Try not to assume those who say this are minimizing your son’s accomplishments or insinuating that your son is simply lucky. We are all perplexed and confused by who gets in and who does not, and if your son didn’t get in you might be the one left asking similar questions. Frankly, as a poster said above, I wouldn’t feel it appropriate to discuss my son’s stats etc. Perhaps the best way out is to say that your son is very excited to have been accepted and is also quite humble and would not want his mom talking about his accomplishments. ;0)
I don’t lie about anything. Most everyone who knows me and my kid knows he had a couple of major hooks that very few people have. But at the same time my kid was lucky to get into a lottery school with a pedestrian GPA and pedestrian ECs. And that’s the bottom line that I say - he was very lucky to get in. No need to sugarcoat anything.
For me it would depend upon context and sincerity.
In the example Hoggirl presented it was in a group setting and asked by someone who should know the possible answers to her own question.
Most of us don’t know the actual “answer” to the why our son or daughter question.
When our daughter came off the waitlist to be accepted at Harvard in 2014 my wife and I went to Cambridge to meet with her admissions officer. I had asked him specifically what was it about our daughter that made the difference. Our daughter was completely unhooked.
The admissions officers at these schools know the applications of their assigned regions accepted students extremely well, to a level that is almost stunning.
The bottom line is that there was something about your child’s application that resonated with them and touched them. The right AO read your child’s application at the right time for them.
The Admission Officers answer to my question was that it was her character. I proceeded to cry right in front of him.
Our daughter excelled while dealing with a significant illness. Suffice to say I am a huge proponent of holistic admissions practices.
My answer to the why your kid question is almost always that she was extremely fortunate. Yes she excelled academically and was across the board strong in all the things that matter but so are so many other kids who are not accepted.
@Hoggirl just playing devil’s advocate — reread your post to make sure I understood but it seems like another person chimed in with “It’s a lottery school.” Do you think perhaps maybe that person was trying to diffuse the line of questioning on the part of the GC? Maybe it was meant to be dismissive or maybe it was just meant to divert the conversation. Who knows? Sometimes life is easier if one assumes people are being benign. Your student’s accomplishments speak for themselves, I would not give this another thought.
We’ve been fortunate enough that all of our children were accepted to multiple elites from a large public school.
All choose to attend. Ironically, one of them wouldn’t have, but got rejected by their favorite top 25 school.
After the third, I learned that the best thing is to praise them for their hard work and point out they were are very resourceful.
I would say it’s all about how a kid contributes to the mix of the class, meaning admissions is focusing on assembling an interesting bunch of freshmen who can contribute on campus and cross-pollinate.
It really isn’t a competition between individuals in the hierarchical way people envision.
@mountainmomof3 - I think that is absolutely possible that the other person was trying to diffuse the situation.
It’s a lottery school but you have to have the right ticket. Bet yours weren’t the winning numbers. Sorry about that.
@GreatKid Your saying you cried made me smile warmly. We also profusely thanked the adcom who himself graduated from one of HYP who reviewed our kid’s application, and told him we were hugely shocked. He told us he thought our kid had a good chance to get into HYP had he applied there. I can only think that our kid’s application, unhooked and with no great and special achievements and awards, must have resonated with this adcom; and had the adcom been different, he would not have “advocated” for our kid to be accepted to Stanford REA. No doubt, our non STEM ORM kid benefited from the holistic admission process because I already knew perfect GPA and test scores were not what top schools or any school which emphasizes the holistic admission were looking for, so I steered him towards developing his interest area and exploring ECs both within and outside HS opportunities. He even skipped several school days to attend conferences held outside his HS.