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

To anyone not in the know, elite college admissions looks like a crap shoot because they all know at least two candidates where one with stellar standardized test scores, ECs, GPA and recs doesn’t get in and someone with okay test scores, GPA, EC and recs does get in.

or two candidates with equally good stats, and one gets in and the other does not.

There is a rhyme and reason behind each of these decisions, that tip the scale. Those additional factors that aren’t at first evident include statuses like first gen, URM, recruited athlete, developmental or legacy, the so called “hooks.” Elite colleges have their own agenda, not just to take the “best” students.

It’s not a crap shoot at all. But those closest to college admissions will tell you all you can do is maximize your chances. In the end, many of these colleges are private and don’t have to disclose their rationales for whom they pick and whom they reject.

It is not, but there is no way for outsiders to reduce the unknowns (to them) of the process and competition, so that it can appear indistinguishable from a lottery from an outsider viewpoint.

As a practical matter, any given applicant who does not have a super hook (relation to huge donor, maybe high level recruited athlete) can only see admission to a super selective college as a low probability reach.

In addition, those tippy-top schools may be looking for certain things one year, and not those things the next. Maybe the orchestra is losing its entire flute section and so a flautist gets in when a violinist of similar talent who is similar in every other way (grades, scores, ECs, essays, intangibles) doesn’t. And maybe the next year the situation is reversed. No, it’s not literally a lottery, but it may as well feel like one. And when applying to schools with 15% (or less) acceptance rates, thinking of the process as a lottery may ease any disappointment when not getting into a school even when a student’s scores seem equal (or better) than others who do make it in.

It’s a crapshoot. The top schools fully admit that they can fill an entire class with new students, then completely throw them out, start over, and make another group of new students that is just as wonderful as the first. My kid was just as strong a student as the one you know, and he got denied from 4 ivies, one of them an ED pick, then he was waitlisted from a top cs school (his intended major) and also from another top college. He was left with 1 college that was on level and 3 safeties. It is a cruel, cruel world out there for tippy top students. :((

There are a lot of very qualified students who get waitlisted at 6 or 7 very selective schools but admitted only to a safety. I think the “randomness” is whether they happened to craft an application that matched something those schools were looking for and no more appealing student happened to have that particular characteristic that year. Whether you call that “less deserving” or luck is really just semantics in my opinion. And a small number of those students on the wait list will be admitted and will not be any less deserving than the ones admitted outright. And maybe the randomness is whether a student with similar characteristics turns the school down that year.

Most of the crapshoot dumb luck type comments relate to the application decisions seeming random to an outsider, primarily because the decisions do not strictly follow stats. For example, Naviance type scattergrams for HYPSM… will usually show most top stat applicants rejected and a few accepted. However, those few acceptances usually don’t go to the pinnacle of highest stats. Instead they might accept the 34 ACT + 3.9 GPA applicant and reject the 36 ACT + 4.0 val applicant. If you just look at stats, you only see a loose correlation type relationship, which gets described as “random.”

The problem is not considering and/or giving enough weight to the other additional non-stat based criteria that is also considered in the application process. For example, Duke has been quite open about their admission process, which is described at http://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2015/03/ferpa-request-gives-inside-look-duke-admissions-process . They mention that readers give applicant a rating on a scale of 1-5 in 6 categories. Having a perfect GPA and test scores only gets you the max score in 2 of the 6 categories. If you aren’t considering the other 4 categories, then you’d expect to see the described relationship with decisions only having a loose correlation with stats, which gets described as “random.”

That said, there are some elements of the application that do have a near random component such as variation between different evaluators and variation in different institutional needs. For example, different interviewers for the same school may ask different questions and may come to very different conclusions about the same applicant. Or in a particularly year, the college might want to increase enrollment of a particular type of student, and that need might be quite different in the following year.

In composing your list of schools to apply to, you must choose “reach,” “match,” and “safety” schools. (Depending on your resources, you also may have to add a “financial” to reach, match, and safety.) The odds were much better for strong candidates at the colleges my two kids applied to 15-20 years ago. Case in point, my son attended University of Chicago. His stats were outstanding; acceptance rate was about 35%. I said at the time “I’m sure he’ll be admitted,” and he was. Today? Chicago has an 8% admission rate. I’d say “I’m sure he will be competitive, but he’s gotta win the lottery among the best applicants.”

I think of it as a weighted lottery. You get a ping pong ball for each accomplishment (grades, test scores, extra curriculars, essays, etc.), and you want as many ping pong balls as possible. But in the end, they go in a hopper with lots of other peoples’ ping pong balls and some balls get picked and others don’t.

Tho I don’t think admissions purely based on “objective”, quantifiable stats r a good way to choose best students for the highly selective colleges, it eliminates/ drastically reduces the “opaqueness”/randomness/luck factors we often see in today’s environment.
We have a swimmer, and swimming and diving r two completely irrelevant sports but somehow r grouped together for hs (and collegiate) meets. There is hardly if ever a disputed re who wins that 100-yard free style race or which group of kids r in the A final or B final, but often whether the top diver really deserves the points s/he got, could be debatable.
I also disagree that highly selective colleges r selecting “excellent characters and qualities”, there r no basis to say at the TT colleges, students have better characters than those go to CC.

it’s not a crap shoot, which would indicate that everyone has an equal chance of getting in. However, we went to an invited prospective student event at UChicago last summer, which was a great event if you get the chance to attend, and the Dean of Admissions made a statement that I’m paraphrasing: We could pick a class, eliminate it, pick another class and eliminate it, and then pick the best class from what is left and end up with the same great class. In other words, there are way more qualified students then there are spots for them at all of the elite universities.

So you have to find something that differentiates you. One of my son’s friends interned at the United Nations one summer and he was accepted at Stanford. My son is an exceptional student who is also a DIII caliber athlete and he is going to UChicago. If you are just a perfect test score and 4.0 Unweighted GPA but not much else, there are a ton of you, you need something that stands out to an admissions counselor.

@ucbalumnus
I do see ur point that an outsider could only have intimate knowledge of a small slice of the application pool (one applicant or a few) and would have no ideas to get the whole picture of the whole application pool’s quality. But, isn’t the quintessential insiders, AOs, face very similar quandary? They r not able to read and compare every single applicant in their pool, they may each have their own geographical regions to cover and they each have their own particularities re. tastes, religion, political leanings, …, so it is highly possible a given essay is a jewel in one reader’s eye but a turd in another, thus the randomness/luck factor.

From the schools’ perspective, they’re building a class and know what they are looking for (which can vary from year to year); from the applicants’ point of view, assuming we’re talking about top schools, it’s a crap shoot.

There is a 100% chance that luck plays into the process. College admissions committees are called upon to evaluate students empirically based on non-quantifiable data points, i. e. essays, recommendations, and the rest.
Standardized essay grading is notoriously difficult. Did anyone else get an odd score (i.e. not even) on the ACT Writing? The only way that can happen is if two graders disagree on your score–and they do, as in my case, for example.
The bottom line is that the college admissions process attempts to use people to judge between other people. Each time a person makes a judgement, a degree of randomness is involved (i. e. your mood, how much coffee you had, which side of the bed you got out on, the number of other applications you’ve read today). And each time a person presents himself in any medium (an essay, a test score, a GPA), another degree of randomness is added (your mood on a Saturday morning in April, your schedule in September, your aversion to a teacher in freshman year).
The only completely non-random, empirical admissions decision would be made by a computer, at a college for computers.
That said, you can definitely impact your chances! Statistically, you can raise your chances at Harvard, for example (and you can check this out on prepscholar.com) by about 10 % by scoring 5 points better on the ACT (from a 31 to a 36). Essays, extracurriculars, and other choices you make during your high school years will adjust your chances even more.
If you’re a human, being judged by a human,

I get irritated when parents say it is random or a crapshoot, usually when their kids don’t get into whatever elite school they are hoping for. Admissions people usually get it right for the most part, so to insinuate they are incompetent or just throwing darts to choose the class is ridiculous. Kids and parents alike are disappointed initially, but don’t things usually work out just fine?

Highly selective college admissions would be more like if each diver did his/her dives alone (without seeing any of the competitors’ dives) on video, each one sent the video to the judges, and then the judges informed each whether s/he won or not (no other information like point scores or anything about the competitors other than how many there were).

To the judges in this hypothetical situation, it will be pretty obvious why the winners are who they are, but not to the divers.

I actually have heard from several kids (and/or their parents) that they have no idea how or why they got into Stanford or Yale or Harvard, for every reason they postulated, u coupd be sure to find some one(s) similar but didn’t get in. So, it is very jutisfiable to hold the belief that the college application process (to the TT colleges esp) is opaque and has lots of randomness in it. @CottonTales

Let’s look at this way: if you take an random unhooked high stat kid with a bunch of ECs, captain of his/her sport team, great letters of rec, and volunteers, and you are asked to give odd of getting into, say, Princeton, and your answer is less than 20 percent, it’s a crap shoot.

Actually, a crap shoot is the wrong analogy as I think you have better odds in craps!

@ucbalumnus
Lol. I am good at being off-track.
I guess u have not watched the Olympic divings (or gymnastics) of the past when each judges gave out their scores in public and u can actually see who gave what, those judges r from different countries and gosh did they show their preferences: Soviet blocks vs. western countries vs Asian countries. Or why nowadays, auditions to big-name orchestras r conducted behind curtains and nameless. Biases of this sort r so prevelant and often subconscious, it is impossible to get rid of.

I was thinking of a similar analogy as pantha33m’s (#27) as I was reading this thread. I think the analogy is good up to a point. However, once all the ping pong balls get in the hopper, the ones that get selected are based on the institutional wish list for that particular admissions cycle: recruited athletes, URMs, FGLI (first-gen low income), development cases, politically well-connected, i.e., the usual “hooks,” followed by talent, achievement and other characteristics that the institution wants for that year’s class. The so-called “randomness” or “crapshoot,” in my opinion, does exist at the point where the admissions folks’s eyes and minds start to blank on them as they glaze over those candidates with similar characteristics AFTER the initial selection by higher priority wishlist consisting mainly of hooks. Although the movie “Admission” satirizes this aspect of the selection process, the dean of admission at (I believe Amherst?) pretty much admitted in one interview that, after awhile, things start to become foggy. Not surprising when you’re going through thousands of applications. However, this randomness at the highest level of discernment shouldn’t be confused with a mere random pick from the hopper.