Yeah. I agree. Not all bachelor degrees are the same.
People have different goals for college. One of ours is for our kids to meet kids from all over the country and the world and for them to be challenged by their peers. I don’t think one needs to go an Ivy for that but I do see parents on here who are all about the end game and not so much about the experience. The experience itself is important to us.
@homerdog you bring up a good point that getting an “education” is much more that whether or not you get into a top college. Case in point, D20 will be attending a short 3 week university summer program in San Diego this year. It will not be for college credit but has a mix of interesting study topics, not offered by her HS. It probably won’t mean squat to the AO when she applies to colleges in a few yeas but she wants to do it because it seems fun and interesting to her, taking her our of her comfort zone. We think it’s a great experience for her whether or nor she is recognized for it academically.
What makes a decision “wrong” in this case?
If a student doesn’t stay at the college (takes a leave, drops out, transfers, etc.), that might be considered a “wrong” decision. My own son took a leave of absence from an Ivy League, and won’t be going back. That could be viewed as a wrong decision in terms of retention–but who can know these things ahead of time? My son didn’t plan that, so I hardly think the admissions office should be culpable for “making a mistake” in admitting him.
Flunking out, taking too long to graduate, committing a crime (abuse, assault, drug dealing)…
You can find all the wrong decisions in the following books:
“Monsters of the Ivy League: A Gallery of Elite A$$holes” and
“Ivy League Fools and Felons: Over 100 ‘Elite’ Nitwits at their Best and Brightest!” 
You can find all the wrong decisions in the following books :
“Monsters of the Ivy League: A Gallery of Elite ■■■■■■■■” and
“Ivy League Fools and Felons: Over 100 “Elite” Nitwits at their Best and Brightest!”
As the Harvard AO who handled my (voluntary) out processing from HBS said many years ago, “There are no admissions mistakes just acceptance mistakes.” So, my leaving was not Harvard’s fault, it was mine for agreeing to matriculate.
I will also add that during opening days at HBS (yes, grad school but I think still relevant), we were told that applying to Harvard was similar to applying to a bank for a loan. The more you could convince the bank you didn’t actually need the loan, the better your chances of getting it. The idea was that Harvard was looking for candidates who had already proven themselves to be successful and would most likely be just as successful with or without the MBA. The purpose of the program was to bring those successful people together and run them through an intense bonding experience that also gave them a framework for solving business problems. To me, it really did seem more about bringing the big fish together than the program content.
In any case, I agree with those who have posted that the luck and crap shoot theories on the application side are weak arguments for what certainly is not random on the admissions side. And I really like the article from Georgia Tech that @droppedit linked above. I think that is a good read and sums up this discussion nicely.
It is interesting to hear that people are saying this “crap shoot” phenomena were not present 30 (or XX number of) years ago (at least the competition then did not seem to be this intense/stressful nor “random”).
So what happened over this 30-(xx) year period? Are kids today more brilliant than kids of yesteryears? I somehow don’t think so.
The admission process, especially at the very top is really messed up IMO, but its probably not random.
Its messed up because it sorts kids into different cohorts where their credentials cannot be easily compared with each other.
Its not random because there is predictability, by those AOs and people in the know. I personally know someone who was a former AO at HYPS and read five common apps to HYPS in entirety (minus the LORs) before the results came out last year. He predicted all five of them correctly. I think the holistic process is designed to be opaque so that AOs and private consultants can always be in the driver seat and their services in great demand.
I guess part of randomness has to do with the fact parents and applicants have few opportunity to view other apps in their entirety, thus tend to base their prediction on the observable like scores and GPAs. But even with scores most people tend to underestimate the abundance of high scores nowadays. Forty years ago 1600/4.0 was so rare that at places like Princeton it took a whole committee to reject an applicant with such credential. Last year ACT 36 score alone was obtained by 2760 test takers. If HYPS admission does not distinguish a 34 and 36 we are talking about 35000 ACT top scorers. If you add SAT equivalent you are looking at over 50000 kids. Assuming most of them are unhooked vying for a spot at HYPS who typically set aside only a third of admits (1/3 of 8100 total) for such cohort you would have a statistical chance of 2700/50000=5.4%.
Such lack of differentiation at the top means that other factors like national level accomplishment have to come in play. 2700 slots sound like a lot, but you subdivide them into gender and interest the number is more daunting. Say you have an unhooked STEM boy applying for HYPS, he would be basically trying to be among the top 700 STEM boys in the nation. Each year there are 1100 Intel ISEF finalists, 400 STS semifinalist, 60 kids in Math Olympiad camp, xx number of kids in each of the other national Olympiad camps and teams(like phys, chem, bio, CS etc), and if you add prestigious summer camps like RSI you easily have over 1000 boys who distinguished themselves nationally beyond having top scores/GPAs. That’s why if you go to CC result pages–and there are hundreds of them-- you will notice some pattern. Even without the benefit of seeing the whole applications you can feel some predictability.
When I was in HS in the early 1970’s, smart girls applied to Smith, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, etc. Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale didn’t accept women. Brown did- but they went to Pembroke. Harvard had Radcliffe.
Kids who were first generation went to teacher’s colleges to major in elementary ed; the only girl in my graduating class to take AP Chem and Physics (she aced both) went to nursing school (not for a BS degree-a local nursing school.) A lot of boys went to Viet Nam if they had bad draft numbers. Some came back and went to college, some didn’t come back. The Val of my class commuted to a local college- her parents refused to let her go away even though she got a huge merit scholarship “out of town”. One of the Af-Am kids in my class went to Morehouse-- we all thought it was very exotic, since the other Af-Am kids ended up local, either in community college or beauty school/secretarial school. Sort of weird that a kid would go from AP Euro history to secretarial school but if you had parents who hadn’t gone to college themselves, who was going to push you?
Makesmesmart- do you really want to turn the clock back to when smart kids were discouraged from aiming high (i.e. less competition?) It was easy being a white male with college educated parents back then… but what about everyone else?
A lot of parents/applicants don’t even see their own entire app, often (not always) the teacher and GC recs are never seen.
@jzducol
How did you know all these numbers!
Kids today are studying harder, definitely. Are they more creative? Daring? Or more diverse in their pursuits of knowledge?
@blossom no I don’t want to turn the clock back. But isn’t this uber-competitiveness a (collectively) self-inflicted wound? Kids are applying to 10/20/30 schools, high achievers want to have a bragging right of been accepted to highly selective colleges, unrealistic number of reach schools for most of us, … but then again, how can we blame the students or parents or HS when colleges are marketing their schools so heavily and middle class families believe that there is only one way to a “successful” life.
City college of NY generated 10 nobel prize winners, not a bad feat for a college that are not considered highly selective, granted most of the 10 were from the first half of last century. Where is CUNY of today?
Finally, I think kids like @homerdog ‘s son belong to great schools, I just hope he and many other brilliant minds don’t all choose business schools or law schools…
@blossom Does it matter what schools he applied to? He went to a great college (a top college that could see his worth). Had a great education with amazing opportunities he probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. Now has a wonderful job. And all the schools that turned him down missed out.
You have to agree that even if you think the adcoms know what they’re doing, there is still a lot of randomness in the process. It’s sheer luck that you happen to live far away or you’re the gender or race or whatever that they’re looking for to “round out” the class. It’s sheer luck which admissions person reads your application. It’s also sheer luck what other applicants you happen to be up against that year. That’s why it’s dumb luck. Yes, you can do everything right and have the most outstanding application EVER, but the cards may be stacked against you because of sheer luck (and the very, very few spots open at these schools). It happens. A lot.
Megan, agree that the colleges that rejected him missed out. But there are parents here who post “woe is me” because their kid ended up at CMU instead of Stanford, or JHU instead of Princeton. And in those cases it is really hard to follow the parents argument that something is wrong with the system based on that result. I’ve got a neighbor whose kid went to Middlebury- knocked the cover off the ball- but the parent will go their grave aggravated that the legacy Ivy school deferred and then rejected him.
JZ- you believe that private college consultants are in the drivers seat? I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Private consultant gets a kid into Hofstra because the SUNY’s are too big for the kid? Sorry, that doesn’t require a couple of thousand bucks and hours of a consultants time.
Increased immigration from Asia and Eastern Europe over the past 30+ years comes to mind.
@blossom Hofstra and SUNY are not “crap shoot” schools that require “dumb luck” to get in.
Remember the quadruplets from Ohio of class of 2017? I was not on CC then but a friend emailed me one of their posts. They have very decent stats if I remember correctly and they are URM. I think they got great “yields” from HYP etc. and they all went to Yale in the end. Pretty bad luck for nearby URMs or other kids that year who wanted to get into Yale, at least in OH?
^ I imagine that would be the case for nearby kids. Harvard website says 74% of class are single admits from their school. I was at a local Harvard admit event (for REA) last weekend. All of the 39 kids there are single admit from their entire school district (with the exception of two private prep schools).
Another example of how people think race/ethnicity first, rather than look at what is actually going on (i.e. immigration of people who initially came here as graduate students or highly skilled workers; both nature and nurture tend to be in their kids’ favor as far as educational achievement goes).