I don’t think they all die off. I just read a story about at CO teen who started one to help the homeless with college admissions and he took a gap year last year and started college in 2021. It’s still going. Maybe not typical.
I guess it’s not unheard of to start a company but only the tippy top ones rise to the Coca Cola award level.
I think it wasn’t the non-profit that propelled in this case but the research and regeneron. Big national things.
Maybe this actually answers the question - who gets into multiple Ivies. Because my DD was top 1%, didn’t win a Diana award or create an AI program, but she was accepted to 3 top 10 universities and 2 top 10 LACs. However, she was only waitlisted at one ivy she applied to, rejected by the others. 
I love how they list 10 schools and say “to name a few” - I want to know what the other 8 are.
Yeah,
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Penn, Stanford, Dartmouth. Berkeley, Northwestern, UCSD, MIT, Columbia (she mentions both Berkeley and SD in the video).
Not sure of the others but guessing they were lower ranked. Maybe UIUC as a safety.
Congratulations. I think the kids who get into multiple Ivies have a hook. National science awards, scholastic gold keys, NYT STEM writing competition winners.
Check out this list of 2021 winners.
#1 on the list was only 16 but super impressive and I think she’ll get into a few good schools. What do you think?
2020 winners
One of the winners has multiple accepts to Ivies. Well deserved; truly unique writing.
There aren’t many non-Ivies in top 10 according to USNWR. Just MIT, Stanford, Chicago and CalTech. You D got into three of those?
UIUC is generally not considered a safety for CS (of which AI is a subarea) for anyone.
True true, but she did likely apply there as one of her 18 since she’s in state.
Always so interesting—it’s one thing for all these very different schools to think she’d be a good fit for them. But what kind of student finds all these programs to be a good fit for them? Some of these schools are so different it’s hard to imagine.
I’m willing to bet that she and her family thought UIUC was a “safety.”
Maybe, but S19’s friend here got dinged for CS at UIUC but got into MIT and Cornell so the Illinois schools know that CS is not a safety. I’m guessing she maybe applied to somewhere like Purdue as safety.
You’re forgetting Duke, Northwestern and Johns Hopkins and yes 
Kids more or less “shotgun” the ivies.
And the doremi project was a winner! Founder into Harvard. I don’t think her musical accomplishments would have gotten her in (competitive state) but the musical non-profit was innovative. I would have thought before all of this that the colleges were tired of kid non-profits that disintegrate after they go off to college but I ti
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The problem is not with teens like her. She is exactly the type of kid who every “elite” college wants to have. There are tens to thousands of kids with the resources that she had, and only a handful do as much as she did.
The problem is identifying kids of her abilities in populations with fewer resources. In theory, it should be fairly simple - you see what they do with the resources that they have. Unfortunately, most people from wealthy populations have difficulty in doing so, since the rarely have any idea of the resources that are available to kids who grow up in poor families. AOs at “elite” colleges, are, invariably, not from poor, or even lower middle class families, so they have difficulty extrapolating.
So kids with 1/10 of the resources that this extraordinary young woman had are still expected to do at least half as much as her to be considered in the same category as her.
I will repeat something I’ve written before. The problem is not the the kids who are accepted are not, in general, really qualified. The problem is that the indicators that are used to identify the qualifications are calibrated to the very wealthy or to those with a lot of resources.
By having 70% from the top 20%, most “elite” colleges are missing the majority of the top applicants.
The problem, IMO, however, is less the private colleges, but public ones, like UNC (60% from the top 20%, 27% from the top 5%), UVA (67% in the top 20%, 32% from the top 5%), Michigan (66% in top 20%, 33% in the top 5%), and the worst public offender, W&M (72% from top 20%, 35% from the top 5%). If they want the most academically talented kids in their state, they should be doing a much better job finding those who are not in the top quintile by income (and making their education affordable).
Shouldn’t this “identification” problem be solved much earlier than at the time of college application? How do you identify these talented kids and then give them the resources that help them reach their potentials? Instead of eliminating “testing” (as many advocates seem to favor) for academic potentials (or their equivalent in performing arts or sports), shouldn’t we have more such tests, perhaps every year at each grade level from pre-K? Sure, there will be some late bloomers, but they, too, should be able to emerge when they’re ready for their age-appropriate tests.
I don’t know how anyone can predict what the next few years will bring for College Admissions. I think we have multiple conflicting trends:
Test Optional vs. High School Grade Inflation. With so many colleges going TO or Test Blind, it has reached a point where a high school Principal is not doing their job if they are not simply inflating grades, especially for those students in Honors and AP classes. Maybe colleges will ignore this obvious incentive by high school Principals and Boards of Education, or maybe they will come up with a new way to compare students across high schools. A few schools, particularly the more STEM intensive, seem to be moving back towards standardized tests. This issue is a long way from being decided.
Benefits of Privilege - While I did not grow up wealthy, I did grow up in a wealthy town, and I know that I had huge advantages in applying to colleges compared to kids from other towns. That advantage is nothing like what there is today. Between the grade inflation, number of AP classes available, access to better guidance counselors and college advisors, and massive advantage in access to and variety of extra-curricular activities, the wealthy suburban and private schools have an overwhelming advantage over middle and working class town and city school systems. My advice to any parent whose child has a shot at a T20 school: move to the wealthiest zip code in your area. That will matter more to getting your kid into a top university than anything else you do as a parent.
Yield Management - I don’t know how schools can effectively manage yield when it is so easy to send applications out using the common application. How does a school have any idea how many kids will enroll when applications are skyrocketing while the number of kids attending colleges is flat and may even be shrinking. Kids sending out more applications is different from more kids applying. The problem is, when the absolute numbers get so big, even a slight percentage point move can have a huge impact on the size of an incoming class.
3A) Waitlist Management - The old methods of managing yield through waitlists won’t work as well when applicants are applying to 10+ schools, and are getting into several of them. Applicants are likely to just move on when they receive a waitlist unless the school is truly their first choice or a reach for them. By that logic, the kids still on the waitlist, especially for schools outside the Top 20, are likely to be the weakest applicants from among those waitlisted, because the stronger applicants on the waitlist likely got into a school that was comparable to the one that waitlisted them. But colleges can’t just accept more students because that risks a tsunami of enrollees. I would not want to be an Admissions Officer trying to solve this capacity problem while maintaining quality.
On a separate note, there seems to be a race among the top schools to be the first one to have a sub 1% acceptance rate. I find this repugnant and manipulative on so many levels, and the first school that does that deserves to be so shredded on social media that kids will not want to apply to the school in the future.
I’d have to disagree about zip code moving. I feel like colleges are now wanting diversity and having a certain zip code doesn’t mean much anymore. It does matter for geographic diversity but not economic. I’d also have to strongly agree the yield game has gone overboard. I’d actually tell me child not to apply to the 1% acceptance school no matter which school they were.
ZIP code is not a perfect correlate to school zones. Seems like the parental strategy in terms of housing choices to maximize college opportunities for the kids would be one of the following:
The cheapest place in each of the above is to allow for retaining as much money as possible to be able to pay for college (and private K-12 if that option is chosen), because a very common limitation on kids’ college choices is parental ability to pay.
It probably differs by subject. Some business areas may be more college-elitist than accounting, for example (e.g. would Wall Street or management consulting favor a graduate from UPenn versus PSU-Erie?). That can also apply to various majors within the “STEM” category (engineering technology and engineering are probably less college-elitist generally than science and math).