<p>from Montana? LOL maybe.</p>
<p>I graduated from a small Wyoming High School. hmm that would have been even better for my sons ;)</p>
<p>Who knows, I was actually shocked my son got into his first choice college. He may have just known himself well enough to apply for the right fit place. I think his passion for playing three sports all 4 years and his strong academics and his commitment to honesty and integrity helped also. He was involved sincerely in his school. This is a strength to colleges because, they hope you will do the same there. It’s a crap shoot but not completely. They want to see involvement and they want to see it in the community you are in.</p>
<p>A hook is something about your application that substantially swings the indicator to “admit.” All the other accomplishments of our kids are “data points.” Taken together, a conglomeration of data points can lead to admission.</p>
<p>My D will be an unhooked applicant next year to the top colleges. Straight A so far, will probably stay that way, most rigorous curriculum, a fair number of APs, high SAT scores, a couple of strong extracurriculars, a few awards, likely to write good essays and get good recommendations. Undecided major. Not URM, non-athlete, not first generation college, not a serious legacy, not related to a celebrity, no political connections, and definitely not a possible ‘developmental’ admit.</p>
<p>Any suggestions on how to ‘create’ a hook in the next few months?</p>
<p>Ask on the Meta thread in Parents Cafe. Adopting an octo-baby may work. :)</p>
<p>^^ I’d rather she was adopted…by a dying philanthropist Harvard alumn and his Yale alumn celebrity wife.</p>
<p>Not exactly a “hook” but good suggestion: </p>
<p>Show active interest in the school(s) you apply to. I.e., schedule a visit, interview when possible, attend the open house, make time to meet the rep who visits the high school. We had a true “hot-shot” type student in my kid’s class apply to many, many selective colleges. They were surprised to be rejected by several. When the college counselor called, she was told the student showed no interest in the school. I know it’s not always possible to physically visit, but it’s a good idea to let your top choices know they’re your top choices…</p>
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<p>Doing real well in high school - perfect A grades and high test scores are excellent qualifications but not a hook. An academic hook might be something like publishing a proof for a famous math theorem that has previously stumped mathematicians.</p>
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<p>So let me rephrase my sweeping statement, to say that great grades and SAT scores are better predictors of admission to the University of Chicago or Macalester than to Brown or Middlebury. I presented data to back that claim up. I could present more data, but it gets a little tedious. </p>
<p>Are “numbers” a necessary and sufficient qualification to all these schools? No. Without a “hook”, good numbers are necessary for all of them. At the best midwestern schools, they are much more likely to be sufficient (or nearly so, assuming you complete the application process in earnest) than at the best northeastern schools.</p>
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<p>oooo–that’s a good one!</p>
<p>As another poster said previously, whether or not an activity is a hook sometimes depends on what the institutional needs of the college are that year. We had a D who got into a super-selective school years ago and we kidded her that it must have been because she is a bassoon player–for the next 4 years, people chased her all around campus, trying to get her to commit to playing bassoon for their groups.</p>
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<p>Right, we could say that is one kind of hook. Though, not all selective schools will respond in the same way. Suppose your 15 year old child happens to solve (that is, re-solve) Fermat’s Last Theorem in study hall one night, when he was supposed to be doing his SAT vocabulary drills. For MIT or the University of Chicago, that’s enough, he can stop right there. Forget about taking the SATs. Maybe even forget about finishing high school. They will send a car and driver, with a suitcase of cash, to pick him up in the morning.</p>
<p>Middlebury? The Adcom might very well ask, “What’s Fermat’s Last Theorem? Does Fermat play ice hockey?” Better not skip those vocabulary drills.</p>
<p>My kid was in the range for his favorite LAC–top 5 percent, good SATs, but I think what pushed him over the edge was a passion for history. He took every AP history course that was offered, he took a summer college class about history, and his essay was all about his philosophical ruminations about history. I actually did not completely understand what his essay was about, but apparently the colleges did!</p>
<p>Small schools ( my experience is with NE LAC’s, but I assume it’s the same everywhere), definitely pay close attention to “building” their student classes - they have to, because student groups (newspaper, music, sports, theater, etc.) are a large part of what creates the schools’ personalities and attracts the applicants in the first place. </p>
<p>So (leaving out the athletes for the moment), the high school bassoon player, tenor, improv comic, or reporter may in a particular year have a stronger application at a particular school (academic accomplishments being equal).</p>
<p>In any case, small schools really need kids who are going to be involved and bring life to their communities. And since you can’t plan what talent a certain school might be looking for in any given year, it’s just another reason for a high school student to get involved in what really interests them. That interest may pay dividends in terms of admissions later on, but if not, the kid has had fun with it. </p>
<p>I know such extracurricular activities can’t be called “hooks,” but without them students are less attractive to many colleges. I have no experience with student athletics and I know the issue is much more complex than with other EC’s.</p>
<p>D got into few very selective programs at state shools, we believe, among other things because her HS is very well known in our state. She is finishing her sophomore year in a program that has only 10 spots for incoming freshmen.</p>
<p>A truly top-notch essay can be a hook of sorts. When I applied to colleges four years ago, I did far better than most people would think with a 3.0 GPA and 1430 old SAT. (790 verbal) I’m sure my essay had a lot to do with my admissions to my soon to be alma mater. It showed my personality and was very well-written. I have a knack with words and was lucky enough that my AP English teacher junior year helped us get started and provided excellent feedback. I don’t know how much a great essay can help at the Ivies, but surely it is a leg up. It also helped that I sold myself as a writer, with my main EC, the topic of my essay, and, I’m sure, the letters of recommendation.</p>
<p>OK, tk, let’s play “Parse those Statistics.” </p>
<p>I just logged on to the US News website and compared the numbers (basic admissions statistics and admissions rates) for a bunch of Midwestern and Eastern peer universities among the US News Top 25: Northwestern, Wash U, U of C, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown. It’s too tedious to list the numbers, but with the exception of U of C (a 34.7% admission rate for the Fall of 2007, which I think was down considerably for the Fall of 2008) they’re not meaningfully different. </p>
<p>You are correct that there is more disparity among admission rates among Top 20 peer LACs – Middlebury at 20.6% and Carleton at 29.8% are examples. I think this is in part a reflection of East Coast applicants’ unwillingness to take on the wilds of the Midwest, and this factor may, as I noted in my very first post, make a school like Carleton a slightly better “admissions value” than a school like Middlebury. That said, you sure can’t get into Carleton with nothing more than “desire and strong fundamentals.” </p>
<p>So if your theory is that the admissions rates are higher across the board at Midwestern schools than at their East coast counterparts, the numbers don’t bear it out. If, on the other hand, your theory is that, despite the similarity in scores, grades, and admit rates, those Wash U admits (17.8% admission rate) were relative slugs who got in largely on the strength of their grades and scores, while the JHU admits (24.3% admission rate) needed stronger intangibles to earn a fat envelope, I’m unaware of any data that might prove it.</p>
<p>WJB, you are looking at the stats in a way that doesn’t show the geographic tips. It is a fact that schools that have a huge regional draw and want a national student body do give some preference to out of area students. They could fill their class with certain student types, and they want diversity. I know CMU has two basic stack for their apps: PA and others. And danged if the PA stack is as high or higher than the other. Most families like to have their kids nearby so schools like NorthWestern, Wash U, CMU, BC, Columbia, etc have a huge number of top kids in the region applying to them. Geographics can play a factor in such cases.</p>
<p>Doesn’t mean the out of area kids are slugs. We are talking about “tips”, not “hooks”, so there is very little disparity among those kids anyways. Just as there is not much difference among some of the waitlisted kids and accepted kids.</p>
<p>^^I believe that what you’re saying is that being from outside a college’s region could make an applicant a slightly more desirable candidate than someone from inside the region with a similar profile. That may be true, although IMO geography (aside from being from S. Dakota or Alaska, perhaps ) is only a small tip factor.</p>
<p>But this has nothing to do with what tk is saying, which is that for everyone, Midwestern schools are easier to get into than their Eastern counterparts.</p>
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<p>No. The real crux of my theory is something like this: There are a lot of great colleges out there in fly-over land. </p>
<p>Where I go out on a limb is to suggest that, if you are a very good student but you have no “hooks”, your chances of admission to some of the excellent ACM colleges (Carleton, Macalester, Oberlin, Colorado College) may be better than your chances of admission to the more competitive NESCAC colleges (Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Middlebury). Ditto for your chances of admission to the University of Chicago compared to your chances at most of the Ivies. And this is not merely because the first group is easier than the second, based on the fundamentals. I believe it will be true even for students with equally strong fundamentals, after excluding flatly under-qualified applicants in both pools.</p>
<p>My evidence? According to the Naviance data I’ve looked at for applicants from my child’s private high school, strong grades and SAT scores alone tend to be a better predictor for admission to those ACM colleges, or to the U of C, than for admission to those Ivies or NESCAC schools. Notice I say “better” predictor, not “perfect” predictor. And of course, it’s possible that there is something special about my child’s high school (which, come to think of it, certainly is true).</p>
<p>My method of comparison? I’m not comparing just any arbitrary midwestern college with any arbitrary east coast school. Pick two schools that have equivalent (or nearly equivalent ) 75th percentile SAT scores. Like Macalester (1440) or Oberlin (1460), compared to Bowdoin (1470) or Wesleyan (1480). Look at Oberlin’s admit rate (31%), and look at Bowdoin’s (19%). Or, compare the admissions results for applications from my high school. For Oberlin applicants above the accepted SAT and GPA averages, the odds of admission are 7 in 14. Even for Wesleyan applicants above the accepted averages, the odds are only 1 in 9. SAT and GPA scores alone seem to be better predictors for admission to some of the top midwestern schools than to some of the top eastern schools.</p>
<p>My explanation? I suspect that Middlebury, Bowdoin, or Wesleyan tend to place more emphasis on fit/match considerations (“hooks”) than Oberlin, Macalester, or Colorado College do. For this reason, NESCAC and Ivy admissions take on relatively more of a “crap shoot” quality. Middlebury or Bowdoin, I think, are more likely than Grinnell or Macalester to reject you just because you have the bad luck of being the 4th bassoon player from New Jersey to apply this year. And the University of Chicago really does not care at all how good you are at ice hockey. They care about how you will contribute to the “life of the mind”, not about how many pit band members they need this year. They figure students will sort all that out on their own.</p>
<p>Now, I am not saying you can blow off the essays and expect to be admitted to any of these schools. I know about what a fine man Chicago has in Ted O’Neill, Dean of Admissions, and that he definitely sees applicants as very much more than their numbers. And I did get a PM this morning from a kid with astounding numbers, asking me if I could explain why one of these midwestern schools rejected him, when an uber-prestigious New England school accepted him. I can’t!</p>
<p>But as I said, there are a lot of great colleges out there in fly-over land. And (though your mileage may vary) I suspect they are not merely “easier” to get into, they have an approach to admissions that is (whether intentionally, or due to market factors) fundamentally a little more fair and a little more predictable for many good applicants.</p>