Sort of, milee30. Yes, your son was a match, but so were 50 others (or whatever the number was) who were indistinguishable from your son in academics, activities, passion, curiosity, or whatever. None of our children are so unique that there is only one with their combination of talents and personal qualities. Fortunately, the college had not already filled its allotment of students like your son whom they wished to admit when it came time to review his folder; otherwise, regardless of how much they like his type, he would have been out of luck.
âMaybe future unhooked students should spend less time getting excellent grades, instead earning Bâs, and devote the extra time toward preparing for the future to a greater extent.â
Or maybe students should stop over-valuing 20 schools they empower with absurd attributes and look more seriously at the hundreds of other schools which would serve their purposes as well.
Yes, but youâre missing my point. My son was the 1 of 50 chosen - long odds. Had he applied to a college where he wasnât what they were looking for his chances would be zero.
My point isnât that there arenât many other fantastic candidates for every open slot. Apply to a college that is looking for students like you and you have a chance. Apply to a college that is looking for students with other attributes and you have wasted your time and possibly your ED bullet. Know what the colleges are looking for before deciding where to apply.
âFor those of us who have worked hard their entire high school career, have great stats, have been active in their community, but are unhooked, is there any hope?â
In my day BU and BC were âsafety schoolsâ. Now theyâre âreaches for everyoneâ. That is because we now have thousands of students, just like you, with impressive stats and resumes. In my day maybe 30-40% of the students went directly to a 4-year school, but that number is north of 60% at DDâs high school. That number might grow even higher in the future. The schools your cohort attends in lieu of the ones from which they got rejected, those are likely to be the selective schools of tomorrow.
I can see this in the USNWR rankings. There are six-way ties for some spots. And the top 50 has become the new top 15.
Just use your early admission card wisely. Donât waste it on SCEA or EA, go for schools with ED, as their acceptance rates are higher. Go with a school which isnât dream school for kids from your school or geographical area.
If you are single and hoping for your kid to get into an Ivy then for starters marry right minority, move to Alaska and stop working. This way you can not only send them to school of your choice but do it for free. As soon as they are old enough, push them to excel at some rare sport, put them on some learning disability track for SAT, get i them into environmental activism.
If thatâs not for you then marry a rich senator who is triple legacy to an Ivy, donate $15 million to that school, enroll your kids into exclusive prep school, hook them up for fancy internships and build a pet gourmet food business in their name to demonstrate their skilfull entrepreneurship.
If unhooked:
-ED at top but non-Ivys who take most of the class ED (Tufts, Vandy, Wake, Amherst, Bowdoin, etc). Since many of these are not need blind, full pay helps.
-pointy EC and story that goes with it (** that is AUTHENTIC **).
-Great essay (that tells the story) and recs (that confirm the story and academics)
-A/A- grades in honors and APs when offered but no need for trophy hunting APs or self studying APs. I donât even think the dual enrollment really helps unless the high school is really lacking in challenging courses. The goal here is to show academic strength. GC needs to check âmost challenging coursesâ box
-High but not necessarily perfect test scores.
Basically, grade grubbing well rounded is out, smart, interesting intellectually curious is in.
Pointy EC that is a recruited sport at the target colleges is probably more valuable than most ECs.
@ucbalumnus But a recruited athlete is hooked. We are talking unhooked here, right?
Recruitable athletic talent is the âhookâ characteristic that the student can develop or earn (although parental support certainly helps), unlike other âhookâ characteristics that are either inherited from or purchased by parents.
@riversider Hilarious?
@suzyQ7 loved your post until the last line - âBasically, grade grubbing well rounded is out, smart, interesting intellectually curious is inâ
The problem I see is that, recent news excepted, ECâs and Essays are the easiest parts of the application process to cheat on. How many kids can realistically start a charity by themselves, given the paperwork and legal costs associated with it, never mind the time to actual run it? How many of those fabulous essays are wholly or partly ghost written by the college consultants that only the rich can afford?
I hope this thread isnât heading toward, âSpend less time studying and more time working on your PR campaign for Princetonâ. I think that would lead to Pyrrhic victories for our kids.
âBasically, grade grubbing well rounded is out, smart, interesting intellectually curious is in.â
As it should be in life. Who wants to be at a school with grade grubbing peers? UCK!
@privatebanker Thank you so much, you are an awesome poster yourself.
Back to the topic at hand - you are correct about there being 2.6 million kids who are starting college, but about 1/3 of these will be enrolling in two year colleges, so weâre talking about a number closer to 1.8 million who are competing for the places at 4 year colleges, and, as you wrote, the overseas kids, which I admit that I forgot.
Places like Harvard consistently only have about 5% from the bottom 20% by income, so we can assume that that would be the total number kids with this âhookâ which are being accepted.
We can also look at acceptances chances for high stats unhooked White kids in another way. Looking at the different stats of acceptance to colleges, one can see that any kid, including an unhooked White kid, with an academic record in the top 10th percentile, has about a 10% chance of acceptance at Harvard, and itâs likely that this is true elsewhere, with it being higher at places like Cornell. If we simplify it at 10% across the board, the chances of being rejected at every single one of the 8 Ivies is 0.9 to the power of 8, which is 0.43, which is the kidâs chance of being rejected from all the Ivies, meaning that their chance of acceptance at at least 1 is 57%. If we look at the top 20, itâs 0.9 in the power of 20, which is 0.12, or an 88% chance at acceptance in at least one of the top 20 colleges, if the kid applies to them all.
Of course things are not that simple, but that is a rough estimate for the chances of an unhooked high stats White kid.
It is true that unhooked White and Asian kids generally need to have better application profiles than than hooked applicants, whatever that hook is. However, even hooked applicants need outstanding application profiles to be accepted. When thinking about hooked applicants, we should remember that, aside from hooks like legacy and athletic, most âhookedâ kids would rather be middle class White kids than have their hooks.
@CollegePrepping2 Iâve written elsewhere that the rankings are crude instruments at best, and there really is no difference in the education that you will get at Stanford (USANews #7), and Carnegie-Melon (USANews #25), despite the claims of many, especially from Stanford. Then there are the LACs which are parallel to research universities, and provide a different, but just as high quality education, so they really cannot be ranked in the same system. So for somebody like you who is really smart, ambitious, and focused, there are many opportunities at a high quality education which do not require acceptance to a T-20 university. However, I wouldnât give up on an acceptance to a T-20 just as yet.
@Nocreativity1 If you set your son as the bar, kids are going to give up on applying to Ivies entirely. Your kid seriously belongs to the 1 in 100,000 category (which is why he was accepted into multiple top schools). I think that the for most kids, being 1 in 100 is enough to get them a place in a top collegeâŠ
PS. Iâm the father of an unhooked (unless being LGBTQ is a hook, and I do not think it is), fairly high stats White kid.
However, college application decisions are not independent events like rolling a 10-sided die 8 or 20 times would be. Many of the things that the various colleges consider are the same in the studentâs application to each college (high school record, test scores, recommendations, extracurriculars, some essays). Because the decisions are likely correlated, due to using much of the same application materials, the chance of being shut out is higher than if the decisions were independent events. (But also, a really impressive applicant may be more likely to get more admission offers than expected.)
@ucbalumnus Yes and no. The admissions office looks at applicants independently of each other, i.e., the fact that an applicant has been rejected at Harvard does not affect the decision of the admissions people at Yale. They may be looking at the same things, which will reduce the admissions probability at both, so rather than 10% and 10%, theyâll be 7% and 7%, not 7% and 10%. However, the probability of being rejected at both is still the probability of being rejected at Harvard multiplied by the probability of being rejected at Yale.
So the 10% is likely not true for every high stats kid. Some have higher, based on their ECs, and some have lower, and these vary in a similar manner across all Ivies. However, the probability of an individual being rejected at all of the Ivies is still the the product of the kidâs personal acceptance probabilities at each Ivy.
On the other hand, the probabilities of an individual being accepted to an Ivy is NOT independent of the probability of another individual applying to the same Ivy.
@MWolf: âLooking at the different stats of acceptance to colleges, one can see that any kid, including an unhooked White kid, with an academic record in the top 10th percentile, has about a 10% chance of acceptance at Harvard.â
Except thatâs not true. Hooked kids have better to far better odds. So do the very best academically and those with the most impressive ECs. And isnât Harvardâs acceptance rate around 5%? So if youâre not national level in stuff and unhooked, your odds are far smaller than that.
BTW, even in ED, itâs getting tougher for unhooked kids.
A decade ago, unhooked average excellent top percentile kids with impressive stats but meh ECs stood a decent chance in the Ivy/equivalent ED round. These days, I see those that get in during ED doing a lot of ECs (while maintaining a high level of academics).
@PurpleTitan When D16 applied to one of the need-blind schools regular decision, they waitlisted hundreds of students. Their waitlist was need aware and they accepted a couple of hundred off the waitlist. So, I donât really believe schools when they say that they are need blind.
@bouders: Fair point though that doesnât mean they arenât need-blind in ED and RD.
It just means they are gaming: Saying that they are need-blind (which they very well might be in ED and RD) while only being so to a percentage of their student body (by not being need-blind with the WL).