“Getting into a top college is not a crap shoot or dumb luck. A lot of people do not like holistic admissions that give the underprivileged and the under represented a chance. Some people think the same old playbook of taking the SAT 6 times and being the president of 9 clubs and hiring tutors to insure you get good grades and sending you to pricey summer academic camps should work forever to get you into tippy top schools. AOs see through that. AOs want a diverse class of society. Being a leader and an innovator is what gets you into a top school not a rehash of a tired and worn out strategy that is no longer relevant in todays society.”
The top applicants to the selective schools do not take the SAT 6 times, they take it once or max twice since they get very good scores the first time. They know that being president of 9 clubs is not the way to get admitted to a top school, they focus on just a couple. Being president of the class has worked well for the top students at some of the local high schools in getting admission into Stanford. And these adcoms can’t recognize leaders and innovators from an undergrad application. I give credit to Harvard for Gates and Zuckerberg, but there’s no way an adcom at at any college could figure out that Steve Jobs would reinvent three industries, except for maybe Reed of course. I wonder if Steve Jobs got invited to any diversity days. lol.
I’m pretty curious about this. My high stats white D, middle to upper middle class D probably gets through to the gates. I’m not sure where it goes from there. She probably looks like many other qualified kids (music and science oriented).One tiny little possible hook is that there is probably not s single person in the Ivies ever to have her obscure religious background on her fathers side. She mentions it briefly in her essays. I would not have thought about it much except that two of her interviewers were pretty astonished when asking about her family background. You never know.
A kid raised in an Amish family who is going to college- that would be interesting.
But the key is “raised in”. Not “my grandpa is a Mennonite but my dad left the community at age 19 and never looked back”. Not sure that the heritage piece is all that astonishing- but the life story of an upper middle class young woman who was raised in that milieu and is going to college would be interesting.