<p>I think there is a bit of a feedback loop here. Some people want to go where the the largest concentrations of the “best” students go–historically, that meant the Ivies, some top LACs, and a few other places (like MIT). That list has gotten bigger more recently. But because those schools get top students, they also get top faculty, etc., and they get high ratings. I think some schools that have moved up the ratings (like WashU) took steps to attract “better” students, and that resulted in better ratings for them.</p>
<p>My son is a sophomore at Yale. We’ll never know if he would have gotten into Columbia or Brown, because he got into Yale SCEA and withdrew all his other applications. He was accepted at Pitt before he had time to withdraw. He had a legacy hook at Yale, so I don’t know how he would have done at the other schools. But I can tell you that my approach was to enthusiastically talk up the match schools.</p>
<p>Did nt realize he was already in college! I was wondering why there were no messages about where he got in.</p>
<p>“But I can tell you that my approach was to enthusiastically talk up the match schools.” I am trying to understand what you mean by this. can you elaborate further?</p>
Fordham (Lincoln Center), Tulane, Loyola New Orleans, University of Florida, and possibly University of Miami. I got into a few others, but they’ve been whittled away.</p>
<p>
As someone who applied to several Catholic schools, I always found historical things pretty funny. Historically, Catholic students were not allowed at many of the original universities (several of the schools that would one day form the Ivy League Sports Conference), so they founded their own schools. REALLY historically, pretty much all of the universities in Europe were taught by Catholic priests (lots of Jesuits, but other orders, especially before the Jesuits were founded), far before European imperialists set foot on American soil.</p>
<p>As for the modern pursuit of ratings… Well, I don’t like it when a school plays the system too hard, but I also realize that it’s not the school’s fault. So many people buy into these ratings as a true measure of a college’s worth, it’s pretty sad. Yes, we should certainly trust this formula that is changed every year to generate a new list to sell more magazines. I would do a :rolleyes: if it wasn’t really a :mad:.</p>
<p>But I think this brings me back to the point at hand. These rankings draw a line. At this end, we have Harvard and Princeton and Yale and Columbia and MIT and Stanford, and we draw the line all the way down, passing schools like Dartmouth and Brown and Georgetown and UVa and going all the way to the end. Students take their SAT scores and GPAs and plot them on the line, to find where they think they should apply.</p>
<p>However, this approach is seriously flawed. They may not have the interests, qualities, or overall fit that is right for any particular school in the area of the line that they plotted their point. Maybe their scores tell them #30, but they belong at a #15, #23, #48, or #67, and those schools can see that. Maybe their best fit is the #48, but will they choose it over the #15? If they buy into the rankings, probably not. However, it works both ways. The school needs to choose people who fit, too, and that goes beyond scores. College admissions isn’t the straight line that these rankings would have us believe, but rather a great field, where no particular direction is forward or backward and different areas have far different terrain for people of different preferences. When it comes down to choosing your schools, I don’t see statistics as being even close to the most important consideration.</p>
<p>This is what I disagree with - that “historically” these were just Ivies, a few top LAC’s, and a few other places like the MIT’s of the world. It’s like when I read stuff on here about how (say) Carleton or Oberlin or Grinnell are “on the rise.” Huh? They’ve always been known as excellent schools – this isn’t just new news. I think there was a pocket of people who thought they “knew” all the excellent schools – when other people knew differently – and now that the first group of people have been made aware, all of a sudden they think that these other schools are “on the rise.” Uh, no – you’re just now joining the party.</p>
<p>Historically, Ivy league was just an athletic conference that also included Navy, Army and one or two other schools that left the conference. I was shocked when the guy presenting at Columbia talked about which schools were there that left.</p>
<p>“In 1936, sportwriter John Kieran noted that student editors at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Penn were advocating the formation of an athletic association. In urging them to consider “Army and Navy and Georgetown and Fordham and Syracuse and Brown and Pitt” as candidates for membership, he exhorted:”</p>
<p>I guess my disagreement with you on that, Pizzagirl, is that back in the olden days (i.e., when I was applying to college), there weren’t that many schools that were nationally viewed as the “best.” Others had regional reputations, primarily. Wash U is the prime example. I think that has changed, tremendously. Grinnell was (I assume) a great school back then–but I’m pretty sure they are drawing from a bigger pool of applicants–and, as a result, I’ll bet that they have a stronger student body now than they did 30 years ago.</p>
<p>
What I mean is that when my son was looking at schools, I tried very hard not to have (or convey) an attitude that getting into Yale or Harvard was success, and that anything else was failure. So when we visited less selective schools, I did my best to praise them, and to help him see himself there. I think this is part of the parent’s job in this process–as much as you might want your kid to go to Harvard, you should help your kid be prepared to go somewhere else happily if he doesn’t get into Harvard.</p>
<p>Although we are surprised that kids are not thrilled about the acceptances they got instead of being unhappy about not getting into specific schools considered prestigious, is there a parental issue here that they have nt provided the kids with expectations? If we go back to Amy Chua’s book, it almost sounded like if these kids did nt get into Harvard or Yale, they were failures and may be that is a problem with some of the parents’ expectations that is trickling down to the kids. Using the premise of this thread, is there ever truly a kid that cant get into a school with a 2400/36? I am assuming it is possible only if the kid applied to most selective schools and ignored all others. We have a tier 1state school in Texas (albeit 140) offering an admission to anyone with 1800 score as long as they are doing ok in school (dont need to be ranked even in top 50%) or the other way to get in automatically in top 15-20% .</p>
One problem I see is in the bright students that are aware of how bright they are and often exaggerate how much brighter than everyone else they are. They see the students around them dreaming of going to a certain state school, and thus think that it’s beneath them and hardly put the effort in to apply. When they carry this attitude around with them, that they’re better than a school because they get better grades than students who want to go there, then they’re much more likely to be crushed when they end up getting rejected by their top choices. However, that’s really their fault.</p>
<p>To think, unlike all the other ages past, almost every student in this country today has the opportunity to go to some form of college (though issues like poverty still often get in the way). In many parts of the world, you can say “The University,” and people will know what you’re talking about - there’s only one around. How lucky today’s students are to (1) be born at all, (2) be born in this time, and (3) be born in this country, yet so few realize it. The sheer number of options and opportunities is staggering, and I wish more people would appreciate that.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, some would look down on a school like the one you described. However, I think it’s a great thing that a university is offering so many people the great educational opportunities that they provide.</p>
<p>Honestly, I feel grateful to be able to attend any university. Maybe that’s because I’ve seen my parents’ struggles, but I wish more people would feel the same. Less people here would be overstressed.</p>
<p>It is certainly true that some kids get unreasonable expectations. This can happen when they really are smarter and more accomplished than the other kids in their high school. “You’ll get in everywhere,” people tell them. But often they don’t.</p>
<p>Billy - great write up. I have seen precisely this problem in my kid’s school where the kids refused to apply to the automatic admission in State because they were expecting to go to high profile schools (Texas has a law that says top 10% in any school in State need to be admitted to a school of their choice (UT Austin wanted to control the excessive numbers applying there and got an exemption to lower it to 8%). All they needed to do was turn in an application (no recs - only a transcript with a rank) and they just did nt make that effort.</p>
That’s pretty ridiculous. Most students around the country only have guaranteed admission to open admission schools. If one of my state schools said that the top 8% or 10% were in, I definitely would have applied. I mean, really, what happens when they screw up their applications or overestimate their chances elsewhere? Just seems kind of irresponsible.</p>
<p>It is a State law in Texas created during Gov. Bush era to do away with affirmative action requirements. The premise is that no matter how bad your school is, if you did well there, you are in at any State School. So what usually ends up happening is that every one applies to UT, next to T A&M, and down the list. As you go down the list, some schools allow 15%, some go up to 25% etc for guaranteed admissions since they know top 5-10 end up at UT or A&M.</p>
<p>I have to agree with Hunt that a lot of the time a kid is such a superstar in his own small corner of the universe, that everyone repeatedly tells me he’s a shoe-in for even the most-elite of the nation’s colleges. The cautionary voices are often drowned out as being “negative” or “demoralizing.”</p>
<p>And it certainly doesn’t help that those credentials that would have gotten you into Harvard a decade or two ago might not even get you on the waitlist at Northwestern or U. of Chicago today. A lot of kids are crying right now that not only did they not get into the Ivies, they couldn’t even get into their perceived safety school, the one where the slacker older brother breezed into 5 years back.</p>
<p>It’s great to have a site like CC to get an up-to-the-minute account of what’s really happening out in the trenches. The downside, perhaps, is it may well help to accelerate the stats/EC arms race where nothing is ever good enough. I have seen dozens if not hundreds of threads by now where someone asks if they should retake their 2300+ SAT to get a better chance of admission. And what some parents are willing to spend for Ivy League-grade “admissions coaches” is absolutely mind-boggling!</p>
<p>I agree with you on WashU, and I would add Vandy as a prime example as well.</p>
<p>The broader-applicant-pool is true of any elite school, though. Don’t you think that <em>all</em> elite schools – yes, even including the Ivies – drew far more from their immediate surrounding areas / states – 30 years ago compared to today?</p>
<p>Or, to put it another way – and I’m just picking on these schools as examples –
wasn’t (say) Bowdoin just as “regional” 30 years ago as (say) Oberlin was 30 years ago? The difference was, Bowdoin was regional to the east and Oberlin regional to the midwest – and “regional to the east” is often confused with “national.”</p>
<p>I also wonder how much is socioeconomics. A sample of one – the parents / students in my suburban St. Louis high school 30 years ago were FAR more expansive and FAR more savvy in their knowledge of what was good and where they’d send their kids to, than the parents / students in my kids’ suburban Chicago high school, which has a broader socioeconomic range (not as uniformly affluent).</p>
<p>I do think it’s harder nowadays for a well-qualified but not-quite-superstar kid to get into a regional powerhouse that is not so well-known everywhere in the country as Haarvard. A year ago, we had never heard of Williams and I sort of thought that Amherst was a fancy New England prep school. Now my son has been accepted to both and, more likely than not, forced some poor soul from New York or Massachusetts onto the waiting list. I’m also sure there are plenty of Midwestern folks dismayed that acceptance rates at Northwestern and U of C have plunged from the high 20’s to the mid-to-high teens, just in the last few years – undoubtedly due to more national recognition.</p>
<p>yeah, last year a member called christiansoldier got rejected from harvard with like 20 aps and 800 in 10 subjects,let alone 2400/36
but i remember he was half asian(maybe chinese) though,that could be the main reason.</p>
<p>Chicago’s numbers have dramatically shot up in the last couple of years. I think it was 12,000 two or three years ago now they received 21000 and almost 7000 in early alone. The open EA may have a lot to do with it. So they essentially went down from 25%+ down to 16%, all within a span of 2 years.</p>
<p>No, jupitertang. You are laboring under the untrue assumption that the 800/2400/36 made him “more qualified” than the kid who was 700/2250/33. That’s simply not true. He could have not come across as an interesting individual. I don’t know of course, but it’s simplistic to reduce it to “he was half Asian.”</p>
<p>Every year there are some very surprising rejections of kids on cc-often kids who seem very interesting. (This year, it’s silverturtle.) But those kids usually get into very good schools, even if it’s not HYP (for example, silverturtle got into Columbia and Brown). I think kids get rejected who are very qualified, but who don’t fit into the puzzle at some schools for some unknown reason.</p>
<p>Actually, the selectivity of Columbia this year, I think, was greater than that of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, or Stanford. Correct me if I’m wrong, but congrats on THAT silverturtle!</p>