Shocked and disheartened at the whole college admissions process

Applying to College
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i just need to rant. i really dont understand the process. here is my DS story/stats and maybe someone can help me understand where we went wrong…

DS attends a small private school which focuses on classical education. we moved him there in Elem school as the public schools were a joke and not able to give him any sort of challenge and we didnt want to move him up a grade or two which was the recommendation of his teachers/principal.

he has never received any class grade less than a 97, but generally his grades are 99/100 even at the AP level. we thought maybe he was just at an easy school or something so we enrolled him in online public school AP classes as well and he earned similar grades.

he took SAT and scored 1540 twice (superscore 1560)
AP superscore was 36 (34 and 35 non superscore)
he will be the validictorian of his class
4 year varsity athlete (basketball)
national merit scholar (finalist and winner)
president of NHS, and 3 other academic clubs. won several academic challenges and debates. national awards for Latin and Quiz bowl. lots of service hours. wants to join Navy and serve after college. He is a gifted writer so i fully expect that his essays were good as were his recommendations

he applied to these schools CoE: Michigan, PennState, NCSU, UIUC, GaTech; Duke, Cornell, MIT. Stanford, USNA, Harvard, RPI,

he was rejected by 7 of 12. i realize 5 accepts=good, but why is he not able to get accepted at even Michigan?

what more could he have done to get into H, C, D, S, MIT, UM???

did we do something wrong on his path? was it sending him to a small private school? is it really about legacy, demographics, and money?

sad…

he will be fine at the school he chooses but i guess im looking for an answer as to what part of the puzzle was missing for him.

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There may not be any part of the puzzle missing from him. I think the puzzle piece that is missing is the understanding that at the top schools, past a certain point of achievements, it’s all just a lottery ticket. There is definitely an element of luck, or whatever you want to call it, outside the control of the applicant that really has nothing to do with them.

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You and tens of thousands of other families. Don’t know what to tell you. At least you have a good list, and he will be in good company with lots of intelligent kids at the schools where he has been accepted.

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Nothing was missing, but he wasn’t as unique as it seemed in comparison to the number of slots allocated to non-hooked students.

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It’s just luck, or lack of it.

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There are many, many students just like your son. Not a single person was admitted to MIT from my son’s school this year out of a class of 650. There were a handful admitted to the Ivy League schools, and some of those are recruited athletes.

I’d focus on his great choices.

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Duke, Harvard, Cornell (engineering), and MIT are crap shoots no matter what kind of stats you have. A little surprised he didn’t get into Michigan, but that’s tough to get into as well. That said, you can only go to one school and GaTech is one of the tops in the country. Same with Annapolis (although it’s obviously not for everyone). Focus on the positives (i.e., where he did get in) and not the negatives (i.e., where he did not get in).

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While he may not have got into the top schools on your list, the others are still very highly regarded schools that you should be very proud of. Congrats on what you did get, all of those schools will provide more than enough for your son!

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In your earlier post a number of people told you that the very top tier schools are reaches for everyone. The only thing different that you should have done was believe those posters from the start. http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/2076788-new-here-son-needs-help-figuring-out-what-colleges-are-considered-reach-or-safety.html#latest

No grades, standardized test scores, activities etc. make a student a “lock” for the uber-competitive schools.

Your S got a number of fantastic acceptances so IMO it is time to stop looking backwards and start looking forward.

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Where are you instate to? Are you willing to share which schools he got into and what might be his choice?

Yes, 5 out of 12 is considered a win. Be proud of that and own it.

Schools are building a class. It is what they need at that time. Lots of kids with similar stats. If going into engineering did he have activities that showed this besides good math scores? Debate is great but it’s not engineering type activity. Also what was his highest math he completed?

I am just being picky since you are looking for answers that might not be there. It might just be the system. Some schools like Michigan want contact and they want to know you want to be there. Having a 36 and high GPA might tell them you might accept at MIT etc and use Michigan as a fall back. Many have found out the last few years that Michigan is not a fall back. Also many kids with almost perfect scores do get shut out of they didn’t let a school know they want to be there. The other schools assume you want to be elsewhere. I hear this sad story every year and do know some personally.

As parents we all wonder what the kids could of done differently. At the orientation day we were with other families at a parent lunch at Michigan. It seemed everyone at the table was rejected by Vanderbilt, WashU, Berkeley, Georgia Tech (my son was wait listed), And so on but for some reason Michigan accepted them… That year. We all had that same questions you did.

Your son will thrive where he is planted. They all do. I think it’s harder on the parents expectations and not really the students.

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Your situation is not unusual.

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Your son sounds like a great kid, and a high achiever. Congrats on him having a good selection of colleges.
Is he planning on ROTC?

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Your son has amazing choices.
If he wants to join the Navy and serve, and he got into USNA, that is a big win, isn’t it ? He can only attend 1 college.
MIT, Stanford, Cornell acceptances are in single digits, so it’s a crap shoot to even high profile, national award winners.

If you were OOS for Michigan, they must have assumed it was his safety ?! They get too many applications.
There are so many high stat students who are shut out from the colleges, and got into only 1 safety school.
Congratulations and be proud at his accomplishments !

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@knowstuff still waiting on USNA and that is first choice, but if thats a no then i believe he will choose GT. hes on a college visit in NY as we type.

his science EC’s were: head of Science olympiad team 4 years, pres of Chem club, organized a science fair for the middle school, and is in an engineering 4 year “track” at the school. i believe he is CAD qualified or something like that. highest math completed is AP Calc BC

im beyond proud of him just curious about what else we could have done. sounds like nothing except maybe send him to a feed school / boarding school in the NE :slight_smile:

thanks for comments everyone , i feel better already.

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Congrats on 5 acceptances! There are simply too many high stat students for the number of spots. One tiny thing I notice is a lack of engineering/CS/ or math extracurriculars. This may be unattainable at a very small school.

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thanks @Happy4u !! also see above he had eng/science ECs i just hadnt listed them out :slight_smile: in addition he works PT as a coding ninja at a local kids coding workshop. and he spent 2 summer sessions at college engineering camps

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@nckris still waiting on USNA. not in there yet…still holding small glimmer of hope for that, buit not looking too likely at this date

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@mcfamilyof4 - I think we were cross posting. Good luck with USNA! He would represent our country well!

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Congratulations on such a successful outcome for your son. Given the acceptance rates for these schools, shouldn’t your question be: Why did my son do so much better than predicted? Or maybe he didn’t do better than predicted, but he did as the stats would predict.

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It is not a lottery ticket, and it is not constructive to say it is. While individual admission decisions have some randomness to it, across multiple applications the results tend to come out as expected.

The first thing to understand is that when it comes to the most elite schools, anywhere from 30%-50% of the class is hooked in some way (legacy, URM, geographic diversity, etc.). So your son was not competing for the entire class, but a subset of it. What this means is that unhooked students who are admitted cannot be just “average excellent”, but must be truly exceptional relative to the normal applicant pool.

Our high school does well in terms of elite college admissions, so we tend to see a pattern in terms of who gets in and who doesn’t. Multiple times we have seen the valedictorian with no hooks or other outstanding activities get shut out of the Ivy+ (Ivies plus Chicago, Duke, Stanford, MIT) schools.

On the other hand, the students with the national level awards tend to do very well in terms of admissions if they are anywhere in the top 10%, GPA wise. There was one such student graduating this year who was truly exceptional, and I was shocked that he wasn’t admitted to MIT for Early Action (some posters gave me grief for being “shocked” about being deferred from MIT). But when regular admissions came around, he ended up being admitted to three of the HYPSM schools, so things worked out as expected.

And Georgia Tech is not some “consolation prize”. It is one of the nation’s finest engineering schools. Congratulations on his admission there, and everywhere else he got in.