuffed to the gills. This doesn’t feel like Ivy fever to me, 10 years from now. These elementary school kids are absorbing the message that the only thing that matters is sports.
I’ve always thought the concept of “fit” a bit of BS for most kids. We visited 10 schools with dd’18 and she loved all of them, a couple more than others, but she can see herself being happy in all of them. A couple of kids I know, I can see are definitely more suitable for a certain size of schools, but most kids tend to be quite flexible. Not to mention most of them aren’t great judges, at this age, of what’s a good fit for them anyway.
Re Ivies, I don’t see a problem. Yes it’s extremely competitive and you shouldn’t expect to get in, no matter what stats or ECs you have, but what’s wrong with reaching a little? The most important role for counselors and parents is to make sure that their students are being realistic. If your student has never had an A in an academic level class in HS, then they have no business aspiring to the ivies (real case in dd’s HS!) As far as kids being “obsessed” with ivies, that’s kind of what teens do anyway. My dd and her friends “obsess” with boys, clothes, social media, proms, other girls, their sports, celebrities, etc. I am not denying that there is a minority of students who are too obsessed with getting into ivies. But frankly, most kids have the opposite problem – too much obsessing with being “cool” and not enough obsessing with grades.
“How many college offer true need blind admission policies to all aplicants irrespective of their financial need.”
The ivies and other selective colleges are not need blind. This was discussed in another thread but the ivies have a class where one part (wealthy) subsidizes the other part, without them having to dip into their endowment. This happens because ivies can determine wealth or lack of it by reviewing the application. Both parents work, they’re in one of the zip codes blossom mentions, the applicant participates in lacrosse and applicant wrote about their summer trip (s) out of the country. They also know whether the student has applied for FA (note, they do not know if they do apply for FA, what their income is). I don’t want to imply that adcoms look at fafsa, they don’t.
But they’re not need blind. I’ve said it before, the wealth on these campuses can be staggering, and that’s coming from someone in silicon valley.
A different way of defining strength, which removes “Ivy League” as a factor, is to put schools in tiers based on perceived academic strength, selectivity, and type of school (private U, public U, and LAC).
Maybe kids can be persuaded to do this for themselves by plugging in their own fit preferences. And instead of naming them “Tier 1/2/3…” they could use three: Reaches, Matches, Safeties.
As long as you go into the college application process with an understanding that you can get into all or none of the reach schools and you apply to a few match and safety schools, it’s all ok. Here in CA, I never heard of any student among my surroundings who wants to get into Darthmouth, UPenn or Cornell over Stanford or MIT (non-Ivies). So In this sense, I see a focus with wanting to get into one of HYPSM rather than just one of the Ivies.
For us, no way in hel*, I would have had my kid apply to MIT, CalTech or Harvey Mudd type of schools because there is no way our kid would have gotten into these schools because he’s just not a STEM bound kid. But did I think he had relatively a decent chance to get into Cornell, Dartmouth, or UPenn? Kinda of but he never applied. I also don’t think he would have gotten into U of Chicago or Columbia because as I understand it, these two schools demand a little more of academic achievements – not sure. HYP, maybe one of them. But again never applied because of the “fit” issue. Our kid is going to Stanford based on what he thinks is the best fit but frankly like the above posters said, who knows if it’s the best fit? We feel it is but we also could be dead wrong.
Hard to count each UC as a separate application because you fill out one UC application and can just check another box if you want to apply to another UC. Therefore, it’s just ONE application for all UCs. In this sense, our kid applied to “only” 4 schools, and should have applied to only 3 colleges because one Honors Program required only one or two pages of info filling to get a COA scholarship: Univ of South Carolina Honors College, one common application for UCs and Stanford. That was it for us. If he had not gotten into Stanford REA, he might have applied to Georgetown and Yale. That’s it. So getting into an Ivy school was not a goal or desire at all.
That’s irrelevant. They have $25 BILLION dollars. They didn’t need more. Period.
Most of them, but hardly any meet full need. It’s moot for most applicants anyway; if you like the school and the NPC suggests you can afford it, and the CDS suggests you have a chance, then you apply.
Stanford always wants/needs more money to compete with Harvard which has even more money. lol What Stanford has more than any college is land though. I heard starting near future they are going to increase the incoming class size by 10% each year until certain ceiling number. I know they built or are building more residential dorms.
My friends who went to MIT jokes that MIT is actually a big college because most of their campus is underground. lol
@milee30 Highly doubt anyone would grudgingly include S (or even MIT) to the HYP party. Stanford is ahead of YP in terms of desirability and prestige in the eyes of most domestic and international students these days.
Only Stanford and MIT are more prestigious than most ivies and have a more dominant standing/prestige internationally, more or less on par with Harvard and better than Y,P. Also Duke is most often included in the ivy plus group.
@CValle I see nothing wrong with people gunning for the top schools. There are advantages to attending those schools. As long as you dont develop unrealistic expectations and go in it with the mindset that most likely you will not get in, then I don’t think it is an issue. The awful thing is that many students equate success and self- worth with attending one of those top schools. That should change but obv super hard to do.
@websensation Not true. There is no real difference between Penn or Columbia or Chicago or even Dartmouth in terms of quality of the students. Each school just looks for slightly different things. The distinction is quite arbitrary. The only real distinction is between HYPSM vs the non-HYP ivies, Duke, Chicago and maybe Cornell vs all the other elites.
But you are right that most applicants would not consider choosing (and actually do not choose) Columbia, Penn, UChicago, Duke, Brown, Dartmouth or Cornell over Stanford or MIT. The prestige differential makes the decision pretty easy for most candidates.
“@milee30 Highly doubt anyone would grudgingly include S (or even MIT) to the HYP party. Stanford is ahead of YP in terms of desirability and prestige in the eyes of most domestic and international students these days.”
I’m not the one that needs convincing. In the discussion referenced in my post, I was the one that asserted that it was possible for top students to have a top choice that isn’t H, Y, P… or even S or M. It’s a great big country. Heck, there are over 35,000 high schools (so 35,000 valedictorians each year). Of course many of them will have similar dreams and goals, but there will always be thousands of top students who want different things than the common favorites.
I wasn’t trying to start Ivies vs. HYPSM. I just don’t think the Ivies at all cost is truly sought after anymore given the fact that there are many non-Ivy schools which are just as “prestigious” or have even better-known or respected brand name. This brings me to a point: People who apply to all 8 Ivies definitely have a thing about going to an Ivy. Not our family because we already know there are many better schools than Ivies, especially for certain areas. Now, if you wanted to major in Plant Science, Cornell would be an excellent choice.