I agree with this. DS received a $29K scholarship+grant at Fordham and I strongly believe it’s because he applied as a Mathematics major (with Calc I-IV completed at local state university). Fordham is not traditionally strong in his field of interest (Applied Mathematics), and I can see how his interest may have been attractive. If a school is wanting particular students, they will do what they can to entice them. Contrast this with UCI and UCD, where he is an OOS admit, but where there are plenty of math/CS inclined students and he got no money. (In fairness, he did get Dean’s scholarship at UCSC and P&G at UofWA). DS wasn’t a NMSF and is Asian.
It’s a little frustrating because it appears that a lot more research needs to be done by parents and students with the make-up of the schools, previous admits, and what programs are needing which kind of student. And some of the previous “research” data is now skewed. Specifically, I’m thinking about the Naviance/MaiaLearning data that correlates test scores with GPA. We always knew it was a bit off, but now - for future students - it’s even more so.
There seem to be tricks to everything in life, unfortunately. I had no idea before joining this forum that being male helped at LACs, and that being a musician was a spike for Ivy’s. If I didnt join to get information for my kid applying to performance based schools (which our school had zero experience with) I would have no idea what to do with my next one. It is another way that admissions are not fair.
I’m not blaming anyone. I’m pointing out that what seems to be systemic discrimination (Asian males can’t get into college even with sky high stats) is something else. You’ve got a lot of White guys with the same complaint (really? look around.)
It’s easy to cry foul when something bad and unexpected happens to your kid. It’s a lot harder to figure out how to fix it.
The answer is to find a safety that you like and is affordable. Some colleges are very up front about what they want, even posting stats that would give automatic admission (including to major if applicable) and sometimes scholarships that can help if the cost needs to be lower.
A high stats student should have the widest range of such safeties to choose from, if they do not think of any non-reach college as “beneath” them.
There could be a lot of money to be made in creating a computer program that gathers all the college data and spits out a list of “likely” schools for individuals. Quick! Let’s get some people on that !
Excellent post. I’ve got a college friend who lives in NJ whose son just had a disappointing application season. I said (in an effort to be supportive) “How great that you’ve got Rutgers as a back up- I know my company loves recruiting at Rutgers” and she snapped at me “He didn’t apply to Rutgers”.
Really? A well regarded state flagship with extremely transparent admissions and virtually every major under the sun?
Yes, it’s tough being a white guy who can’t get into any good college (and when you define “good” as Princeton, Yale and Duke I guess it IS tough). Why apply to 50 schools?
DS and I watched the movie “Try Harder”. In it, a guidance counselor from Lowell High School plainly describes the bias some Asian students will face during college acceptance season. The reasoning: Look around. A typical college campus does not want everyone looking the same.
I would suspect if most Asian kids with very similar stats are applying to the same schools, colleges/universities can afford to be choosier with that demographic. Maybe the Asian males from a local school/your local school didn’t get in, but chances are an Asian male from some school did. It’s a numbers game, sadly…and I say this as a parent of an Asian male.
Yes, it may be the case that the “best fit” from the student’s point of view is different from the “best fit” from the college’s point of view. A student who wants to major in X may see the colleges with the best programs in X to be the best (academic) fits, but those colleges are probably overflowing with applicants who want to major in X, while colleges with less well known programs in X may be trying to admit as many applicants interested in X as they can.
Something similar can apply to race and ethnicity – many students do not want to attend a college where there are “too few” of their own race and ethnicity there, although many of these colleges are the ones that will most actively recruit students of their race and ethnicity (e.g. how many minorities want to attend WLU?).
But none of this really should matter for the automatic admit (and scholarship if applicable) safety for the student’s stats. (Although if the student’s idea of “best fit” is high selectivity / exclusivity / prestige, that would be the opposite, and the student may not be able to find a safety that they like.)
It is an emotionally tense time of year, and I do not begrudge anyone for how they choose to process unfavorable news, but I am appropriately skeptical of stories of applicants getting in “nowhere,” at least if where the kids applied isn’t known.
Seriously though. The schools can enter their “needs” (e.g. a tuba player), while the students can enter what they have to “offer” to the school’s milieu (maybe they play the tuba!) Then a computer match will be made like a dating program from the 1980s!
In all seriousness, I don’t know how one finds out this information without inside information or deep digging. Way back in the day, my high school pal found out that Stanford needed a harpist in their orchestra because their current one was graduating. She found out about it because her harp teacher happened to know the orchestra people. She got in, most probably because her father was on faculty, but her being a harpist was a lock!
While some openings might be THAT specific - need a harp player? - some are pretty obvious but seemingly don’t want to be seen. Those Maine LACs could definitely use more URMs. It’s not an easy task to convince URMs to come to Maine and to schools that are still working on diversity. Students from the NE who want to stay in the NE would have it way easier if they applied to colleges in the middle of the country instead of the NE and then California. In general, more men are wanted at all top LACs. There are a lot of examples like this.
Families are going to spend $300,000 (full pay) or, they are going to ask an institution for a substantial amount of money, in many cases hundreds of thousands of dollars) and yet it is too much to ask them to do some research??
Also, I see this all the time in the sports world, where an athlete isn’t recruited, or doesn’t make the starting lineup. It is WAY easier to blame the coach for having favorites than to accept that at this time that athlete was not who the coach was looking for. Find a team/coach who is looking for what you have to offer. Target correctly.
IME, it’s mainly people new to the college admission “game.” They either didn’t go themselves or it was decades ago when the process wasn’t so difficult or expensive.
Our school tries to get parents involved at the beginning of high school, but few do. They assume they don’t have to bother until fall of senior year. Students aren’t always on top of it either - esp if they’re the oldest in the family and/or first gen.
Schools can offer info, but we can’t force parents to read anything or attend meetings.
Parents who find this site have a terrific source for info if they can glean the information useful for them and their student. Part of why I stay on this board long after my youngest has graduated from college is because I like to think I can help contribute a little bit here and there as I often did when working in my school with high schoolers.
It’s a vicious cycle. I encouraged DS to look at Bowdoin, Bates, and Colby and while he was excited about their math programs, he didn’t want to be in Maine as an Asian-American (not a typical URM, but possibly considered one in Maine). He felt like there would be no cultural connection while on campus; though frankly, he didn’t do a deep research dive into those schools.
Now he is contemplating UCI, which I have concerns about being 45% Asian; how is that helping him learn about diversity? But then I think about where we are in the PNW and realize, maybe that’s what he wants??
Our HS purposefully discourages parents until junior year. I wish I’d asked the question “how do we pivot for ECs” after school shut down in March 2020 and did not open until Sept 2021.
Not disputing your argument, but some of the tools students have used in the past are now obsolete. While students may be able to get a general sense about school stats, tools such as Naviance (which many high schools rely on) have what may be construed as misleading data. With two years of test-optional and more schools looking to diversify socio-economically (which is a very good thing), parents and students may be having a hard time finding enough data to make a good college list. Within the 2 years my DS started looking at college choices, data had already started evolving.
Except the families we are discussing in this thread are the parents of high octane, high achieving kids – the ones with 4.0s and 1500 SATs. Those families have the ability to do some research!
Absolutely. Many ‘need-blind’ schools are not need blind when it comes to the wait list.
It’s easy to forget these are businesses. It’s not an accident that the schools that claim they are need-blind usually have about the same percentage of students on aid every year (or maybe it inches up a little at a time). If truly need-blind, wouldn’t you expect that to vary more dramatically from year to year? How is it that a school has never selected 90% of students that need aid or 100% of students with household incomes less than $50K?
The common app makes you check a box if you’re seeking aid the AOs can plainly see. It can’t be totally blind.
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