<p>*2340 SAT I (one time)
*730 and 750 for SAT II
*rank: ~55/640 at competitive public school (a few Harvards this year).
*GPA: 3.9 UW when D applied, dropped to 3.85 UW by midyear report
*No big awards like USAMO or national competitions, only local ones.
* Asian (not international applicant)
* Very good ECs, 350 + hours Community service, 4 leadership roles, etc. ECs relate to her pursuits.</p>
<p>Rejected at: HYPSM Brown, and Cornell!! (we thought Cornell would at least waitlist)</p>
<p>D said one of her teachers she asked for recs tends to be very straightforward (ex. teacher told another student he could only reach for a 3 on the AP exam). D never talked much in that class but got the highest grade. Could the (very probable) bad teacher rec have been the deciding reason?</p>
<p>Or is it her rank?</p>
<p>D is a naturally good writer (won awards) so I doubt the essays are the problem, though they probably weren't "amazingly brilliant" (as in 1 out of 1000.)</p>
<p>Be assured D did get into some great colleges, just not the Ivys. Anyway, I am just curious as to what happened. Is it common for stats like these to be rejected at the very top colleges? </p>
<p>There doesn’t have to be anything wrong with her application. Plenty of people with great applications are rejected from those schools (Yes, even Cornell…), so you don’t have to find a particular “flaw.”</p>
<p>
Good, congrats to her, then.</p>
<p>
I hope you realize that the Ivy League is a sports conference (like Big East, Big 10, whatever), and that its members are not innately superior to other top colleges. Two of the schools you listed (Stanford and MIT) and not members of the Ivy League Sports Conference.</p>
<p>This was a very difficult admissions year, as has been addressed in many other threads. Almost all the ivys have admissions rates in the single digits. Chances are your daughter did nothing “wrong”. She is unfortunately in the large majority of applicants that were qualified but didn’t make the cut. Congratulations on the other acceptances!</p>
<p>Rank probably wouldn’t have hurt, necessarily. Being Asian doesn’t help. Everything else is subjective. It’s hard to say how her ECs would look. A bad teacher req could explain a slate of rejections, although a neutral one probably would just be neutral (especially if the other was good). Also possible, her essay just may not have been what they were looking for.</p>
<p>I guess the better wording would be to say that D simply didn’t stand out enough, even though she was qualified. BillyMc, you are right, an Ivy League student is not necessarily superior to others.</p>
<p>It was the worst year ever for a high school student to try to get into a top-ranked college. All of the schools above had acceptance rates below 10%, often well below it. Cornell accepted 18%, but that number is highly misleading, because some individual colleges have a much higher acceptance rate, so the others could well be down in the 10-12% range.</p>
<p>My own son had perfect stats (36.0 ACT, #1 rank, etc.) AND “best student of my career” letters of recommendation and still got turned down by MIT, Princeton and Yale – and he was far from the only turned down with such stats.</p>
<p>He did get into Brown (and the two top LACs and a couple others), but I think with Brown it was just that he was a perfect fit – they have an open curriculum where you have to be self-directed to make the most of their resources. In his transcripts and his essays he showed himself to have, with his counselor’s permission, basically shredded his high school’s rulebook on what was permitted, graduating in 3 years, skipping required prerequisites, taking his first college class as a freshman rather than a junior, taking 3 AP classes sophomore year (plus a college class) when the maximum allowed was one, and then pulling this crazy stunt where took 8 APs as a sophomore, 4 of them on self-studied subjects. I have to think it was his crazy obsession with self-directed learning, not just his stats, that got him over the acceptance threshold.</p>
<p>I don’t think your daughter did anything “wrong.” I think it was just a year when many high-caliber students were turned down and the ones that made it through had done something rather unusual that tickled the admission committee’s fancy.</p>
<p>Lots of well-qualified applicants get rejected because there is not enough room. It could have been the essays. It could have been the class rank. One would have to know which of her classmates applied to the same schools to gain additional insight. Do not beat yourself up trying to figure out “what was wrong” with the application. There is nothing “wrong” with it, so you can never find it.</p>
<p>I am sure the combination of rank and race put her at a disadvantage. As I tell my kid, it is not you, it is all these high performing kids driving up the expectations. </p>
<p>If you go back 2-3 years, your SAT math could have one or two wrong and you are expected to get 800 but people are doing so well that if you miss one, you can drop to 760. So competition has become severe and most of these schools are judging you against your peers since there are fixed number of seats. If everyone showing up has these perfect scores, top 1% ranking etc, they dont have to go deeper in the pool to look for other candidates.</p>
<p>Precisely. If the top 10,000 students apply to every school in the nation, the rest of us will be shut out completely. I’m not saying they are doing that or they don’t have the right to do that.</p>
<p>“Be assured D did get into some great colleges, just not the Ivys. Anyway, I am just curious as to what happened. Is it common for stats like these to be rejected at the very top colleges?”</p>
<p>Absolutely.</p>
<p>This is not news. If no one told you that this was a possibility, then you were poorly advised. If you heard it, but didn’t believe it, well stop kicking yourself. Many parents and many applicants don’t believe this information when they first learn it. The simple truth is that for many years now, the top institutions have received applications from more qualified candidates than they have space for. Only the people who form part of the admissions committees have any idea why your daughter didn’t make the cut. To try to parse their decisions from this distance will make you crazy.</p>
<p>Go give your daughter a great big hug, and congratulate her on the wonderful list of acceptances that she does have. Then help her sort through them so that she can determine which of them is best for her given her own particular circumstances and interests.</p>
<p>Wishing you and your daughter all the best!</p>
<p>There was no flaw in her application. She sounds like a great kid and you should be extremely proud of her and just move on. Wherever she decides to go just got better because she’s going there. Her classmates will be lucky to have her as a peer and as a friend and a new world awaits her. </p>
<p>It is likely that any kids with any stats get rejected by these schools.</p>
<p>He’s both a junior and a senior and will graduate in June. Brown has not only accepted him, but is flying him out to see the campus next week, before he makes his final decision. We couldn’t be happier. We consider the MIT-Yale-Princeton rejections as a “cost of doing business.” He only needed one and this result, if anything, makes his own decision easier!</p>
<p>Does there have to be flaws? Always?
It’s a crapshoot. That is the reality. I got accepted to HYPS, Georgetown, and Rutgers. I got rejected from Dartmouth, UMichigan, and waitlisted at Columbia. I’m sure 80% of my fellow applicants (including your D) was just as qualified.
It does hurt that your daughter is Asian, and her rank doesn’t help as well.</p>