Four real hooks that I’m aware off:
1 - URMs
2 - Big time donors, or children of alumni
3 - Recruited athletes
4 - Connections, like children of POTUS
@DrGoogle I do believe that being a first-gen college student is a small hook as well.
Post #21, you can believe what you want to believe, but please understand the difference between tip and hook.
For Ivy league universities and other elite colleges who desperately want to enroll more Pell Grant-level/working class kids in order to increase socio-economic diversity, being lower-income (whether urban or rural) is a hook. Those typically belong to Questbridge and/or Posse.
For most universities, it’s not.
Low-income had always been a hook, however it is becoming less and less of a hook with programs like Questbridge.
It would be more of a hook for Ivies or MIT and Stanford than the average university as MYOS1634 said.
Where I work, there are many low-income kids who can’t afford to attend, even in-state, but they’ll take internationals full-pay regardless of English ability or background. Conversely, the Ivy I attended had quite a few very poor (free lunch) kids, some of whom were reached out to in 9th grade as potential students.
The problem with low-income being a hook is whether your family makes little enough to get an Ivy full ride or will be responsible for a few K per year. If the latter, it likely does not matter if you get in or not.
I would consider it a hook. Especially if you are a Questbridge scholar. That’s a major hook.
I don’t know if it’s a hook. My daughters friend is Mexican, which is URM, low income, which according to several posters here is a hook, first generation, which is another hook. She had decent grade, taken less number of APs then my daughter, she was not accepted to USC, her dream school. She was not Questbridge scholar. Maybe for California schools, she was not considered special.
Would people, including the OP, please stop using the term “hook” inaccurately? It’s so annoying and so misleading. Hooks are 4 special admission categories. You know if you’re one. If you have to ask, you are not in the hooked category. A hook has nothing to do with elements of an application, including SES.
And SES, by itself is not even a tip. It’s a tip if you nevertheless achieved one heck of a lot while being poor-- and “a lot” is measured not by you or your friends or your parents, but by the college. A lot means much more than most people think it means.
Questbridge is also a special admissions category, but you first have to qualify for QB, and your application is not reviewed as part of the standard pool. Merely being low SES does not in itself qualify a student for QB. And QB is a match system, so the student doesn’t have ultimate control over where he or she is applying and where accepted.
Post #27, I think that’s implied if you apply to top colleges, regarding your second paragraph. Lots of poor people go to CC.
@epiphany not necessarily. There is a match system, but far more QB students are accepted through Regular Decision, where they have power to choose where to apply and go if accepted. Some partner schools also say that they consider these applicants with the rest of the regular applicant pool. QB applicants still have “ultimate control” on where they apply for the match process, it’s just limited to up to 8 partner schools.
A hook is an objective characteristic that moves an application out of the regular admission pool and into a category that has a higher admit rate and/or different criteria. What is and isn’t a hook varies by institution.
Legacy / Recruited athlete / URM / 1st gen are widely accepted hooks.
In-state residence / low SES are less common, but still hooks at certain schools.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Often in life, one comes upon a situation and says, “That is a teachable moment.” This is not one of those times.
Even if our young members knew the distinction between a hook and a tip, we would still get a thousand new threads every year asking, "Is XYZ a [fill in your preferred word]? Stick to the question asked please.
You gotta have a warm fuzzy for a student who excels despite significant socioeconomic disadvantages.
Yes, I realize there are some technical QB distinctions here, and many of my QB students have gone through RD as well, but the standards for their admission are different from their competitors applying during the Regular Round. Their scores, for example, are typically not competitive, yet my low-scoring QB students have been admitted to Brown, JHU, etc.
For that matter, a URM can apply RD as well. Not all or even most apply ED or EA, where they will have a more likely prospect of admission, but they are still considered with some different expectations than non-URM students in the same Round.
My main point is that a tip is not a hook, and too many CC’ers and non-CC’ers have no understanding of the difference but just throw terms around.
From my understanding, a hook is what draws the college to you. A tip is just something extra that may be impressive, but not much on its own.