I am in complete agreement with what you wrote. It is really easy to join the “harder than ever” crowd, but not the case from where I sit.
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I was responding to this as well as the quote below…which seems be you commenting on to the usual data points that parents and students use to assess safeties, matches and reaches.
Not sure what a “just outcome” is. The OP’s list was reach heavy and thus challenging for a domestic applicant, which becomes even more difficult for an international applicant.
Also GAP year students weren’t a secret, although I do think the schools should have been more transparent about what effect, if any, those students would have on this year’s applicants. But I’d hazard a guess that even if they admitted they were taking less students due to gap years that would not have deterred many highly qualified kids from taking their shot at the tippy top schools.
Personally I think TO was a bigger culprit because the schools had to take a good chunk of their class from that basket of applicants otherwise the TO wouldn’t seem legitimate.
Semantics. My definition of a just outcome is likely different that yours. I think the kid should have done better than he/she did based on the data at hand, you differ. You think he/she got what she deserved. Philosophical difference, I think. Naviance is school specific so I cannot address that nor would I try. Naviance for my kid’s school is going to be very different than Naviance for another person’s. I do think colleges with a few exceptions (Dartmouth and Duke) were borderline dishonest about the degree to which deferrals would affect their numbers, something completely knowlable for them.
Have a friend who was a admin officer for an Ivy and now works in an adjacent field. Said this is the weirdest/worst year she has seen in her 20 years in the biz. This has been echoed by several people I know who work exmissions for highly selective schools. Honestly, I don’t totally understand the desire to harsh on a class of students who had their senior year and half of junior destroyed and then were subjected to totally changed admissions landscape.
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The guidance counselor should also have advised that any student would need a higher proportion of of matches and safeties in such a long list (GC may or may not have realized the nuances of which schools would fit these categories for an international).
Happy the OP got into a good target.
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Why?
Admissions to an “elite” colleges is not a well-deserved award for students who did well in high school. A kid who got good grades and had excellent ECs does not “deserve” admissions any more than a kid with lower grades and less impressive ECs.
This is a hard truth - in private college admissions, nobody “deserves” anything. In public university admissions, only in-state applicants deserve anything.
Harvard, or NYU, or USC, or RIT, or Gonzaga don’t owe anybody admission, no matter how well that person did in high school, or how many awards they won, or even if they did cure cancer.
Private colleges are not the National Merit Corporation, and they are not USACO. Colleges applications are not competition entries, and AOs are not competition judges. Parents, GCs, and high school students should stop treating them as such.
Private colleges have a vision of what and who they want to be, and they select students who help them fulfill that vision. An applications to a private college is not an entry to a competition, it is a profile of the student. The college looks at the profile and decides whether that person fits what the college feels that it needs.
A college application to a private college is just like a job application. The company hires who they need, not the person with the largest amount of experience, with the best job reviews at their previous job, or the best dressed at the interview.
Finally - private colleges are not required to increase enrollment just to accommodate every kid of every parents who thinks that their kid deserves to attend an Ivy.
There are hundreds of top-notch public universities which provide an excellent education, and whose mandate includes providing a top notch education to the kids of that state. The kids at the top of that state, academically, deserve to be admitted to the most selective college in their state. That is usually what happens, especially in state where it is explicit, like , say, Texas.
Bottom line “I didn’t get into a private college which I think is as the level that my kid/I deserve” is not injustice, no matter what it feels like.
PS. The mission of all colleges is to educate students as non-profits. In none of those statements does it mention that they will only the best students academically or the highest achieving students.
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I wonder if this college cycle will cause everyone to rethink what it means to go to an “elite” college and what kids need and want out of schools. Schools are admitting their most diverse classes and this will mean a lot of kids that “deserve” to go there just won’t get it. This is a good thing for our society but a bad thing for the individual kids that may have to get in to a “less desirable school.” My S24 will spend his high school years learning, growing, playing music and enjoying his high school career, and will not think that the goal is the right school, just the right school for him.
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I really wish that more kids had this attitude…
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Not sure what you are saying exactly. I am sharing my perspective which seems relevant. Note I am a dad of a student in that class and I do not see it as you do. Like your friend in admissions, I also know a thing or two about a thing or two.
I don’t know. I went to Columbia. I knew a lot of people there who deserved to get in and some who probably did not. I really cannot, as an alum, get worked up about stentorius gatekeeping. I call it like I seet it based on what made me successful in applying and perhaps, more important, after. I don’t see myself as someone who tells younger people “how it is.” Maybe that is my puckish flaw, but it has served me well. I have a kid applying. I’m here for a while. I won’t be hanging around posting every day for years. This is my take
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and parents!
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What do you mean by “deserve”?
Uggh. Dude. I’m not into this. Not sure what you have to prove. I mean kids who had money and/or parental pull who weren’t maybe totally up to the level of the other kids and private school kids who were well polished but maybe didn’t have intellectual chops. Not super important to me then and now, but I do acknoweldge the process was imperfect even before it became insanely competitive.
Where did you go to school?
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Good take. I hope this will be the outcome. The general trend before this year was a welcome loosening of admission. This year was distorted for all the reasons people have enumeriated on this site, but I do think once Covid irons out the trend will be higher acceptance rates as colleges contend with a smaller cohort. Since most elite colleges except for a few (Rice, I’m looking at you with love) have refused to increase enrollment, a shrinking cohort is the best answer to this craziness. My dream would be the Oxford/Cambridge model. You sit an exam. You get an interview with people in your area. You pay a maximum of GPS 14K. Legacy and donations are not a factor. But short of that, demographics will help.
There is literally no one in the biz who doesn’t think this was a really weird year. Does that mean your kid or someone else’s kid didn’t get the right result? Of course not. Are their kids who will rise in college admissions no matter the circumstances? Yes. But there is also the rest of the class, some of whom go on to be as or more successful. It’s like denying gravity and frankly, mathematics to say this wasn’t a messed up year.
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It’s absurd to frame any of this as a matter of “justice.” Elite institutions derive value from scarcity. While they do provide an excellent education, typically, they also jumpstart careers more directly by establishing social connections and opening up opportunities. They’re primarily in the business of taking potentially small differences in aptitude and amplifying them into large differences in outcome. I am not saying that’s “unjust” either. They are private institutions and it’s their prerogative.
I am a lot more interested in improving the quality of public universities, and for that matter, improving the overall quality of K-12 education that feeds students into universities. The fact that smart, accomplished students are competing desperately, as if for the olympics, and take it as personal failure not to receive a prize is a bigger problem than any perceived misjudgment by an admissions office. And I don’t blame the wonderful young people caught up in this rat race, just the culture that encourages it.
In fact, you can get a great education and be involved in research at many world class public universities (these are also often highly competitive). It requires more self-motivation, and may not open the same opportunities without a lot of additional effort. Getting into your first choice of college is not a life accomplishment. It’s merely opening the door to opportunities of what you can really contribute. Conversely, being rejected isn’t the end either. It’s one idea that didn’t pan out. Keep trying.
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Good grief. I just meant “just” in the sense of deserved, as in based on what you wrote you didn’t deserve to get kicked in the teeth by St. Olaf’s. Elite universities have enormous lobbying power and they have used that, in the past, against state schools where they compete, and continually to consolidate their position. The Government should increase funding to State schools so that they become national in terms of tuition. I’m not holding my breath. For now schools like U Michigan to better taking the wealthy out of state students instead of the best out of state students, because they provide very little aid out of state. The incentives are wrong.
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I may be missing some context, but was anyone kicked in the teeth by St. Olaf’s even in a figurative sense? Being told (in effect) that they have a limited number of spots and they’ve found better matches to fill them is a neutral evaluation. It doesn’t have to reflect badly on either the college or the applicant.
I agree that the incentives are wrong, but I disagree with the word “just” or even “fair” because neither of these are reasonable expectations when supply exceeds demand. There’s going to be a lottery element to it. The original poster made a lot of risky bets that were also highly correlated. It’s unpleasant, but doesn’t really come down to anything but a tactical error. Sometimes you put in your best shot, or think you do, and you are still disappointed.
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Ok. Fine. It’s semantics. You are right in an absolute sense that justice and parity are not in play.I felt like given the stats this kid should have gotten into at least St. Olaf’s. Similarly I thought my friend’s kid who was admitted at Harvard, Yale and Princeton should not have been wait-listed at Case Western.
I’m not accusing you of this, but as a general observation, I never really sure why people carry water for elite schools since I know so many legacy candidates who get in despite pretty unremarkable applications and people who start giving $500k a year when their kid enters high school. I look at elite NYC public where more than half the kids qualify for free lunch and there are 150 merit scholars year and notice that the outcomes are better proportionally uptown if you pay $55K a year. When I see that, I think: that’s not just or right or fair or in-keeping-with-promotional-rhetoric.
But even apart from that, this year I give most kids the benefit of the doubt. Last year, Stanford took almost a third of its class from the waitlist because of deferrals etc. Some years are exceptionally soft and others exceptionally hard.
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I’m definitely not carrying water for elite schools. In fact I see them as a big part of the problem with American culture and education. In some fields I think it’s not as important. I’m a software engineer and while there is a correlation between degrees from elite universities and technical ability, it’s a weak correlation, often overshadowed by other work skills. In academic computer science, it matters more, but is not insurmountable. In specific “leadership” roles like the federal judiciary, it seems like you don’t have a shot at all if you weren’t admitted to an Ivy League university at 18.
I sympathize with the original poster, but if he had a guidance counselor look at that list, then they committed malpractice. There are probably some schools that could have worked out, but given the element of chance, there should have been more of them.