To prevent the complete derailing of the thread, you may want to read parts of this thread What if your kid picks a profession that will never make any money? - #211 by AustenNut
Yes, that is how I understood your original post. I was just saying that if parents have the means to send him to any college that he wishes to attend, it is very unlikely that they are actually middle-class. But obviously, I don’t know the family personally and you do so you may very well be right. Or perhaps like many wealthy families, they perceive themselves to be middle-class when in fact, they are not.
The colleges that the original poster mentioned do routinely give aid to families earning up to (and sometimes above) 200K depending on their assets. And no, 400K is not middle-class.
I really didn’t men to derail this conversation with my post. Sorry about that.
To answer the original question, I think character as shown through letters of recommendation and authentic essays can help a student’s application. And those are the parts of an application that are often unseen by outsiders. At very selective schools, many applicants have a strong academic record, but there can be a big difference between a letter of rec that extols a student’s intelligence and one that describes a student as someone who adds to a classroom’s community or is a pleasure to teach. And of course, at the end of the day, luck and random chance do matter some as far as which kids catch the admissions officers’ eye in the 5-10 minutes spent reviewing an application. I think it is also easy for a kid with great academics, letters of rec, and essays to slip through the cracks or not end up with the acceptances that another similar child received.
It is very hard for an individual parent or kid to understand how big this country is, how widely distributed talent and initiative are, and what a significant percentage of kids emphasize the wrong element of their application.
I cringe when the kids I know in real life sit down with me and lead with the number of aggregate service hours they’ve put in. 20 hours at an animal shelter (they have no interest in animals per se). 50 hours in some mandatory service program from their church painting walls at a local youth center. Etc. So it all adds up to a huge number. And no adcom at a highly rejective college is arguing with her colleagues: “You can’t admit Susie- she only has 480 service hours but Charlie has 525 so he is clearly the best applicant. Plus he’s in the HS Honor Society!”
And then there is the narrow parsing of different levels of athletic achievement. A three season athlete is a fantastic accomplishment. But if the kid is only interested in being a walk on for a club team or is only good enough to join an occasional Sunday afternoon game, three seasons isn’t meaningfully better than two.
Etc.
So the sniping about “how the heck could an ordinary kid get into so many colleges” lacks the same nuance in my opinion. Maybe the kid is advising the Horticulture Society of America on butterfly pollination strategies based on his 12 year’s of experience cultivating butterflies in the garage. Maybe the kid has been accompanying his grandma to the doctor for 10 years because she doesn’t speak enough English to understand how to treat her diabetes and asthma-- but a teacher close to the family wrote about it.
We don’t know. But pushing your kid to “do more” if that means adding marginal accomplishments to the application-- probably not the right focus given the competitiveness of the applicant pool.
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Funny @blossom I have used collecting butteflies as an example 
Remember the unicycle/juggling craze of 2009? Now we’ve gone and triggered a craze which will spawn thousands of essays that start with “Despite living in a climate zone which is inhospitable to butterfly cultivation, I have managed to become a subject matter expert on butterflies with a podcast and thousands of instagram followers”. And the prompt-- “what challenges have you overcome?” will yield MORE stories of the difficulty of butterflies and pollination…
I think authenticity is important, and is not emphasized enough.
I also think think this business of applying to multiple ivys etc is a little dubious unless you are looking for the best aid package. If you are not getting aid anyway, and if you were strong enough to get into multiple super reaches, it likely means you got in EA anyway, and then chose to apply to yet more schools in RD – this speaks to mild character issues – you are hosing your friends.
Interesting @neela1. Displacing friends is not often discussed. I was glad the my oldest didn’t apply to Bates because his best friend had his heart set on it and my son had an objectively better chance. Some say it doesn’t work that way but it seemed intuitive that for kids from the same small school, odds would be against more than one getting in.
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My dad wanted my son to apply to Harvard and MIT after getting into Princeton EA. Because my dad hasn’t heard of Princeton. Guess what happened ?
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80th to 97th percentile (top 20% to top 3%) household income is “middle class”?
Also, some colleges do give financial aid to students with parental income in the $200k or so range.
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What do you consider upper class—I’d say at least $1m/year, if not more.
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I don’t see, logically, how getting an AO who is favorable to a particular student’s submissions on one day at one college could be only possible at one school without collusion.
Indeed, holistic admissions specifically allows for personal judgement to be factored into the decision. Holistic admissions are also not limited to top-10 schools.
This isn’t an offensive or problematic approach, nor does it indicate that any admitted student doesn’t “deserve” to be admitted any more than an equally qualified and likable student “deserves” to be waitlisted or rejected as some have suggested.
Someone far more analytical than I should do some research to see if the posters who think 400K is “middle class” are the same posters who argue that if a young grad is making 100K in Boston or NYC they are “barely making ends meet”.
I would like to be adopted please. I would love to be part of a family which thinks that a 22 year old needs to live in a doorman building, drink $20 cocktails after work, and take Ubers to and from work instead of swiping the turnstile to use public transportation (which is what most people do in these cities).
Any takers?
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Collusion? You mean the Adcom at Dartmouth calling the Adcom at Yale to say “Hey, did you get a load of Joanne’s essay on volunteering at the local historical society which led her to restore an overgrown and forgotten civil war veteran’s cemetery in her town? We should both take her, right?”
You think Adcom’s have time in the middle of application season to start crowdsourcing essays?
Collusion would be if one office contacted another and said, “We like this student so don’t accept him/her/they”. Thus, they would get one acceptance. That certainly doesn’t happen.
It is amusing to me that mocking W&L is acceptable on this site. I also graduated from a Catholic university.
Well, to be fair, @blossom - those 22 year olds aren’t able to recreate the lifestyles of their 45-65 year old parents, supervisors and family friends immediately upon graduating college. Obviously something has gone terribly wrong.
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The point of my post was not to debate middle vs upper vs extremely wealthy. I think that all of those terms and definitions are relative and open to interpretation. What I hope was inferred is that this student did not have any special circumstances related to income that would have weighed into the college application process.
For the purposes of my post I cannot see that there would be any collusion on the part of the colleges and universities. Each school is different, in different parts of the country, and given that all the schools field thousands of application seems really far-fetched.
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So could you expand upon what form of collusion you think is happening?
Not sure what you are suggesting.
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I think we sometimes underestimate the power of likability in a college application. The applicant as described in the OP (and further posts) sounds delightful. His results make it sound as if not only is he delightful in real life, he was also successful in showing those qualities in his applications.
Sometimes I think it would be a good idea if we looked at college applications the same way we look at job applications. Once a group of job applicants makes it past the first hurdles - managers are looking for people they would be happy to spend the day with, as they are going to have to do that day in and day out.
And I think a lot of people underestimate how much of a voice (positive and negative) comes through the essays in an application, especially applications with multiple essays.
To personalize it a bit - think of everyone on College Confidential. While most of us only ‘know’ one another via each other’s posts - I am sure most people on this board have favorite posters, posters they’d like to meet in real life and posters who they would cross the street to avoid. And none of us would have the exact same list, though there might be one or two extraordinary posters of whom everyone thinks positively and would like to know better.
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I will try again. 
I am saying that collusion would be the only way to ensure that one particular student was only accepted to one reach school if they applied to multiple. Thus, it is highly likely that one student for a variety of holistic reasons would be accepted to multiple schools.