So my dad is active duty in the Air Force and I am wondering if this would be considered a hook?
Thanks!
No. Hooks are something why a particular college would want you above anyone else with a similar profile. Hooks are few and far between and would include something like being a recruited athlete, being a child of a huge donor or something along those lines.
Hooks usually fall into five categories:
First generation—you will be the first in the family to go to college;
Recruited athletes—you have to be good enough to be recruited;
Alumni children—your parents went to the school you are applying to;
Under represented minority—Hispanics, native American, AA etc;
Development admits—big donors’ kids, celebrity children etc;
Basically, hooks are something you are born with; you should know you either have it or not by eighth grade.
@jzducol’s explanation is accurate except for the assertion that hooks are something you’re born with; in the case of recruited athletes, those skills must be honed over many years of practice and training.
I imagine that if you are an athlete at the recruited level you need to have certain born talent and such talent usually would have manifested itself by eight grade. I have never heard of any D1 athlete who didn’t show great promise at an early age.
Another hook could be your geographic area. Assuming you are highly competitive in other aspects, then other wild cards like geography come in.
It’s not considered a hook, but it does carry weight.
@jzducol - As a parent of two recruited athletes I agee that one must be born with some level of innate ability to rise to the NCAA level, but strongly disagree with the rest of your assumptions. I’ve seen athletes go from totally off everyone’s radar to being highly recruited between 10th and eleventh grades. But my larger point is that, unlike people who are born into wealth, with a certain skin color, or whose parents haven’t attended college, recruited athletes’ special opportunities are largely a result of their own efforts.
I just know that with my two kids by eighth grade they would not rise to the recruited level no matter how much amount of training they were willing to go thru.
I would agree though recruited athletes are hardest working bunch. My friend’s son was a recruited swimmer last year and I know he swam over 6k meters daily for six years.
Of the five categories of hooks that @jzducol listed, only one, recruited athlete, requires effort. Whether recruited athletes are born with natural talent or not is highly contentious, but they do certainly require effort to get to the point of being good enough to be recruited. The rest of four categories of hook is taken care by nature with no nurturing involved, although some would even argue that developmental cases do involve a degree of effort.
To build on @TiggerDad’s point, it is extremely rare for a hook alone to get a student into an elite college. The Ivy League has it Academic Index requirements for athletes (granted Stanford shows more flexibility), and URM’s and legacies are generally held to very high academic standards.
There might be a few cases of the super rich sliding in with marginal stats, but I expect there are very few.
I’ve posted this elsewhere but it’s probably worth re-posting here:
In the book, The Price of Admission, the author Daniel Golden estimates that at elite schools, URMs make up 10 to 15% of students; recruited athletes, 10 to 25%; legacies, 10 to 25%; children of people who are likely to become generous donors, 2 to 5%; children of celebrities and politicians, 1 to 2%; and children of faculty, 1 to 3%. A former chancellor of Cal-Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, once estimated that roughly 60% of admitted students at elite schools are comprised of these hooks.
This book was published 10 years ago, by the way, when FLI (first-generation, low income) wasn’t considered a hook then. Now it is, so the percentage of overall hook admits at elite schools today is most likely higher. In fact, someone noted that an AO at Princeton stated that it’s as high as 70% now.
Judging by the academic performance data available in CDS, I suspect that there might be a lot more cases of not only the super rich but other hooks “sliding in with marginal stats.” Not that it matters hardly since there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they do any worse post-graduation than unhooked students.
Looking at hooks another way, hooks are what the school needs, so they are on the lookout for those students. So for instance if you play the french horn and they need a french horn player in their orchestra, or you play tuba and their marching band is short on tuba players (like at one point, Stanford), that could be a hook. Elite colleges want to give first gen students opportunities, just as much as legacies, so they reserve 17 to 21% of their class for this type of student.
So, asked in this way, does the college need or want students whose parents are in the AF or military? probably not. However, I have seen more than one student who asserts they have lived abroad because one parent was another National, or a parent was a diplomat write their way into suggesting the school needs them for diversity, because of their firsthand experience living abroad or their in depth knowlege of politics overseas from living in South America or Europe (rarely Asia) or Australia. Think about how you can spin it if you have traveled with a father in the AF, but a parent in the military alone, probably not a hook.
bump
Is there anything left to say???
“it is extremely rare for a hook alone to get a student into an elite college. The Ivy League has it Academic Index requirements for athletes (granted Stanford shows more flexibility), and URM’s and legacies are generally held to very high academic standards.”
They’re held to high academic standards but not has as high as white or Asian applicants. A 32 by an URM is considered competitive by selective colleges but not for Asians or whites who would need to score a 34 to be considered competitive. In fact Asians would need a 35 or 36 to get nod over the URM with a 32.