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

@socaldad2002
I sincerely hope you are right. But we are all humans, and the “randomness/luck” factors I am talking about are things that are out of everyone’s control, AOs’ ethnicity, religions, prior experience, sleep patterns, satiation status, … these factors will and do influence their decisions.
And I also believe that strong applicants (and their parents) should realize the existence of these random factors and don’t judge their application results as the be-all-end-all. They could be happy and successful in many places.

Suppose the amazing STEM kid happened to read a few questions too quickly when taking the math SAT, made some careless errors, and got a 750. I’m sure a holistic evaluation of the admissions profile would reveal many amazing STEM activities besides just the math SAT score, including pursuing STEM activities out of the classroom and accomplishing amazing things, being passionate about various STEM activities and wanting to learn on his own, challenging himself with a high level curriculum and doing well in such classes, some related awards, etc. They’d get the message and be able to distinguish between the two kids you described, regardless of whether he made a few careless errors on the test or not, leading to similar test scores. MIT has gone so far as to say there is no difference in their application process between a 750 and 800, as quoted below:

My point is test scores are one of many factors that are considered in the application decision. People that expect or want elite college decisions to follow the pinnacle of highest test scores will find that elite college decisions look like “a crap shoot or dumb luck.” For example, Stanford ranks applicants on a scale of 1-5 in the following categories – Test Scores, HS Record, Support (LORs), Non-academic, Intellectual Vitality, Character/Self-presentation, and Reader’s Impression. The readers also have a sheet showing various stats such as interview score(s), what course rigor box the GC checked, recalculated GPA, class rank (if provided), first gen, and many others. Suppose an applicant has perfect grades with a rigorous curriculum, along with perfect test scores, earning him the max rating of 1 in those categories. That’s good to have, but there are 5 other categories beyond just stats.

“I don’t think ANY college, however tiny its admit rate, believes that by accepting a kid and rejecting another they are making the value judgement that the accepted kid is going to be more successful than the rejected kid. That’s both absurd and untrue.”

It may be absurd but it’s true, the colleges main message to get kids to come is that they will be more successful there than other places. Especially if have to pay, either full or partial, you want to attend a place that will make you successful (and that’s defined differently for each student, doesn’t have to be money). And my point was that it would be also what they contribute in college.

“There are kids who graduate from Yale and become Missionaries and live on $15K per year. There are kids who graduate from Dartmouth and become 3rd grade teachers. The kid who didn’t get into Yale but went to Villanova and now works at a Hedge fund for many multiples of 15K, or the kid who didn’t get into Dartmouth but went to BC and is now a partner at a big accounting firm is not somehow an indictment of the admissions process (successful, not successful, less successful- what does this mean anyway? Money? Prestige?)”

If only this were true, while there maybe ivy grads doing this kind of service, the most popular major at the ivies is economics with the most popular jobs after graduation being investment banking and consulting. And most elementary school teaches come by and large from state schools, excellent ones of course. It’s possible that high school may have more ivy grads.

Are you really saying that there are more hedge fund managers from BC or Villanova than Penn, Princeton or Columbia? Or there are more consultants at McKinsey or Bain from UT or UIC than Harvard, Brown or Dartmouth?

Anyway my point was that adcoms like all of us make mistakes. If your position is that they’re perfect, at least in their jobs, I think that’s equally absurd and untenable.

The hooks that @TiggerDad mentions are a big deal. They chew up a meaningful percentage of spots so the unhooked have a smaller chance than the tiny acceptance rates suggest. Then there’s geographic and gender ratios to deal with. Once you get to the real number of available spots, you need to stand out. I think too many focus on improving that 1520 SAT when that’s not going to hurt chances. They’d be better off deepening their ECs and learning to package their accomplishments. The “objectives” basically all look the same.

@amNotarobot I don’t think you got my point at all. An A- from Exeter will put you in the running for the Ivies. At my kid’s ordinary high school it will not. There are extraordinary kids at my kids’ high school and they do get into the top schools, but their GPAs are in the A to A+ range and they are in the top 2% of the class. I sent my kids to the school because of the diversity, because there was a critical mass of bright successful kids, and because there was not the cut throat competition of some of the magnet schools.

I know Harvard doesn’t care particularly about level of interest or yield. My son told his interviewer that he had not applied SCEA because it was not his first choice. The interviewer spent a considerable amount of time trying to persuade my son that Harvard was just as good as MIT and offered other things that were better. (Obviously Harvard’s yield is high enough that they can afford to accept someone who might get away.)

The end of my son’s story: MIT rejected him. He attended Harvard’s accepted students weekend and liked it much more than he expected to, then he went to the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science’s weekend and was blown away. It was still a difficult decision, but we all though he made the right one when he went to CMU.

My math kid never did get an 800 (except on the PSAT) in the math section of the SAT. He always made a stupid mistake. However he had an 800 on the math subject test, qualified for the AIME all four years he was in high school, got a 5 on the BC Calc exam as a junior and took Linear Algebra on a senior. I doubt any admissions officer thought that his 770 math score was a problem.

My experience echoes that of others. The top 5 or 10 kids (even the top 25) all ended up at top colleges. The only one who didn’t hadn’t taken any AP courses, but managed a top GPA because our weighting system weighted honors and APs the same.

@mathmom - there are approximately 35,000 public and private high schools in the US, the top 5 to 10 kids at each school would be 175,000 - 350,000 kids. If you look at the top 12 private colleges (8 ivies, Standford, MIT, UChicago, CalTech) with an average acceptance rate of approximately 2000 applicants = 24,000. This doesn’t even factor in that some applicants will be accepted to multiple top colleges, there is no way the 5 - 10 kids at each HS get into the top colleges that we are talking about in this post.

Note: I didn’t even factor in that some of the spots will be taken by International students.

As @rickle1 stated, “I think too many focus on improving that 1520 SAT when that’s not going to hurt chances. They’d be better off deepening their ECs and learning to package their accomplishments. The “objectives” basically all look the same.”

As a former interviewer, I’ll attest to the fact that after awhile (doesn’t take long, trust me), all the SATI scores that start with 15… and SATII’s with 7… look the same. They become absolutely meaningless at that point, perhaps with the exception at those schools that really base their admission decisions on high scores and other academic records and are less holistic based. And I was just an interviewer handling only about 5 interviews annually on average. Imagine what it’s like for those AdComs who literally go through thousands of these “numbers” on top of everything else, day in and day out for several months.

When my son’s first SATI test yielded 1520, I told him that’s good enough. The same thing with SATII’s with MathII at 780 and Bio (forgot which one) at “lowly” 710, I believe. Instead of wasting his time and my money on quantitatively meaningless, he focused his attention more on his essays and EC’s, the “qualitative” aspects of his application. Yet, it saddens me to see so many people here on CC focusing on the quantitatively meaningless: “I scored 1570 (or even 1590) on SATI. Should I retake it?”

There are lots of high schools where no one is thinking of going off to one of the top 25 colleges in the country. If every top 5 student in every high school was aiming for the same 25 schools we’d have a real problem on our hands. Andt that is part of the problem, a lot more kids now are think of going further a field. I had a friend when I was in college who was the first person in her high school to go out of state, much less to Harvard. That said there are a lot of high schools where no one is getting the kind of SAT scores that even makes aiming at these colleges a remote possibility.

There are also students in that “top 5” group who have a chance at getting accepted but whose families can’t justify the cost, so they are not even going to apply.

Not when attending top private schools could cost you less than in-state public schools, all depending on your income level.

Keep in mind that the top ~10% of high schools in the US and abroad likely fill close to 90% of the slots at top schools. Kids are just coming into the game with dramatically superior resources and counseling support behind them at somewhere like Stuyvesant or TJ than they’d get nearly anywhere else in the country.

And yes, for all but a handful of kids with absolutely phenomenal profiles, it all boils down to luck of the draw. Grades/scores provide a benchmark threshold, but if you think there’s a truly discernible pattern for which of the 15xx/3.8x kids end up at harvard and which get rejected across the board, you’re kidding yourself.

The pattern is likely obvious to admission office insiders (who see the essays, recommendations, etc. that are not visible to outsiders and see the other applications for comparison), but looks random to most outsiders (who see incomplete portions of a small number of applications).

1d51jklad1 wrote: Kids are just coming into the game with dramatically superior resources and counseling support behind them at somewhere like Stuyvesant or TJ than they’d get nearly anywhere else in the country.

They sound like the careers from the districts 1, 2, and 4… but with self-driven and proper guidance from parents willing to dig in themselves, many kids, like Katniss (as I fancy my D) and Peeta, are still able to come out as winners.

The primary reason why Stuyvesant and TJ get a lot of acceptances to top schools is because they are have selective admissions, resulting in having a high concentration of top students compared to typical public HSs, not because of superior resources or counseling. For example, students at TJ have a mean M+CR SAT of 1480. The full Fairfax, VA county has a mean SAT of 1130. Obviously, TJ has a much higher concentration of the types of students top colleges want than typical schools in the county, so they are expected to have much more highly selective college admissions.

However, even with this high concentration of incredible kids, TJ’s admission rates to top colleges are not ridiculously high. Some specific admit rates are quoted below. Yes, the admit rates are all higher than the overall national population, but not as high as I’d expect with such a concentrated population of stellar students… The admit rates are not even high enough to imply that students would be better off going to TJ than staying at their old typical public HS, for the purposes of college admissions (there are many benefits to TJ besides college admissions).

Princeton – 9%
Duke – 10%
Penn – 10%
MIT – 12%
Cornell – 19%
Harvard – (Below min published acceptance number)
Stanford – (Below min published acceptance number)

Harvard published the article at http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/making-harvard-feeder-schools/ about admission concentration by HS. The entering class of ~1650 came from over 1000 different HSs, quite a wide variety. Yes, Stuyvesant, TJ, and others sent more than 1 student; but the percentage from such schools was only a small minority of the overall student body. Plenty of students attending HYPSM… come from more typical high schools.

Agree with @Data10 That Stuyvesant and TJ both having the brightest students in their respective district/state to begin with; therefore, many of these students could have been gone to the top schools without went to the two schools. If fact, I personally know a few students were accepted by comparable magnet schools in neighboring state but decided to attend their regular home high schools instead and still made to the top 25 schools.

I also agree with @Data10 that “TJ’s admission rates to top colleges are not ridiculously high.” There is a magazine call “Bethesda” that publishes annually the 7 best high schools within a best school district in the nation (some of these schools have magnet programs equivalent to TJ. And these are the quote from the 2021 admission (sept/oct 2017 issue) figures (tally from the seven schools):

Princeton – 13 out of 221 applied; 5.9%
Duke – 28 out of 213; 13.1%
Penn – 33 out of 311; 10.6%
MIT – 14 out of 134; 10.4%
Cornell – 58 out of 337; 17.2%
Harvard – 8 out of 188; 4.2%
Stanford – 10 out of 201; 5%

This % is actually very close to the general acceptance rate of these top schools’ and also very to to my D’s normal , average high school’s historical acceptance rate by some of these top schools (observed from Naviance scatter graphs for the past ten years, in which probably only handful of students dare to apply to these schools each year).

“The primary reason why Stuyvesant and TJ get a lot of acceptances to top schools is because they are have selective admissions, resulting in having a high concentration of top students compared to typical public HSs, not because of superior resources or counseling.”

You’re objectively incorrect if you think kids at top public high schools don’t have drastically superior counseling and resources to the average high school in the US. The average high school doesn’t offer 30 different AP classes, free standardized test preparation, fully funded robotics teams, debate teams with professional coaching staff, 20 different varsity sports, access to professional research labs, and whatever else you can think of. Full stop.

Harvard’s entering class had ~1000 high schools represented. That’s under three percent of all US high schools. The vast majority of high schools don’t have anywhere near the kind of infrastructure in place to consistently build kids’ profiles up to the point where they are competitive applicants for elite universities. The key word there is consistently: top schools (and here I just name TJ and Stuy as examples of top public high schools–feel free to replace them with any true open enrollment top high school of your choice) send similar numbers of students to the same elite universities every single year. Harvard’s incoming class representing 1000 different high schools doesn’t showcase quite the diversity that the number would first lead you to believe when a significant portion–500? 800?–of those schools send a kid or two to Harvard every year.

Looking at the raw acceptance rates to top 10 colleges from top high schools is also misleading; the average public high school won’t have a quarter of its class applying to Princeton.

Also keep in mind that the 10% acceptance rates you’re showcasing do not at all demonstrate that “The admit rates are not even high enough to imply that students would be better off going to TJ than staying at their old typical public HS, for the purposes of college admissions.” In fact they demonstrate quite the opposite; the typical public school in the US sends roughly zero kids to elite universities any given year. TJ is sending >10% of those who apply every year.

“You’re objectively incorrect if you think kids at top public high schools don’t have drastically superior counseling and resources to the average high school in the US. The average high school doesn’t offer 30 different AP classes, free standardized test preparation, fully funded robotics teams, debate teams with professional coaching staff, 20 different varsity sports, access to professional research labs, and whatever else you can think of. Full stop.”

What you just described can also describe some neighborhood high schools in the bay area and these are not open enrollment or magnet or lottery, it’s a standard neighborhood school the gets kids within a district boundary. And they they have access to what you posted with the the top schools having similar acceptance rates to TJ though I think TJ does a little better overall.

“The entering class of ~1650 came from over 1000 different HSs, quite a wide variety. Yes, Stuyvesant, TJ, and others sent more than 1 student; but the percentage from such schools was only a small minority of the overall student body. Plenty of students attending HYPSM… come from more typical high schools.”

It’s good to see more high schools but it’s not as diverse as you’re making it out to be. Replacing three kids from a wealthy part of NE with three kids from a wealthy part of bay area (Harker HS) is not really making Harvard more inclusive. It’s an exclusive campus by wealth and connection standards anyway. It will be interesting to see if the income percentages change (only a small percentage are below 60K now) and percent of students receiving Pell Grants changes with all these new high schools.

“If you look at the top 12 private colleges (8 ivies, Standford, MIT, UChicago, CalTech) with an average acceptance rate of approximately 2000 applicants = 24,000. This doesn’t even factor in that some applicants will be accepted to multiple top colleges, there is no way the 5 - 10 kids at each HS get into the top colleges that we are talking about in this post.”

Well your definition of top 12 colleges is a little off, the top-14 (because of some ties) per US News doesn’t have two ivies and replaces them with Duke, JHU and NU. And you didn’t include the top LACs and the top public schools whose engineering and computer science programs are better than most if not all the ivies. So you have to include a lot more universities and break it out by major. The top 5 electrical engineering/computer science students in most high schools will be attending a top college.