Amen @Nocreativity1.
Here are my thoughts. Thereâs only limited hope for a non-hooked applicant and your best chance by far requires applying via early decision to one of the schools where that makes a significant difference. I would suggest that students consider doing that even if they might have to renege on an early acceptance if the offered financial aid is insufficient. Otherwise, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
The other sad reality is that admission to the top tier isnât the only new challenge. There are no real safety schools anymore. When I applied to college, entrance at other than the handful of schools at the tippy top was very easy to calculate. My safety school was Duke if you can believe it. Now, admissions is too much of a crapshoot. If schools think they might be your safety, you will get denied. If youâre not a hooked candidate or someone with a remarkable background, you will get denied to your reaches. So you can really end up between a rock and a hard place. In addition to applying to your reach school ED, find some schools that are rolling or offer EA and apply to those right out of the gate so you know you have a good choice with which you are happy.
Having said all of that, most of the most successful people I know did not go to a âtop university.â You can get an excellent education at a lot of schools and if you are worried about your future career prospects, learning to work hard and get along well with others will be more important than the name on your diploma in the long run. Find a school where you can thrive and will enjoy your college experience.
Finally, I get annoyed every time I read that colleges are overwhelmed with students who are unable to function independently of their parents and parents who are badgering them over grades, housing, etc. If universities only accept students who have started successful businesses, who are olympic athletes, who speak 10 languages, or who have published multiple scientific papers, how do they think those students managed to achieve those successes? There has to be a parent who drove that kid to practice and paid for equipment and lessons, a parent or mentor who suggested that the child seek out internships or research opportunities at an early age, etc. These kids donât come out of high school this successful without a lot of parental involvement. If colleges want kids that are untethered from parents, then they should stop demanding that applications be filled with achievements that almost always require a tremendous amount of parental support.
There is no hope at HYPSM and lower ranked Ivies if you are an unhooked Asian. You may have some hope at Berkeley, Rice, Duke, Vandy, Amherst, Williams, CMU, CIT.
My younger sonâs best friend got into Yale with no hooks. Number three in his class, lots of different music activities school orchestra, jazz band and his own rock band. Taught Hebrew school and at music camps. Was in the school musicals, but never a star. Heâs also one of the nicest kids Iâve ever met. (And I do still listen to the EP his band put out in high school.)
Obviously your odds arenât great - you need to figure they are lower than the admit rate. But they arenât zero if you really have the stats, plus something more. Itâs really that something more that makes a difference.
@pittsburghscribe, there are a ton of safeties out there (assuming that you are 99th percentile and can pay at least R&B). They may be lower ranked than kids may hope for but to assert that there are no true safeties anywhere is ridiculous.
@PurpleTitan â youâre right. Of course there are safeties, but they are vastly different than when we were growing up. You canât simply move down a tier or two and find schools where your stats exceed the schoolâs average. That makes this process much more difficult than it used to be. Tufts was a legitimate safety for students hoping to attend Harvard. Case Western a legitimate safety for a student hoping for MIT. Those days are long gone.
I actually believe there are no real âunhookedâ kids any more. Even those considered âunhookedâ generally have some experience so exceptional, that it is out of reach for the average kid with average resources. Most âunhookedâ kids we know that get into Stanford/Ivyâs are on the National Physics Team, Spelling Bees. Have been taking AMC math contests as early as they could walk. Have some connection with a university and are working on breaking research with professors, or something equally as crazy impossible. I think at one time, the naturally exceptional students surfaced out of high school. Lately, nothing surfaces, Exceptional students are made and it has to start early. At one time school accomplishments were local, then there were young students on state teams, then national teams. Now that has expanded to national and international academic award in all fields. And most of those kids need an incredible amount of money and support and time commitment from parents starting young and outside the general public school system. By the time kids enter high school, for many students, it is already too late to reach that level of accomplishment. I know there might be some exception, but that is just my observation. But that is coming from a parent of an exceptional unhooked daughter expecting a slew of Ivy rejections this week 
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My D is a freshman at H. She was unhooked and was accepted SCEA. I have met about a dozen of her friends and roommates and of that group, I would estimate about 25% of them were unhooked. The rest are either URM, first gen, legacy or athletes. Obviously, this is a very small sample size but it doesnât bode well for the unhooked applicant.
It looks like many student and parent posters on these forums define âfitâ as being mainly âprestigeâ (and cost if that is a constraint), perhaps because they believe that college-prestige is highly important for future job opportunities in what they perceive to be a negative-sum economic future for the bottom 99.9%. (Whether the beliefs underlying the chase for prestige are correct is another thing altogether.)
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@Riversider "There is no hope at HYPSM and lower ranked Ivies if you are an unhooked Asian. "
I suspect this would come as a surprise to the unhooked Asian woman (published poet and childrenâs book) on my sons hall. She apparently was under a false impression as a matriculated student that her application as an unhooked Asian had been reviewed and accepted as opposed to your suggestion it went straight to trash?
I know of several other Asian kids that were unhooked and are at top schools. Yes the odds are challenging but hardly âno hopeâ. These sorts of generalities are misinformed.
If the answer to the title question (âIs there hope for unhooked applicants at top schools?â) is ânoâ or âhardly anyâ, then wouldnât the corollary be that one should not be too impressed by the fact that someone graduated from a âtop private university or LACâ, unless one finds that s/he is an actual true superstar of some sort, rather than âmerelyâ an âaverage excellentâ high school student who got admitted with some sort of âhookâ?
The other corollary is that high school seniors expecting to be immersed in an environment filled with academic superstars at a âtop private university of LACâ may find that much of the student body falls short of such expectations.
A Kia may not be a Maserati or even a Mercedes. But it will get you on the road to a career, for a whole lot less money than the latter. I know that in a consumerist, brand-oriented society thatâs not enough. But maybe people just expect too much. No one is owed a Maserati, and society only really suffers when no one is able to afford a Kia.
I blame TV and social media for giving working people the impression that they should drive a Maserati because someone theyâve seen on a screen of some sort drives one.
Itâs time this society grew up.
Thanks Purple Titan, itâs good news for waitlisted kids to think they have a smidgeon of a chance! But I think overall the numbers typically arenât so good. Since the OP was talking about âtop collegesâ, I assume they mean more like the Ivy League vs. very fine, fabulous colleges such as Macalaster and Oberlin which are ranked more like 25-30 for liberal arts colleges (and neither of those are need-blind for RD or ED anyway)
Looking at the Ivies, I think that Harvard and Yale may not publish info about their waitlists, but for the others, in the past 2 years, Dartmouth accepted 0 both years. Brown accepted 86 and 82 in past 2 years, with over 3000 acceptances per year, so while thereâs hope thereâŠitâs still not a sizable portion of the class at all. Cornell had 75 and 61 waitlist acceptances out of >5500 acceptances total. UPenn had 9 last year and 58 the year before out of 3700. I couldnât find this yearâs Princeton data but in May of 2017 they accepted 18. Looking at the top 2 liberal arts colleges, Williams had 76 last year and 0 the year before. Amherst had 0 last year and 60 the year before. So clearly thereâs a lot of variability, but overall, waitlists are not contributing more than very small single digit percentages of acceptances to the top, need-blind colleges. The overwhelming majority of the acceptances are offered need-blind.
This is a good thing!!
By the way, thanks for that link, it was interested to see all of those schools compiled like that!
@ucbalumnus - If you can pinpoint for me a school with excellent academics, a challenging intellectual atmosphere (at all levels), high quality instruction, and offers a variety of disciplines that does not also carry âprestigeâ have at it.
@Trixy34, it depends on how youâd define âvariety of disciplinesâ, but NCF has the first 2 and most people havenât heard of it.
I feel that binding ED at `lower Iviesâ or schools like Duke and Northwestern is the best option for an unhooked kid â a person with strong overall record, but not crazy level accomplishment in EC.
Many kids/parents are unwilling to make ED commitment (and understandably so). Also, many `topâ kids do not like giving up the HYPSM option and finish up doing EA/SCEA/REA at one of these schools. EA at HYPSM as well as RD at lower ivies/ NU / Duke etc. finished up being brutal.
I propose the term âcuratedâ for this group.
By this I mean that the parents were actively involved in exposing their kids to many activities, with the hope of finding ones that they both liked and excelled in.
Iâm happy to admit to being a curator. My older son showed an early interest in trains. I threw trains at him. Then he got interested in electricty and we gave him electric kits from Radio Shack. Then he got into computers and we helped him explore that as well. I donât remember throwing large sums of money at him though he did get a personal computer earlier than most of his friends. He took his first AMC test in 6th grade, which he only did because he was a grade ahead in math. Iâd never heard of the thing, but all the kids in honors math at his school took it. I will say that teachers at his school also did their share. He attended a series of Saturday lectures at IBM and went to Saturday classes at Columbia one year thanks to a recommendation from a teacher. We had to drive him to IBM, but he got to the Columbia classes via public transportation.
I think being a curator is great. To encourage a childâs interest/passion, to help her/him grow. Thatâs good parenting.
unhooked kids should stop applying to T20 schools except for a well placed ED app. OR do your best to get a hook like take up fencing or field hockey early. Or go to an elite private school that specializes in getting kids into those schools or go to a public charter like NC science and math that preselects juniors for 99%tile scores and gets in multiple kids each year into each HYPS school. Holistic admissions is legal mumbo jumbo that allows the universities to apply completely different academic standards to different kids; unfortunately unhooked kids read holistic as if I write a good essay my A- average and 97%tile score will give me a chance. The good news the top LACs and public universities, if your state has them can be good deals and prepare you just fine for life. the last thing HYPS needs is another 85$ from a middle class white or asian kid.