I think you have to be careful here. What they typically say is they have many more people who are academically-qualified than they can admit. That does not mean they believe everyone is indistinguishable such that they would be happy just doing a basic academic sort and then admitting people at random.
And in fact, a lot of what they mean by thriving is not academic anyway. That is the essential premise of holistic review. And they don’t necessarily want 1500 students who all would thrive in the exact same way. They want a mix of different students, and therefore holistic review gets very complicated.
Of course a lot of outside critics of holistic review basically accuse it of being no better than random anyway. I don’t think the highly selective colleges which practice holistic review agree, though, I think they believe their process matters.
OK, so they are doing holistic review and someone looks promising, but they have some questions not answered by the application.
Why would they not want to try to get answers to those questions if possible?
And to the extent you are suggesting they should never have such questions about private school kids, again I doubt they would agree. All those kids are in fact individuals too, they pick between them based on holistic review, and so it is equally plausible they would have questions about some of those applicants as they would about any applicants.
No it is actually typically the opposite in most elite Independent schools. The college counselors would push hardest for the wealthy parents with the loudest voices. Our Independent school recently replaced the former counselor for this reason.
We have been told that the counselor are in contact with and have relationships with the AOs at many schools. I am not sure if it is in the general admission process but it certainly happens in the case of deferrals and waitlists. The discrepancies between private and public schools is insane when it comes to resources and preparation. We are recipients of the benefit and realize it is an uneven playing field but at the end of the day we have to do what is right for our kid.
At least you’re honest about it. The article above from the Duke student nailed it:
“It’s like when your wealthy friends say they’re socialists — when praxis never has to be realized, it’s much easier to live in a fantasy world of moral righteousness.”
Outrage at income inequality while sending their own kids to expensive private schools, private counselors, expensive SAT prep, etc etc.
People are free to choose what’s in their best interest.
I am not against holistic review and don’t believe that schools need to rack and stack. It’s just that if you can’t pick up the phone about every student you might have questions about, why do it for a select few. AO’s seem to be willing to admit public school students without contact from GCs and it seems to go ok. Just not sure why this special treatment should be reserved for a select few. Maybe prep school parents believe that is something they are entitled to. It just flies in the face of what prep schools tell prospective parents - that they are purchasing a great HS education, not a particular college admissions outcome.
There seems to be a lot of wink wink, nudge nudge at play here. Cynically, I believe the prep schools when they state that the purchase is of great high school education - not college admission…because they won’t be placing special phone calls for everyone of their students. Another wink wink, nudge nudge or “IYKYK” moment.
I alway think of the tweet below when prep school to college admission discussions occur on CC:
Not to oversimplify, but because their employer wants them to.
I think the basic issue here is if you are working for admissions at a highly selective private college, or for that matter doing out of state admissions for a highly selective public college, very likely you have made your peace with the structural unfairness of the US secondary school system. Because your employer has certain institutional goals that inform its admissions policies. And if you instead substitute your own policy of trying to use your admissions decisions to offset the unfairness of the system, rather than optimizing the satisfaction of your employer’s institutional goals, they are probably going to fire you.
OK, so the only real question in a case like this is will reaching out to trusted counselors help you optimize your employer’s institutional goals. If the answer is yes, then the observation that practice is not fair to applicants who go to high schools without trusted counselors will mean nothing to you. Because you basically do things like that dozens of times a day, and if you weren’t willing to do that you wouldn’t have that job.
By the way, I don’t think these admissions officers are evil people. I think they believe that these institutions do good, and therefore by supporting the institution, they are helping do good.
So speaking just for myself as a parent using such a HS, I would never say we were entitled to this.
But in terms of how they promoted themselves–they certainly never told us this WOULDN’T happen. Of course, they definitely did not say just by attending, we would get a certain college outcome. But they also talk about how our kids get like 3X the Ivy+ acceptance rate.
So that’s the sausage, and I have never been under any illusions about how the sausage is made. It is just one unfairness after another, in the sense our kids did nothing to earn these advantages.
And I try to make sure our kids understand that too.
Yeah, that sort of thing is what I was referring to as the sausage in my other post.
That said, I don’t think it is wrong a lot of the value of our HS is in the actual experience itself. Actually, I had a kind of mistaken impression about placement when we chose our HS, in the sense I underestimated how different it was from, say, the top local publics. That wasn’t a big deal to me, so I didn’t really study it.
But NOW I understand we very disproportionately place our kids in highly-selective private colleges (and OOS publics). And some of that likely would have happened even if our kids had gone to publics K-12. But it is very obvious to me now the advantages they end up with if they follow this path instead.
So I don’t know, maybe some people think if all a private HS does is place an incredibly impressive series of annual lists of colleges attended on its website, it isn’t suggesting it will actually help make that happen.
But to me, that’s clearly at least part of what many parents are paying for, even if I personally just sort of stumbled into it.
While it’s true that the Ivy League’s preference in the past had been to fill the bulk of their class from the elite feeder private schools, that has changed over the past few decades and certainly in more recent times. The Ivies and their peers have made a conscious effort to move away from openly preferring private high schools, so although private HS students are still over represented, this isn’t an institutional priority for them anymore.
Not sure that one can conclude that not “openly” preferring is the same as not having an “institutional priority”?
One can have an institutional priority that is not spelled out in the open?
Quietly “recruiting” from families who afforded a private school, might lead to higher odds to some day have a larger share of wealthy alumni donors?
Per example, wasn’t the share of alumni donations one factor in one of the College ranking lists - so there are other benefits than just the new building by that one top donor.
I’m not sure that kind of recruiting requires CC advocacy. College fundraising operations are very sophisticated - especially at wealthy, elite schools. There are plenty of ways of identifying the children of potential major donors. Those kids are already earmarked for the dean’s list or other special treatment categories - no need for the CC to get on the horn and advocate for them. I guess if you are talking about kids at the margins of wealth (meaning wealthy, but not wealthy enough to make the kind of donation that gets you in without question), it might make sense.
S24 was admitted to one of the top 5 prep schools in the country (an admission he declined to the shock of the admissions staff) and during the process we were told directly that if we were concerned about college outcomes, our son would be better off going to the LPS. That wasn’t the reason he decided to attend our public school (wanted to stay with his brother, it was covid etc) but I remember the discussion vividly.
Well, here I’ve been trying to strike a balance between poking D24 to get her to work on her essays, college counseling stuff for school, etc without nagging or pushing too hard … and I logged into Scoir yesterday and she has already added schools to her “applying” list and had them acknowledged by our counselor. I guess I can stop worrying that she’s letting stuff get away from her.
Interestingly, there were schools on her list that were surprises(to me). In that, I thought she had decided against them, but I guess not. Obviously her decision ofc.
So from the inside, it seems obvious to me a lot of things can contribute, with different marginal impacts ranging from zero to decisive depending on the individual case.
In this situation, I would suspect at most of these high schools, in most cases, there is zero marginal impact because there is no such conversation at all. But then in a few cases, there is a conversation, and it proves decisive at the margins.
At some point then someone does a study and it shows applicants from this type of high school have an X% higher chance of admission to certain colleges even beyond what their standardized test scores and family demographics and such can explain. But that should never have been interpreted as a blanket X% “boost” that applied to each candidate. Rather, it was always a matter of different applicants getting helped in different ways, and not all applicants necessarily getting helped at all.
Like, another thing that seems well-confirmed is these high schools often invest in a lot of “niche” sports that generate more recruited athletes. Like, they have squash courts and a squash team and generate recruited squash players, a channel that might not exist at many other high schools.
OK, but having a squash team doesn’t help most applicants from that high school. Indeed, having more teams like that in general doesn’t help many applicants, because many are not recruited athletes at all.
But it helps some applicants a lot, and then that becomes another contributor to that X%.
I agree it isn’t a direct institutional priority, it is just correlated with things that are.
Like, sometimes these colleges want great players for their nationally-ranked squash team (to continue a prior example). But private high schools disproportionately invest in squash teams. Voila, private high schools place a few more students in these colleges than their numbers alone would predict, because they are placing recruited squash players.
Of course that alone is just one small thing. But then you add up a whole bunch of those things, and you start getting many more students than their numbers alone would predict.
So I agree with things like actual recruited athletes, Dean’s list, legacy, and so on, you probably wouldn’t have a need for a counselor call.
But one of the things that came out of the Harvard lawsuit was there were milder forms of all of this. Like, Harvard was rating applicants on their 6 point scale for athletics. Only recruited athletes got a 1, but non-recruited athletes could get as high as a 2. And that 2 for athletics then correlated to higher admissions odds controlling for the other internal ratings.
And this factor also correlated with things like family wealth and type of high school. Meaning applicants were more likely to get athletic 2s from such backgrounds.
OK, so given this backdrop, might Harvard want to call a counselor to get some clarity as to a non-recruited athlete? Sure, why not? If they are not recruited, they may not have gone through a much more thorough version of that process as run by the Harvard coaches. But if this actually matters to Harvard–and the data says it sometimes does–then they might reach out to get more information.
Of course maybe that specific scenario is rare, but again there could be a gazillion things like this that Harvard could conceivably want to chat about. Maybe there is an Additional Information entry Harvard wants to get more information about. Maybe an otherwise great applicant got a meh teacher recommendation and they want to investigate why. Maybe a STEM applicant didn’t apply REA and they want a read on whether they are actually headed to MIT. And on and on.
Once you think about it, it is easy to come up with many plausible scenarios in which Harvard might have some questions a trusted counselor could help address.
Interesting. That definitely never happened when we were doing parent interviews at private high schools.
Then again, these were not top 5 in the country sort of schools. These are the sorts of private high schools everyone in our area knows about, not necessarily people around the country.
Obviously her decision ofc.