<p>I don’t get this Ivy love thing.</p>
<p>Some of them have unbeatable financial aid for people in the “gray zone”. Add the name recognition to it and it’s worth a shot.</p>
<p>Placido- while you are correct, I think your spin is unduly cynical. I interviewed for my alma mater for many years when I lived in the Midwest (my college was in New England) and I recall one true standout from those years. First Generation, rural, took a Greyhound bus and then two other forms of public transportation to get to me, and an absolute star student by any measurement. How had he heard about the college? A piece of mail. </p>
<p>I don’t think it’s romanticism. It’s part of the college’s mission to make a good faith effort to make sure that the Freshman class is not entirely comprised of kids from Belmont Massachusetts and Atherton California. It’s not hard getting kids to apply from top prep schools and top publics in major metropolitan areas. It’s harder encouraging a kid from Kentucky who thinks he’s going to Community College to get a pharmacy tech license to work in the local Walmart, to consider applying to an Ivy League university which he’s never heard of in a state he’s never visited where lots of folks will encourage him to then apply to medical school.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s about props. It’s part of the institutional mission although it gets lost in the “can you believe they took a kid from Kentucky with SAT scores 20 points lower than my HS’s Val?”</p>
<p>I agree fully with blossom. And I think there is more than a little upper-middle-class-coastal-arrogance about “how dare they reach out to areas where these schools might not be as well known; why, our affluent suburban high schools can fill their school slots just fine.” I think there is a huge provincialism on CC where there really are a significant number of parents who truly don’t understand that the schools that they drool over, whose names they whispered over their sleeping babies, just aren’t as prominent and well-known in other areas of the country, and that mass-marketing efforts to attract those students aren’t “evil.” I mean, I don’t know how you get to adulthood without realizing that the entire country doesn’t worship Brown and Dartmouth, but there are tons of parents on CC who think that way.</p>
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<p>An extremely well-played analogy.</p>
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<p>What you have to remember is that high-end colleges are in an endless admissions arms race with each other the same way the applicants are. The day Harvard gets complacent and declares that the applicant pool they have is “good enough” is the same day that Harvard begins to be overtaken by Yale, Stanford, Princeton, et al.</p>
<p>I think some are looking way too much into this. I don’t see it as a contest like American Idol nor it is an all out arms race. Yes, they have to be on guard and vigilant to keep their reputation and tradition intact, but they all got the same top 10-15k applicants from the general population of millions of kids every year. If the stat of admitted kids improve, I could hardly think that it is because of the admission process or admission trickery, it simply is the result of kids continual ability to raise their stat and the so called quality (whatever that means) through whatever means they can come up with, tutoring, studying, prepping, coaching, more focus on ECs, etc…</p>
<p>I can only attribute the improvement of accepted students at each school as the general improvement of the applied students and not the admission playing games with their numbers since all of these schools pick and choose from the very top who they want. Maybe they sprinkle in some lower level people with hooks, URM, or what ever turns them on here and there to round out the class. It is not like there is only a few hundreds great students and the rest are way below them that the schools have to fight for these few hundreds kids.</p>
<p>I think unfortunately the admission office job performance is measured by these idiotic ratings and rankings that involves such measurements as selectivity and scores. This is where the arms race is, and I think that all admission offices have to play this game because it is the only game in town. They are judged by these measurements and they are pressured to make these numbers as high as they could in relation to their peers. In reality, they have the luxury to pick pretty much any kind of classes that they want, but that is not enough, they have to also show that they also reject as many students as they could too, otherwise the school administration is going question them that how come school XYZ had so much improvement in selectivity, but ours hardly move this year?</p>
<p>Seriously, how could a kid that was deferred from another Ivy with the same SAT and GPA as the same current hundreds that the school is going to reject in April really add so much to the admission quality of the school?</p>
<p>It doesn’t. In fact, the quality of the class - the ability of the students to take advantage of the specific qualities that this particular school might have to offer could actually go down. That is because the student who wants to study, say “near eastern studies” at Penn (likely the best or second best program in the country) ends up a Princeton, which doesn’t have nearly as good a program.</p>
<p>OR, those wonderful school are in a statistical panic because they have just calculated the average SAT scores of their early admits - they are freaking out because their hooked kids are wonderful and deserving, but have some low scores. Now thay need your kids HIGH stats to raise their averages before the cops from U.S. News and World Report come into their ivy-covered offices and seize the data. What? It could happen.</p>
<p>I was thinking the same thing Glido. Maybe their ED pool wasn’t quite what they were looking for. But why so many rejects/defers then? Makes no sense to me.</p>
<p>In a similar but slightly less cynical vein, what if the early pool didn’t generate enough geographic, economic, or ethnic diversity?</p>
<p>As long as it generates enough cash, and a football quarterback, that can wait.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/12317804-post106.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/12317804-post106.html</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/12644534-post20.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/12644534-post20.html</a></p>
<p>Stories from a girl who said she would have never applied to Harvard if that mail did not come.</p>
<p>Hunt - MIT is bummed because they missed 4 states in EA - couldn’t find anyone good enough to admit. MITChris is not saying which states though!</p>
<p>I also noticed that the kid texaspg is referring to was deferred ED by Brown before being admitted by Harvard.</p>
<p>“Stories from a girl who said she would have never applied to Harvard if that mail did not come.”</p>
<p>I understand the schools sending out promotional materials, but isn’t the main point of this thread the bizarre timing of come-hither correspondence that goes out right after “early” notifications have been delivered?</p>
<p>Wow you guys have drank the kool-aid. Top schools are not fighting for those top students…they have them by the boatloads and could easily take the top 25% of applicants and the class would be interchangeable with the top 10 or 15% they do take. And no they aren’t digging for the needle in the haystack from podung town in tiny state. Not the school, nor any individual within it, benefits remotely from finding that ‘diamond in the rough’. But the school, and everyone in it, depends heavily on maintaining its rank. </p>
<p>This is big business, pure and simple. HYPs cares as much as any school to keep up their numbers going up. And it is simply easy-peasy to continually increase their applications year over year…a decline in that growth (or a decline in that growth relative to their peers) will make headlines and not be in their interest. It really is that simple. This is not cynical, it is simply how it works.</p>
<p>ds seems to hearing more from duke and penn lately. not really sure what’s up with that. perhaps it’s a geographic thing? ds had a deferral this week from a top ranked school. he seems to be in their mid range on scores.</p>
<p>If HYPS really cared that much about keeping their numbers up, they would have ED.</p>
<p>^ Agreed. What I propose now may be naive and/or pompous but from what I’ve seen in my 20+ years of recruiting/interviewing as an alum of an HYP, here’s how I see it:</p>
<p>The rankings and stuff that outsiders harp about? For HYPMS, Amherst, Williams: we really don’t care. Frankly, we’re above the conversation. Our primary goal is to promote what benefits our own vision of the welfare of our college, our directors, our faculty students and alumni. How outsiders view us, our methods, and how we place on some list – is just not in the conversation. We don’t care.</p>
<p>I know how pompous that sounds but people need to understand the amount of self-confidence and devotion we have to our institutions and their traditions of excellence. If somehow any of us “fell” to 10th or 12th place on the USNWR reports, I don’t think anyone would blink an eye. </p>
<p>The cynicism that’s slathered on the “must reject high stats kids to maintain our selectivity to maintain our rankings” is a natural affect. I think you’ll see that most respondents to this conversation topic who reject the cynicism are insiders with those colleges while those who ascribe the cynical view generally are not.</p>
<p>Also the thinking about the app fees being a revenue source: we’re talking about departments multi million dollar budgets and schools with billions in endowment. Money and revenue (even in the recent down times) is rarely, if ever, a factor.</p>
<p>Have I drunken the Kool-Aid? Maybe I have: I admit I’m not one who can affirmatively say yes or no. But that’s my perspective.</p>
<p>Lastly: I’m a beneficiary of one of those last-minute pushes for applicants. THANKSGIVING WEEKEND of my Senior year, a girl I liked was invited to a alumni event in my city where undergrads were recruiting kids. So I drove her to the event. From that night’s presentation, I was motivated to pull out the app and fill it out. I was already admitted to a top public university and wasn’t stressed out at all. But this single event changed my life’s trajectory. Knowing who eventually was accepted from my area, I’m sure I was the only attendee that night who got admitted. I’m all for good marketing – and it wasn’t even directed at me but at this girl!</p>
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<p>I’ve too much evidence to the contrary to think this is true. It’s true that they have more excellent students than they need, but when a truly top applicant comes along the high-end schools will go to great lengths to make sure they land him/her and not their peer schools. They compete with each other very seriously.</p>
<p>When a top math whiz here in our town was applying to colleges a few years ago, my daughter, who was at the time in college at Harvard, was asked along with the other Harvard students who live in the area to attend a special reception being given to recruit him and convince him to pick Harvard and not YPSM or any other college he was considering. And Harvard got him. </p>
<p>Like I said, the day they or any other top college starts slacking off on finding and recruiting the best students it can get is the same day that school starts sliding backwards relative to its peers.</p>