Seems like Ivy League Admissions Should be Easily Predictible - Someone Educate Me!

Parent Cafe
61

"Ivies and other private schools claim that 50 percent of their students are from public HS. However, only 10 percent of US kids go to private schools. To increase one chances (by close to 90 percent), the first step is to go to a private HS. "

You made the mistake of assuming the applicant pool is 90% public / 10% private just like the total US is. The applicant pool could very well be 50% public / 50% private for all you know. In other words, the high private numbers could be a function of “favoritism” towards private school kids, or no favoritism but they simply apply in great numbers. This mistake gets made all the time on CC and it’s very frustrating.

Also, if your local public hs sends a few kids a year to the Ivies and similar, it’s not representative of anything other than the affluent suburban high school it probably is. The vast majority of the 30,000 high schools in this country do not send a single kid to any elite school. And if your local private sends 30 to Ivies, I’m betting you live on the East Coast.

62

@ucbalumnus wrote: “Top end academic credentials” (post 2)

Sort of. Brown’s 25th percentile ACT score of 30, for example, is high, but not necessarily definable as top end.

63

@GreatKid

Exactly. For some ad coms it speaks of honesty and personal strength… for others, it looks like an insurance risk they wouldn’t want to take on. Did you by any chance see this article about Yale’s weigh-in policy, published the September following your daughter’s admission to Harvard? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frances-chan/yale-eating-disorders_b_4921382.html

Perhaps that essay had become the subject of some discussion and controversy along the way. Maybe she had one advocate who was outvoted by others with a more squeamish response during the regular admission round, but that advocate was still pulling for her and had a little more ability to act unilaterally when there were spaces available on the waitlist.

64

Revised version of flowchart in #57:



+------------------------+  Yes   +-----------------------+  Yes
|Famous, big donor, etc.?+------> |Meets minimal baseline?+------> You're In!  :D 
+-----+------------------+        +-----------------------+
      |                                  | No
      | No                               |
+-----v--------+  No                     +---> Sorry  :-q 
|Great Student?+------> Sorry  :-q 
+-----+--------+
      |
      | Yes
+-----v------------+ Yes
|Recruited Athlete?+--------> You're In! :-j 
+-----+------------+
      |
      | No
+-----v-----------------------------------+  No
|Top half a percent stats?                +------> Sorry  :-q 
|(GPA 3.9+, SAT CR+M 1500+, ACT 34+, etc.)|
+-----+-----------------------------------+
      |
      | Yes
+-----v--------+  No  +----------------------------+  No
|Fantastic ECs?+----->|Legacy, URM, etc. + Good ECs|-------> Sorry :-q 
+-----+--------+      +----------------------------+
      |                           |
      | Yes                       | Yes
+-----v---------------------------v----------------+  No
|Great & Unique Essays, Wonderful Recs & Interviews+--------> Sorry   :-q 
+-----+--------------------------------------------+
      |
      | Yes
      v
You're In! ^:)^
65

Funny, foo, we may link it in the future. But you still didn’t define great or fantastic.

66

I had not seen that article Calmom. Our daughters most difficult period with anorexia was as a Freshman and Sophomore in High School. She had indicated this in her essay and that she had recovered.
It could be that there was some controversy surrounding her essay, Harvard also offers the opportunity to write a second essay which she had done.
My sense is that she was known because of the amount of time and attention that all applicants receive but especially these kids who are being reviewed when selecting who is being offered admission off the waitlist. I am sure there were multiple full committee meetings in that decision making process.
We are just thankful that she was true to herself and had a positive outcome.
She has established such great relationships with so many admissions officers as a result of working there in the summer and being a tour guide the rest of the year. She is incredibly fortunate. There is an organization on campus that is involved with assisting students who have eating disorders, they are intensely private in order to provide students with the most comfort and security possible, so I won’t elaborate.
Suffice to say there are quite a number of students there who are suffering with eating disorders.

67

According to NCES, in 2013, 65 percent of high school students attended college after graduation. Even if we assume that 50 percent of public HS students and 100 percent of private HS students apply to college, that would mean (for Fall 2015), 1.5 million (public) versus 0.3 million (private) students applied. That is still a huge difference. I wish there were more studies on this, but from what I have observed over 25 years is that you have to be a super star in a public high school (Val., straight As, max number of APs, stellar ECs) to have some chance of getting into Ivies+Stanford, while that is not the case at all from private schools. I have had relatives in both types of schools and the difference is just too large to ignore. No, I don’t live on the East Coast.

68

Remember, private school students are self-selected. Either the student or parents chose the private school. In contrast, many public school students are there by default. So there is some motivational difference on average between public and private school students. Also, cost and convenience differences of choosing a private school that costs money (even if there is financial aid) and is a longer commute than the nearby public school mean that there is an additional threshold of motivation required. The cost and convenience differences may also result in private schools having students from somewhat more advantaged backgrounds than average.

Of course, not all private schools are academically elite or even that good, and not all reasons for choosing a private school are academic.

69

Yes, but motivation and ‘advantaged’ doesn’t necessarily mean better students. All I am trying to say is that there seems to be reasons way beyond merit (even after accounting for race/URMs, legacy and athletics) that have to do with ‘packaging’ and connections.

70

“Even if we assume that 50 percent of public HS students and 100 percent of private HS students apply to college, that would mean (for Fall 2015), 1.5 million (public) versus 0.3 million (private) students applied”

The relevant number is drawn from the applicant pools at ELITE colleges, not the applicant pools at college overall. Until you know what % of the applicant pool is public/private, you have zero reference point for analyzing what % of the admitted pool is public/private. Til you do, it’s a number completely without context. Again, it’s a very common CC mistake.

71

Let me try this another way. Suppose I said (numbers made up) -

“20% of Stanford acceptees are from California. Clearly they prefer CA students since only 10% of the population is from CA.”

But you don’t know whether the APPLICANT pool to Stanford was:

-Only 5% from CA, but boy do they love 'em with an index of 400;

-10% from CA (mirroring the general pop) with an index of 200;

-20% from CA so they accepted fair share with an index of 100; or

-40% from CA and they deliberately decided to keep CA students “down” with an index of 50

The prevalence of people in the population at large is irrelevant to anything. It’s the prevalence in the applicant pool and in the acceptance pool that are the relevant comparisons to index against.

And it defies common sense to think that the applicant pool to ELITE colleges resembles the overall population in terms of geography.

72

UCLA and UCB received 80-100k applications, large percentage from Californians. From what I have heard, a lot of the same applicants also toss in an app to Stanford and USC, the two most popular private schools in the state.

73

@ucbalumnus Excellent revision to the flow chart. The only thing I’d add would be to the “legacy, URM, etc…” To specify the following "low SES, first generation, “feeder school” ( aka your HS has an amazing reltionship with the school. I’d say at our school that would be Penn)

I wish I could have shown this to my cousins daughter. She is an outstanding student ( ( only Val in a school of 500 so not like at those schools where it’s 30 Val’s), extraordinary EC’s ( champion in ice skating ( but no Olympic interest) PLUS champion in national debate tourneys, plus winner of several writing competitions) but she had a 32 on her ACT. She got into every noN-Ivy ranked below 10 on the USNWR she applied to most with full scholarship merit aid but not one Ivy. Under your chart she would have seen that the 32 nixed her.

74

“So are there any good strategies for this? (My guess is they would be about as effective as “Beating The House At Slots!” types of strategies, lol…) Aside from the obvious “If you love it most use it” how do you help a smart but inexperienced young person not make a regrettable choice?”

I told my kid 35 ACT kid it was dumb for her to use the ED silver bullet for dreamy Princeton. She’s really smart and great, but frankly hasn’t cured cancer or founded Facebook. Now she’s thinking about whether to aim the silver bullet at Penn or Brown, but something a tab lower is likely the smart play. for her.

75

@northwesty, does your daughter have a first choice school?

@GreatKid, it’s great your daughter is doing so well.

Is anorexia something a person never truly recovers from? I am getting mixed messages from your post.

76

How good of a proxy do you think “school chooses not to rank” is for private school? Based on nothing, I feel like virtually no public schools withhold rank while a majority of private schools do. Thoughts? Am I on track or totally off base?

I ask because Brown for example does report the number of applicants and the acceptance rate from schools who don’t rank vs schools that do and I’m wondering if that would give some sense as to the proportion of applicants from private vs. public school.

77

A significant and growing percentage of public schools do not rank. Many of the better suburban schools around Chicago do not.

78

Until this application cycle, I honestly thought an unhooked student from an over represented state needed to walk on water to get into a HYP – stellar grades with utter rigor + tippy top scores + extraordinary ECs. I don’t think that anymore. I way underestimated the chances of a friend’s kid I helped with application essays this year.

Never in a million years did I think he’d get into Yale, his dream school. He applied SCEA and was deferred. In the end, he was accepted RD, and was also accepted to bowdoin, middlebury as a feb, JHU, tufts and Cornell. Was rejected from Columbia and Georgetown.

He too was a normal, mortal, non-minority, non-legacy, 2180 SAT (680 math, 720 reading, 780 writing), 97 GPA westchester. NY public school kid.

In post #38, ucbalumnus wrote:
Perhaps a simple predictor for typical prospective applicants to super-selective schools:

A. Unweighted GPA < 3.9 or not the most demanding course selection? NO.

This kid had the 3.9, applied as a physics and English major, but never took honors math. He’s presently in AP cal AB, not BC. (At our school only honors math students go into AP cal BC.)

B. SAT (and SAT subject) scores < 700 in any section, or ACT scores under 32 in any section? NO.

This kid had a 680 in math…as a prospective physics major.

C. No achievement, award, or recognition at the state or national level? NO.

He had no awards but for AP scholar with honors (he took 3 APs as a junior), which is fairly common for a Yale applicant, I would think.

In terms of his ECs, his strongest was co-editor in chief of school newspaper. Nothing done out of school, but for a summer class at Cornell. I’m thinking he had great teacher & GC recommendations that made him stand out. And I know that he a lovely essays :wink:

I honestly thought his decent but not extraordinary scores, his non-honors math, and his lack of a super-special EC would tank his application at Yale, but it didn’t. And Yale had already accepted 2 kids SCEA (one a recruited athlete, the other this kid’s co-editor in chief of school paper)…and according to our school Naviance, Yale rarely takes more than 2 kids a year (in the 6 yrs on Naviance, only once was a third kid accepted). It was such a wonderful surprise! The kid is over the moon!

79

This is such common sense. People are doing the choosing. Different aspects appeal to different people. A kid with lower scores who didn’t cure cancer might be more appealing than a kid with higher scores who did cause cancer. So, no, not all geniuses-who-cured- cancer will get in, and not all who get in are geniuses-who-cured-cancer. Why is this so darn difficult?

80

Yes, @Pizzagirl, I understand and agree with what you say. But I still find it surprising and thrilling that a unhooked kid from an over represented state got into Yale RD claiming to want to major in physics while taking no honors math with a 680 math SAT and no special ECs. Can’t be too often that that happens…at least according to what I read on CC and also according to our naviance. His is an outlier data point. I think his great essays and teacher recommendations are what pushed this kid over into the accept pile. And I’m so happy for him!