It’s very much unpredictable. S24 ED’d to a super-reach school.
On one hand, I can see him getting accepted. A male candidate for a heavily female favored school and in a major dominated by female students. S24’s cousin just graduated from that school and he had similar GPA (4.0) and ACT scores(35/36) when he applied.
On the other hand, it’s extremely competitive and S24 doesn’t have any hooks. S24’s cousin shared his information and Brown was the only school he was accepted from Ivy and T15 schools.
I wouldn’t be surprised by the S24’s result either way.
I feel exactly the same way. He has just as good a chance of getting in as almost anyone else but if he gets rejected I would not be surprised either. There are so many equally qualified applicants and they could fill their class multiple times with wonderful young people.
I do think things like that can obviously play a part. I’m not sure you can fake it easily, but if you are genuinely something they would like to have more of, and well into the top of their numbers range, that can plausibly help shade the odds in your favor.
And that is certainly how our college counselors think. Not that there are ever any guarantees, but they very much believe if you have a robust list of colleges where you plausibly are what they are particularly looking for, then usually good things will happen. Eventually. Maybe not ED. But maybe!
For his major, it’s aligned with his interests (non-STEM) and his EC in high school. So I think it will help on during the process. GPA/ACT are all above 75 percentile. But then he doesn’t have a strong hook.
I have a suspicion colleges are getting enough asian male majoring in CS and engineering. so non-stem major might turn out to be a minor hook after all.
S24 isn’t CS or engineering either but not sure how much that will count as these schools don’t admit by major. Probably being a boy is the biggest plus since fewer apply and many schools are trying for a semblance of gender parity.
I feel icky every time this comes up, but . . . yes, outside of the recognized hooks, that is probably the next most obvious source of potential advantage at any of the non-tech-focused colleges where the percentage of male applicants is materially below their percentage of enrolled male students.
I’m hoping our rural status will be a minor hook. (Related to discussion above, rural students also get National Recognition awards.) I think it is at some schools. Lee Coffin recently mentioned rural students were one of Dartmouth’s institutional priorities. So I’m advising my kid to do any interviews in overalls, straw hat, and hayseed in mouth.
“I may just be a simple country Biochemisty major with a side interest in 18th Century Italian poetry, but . . . .”
My rough understanding is the rural thing is a little tricky because they usually mean under-resourced rural areas and disadvantaged rural families, and of course some rural areas/families do not so much meet that description.
I think if nothing else they might give you a break on activities and such that are not so easy to do in rural areas. But I suspect this will mostly be helpful if, say, your test scores are radically higher than the normal range for your high school.
I like to remind myself that helping colleges satisfy their institutional priorities is not really a bad thing per se. If they think their communities work better keeping men above 45% or 40% or whatever, not really my place to argue.
Although it does take some willpower to not burst into singing “Just a Gigolo” whenever this comes up with S24 . . . .
I used to feel like this but with everything being so intense and opaque in the college process I hang on to every piece of information that “may” help my son get an edge - perceived or data driven. I was told that being an ORM (in a STEM field) would give him an advantage while applying to an LAC, compared to other types of competitive schools. Its a moot point now since he didnt apply but it did give us something to think about.
What do you think about the legacy as a hook? I went to a school in CA that considers legacy status and S24 wants to apply even though it’s even more super-reach than Brown. I was told a while back that being a legacy will get you a second view if you rejected in the first round specially for alumni who haven’t donated large sum of money. worth trying anyway?
I think there are elements of truth to a lot of that stuff, but then there are also typically reasons why similar kids want to go to similar colleges and therefore end up competing with each other for the more selective colleges. Indeed, that is kinda what MAKES them the most selective colleges–lots of kids really want to go there.
So if you can figure out where you can zig where others are zagging, you can likely improve your chances. But then a lot of kids don’t want to actually do that. Including because often their peers are all zagging.
Like, my favorite thing to point out to high numbers kids from the coasts (or sometimes outside the US) who are climbing all over each other to get into the most popular coastal colleges is that if they just looked to peer colleges off the coasts, things might be a lot easier for them.
And then the usual reaction is–yeah, but that’s not what I really want. I actually want to go to college in Boston, just like all my friends want to go to college in Boston. So I am going to ED Tufts instead.
I do think more high numbers kids could at least toss in a couple relatively “soft” targets and reaches despite it being the “wrong” format of school, “wrong” location, or whatever. Because I think in some cases, they might reconsider once they are actually looking at where they got admitted.
But again, it is a tough sell. Indeed, it wouldn’t work if it wasn’t a tough sell.
I agree. My son’s friend (ORM) applied to an LAC since his counselor bugged him to. Not only did he thrive there, he ended up getting in to the 3+2 Dual degree Engineering program at Dartmouth relatively easily. This made his parents happy too as initially they were not happy with his choice.
From what I know this is extremely dependent on the school. Obviously some say they don’t consider it at all, but even if they do consider it, it could be anything from legacies get pulled into a separate pool with more generous standards (in that sense a formal hook), to legacies just get flagged for a little extra consideration by the readers (which is really no different from a lot of possibly useful factors in holistic review), and anything in between.
What our college counselors tend to say is if you are a legacy with solid numbers for a college anyway, and of course you want to go to that college in the first place, why not include it as a reach? In a way that is just filling in for the normal sort of fit analysis, in that being a high numbers legacy is some sort of fit–if the college still has a legacy preference.
What they tend to discourage is parents thinking that their legacy kid with substandard numbers that would normally lead to rejection is surely a lock. Yeah, no, not likely anymore.
