<p>@Gibby
I agree with everything you just wrote, except the last part, which makes everything you wrote prior to that misapplied in this situation.
Is it not true that the vast majority of applicants who apply to Harvard, for example, are also applying to other Ivy Leagues (WHYP, afterall)? I know of very, very few students who choose a single Ivy to apply to.</p>
<p>While I cannot possibly narrow down an “Average Accepted Student,” it is entirely within my means to research and describe an “Average Applicant.”</p>
<p>What you say does have a bearing on the conversation however, and perhaps I would be better suited to qualify all further inquiries with the phrase (WHYP) rather than Ivy.</p>
<p>Based upon my children, their friends and classmates who have applied to college in recent years, very few students are accepted to every Ivy League school they apply to. My daughter, for example, applied to HYP, but was only accepted to Harvard. What did Harvard see that Yale and Princeton did not? Or – put it another way – Yale and Princeton seeing the same stats, essays, and teacher recommendations didn’t think she would be a “good match” for their school. The same thing happened when my son applied to HYP. He was rejected from Harvard, but accepted to Yale and Princeton. </p>
<p>You’re trying to narrow down an “average accepted student” but I don’t believe you can because what often tips the balance for students are NOT their stats, but their teacher recommendations and essays. That is where admissions officers learn if a student is a “good fit” for their school, even when that school is HYP. And from my experience, the admissions departments of HYP do not march to the same drummer – that’s not how Admissions works!</p>
<p>All I can offer is an anecdote, but I was accepted to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Dartmouth, MIT, Duke, etc with 15 AP classes (8 of them already had scores - all 5s) and 3 college classes (one university and two community college). I had a 4.0 (4.56 weighted). I come from an average suburban school that rarely sends kids to top tier schools.</p>
<p>By definition, there IS an average Ivy applicant, and an average Ivy accepted applicant. All you have to do is to input all of the factors you are measuring for everyone in the population, and divide by the relevant number. So what? That doesn’t tell you anything. The only thing remotely interesting about the average Ivy applicant is that he or (more likely) she doesn’t have a meaningful chance of being accepted at any of the Ivy League colleges.</p>
<p>I’m sure that there are a number of students who apply to every Ivy college, but in my world that isn’t the norm at all. One of my kids applied to Yale and Columbia, the other applied to Yale, Harvard, and Penn (but only under parental pressure). Both visited Princeton and Brown, and said no. One visited Dartmouth (hated) and the other Cornell (thought OK, really beautiful). Among their friends, there were 2 or 3 kids who applied to 6 or 7 of the 8 colleges, but most, like them, applied to 2 or 3, maybe 4. Lots only applied to one, and not just because of ED.</p>
<p>I’m not saying I think that’s better, by the way. If they had been taking my advice, they would have applied to a few more high-end colleges each. But the fact is that neither they, nor their friends, nor the other recent applicants I know, did anything remotely resembling “applying everywhere.”</p>
<p>I happen to disagree with some of gibby’s analysis. I think the various Ivy League colleges, and most of their peers, are in fact looking for pretty much the same types of students. It’s not one type, it’s multiple types. The colleges do develop somewhat different characters, but that’s more because of who applies and who accepts admission, rather than who is accepted, and also because the separate “characters” represent fairly small variations in the total population of each college. In addition to which, college students are influenced by their peers.</p>
<p>@Gibby
I’m trying to describe the profile of an “Average Ivy Applicant” which is a very different goal than to find the profile of an “Average Accepted Student.”</p>
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<p>@JHS
On the contrary, I think it would tell me something. For one, I imagine it would be helpful to all the students in high school right now who are wondering if their stats are competitive at Ivys. One can find an abundance of people on these forums saying “no chance at Ivy unless XXX,” but this is not nearly as helpful as a neat profile combining this information would be.</p>
<p>While I agree with you that most applicants do not “apply everywhere,” it is safe to assume that if a student applies to one Ivy he or she is likely to apply to at least one more. For example, I know (of) very few students who applied to Harvard without also applying to Yale and Princeton. I think at the very least a profile could be created to describe the average HYP applicant.</p>
<p>From personal experience and from reading, there seem to be several different approaches of Ivy applicants. One, the applicant who works very hard in high school, has good stats and dreams of going to an “Ivy;” then applies to all, or most, of the Ivy’s in an attempt to get into an Ivy. The applicant, a strong student with good resume, who picks one to three Ivy’s based on what they see as matches. The applicant, usually with a lower general range of stats, who applies to one Ivy as a dream school just in case they are accepted. Of course, these approaches are not exhaustive. The point is, it’s difficult to make a total generalization and I believe the stats and profiles of these groups would be different.</p>
<p>Etiquette: Taking into account my children, and all their friends, and all the children of my friends, I would say that less than 20% of the students who applied to any one of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton applied to all three. What’s more, relatively few of the people accepted at any of them applied to all three, far fewer than half. I wouldn’t generalize completely from people I know, or know of, but you shouldn’t either.</p>
<p>The reason an average applicant profile, or even an average admittee profile, would tell you nothing is this: The average applicant has little or no chance of being admitted. And the average admittee has “stats” that are only slightly better than those of an average applicant; the vast, vast majority of applicants with the stats of an average admittee are also going to get rejected. At the same time, Harvard admits hundreds of applicants with below-average stats. That’s out of tens of thousands of applications, sure, but it’s not just one or two people, it’s hundreds and hundreds of people. And by the same token, there is no set of stats, no matter how good, for which Harvard doesn’t reject half or more of the applicants with those stats. So knowing that you are above average, or even way above average, tells you practically nothing, and knowing that you are below average tells you only what you already knew – getting into Harvard is a long shot – but doesn’t mean at all that you shouldn’t apply if you think there’s a coherent reason why Harvard should accept you.</p>
<p>“For one, I imagine it would be helpful to all the students in high school right now who are wondering if their stats are competitive at Ivys”</p>
<p>No, it wouldn’t. It would be misleading. The key is how you have taken advantage of the opportunities available to YOU. So knowing that the average applicant has a 3.8 uw with 5 APs tells you next to nothing about your own competitiveness. It may also cause competitive applicants to give up because their (let’s say) rural high school doesn’t offer any APs, or cause false confidence in students from schools where the median SAT is 2100 and a typical student takes 8 APs.</p>
<p>@quacker789 @gibby Gibby’s daughter school, is literally the number one high school in the country lol it has one of the hardest workloads, so i find it funny when you say that it was easy cuz gibby’s daughter is a genius lol</p>
<p>@gibby were you a tiger dad? Did you force your children to do calculus read before they could eat? That is the real question because your daughters grades are impeccable!</p>