<p>I really think sometimes it’s just who is lucky enough to get to the top of the stack. Those of you who have been around awhile know that my son had a very imperfect transcript. He had “changed” schools several times, lost a year along the way, but ultimately spent his last 2 years of high school at an excellent prep boarding school (not Exeter level but not far below). His scores were good but nowhere near what people think are good on CC. Grades were good, but not all As. His hook was his sport, but it wasn’t one of the “top” sports and most of the highly selective academic school coaches in that sport had just a few tips and somewhat limited “pull” with admissions. The prep school packaged him well (and sincerely). He had started a philosophy club that met on Friday nights in the dorm. There were many varsity athletes in it and they discussed Ayn Rand etc. Again, his sport was a hook and got him early and good reads. Great but risky essays, including the one that explained suspension/expulsion. </p>
<p>Bottom line- we were told that he came across as a different, interesting kid who was intellectual, had learned from some mistakes (and not so much from others, but that didn’t come across on the application…) and would clearly be able to handle the work. He got into Chicago EA, Penn ED and had verbal “likelies” before the ED acceptance that I trusted from a number of other excellent schools, including Davidson, Emory, Tufts, Colgate, Williams and NYU. </p>
<p>My point is that these schools have plenty of kids with less than perfect stats and backgrounds. Sometimes it’s a matter of getting someone’s attention, which isn’t that easy to do. Awards help. Athletics helps. A connection helps. I get concerned when people act like it’s all about the 2400/4.5 or whatever.</p>
<p>“I can say confidently that an essay that would work very well for 5 of my colleagues would work very poorly for another 5, with all gradations in between when the rest of my colleagues’ reactions are considered. I think this is an aspect that introduces an element of randomness, from the vantage point of the applicant.”</p>
<p>I agree with this. It is mitigated somewhat by the multiple readers/committee decision-making process at some schools. I also think there are some remarkable essays that will hit (or miss) the mark with almost everyone at a given type of school. But for a lot of essays and a lot of readers, yes, chance comes in.</p>
<p>Not sure if Chicago is the most “intellectual” college out there but I would say having observed the nonstop inundation of mailings and emails to my DD this season that it is now one of the truly over-the-top marketers out there. It actually annoyed my DD; she didn’t apply.</p>
<p>I have not seen much in terms of mass mailings from Harvard. I do agree with sewhappy that Chicago has been over the top in terms of how many brochures, postcards (two of each for some reason and from what I hear, it seems to be common occurrence) are sent and how often.</p>
<p>For a school considered to be for the quirky, that seems over the top mass marketing. Must be hard to convince the quirky ones.</p>
<p>alh - I am guessing sewhappy and I are considering a different problem. How much mail an individual kid receives from a single school as opposed to how widely a school is casting the net. I don’t think there is a school that tops Chicago in the amount and frequency of mail my kid received from a single school.</p>
And some will forgive a kid who clearly is there doing enough for the A, but whose academic interests lie elsewhere. My older son’s bio teacher clearly admired the fact that he never bothered with extra credit projects instead choosing to spend any extra class time reading the computer theory text he always had with him.</p>
<p>FWIW neither of my kids were suck ups. Older son was slightly disappointed by his admissions results. (Like alh we’re still somewhat cross with MIT), but he’s exactly where he wanted to be four years later, so it all turned out fine. Younger son did much better than we would ever have expected with admissions results. While, no suck up, he genuinely liked the teachers who wrote his recommendations and the history teacher required a lot of work from him before he would even write a letter. (What was your favorite text, what are you thinking about for a major and why, make a copy of a paper you wrote in class etc.)</p>
<p>BTW, if I remember correctly Harvard says they have room for about 200 “true intellectuals” in their class. :)</p>
<p>I think the compare-and-contrast complaints are:</p>
<p>Harvard sends too much mail in the sense that it sends a piece or two to tens of thousands of kids who aren’t going to be serious candidates for admission to Harvard, and the mail pieces give a false impression of the likelihood of acceptance to an unsophisticated reader.</p>
<p>Chicago, on the other hand, sends too much mail in the sense that it inundates kids who may be appropriate candidates with mailing after mailing.</p>
Why does any high school student need to attend a “top” school for undergraduate work? I mean, what is being taught in any subject at the undergraduate level that makes it all so terrible if the kid ends up some school ranked #40 on the US news list?</p>
<p>I mean, as the parent of a kid with a degree from a prestige college, I understand the appeal. But my kid went in with the attitude that she was going to reach for the brass ring, but knew she would do well anywhere. Her safeties were all pretty darn good in their own right – any kid with stellar stats also is going to have some good option for safeties. </p>
<p>Down the line, looking at outcomes for my kids’ middle school and high school friends, the demarcation line isn’t really what college they went to, but whether they earned a 4-year degree. There are kids who went to CSU’s who went onto graduate programs at prestige colleges, and at least one kid who went to a prestige college on the opposite coast, came home, and is currently a very happy stay-at-home mom. (In any case, my observation has been that the arrival of babies on the scene, including my own grandson, throws a huge wrench in the whole education/career thing.) </p>
<p>Yes, it is nice for a kid to get into a “top” university — when it happens – but the quality difference between the “top” and the “pretty good” is not going to significantly impact the actual ability of students to learn and progress. If they are all that brilliant that they need a “top” university, they will stand out and have a great chance of admission at a “top” graduate school, and down the line their grad degree is going to be more important than the undergrad. </p>
<p>I guess the part that I find puzzling is the combination of parents/students who want to get into the types of schools that are prestigious precisely because they are hard to get into… and then are frustrated because those schools are hard to get into. Any competitive process is going to come out in the end to a choice being made among a set of very well qualified candidates. Random? Yes – but so is just about everything else in life.</p>
<p>Well said, but I would add that some of us are ogling these “hard to get into” schools because unfortunately they are the ones with the big finaid package.</p>
<p>^ For a lot of people who end up applying to these top schools, it may come down to money. Either they have the money and feel it is appropriate they use it to go to the most exclusive colleges or they apply because the elite schools tell them if you get in, we will be cheaper for you than your State U. There are brochures from some elite schools literally comparing their COA with the COA of a state school based on income to prove that.</p>
<p>So, if I will definitely need financial aid should I not apply to need-aware schools EA? What difference will it make compared to RD? A couple of my safeties/matches are need-aware, would that really increase my chances of deferral? these days, I feel like deferral is almost always an eventual rejection.</p>
That’s definitely an under-appreciated problem for a lot of people. I had to get into a school that met full need (or one that gave me a full ride) because of a bad economic situation that also caused my family to move a few times, putting me in a position where I wasn’t technically “in-state” anywhere for tuition purposes. I ended up back in my home state later, but that was well after I had already chosen my college.</p>
<p>It’s ironic that a lot of lower/working-class students are now depending on financial aid from the kind of schools that are basically designed for rich people.</p>
<p>
Need-aware schools do still take people with need, but they have a limit. If you apply EA and are one of the better candidates (as is likely with any safeties), then I suspect you’d be admitted. Many of my early action safeties weren’t need blind, and I did fine. But overall, you may end up getting some bad results from upper-matches and reaches that are need aware.</p>
<p>Don’t worry too much about deferral. There’s usually a reason that they don’t reject someone; they’re looking for something in the next semester. Maybe they see it when they check back, maybe they don’t. I’m currently attending a school that deferred me EA, then accepted me RD with a full financial package. Then again, I had a couple other deferrals that ended in waitlists. It’s tough to predict, but it does go both ways.</p>
If the kid has the credentials to even have a fighting chance of being admitted to the top schools with the generous need based aid, the kid should also qualify for generous merit based aid at schools that are less selective – and will also probably attract preferential need-based packaging at many of the schools in the middle. Keep in mind that colleges that don’t meet full need for all of their students typically can be extremely generous for a small percentage of their students – they are simply leveraging their aid dollars to subsidize the students they want most. Any contender for a “top” school is going to be an attractive candidate at the colleges a few steps down the line on the selectivity ladder.</p>
<p>So yes it makes sense to apply to the schools with the generous aid policies… but I think some people forget that it is a somewhat rare privilege for a kid to get admitted to those school, not an entitlement. The bottom line is that for every spot at Harvard there are probably at least 6 well-qualified students vying for the same spot. (The actual percentage of students admitted is more like 1 out of 12, but I’m assuming that some applicants are not particularly well qualified – its like a race where there are 12 entrants, but the runner only has to worry about the ones who are clustered at the front.)</p>
<p>'Yes, it is nice for a kid to get into a “top” university — when it happens – but the quality difference between the “top” and the “pretty good” is not going to significantly impact the actual ability of students to learn and progress. If they are all that brilliant that they need a “top” university, they will stand out and have a great chance of admission at a “top” graduate school, and down the line their grad degree is going to be more important than the undergrad. "</p>
<p>[ another] Great post Calmom!
It matches exactly my DS’s experience. Although he did get into many top colleges, including 2 Ivys and Chicago, like MOWC’s son, he decided to go to the far less highly well thought of U that at the time[ 5 years ago ] WAS# 40 in the UNSWR list. He received a great education [at no cost to us because of a full tuition scholarship] that fully prepared him for his PhD at Caltech, a very prestigious grad school.
Would he have gotten into CT for grad school if he had gone to Chicago? Who knows?
But it worked out just the way he[ and we] had hoped, which also left us with more $$ left in the retirement account.</p>
The biggest “door” that was opened up in my family was the one my son found at a CSU. Too many prestige-obsessed people are simply unaware of the opportunities that exist at many, many other colleges & universities. And I know many unemployed or underemployed Harvard grads – the competition doesn’t go away for students when they get in; on the contrary, for many it simply gets more intense.</p>