Really appreciate everyone’s supportive messages. DD is understandably disappointed. Now comes 2-week mad dash to get apps in for other schools, followed by 3 agonizingly long months to hear the results…
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yes, it sucks, admissions are not race blind, in an ideal world, all candidates would be anonymized and given code numbers and applications evaluated equally. Alas, we do not live in such a world.
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In one of the Stanford posts last year, there was a Black male applying to Stanford EA with a 36 ACT, 1560 SAT, nationally ranked chess champion, lots of leadership, etc. physics internship, honors, awards, etc, first-generation with a disabled brother. On paper, one also would have thought the candidate deserved referral but was also rejected.
bad recommendation, bad attitude, bad essays, bad interviews, reasons could be endless
I know a National Student Poet, excellent in every respect, rejected from nearly every college, going to state school. He asked me to read his essays which, in his National Student Poet hubris, he had written days before the deadlines.
They were full of his own greatness. I advised him against submitting those but there seemed to be no time to write other ones and he didn’t seem to believe me. As far as I know he submitted those essays and got rejected flat everywhere.
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Another example, another very well qualified student had been flippant and rude to a history teacher once. The student forgot about it and eventually asked the same history teacher to write him a college recommendation. The teacher had NOT forgotten about it and included that incident in the recommendation letter and mentioned that the student had never reflected, reached out or apologized to the teacher.
Needless to say, the student was rejected everywhere and is now in a “admit anyone” state school. The teacher told me this story himself.
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Re. the National Student Poet writing lines like “People like me will lift the standards of your program to the sublime.” in an essay guarantees rejection
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If teachers can’t write a positive LoR they should say so and decline when asked by the student to write one.
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Wow, I think that story is awful. I would hope the teacher would decline to write a letter and tell the student why, rather than sabotaging college applications.
An immature teenager may have been oblivious that what they said/did was interpreted as flippant or rude. Presumably, the student would not request a letter from a teacher the student knew he had mistreated.
The teacher’s response here seems really passive-aggressive and vengeful and not helpful to the student’s growth. It makes me wonder just how egregious the flippant rudeness was.
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Unfortunately, some write lines like “I would not trust this person to take care of my dog” actual line from a recommendation letter for a fellowship program written by a full professor for a physician candidate and read by my wife who was on an admissions committee.
I think bigger lesson here is to get 4 recommenders and assign them half (two for one half, two for the other half) and half to the college applications and cover your bets.
yet another example - school counselor had her own daughter applying one year. she apparently trashed every other kid from the school in the counselor letter. One kid got into Harvard nonetheless and got his file. In the reader’s comments they had mentioned that they were discounting the SSR’s (the counselor’s letter) since the counselor had trashed the 11 other applicants from the same school except her own daughter. How she expected to get away with trashing 11 applicants and also writing her own daughter’s letter I don’t know.
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That is so unethical. I hope the counselor was reprimanded if not fired.
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Out of curiosity, did anybody ever see or find numbers for the rest of Harvard’s EA decisions this year? They usually publish them, but this year they didn’t. I wonder because Yale nearly doubled their rejections in EA this year to 57% (31% deferred), and Brown increased ED rejections from 25 to 30% (or maybe it was 20 to 25% - can’t remember exactly, but I do recall it increased by 5). Princeton didn’t release numbers at all. I thought I saw a few other schools with higher rejection/lower deferral rates too, so I was wondering if that was a trend at all of the schools, that more EA/ED were rejected and less deferred than previous years.
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Hope this answers your questions.
I’ve seen that article, thanks though. But last year and the years before, along with the number of accepted, they published the number of deferred and rejected as well. So, we knew that typically between 70-80% were deferred. This year the Crimson article did not do that, and I haven’t seen it anywhere else either.
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@tamenund - is there any merit in reaching out to professors at Harvard after being deferred? Just to show continued interest?
Personally I think that may be a great way to annoy professors. Just let admissions know you are still interested, though even that is not strictly necessary.
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Unless you have a strong preexisting relationship with the professor, no. And if you do have a strong preexisting relationship, the better option would have been to ask for a supplemental rec when submitting the application.
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Since the OP wrote “professors” not “professor” I assumed no preexisting relationship!
I try not to assume, but in this case, I believe your assumption is correct given that OP is international.