Is getting into a top college a "crap shoot" or "dumb luck"?

New England prep schools were markers of SES-eliteness back then. Most of their students who went to HYP were the ones content with “gentleman’s C” grades – i.e. they were not the academic elite (but their presence brought donations and political connections). HYP looked elsewhere for academically elite students.

So last night at Ds HS we parents participated in College Case Study (admission process) and college recruiting fair. The 3 AOs were from Syracuse, Marist College, & University of Dayton. The program’s goal was to evaluate three ficticious applicants for admission to an unnamed NE university and determine who should be accepted, waitlisted or denied.

Some interesting takeways:

  • AOs only have anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes to decide if a candidate is a good fit for the college;
  • AOs are assigned geographical regions and apparently know the HS and GC in that region very well;
  • "Yield" is very important and a couple of the AO stated that even if a candidate is very well qualified, they may reject them if they thought the applicant was not likely to accept the offer (e.g. the top engineering student with a 800 Math score was more likely to attend CalTech instead of their school or the URM athlete walk-on with no scholarship, probably would not get much aid and therefore would not accept an offer as they might not be able to afford the private tuition);
  • In some instances, the AOs have looked to social media to get some additional background and information on the applicant and have made some decisions based on that information;
  • At no time during the 2 hour case study was there even a hint of "luck' or "randomness" to the process. The AOs take their job very seriously and have to justify their reasoning to the admission committee for recommending or rejecting each and every applicant.

While this college admission case study was not done with AO from the top 25 colleges in the US, it did give us some valuable insight into the college admission process. YMMV

Note that these can be school specific. Not all colleges use level of interest in admissions, for example.

^^ Interesting. We did that too at my D’s high school with a few more AO’s and fictional applicants, who were all very qualified. While the AO’s did not use the word luck or randomness, they did have different opinions on who they would admit, so it was not uniform by any means. Some said their opinions were swayed by listening to others during the evening. One said he initially decided to admit a certain fictional candidate, but then upon further review, changed his mind. They cautioned against applicants who looked too ‘packaged’ and not ‘genuine’. While they cut no slack for an applicant from a top private school, meaning no excuses for a sloppy application, they did cut slack for applicants who came from poor schools. But, they also looked very closely at the applicants from poorer performing schools to make sure they could succeed at the fictional but very selective college. They want to accept kids that have a high probability of success.

Our son’s high school ran this exercise as well over College Info Weekend which we attended both junior and senior years, so we got to play the game twice with different panels of colleges. Both times, though, the information provided to us included each college’s institutional needs and missions and those both definitely played into the final decisions. Again, very much in line with the Georgia Tech article linked upthread.

@ucbalumnus - I think there is a difference between “level of interest” (e.g. how many times the applicant contacted the college) vs. whether the applicant would be receiving enough aid to make it affordable or the applicant had such great grades/test scores that they chose to go elsewhere.

Correct me if I am wrong but “yield” seems to be a big motivator for ALL colleges as it affects school ranking, popularity, desirability of schools in the eyes of students.

@ChoatieMom The issue is that he was turned down for all the other colleges. The issue is that he was just as qualified as all the applicants that got into the other colleges. (See all my past comments) This particular comment that you’re referring to was to a specific person because we had been having an ongoing conversation. I think you just came in to it in the middle. The thread is about “luck”, which included hooks so it had to do with that.

While all schools care about making an accurate prediction of yield, many do not care if the yield is high or low. For example, the CSUs and UCs do not consider level of interest in admission. Texas publics auto admit most of their students, so they obviously do not reject potentially overqualified applicants using them as safeties.

The SAT was recentered because scores were declining in the 1970s and 1980s. Some of this was due to an increasing diversity in those taking the tests, but some of the decline is for unknown reasons. The recentering was on a bell curve so the percentage of kids getting a top score has not really changed. However, many more kids are taking the test so many more kids are getting an 800.

Is there really a difference in the quality of a student that gets an 800 vs a 770? On the math SAT that could be one wrong answer.

While the AOs may not state that there is any randomness involved, I would also guess that AO1 and AO2 may end up with mostly the same kids in the admit or decline piles, but that there would be a few differences. There is some subjectivity in all human decisions. If there was not, then it could be predicted with 100% accuracy who will and who won’t get in to each college.

The point about an A from Exeter vs an A from an ordinary high school was to point out that there is a vast difference among high schools in grading policies and in the caliber of students. The kid with a 4.0 but who does not do equally well on standardized tests may just be a bad test taker or may go to a HS where the requirements for an A or the grading is not as stringent.

homerdog asked back in post #193 whether I had data on the new 2-part SAT scores.
I don’t.
My prediction that the number of students scoring 1600 on the new 2-part SAT vs. 2400 on the 3-part SAT is based in part on the number of students with 800’s on each section of the 3-part SAT, the number of students with 2390 or 2380 scores, and the statistical phenomenon of “regression toward the mean.”
It is possible that the new 2-part SAT was simultaneously made harder. In that case, my prediction would not hold. I hope that the CB will release the data sometime fairly soon, so that one can tell.

On a more recent topic: The existence of a rationale for each of the decisions in a simulation does not mean that luck plays no role. Also, simulating reading 3 applications is rather different from simulating reading 10% of 36,000 applications (or so)–especially since the applications may have been selected to make the discernment of the reasons for the decisions easier.

Some of the top colleges are now actively looking for lower SES students, which they either didn’t do, or did less, in the past. Some of the top colleges give a slight admissions bump to students who are “first-generation college.” Two generations ago, a number of the large public universities in the Midwest had large numbers of first-generation college students who were GIs, taking advantage of the GI bill for their education. In the next generation, many of these colleges still had a fairly large percentage of “first-generation college” students. (The University of Michigan and some of the other colleges are probably exceptions to this.) It is interesting to compare the per cent of first-generation college students in these schools today with the per cent of first-generation college students at some of the “top” schools. If the percentage at the “top” school is actually higher, that be due to different colleges drawing from different geographic regions, with different demographics. Or it may indicate a fairly heavy thumb on the scale in favor of first-generation college students.

On CC this perceived advantage has led to posts from students whose parents attended college abroad and then came to the US to pursue graduate degrees, with the students wanting to know whether they can claim “first-generation college” status, since they are in the first generation to go to college in the US. Um, no, it doesn’t work that way.

@Scipio

Exactly my experience. I’ve never seen any top 5 or even top 10 overall student strike out. Seems like an urban legend that spreads around the internet.

Re #210: Well, it depends whether we are just considering HYPSM, or whether we are considering top 25-ish schools. If the latter, I’ve got nothing.

If the former, it’s not an urban legend (based on outcomes for children of friends). QMP was admitted to 7 colleges out of 8 applications (2 of 3 among HYPSM). If I had only QMP’s results and those of a selected subset of friends’ children, I would probably think it was an urban legend as well.

Adding fuel to the fire: https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-elite-colleges-review-an-application-in-8-minutes-or-less-1517400001

You need to pass some threshold to be at the table. And there are some kids that are just so deeply talented that they just stand out. For the rest of the high achievers there is an element of luck. Not that they don’t deserve the admission…but more "why did they deserve it more than the other thousands of “equally” qualified. If it comes down to writing an essay I worry that we lose equity…that rewards the families that can hire the expensive tutors and college counselors. Just my two cents…now retreating back into the shadows.

Go!

I was referring to top 25-ish school. Striking out of HYPSM doesn’t really warrant conversation.

Okay. I got nothing.

Someone up-thread asked, “Is there really a difference in the quality of a student that gets an 800 vs a 770? On the math SAT that could be one wrong answer.”

There can be a difference sometimes. For example, my eldest son got an 800 on the Math SAT in 8th grade (as well as an 800 on the Physics SAT II in 8th), and of course repeated that in HS, whereas my middle son got a 750 on the math in 11th grade. Their scores are “close enough”, but their profiles are night and day in terms of STEM abilities. This is why admissions is so much more than that little number.

@sbjdorlo in the particular case of your two sons, you could say there are meaningful differences between the two in terms of their stem abilities, but at the aggregated level, there might not be much if any differences between the two groups of kids with these scores respectively.

Re. an earlier post talking about simulated admission process and the AOs “taking their jobs seriously”, and implies that no “luck or randomness” exist. I could not help but to remember reading reports that hungry parole judges are less lenient in giving out paroles. These hard-working parole judges (skipping meals?!) most likely never realized their subconscious biases, let’s hope AOs don’t work too hard and get too hungry when reading our kids’ essays. Lol

You mean the phenomenon described at http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889 and https://www.wired.com/2011/04/judges-mental-fatigue/ ? Yes, that could be a potential randomizing factor, although the effect may not necessarily be the same for college admissions as parole decisions.

@makemesmart So you are basing your argument that admissions rely on “luck” because the AO might be hungery? When humans are making decisions of course there is going to be some subjectivity, bias, different frame of references, personal experiences, etc. that come in to play but for the most part they have a job to do based on certain criteria and evaluate each applicant with that in mind. I’m of the belief that no two applicants are identical in all of the factors involved: GPA, Test scores, rigor of course load, academic trend, awards, special talent, EC, Hook, essays, SES, geography, gender, URM, interview, HS attended, LORs, GC, work experience, character, etc. that one can make an argument for one applicant over another. It’s not just about who has the best test score, but all of the other factors combined. I really like what the Georgia Tech article said about the process: the school’s “Mission Drives Admission”

@ucbalumnus
Yes, the exact one.
Comparing parolees’ fates with those of selective college aspirants might be a stretch, comparing the judges who “are trained to be impartial, consistent and rational, and make deliberate decisions based on the case in front of them” with AOs might not be (the admission officers should be more accurately called “denial” officers), the mental fatigues both would have are real. But this is just an example of many potential random factors that could impact the outcomes of applicants.