<p>Meanwhile, friends were pulling out of some of her ECs (eg synagogue youth group) because their parents were concerned that those ECs wouldn’t look good on college applications.</p>
<p>That is exactly what Andrew Ferguson means when he says that the process turns our kids (and apparently us parents, too) into Eddie Haskell. Who the heck cares how the ECs look to adcomms?? If it’s something you love, you should be able to do it.</p>
<p>Why can’t our kids just be kids? It seems some here take strong exception to this idea, but I’m sorry: A process that encourages this sort of driven, hyper-intense monomania is indeed deeply flawed. Not to mention insane!</p>
<p>Oh, I didn’t take it personally, I just wanted to emphasize that it really wasn’t all about me and that even personal essays can be about other topics. I made sure that mine was because, well, we probably have the same opinion of purely autobiographical essays. </p>
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<p>I completely agree with this. I think that, “Please write a 750-word essay on any topic that inspires you” would be a much better prompt. After all, the most interesting people probably find it hard to write about themselves and as teenagers they almost certainly lack the confidence and experience to know how to turn an autobiographical essay into something about something else entirely.</p>
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<p>I think that if he was competing against children who achieved the same things, but who, for example, also had to work, or who didn’t speak English until kindergarten, or who also cared for an ailing parent, or who were also taking care of younger siblings, then probably yes. He might have been able to achieve the same things even in tough circumstances, but the committee did not know that. So I’m sure it’s possible that if the committee was looking at two sets of identical scores, one set earned in the face of adversity, and the other earned in a comfortable environment, they would have chosen the person who earned his or her scores in the face of adversity. That is discrimination, but not in the negative sense. It’s not your son’s fault that he was born into relative privilege, but it’s not the other child’s fault that she was born into poverty, either.</p>
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<p>I’m sure that was gallows humor.</p>
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<p>Oh, I’m sure they’d be laughing their butts off. Well, chicken-nugget boy would be, LOL. Not Mr. Perfect. Though, who knows? He might have been admitted to his dream school and really be chortling.</p>
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<p>I’m fairly certain it’s not the same people who work in publicity / outreach, and on the admissions committee… sometimes organizations have internal diversity of thought, you know.</p>
<p>**But most importantly:</p>
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<p>NO. It says very much about whether or not he has access to transport or has parents that support him in doing non-school related activities. I lived in a very small town and did not have a car (few jobs -> little money -> no transport). In my community, the number one source of activities and jobs was the school district. Period. Only by driving a half an hour or more each way, could anyone hope to participate in anything other than church or school. Thousands upon thousands of high school students are in this situation. **</p>
<p>Please reconsider your assumption about students who only do school activities. MANY rural students have no choice but to work with the school, or pay prohibitively high gas prices and spend at least $500 if not $1000 on a vehicle.</p>
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<p>I’d love to see statistics for this, including information on which kids had to work.</p>
<p>I just learned today that subject tests were available when I was in high school. I am 100% certain, because I had the highest SAT scores in my school <em>ever</em>, that nobody had ever taken them up through 1997 from my high school. I’m not sure the guidance counselor knew they existed. And we took Running Start, all kinds of things. We’d have taken any test.</p>
<p>We didn’t know. Not that we had even the money to apply for name-brand schools anyway, but still.</p>
<p>OK, once again, I’ve gotta get back to work, but I would like to briefly mention a case I am personally familiar with, from some years back (when things were less crazy than they are now, but they were already heading in the insane-o direction). My DH was teaching at a state-funded boarding school for gifted teens, and I was doing PR there. There were some VERY high-stats kids there, including one young Asian guy whose stats were off the chart. But he was intensely shy. At one point he had an interview with an MIT alumnus. Somehow, it got back to the school’s GC (don’t know how) that the interviewer thought the kid was just too shy. Brilliant but too shy. So, he was rejected by MIT. (He did get into CalTech, so no harm, no foul.)</p>
<p>Well, even at the time, this incident ticked me off. From what I’ve been told, shyness is largely genetic. The poor kid was being penalized for something he couldn’t really help – something (IMHO) almost akin to skin color or gender. Well, maybe that’s going a bit far, but the point is – a perfectly innocuous character trait became a liability for this kid, because MIT apparently wanted a bunch of extroverts that year (for their “vibrant” community, blah blah blah). </p>
<p>As I say, CalTech did have enough sense to admit the kid (despite the Mortal Sin of Shyness, LOL). So, it all worked out in the end. But it bothers me that top schools apply such arbitrary, subjective, and (sometimes) questionable criteria to rule “yea” or “nay” on applicants.</p>
<p>IMHO, shy kids should file class-action suits against schools whose admissions policies discriminate against shy applicants. Yes, I’m kidding…but only kinda-sorta. :D</p>
<p>LD</p>
<p>P.S. I should mention that this kid also had tip-top grades and great ECs (like Mu Alpha Theta).</p>
<p>Please reconsider your assumption about students who only do school activities. MANY rural students have no choice but to work with the school, or pay prohibitively high gas prices and spend at least $500 if not $1000 on a vehicle.</p>
<p>Amen!!! I run up against this all the time, because we live in a poorer rural area. Some folks just don’t get it. It’s like, “Let them eat cake!”</p>
<p>I hear this argument all the time on these boards and it always rings hollow to me. </p>
<p>We as individuals also accept money from our employers, does that mean we have to live the other parts of our life according to our employer’s dictates? Some of us are paid a salary from taxpayer dollars. For that reason, should we be obligated to make certain choices? For instance, should a Ford employee be held accountable if he/she buys a Honda? Or for that matter, should a government employee be forced to use a domestic airline to fly abroad, even when on a personal vacation??</p>
<p>Private universities are private. They should be accountable for how they spend research grant money, and how they administer work-study grants, but the fact that they receive grants from the federal government should not compel them to follow government mandates with respect to who they admit to their college and who they don’t.</p>
<p>LOL, you are spot-on as usual, Hunt.<br>
A few years ago, the treks-to-Guatemala-to-build-homes was sort of that unique EC – and then it became overused and trite, and then, to paraphase the old Yogi Berra quote, “no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”</p>
<p>Exactly. If a top school wanted to announce tomorrow that they were only going to admit kids from legacy families, or kids whose parents made over $300,000, or kids whose parents made under $30,000, or kids who have a very specific set of EC’s, guess what? They get to do that. If you don’t like that, if you think it diminishes the school in your eyes – well, don’t apply, problem solved.</p>
<p>Research grants are just a contract to perform a service within certain regulations. Work-study benefits the student first as it allows them to use fewer loans. Has nothing to do with running the college outside the WS rules and requirements.</p>
<p>Mme and Lady:
Wow.<br>
No one is saying a kid has to spend a lot to get involved. But were talking about one’s self presentation in a college app. I have written, if the hs activities are valuable and time-consuming, fine. Being a chair filler in some club is different. Saying your main accomplishment on stu got was hanging streamers for the prom is different. Fgs, if you aren’t sure the adcoms know how remote your situation is, by all means, explain it in addl info. And, make sure what you do at school is valid.</p>
<p>Any kid whose parents take him to church or any religious services can do charitable works there or through them. I can’t share what I read in apps, but plenty were from super remote kids. </p>
<p>ps They had the equivalent of SAT 2’s waaay back- called achievement tests.</p>
<p>What we know: the kid is shy. Someone reports that the interviewer said that the kid was too shy. Finally, we know the kid was rejected from MIT. That doesn’t mean that the interview, or the shyness, was why the kid was rejected. You can’t assume that one implies the other. Every brilliant kid with great stats who applies to MIT isn’t admitted. </p>
<p>I’ve heard of a similar case this year. Brilliant kid who is running the board in admissions at all the usual single-initial suspects. But waitlisted at MIT, the kid’s absolute first choice. He’s not shy, either. All this tells me is that there are a huge number of highly qualified applicants, and not all of them are going to get in to a particular school, even when they are entirely qualified to be there.</p>
<p>“Please reconsider your assumption about students who only do school activities. MANY rural students have no choice but to work with the school, or pay prohibitively high gas prices and spend at least $500 if not $1000 on a vehicle.”</p>
<p>What makes you think that adcoms don’t know this? For goodness sakes, yes, they certainly do get that your opportunity to do a research project with a scientist is a smidge difference if you live in East Nowheresville, North Dakota versus if you live in the Silicon Valley. They understand that your chances of having your school offer lacrosse or water polo aren’t all that high in Smallville, Nebraska. What makes you think that they <em>don’t</em> get this? At the end of the day – they want some overprivileged boarding school kids, they want some fresh-scrubbed upper-middle-class suburban kids who played by the books, they want some middle class kids, they want some rural kids, they want a smattering of each. Why is this so difficult to understand, and why are so many otherwise-bright people not getting it?</p>
<p>Just one comment on the statement in the Amherst piece on rejecting Rhodes scholars–I took that to be an admission by the admissions officer that they are fallible, not a boast.</p>
<p>Pizza,
I really hate that your post says “over-privileged boarding school kids.”
Sounds as if you think all BS kids are over-privileged. Hmmm. Do you know much about the types of kids who are at BS?? You are biased if you believe that! Is this just a knee-jerk statement?
BS try their best to make diverse classes just the way colleges do. They use quite a few of their resources for FA. The schools do have good educational resources, but not more than some other kids have. There are some hardships and disadvantages and challenges, too. And definitely a diverse group of kids.
I just hope the AdComms are not biased like this…</p>
<p>The kids who get into Harvard are the ones who figure out how to move beyond that anyway. With or without parental help. They are the ones who look see every barrier in their lives merely as a problem that needs to be overcome in order to get to the next step – as opposed to more typical young kids who see barriers as a series of “can’t” (“I can’t do X because …”).</p>
<p>I am not saying that you needed to or should have done differently. I’m just saying that you need to understand that in the pool for an elite college, you are competing against kids from nothing-going-on, miles from anywhere, nowhere communities who found a way. Either they did something exceptional in their own home community (Rent the movie “October Sky” for an example) – or they figured out a way out, even if they had to hitchhike to do it. </p>
<p>The kids who win the unanimous nod of the ad com at the elites very often have done things in spite of all sorts of barriers. They stand out. They don’t present excuses.</p>
<p>Again – that doesn’t mean that all of the other kids aren’t worthy – and there aren’t enough stand out extraordinary barrier-breaking kids in a given year to fill even one college class, so every year Harvard and Amherst and other highly selective colleges also fill their classes with personable kids who also did remarkably well while coloring within the lines – but they do tend to be very good at whatever they did. </p>
<p>If you are looking for something exceptional or extraordinary, barrier-breaking thing to do to impress colleges it won’t work. The kids who do those barrier-breaking things usually don’t give a hoot about colleges at the time they are doing whatever it is – they’re just driven by their own desires at the time. They are often doing the exact opposite of what college advisors would suggest. Again … not because they think that down the line some Harvard ad com is going to be amazed at their ingenuity – but because they simply don’t care what any ad com thinks. They may not even apply to elites – they may end up at some out-of-the-way college you never heard of because of some professor in some department that has something to do with whatever their passion is. But when they do apply to an elite college, then the admission reader will tend to wake up and take notice.</p>
<p>One aspect of the discussion here that I find troubling is the view that elite schools are somehow forcing students to behave in a certain way, as though students and their families are not contributors to the process.</p>
<p>These schools are selective, so not everyone who applies is getting in. These schools are trying to get as much information as they can, in the form of grades, test scores, lists of activities and honors, personal statements and recommendations. Based on this information, they select some of the applicants for admission. </p>
<p>This seems entirely reasonable to me. </p>
<p>Since the schools are selective, students and their families try to find ways that will assure them admission. It then becomes an ‘arms race’ of sorts–if I found out that the science fair champion got into Harvard with a 4.0, I’ll do one better and be the science fair champion AND volunteer at the homeless shelter and stil maintain a 4.0. </p>
<p>But this is the student and their families response to the process–trying to find that perfect formula that will basically guarantee, or come close to guaranteeing, admission. </p>
<p>If you want to get off the hamster wheel, then get off it. We are as much the contributors to the negative aspects and stresses of the process as the schools are, and probably more so.</p>
<p>Offering a modicum of objectivity in her analysis --or mere opinion-- of the adcoms and the admission process does not make PG a “protector” of the adcoms. We all know that the system is hardly perfect but there are times when the rants are simply out of bounds.</p>
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