@PurpleTitan OP said in one of her post that her teachers and “everyone” was telling him/her that him/her friends’ URM status was the reason she got in.
I’m assuming the 3.9 is UW. Is it possible your friend had a more rigorous courseload+class rank?
Not inappropriate at all. This teacher is helping OP to understand how things work in this country.
@menefrega That is wildly inappropriate. It’s implying that the friend is somehow less qualified because she is a URM with a lower ACT score. You don’t know the rigor of the OPs schedule, you don’t know the quality of the OPs letters, or the quality of the OPs essay. You are assuming based on one thing that the friend is some how under qualified.
The only thing that is a fact of life is that you can’t get everything you want and that no one is entitled to an acceptance at any school. To think other wise is pretentious and unwarranted. That’s what you subject yourself to when you apply to one of the most selective schools in the world.
This is the Vanderbilt ED thread for 2019. Kids with higher stats than you got rejected and non URM kids with lower stats than you got accepted.
I don’t think you can ever really know for sure why one student gets in over another with similar stats. The best thing you can do is to stop asking why (easier said than done, I know!) and try to get excited about the choices you do have. Once you commit to your school, you will realize that you belong there, and will be able to let this one denial go.
My daughter was rejected from a school that one of her closest friends got into (and D’s SAT scores were higher, so it did sting a bit), but after a couple of days of bitterness, she let it go and moved on. Two years later, she knows that she would never have been happy at the other school and this was confirmed by a visit to her friend there last spring (D’s school year ended a few weeks before her friend’s did.) I hope you come to the same realization and that your friendship isn’t negatively affected.
@PurpleTitan: “I don’t believe that the OP said her teacher mentioned race at all.”
I think that’s what motivated OP to post in the first place.
Really - where did I state any of these things? I don’t think the teacher was inappropriate. I wrote:
Kids letting their friendships be affected by college admission decisions? Bitterness over college rejections?
What a strange world.
20 years ago, this definitely did not occur. I’m going to hazard a guess that it doesn’t occur among the more mature self-confident kids either.
You can control what you can control. You can’t control what you can’t control.
You don’t become bitter if the ball bounces away from you rather than towards you during a game (I hope). Uncertainty and risk are a part of life, and you can’t control how well other people do in the college admissions process. And each snowflake is different from another.
@menefrega But that is not how things work in this country and the teacher was wrong for belittling the success of one student when talking to another. By agreeing with the teacher, you are making said implications.
I know that it’s not the OP who’s playing the race card on this but its’ so darn discouraging.
While i’m white, my kid attends a school that’s 70% AA and it’s so depressing that people label them as getting into schools because of their skin color.
To the original question, “why did I not get accepted and my friend did”?
Possible answers:
- she had better recs
2 better ECs - her essays were better
- There was an “it” quality to her application…everything just shined a bit more.
- pure luck…i wouldn’t discount this…among equally qualified, it’s often just a lucky moment for one and unlucky for the other…
Why shouldn’t there be bitterness?
All throughout HS, there is equity in grading and advancement. For a math quiz where a student scores an 85%, the teacher does not hand out a B to a white kid and an A to a URM kid.
In HS track & field meets, there are not separate 100m dash races for asian kids and black kids, with a gold medal for the fastest asian kid and a gold medal for the fastest black kid
The a kid who is taught from K-12 to share crayons and that everyone is subject to the same school rules and standards is suddenly faced w the college admissions circus… it is rational for the OP to wonder what is going on…
@GMTplus7, because there’s no equity in life.
School’s a rather artificial environment. You and I didn’t have the same parents, they didn’t make the same amount of money, and we don’t have the same genes, etc.
I have to point out that URM are generally disadvantaged in terms of socioeconomic status, and a good chunk of them don’t have the benefit of parents who previously attended college. Even as an ORM, I believe it’s not completely out of the field for colleges to favor URM.
If college admission was truly a stats based meritocracy the OP still wouldn’t get into Vanderbilt.
We’re not comparing a URM from a blighted neighboohood school & a white kid at Phillips Exeter. These are 2 kids who attend the same HS and are friends, so presumably there is not a socioeconomic gulf between them. But the OP can clarify on what the socioeconomic backgrounds are.
@OP, is your admitted friend poor and/or a 1st generation college student?
And college isn’t an artificial environment?
Holistic and color-blind are not mutually exclusive. UMich has holistic admissions that is color-blind by law. It doesn’t admit purely on stats.
@GMTplus7, college is more like real life. Difficulty of getting good grades is more dependent on what classes and profs you take. Recruitment opportunities and success depend on all sorts of factors, including choice of major. So does success in research, etc. For that matter, “success” is measured in different ways.
In simple terms, colleges - especially the selective colleges - are not looking at applications one by one and making yea-or-nay decisions. They are looking to assemble a class that has various qualities and characteristics. One factor is race, most schools don’t want a student body that skews away from the general population in race. That could and probably did affect your friend’s application reading.
But not necessarily in a simple way. For example, maybe Vandy gets a much lower yield from admitted black applicants for whatever reason - they are uncomfortable with a southern school, they think they cannot afford to attend, they have a different repetition of it - so Vandy might need to make more offers to black students to get an equivalent number to matriculate. (I don’t know, and I doubt they’d actually disclose yields broken down by race.)
And there are many other non-number factors that affect things. Were both your and your friend’s parents college graduates? What were your respective intended majors? What were your respective essay topics, and how well written would admissions deans (not HS English teachers) rate your essays? Did either of you have an impoverished background to overcome? What ECs did you each participate in? Etc.
It could be as simple as whoever read your application was just in a bad mood that day, and whoever read your friend’s application was just in a great mood that day.
The bottom line is that your friend made the cutoff for Vandy to get enough students to bring various qualities to their class, and you didn’t - whatever qualities you would bring, they decided they had enough applicants bringing the same qualities that they liked better than you. Vandy wanted your friend, enough to make her an offer, and just didn’t want you enough. Whatever qualities they wanted in their incoming class, you didn’t bring enough of to merit an offer.
This might sound cynical, but your best bet (last Autumn) would have been to start by figuring out what various colleges want in their incoming class, and then apply to those schools most likely to want you. Everyone who submits an application knows what a particular college can do for them; but you really needed to ask what you could do for each college that every other applicant couldn’t do just as well or better.
I’ll just weigh in here. I’m a 50 something white girl from a moderately privileged environment. My dad, a Bell Labs engineer, and long term conservative, became a proponent of affirmative action when he found that he could easily get me (an engineering undergrad) a nice summer job at the lab just by asking around. He suddenly became much more aware of the vast advantage of the “good old boys” network as he saw it in action. Sure, there are URM families that are just as privileged as I was. But on average, the networks aren’t there. Yes I can think of better ways to “fix” this problem, but the “URM advantage” is one attempt to do that.