<p>I’ve read this entire thread and I must admit to being surprised at the number of people struggling with what a ‘hook’ is or argumentative stuff like ‘how about just good grades as a hook’ posts. </p>
<p>Certainly everyone should be able to make the mental leap that 4.0 student with great SAT scores abound. Class valedictorians abound. Why should X university take your daughter? A senior at our high school accepted a full scholarship to Harvard. Her hook? She is on the Olympic development team as a sculler. 'Nuff said? </p>
<p>My younger son is a junior. He’s e-mailing college golf coaches and asking them whether he may introduce himself when he is doing campus visits. At the same time, he mentions some of the AJGA events he played (and will be playing) to spark further discussion. He doesn’t have the game for a scholarship to a Division I school. But he may have enough game to get a coach to make a call to admissions.</p>
<p>tk – I do agree with much of your post. I think it may be easier to get into Oberlin than Bowdoin. (I do note, however, that Bowdoin (#6) is 14 spots above Oberlin (# 20) on the US News hit parade, so we may not exactly be talking apples and apples.) It’s that fear of the Wild Wild Midwest that keeps lots of kids who salivate at the thought of Bowdoin, Middlebury, or Colgate from even considering the likes of Oberlin, Grinnell, or Kenyon. Everyone knows Ohio has cooties. And I’m with you that U of C is in general an easier admit than any of the Ivies, with the possible exception of Cornell. My issue was with your position that “desire plus strong fundamentals” are the ticket into any of these schools. I understand now that you are not saying that.</p>
<p>Here’s a question. Do you think it’s possible that the Eastern schools could have more “let’s throw this app against the wall and see if it sticks” applicants than their Midwestern peers? So Bowdoin got 5961 applications for a class of 476, while Carleton got just 4840 applications for a class of 509. How many of the 5961 were really not viable candidates, just kids taking a wild shot at a school with high name recognition? At Carleton, there is far less name recognition and so there may be fewer pie-in-the-sky applicants.</p>
<p>There is no such thing as a “full scholarship to Harvard.” Harvard does not award merit-based aid at all. The only students who go to Harvard at no cost are those whose families earn less than $60,000.</p>
<p>No, I don’t think the top eastern schools are throwing apps against the wall. They are very systematic about this process. </p>
<p>Now, as far as I know, there is no way to examine for any given college how many students in the total applicant pool would be far under-qualified based on the numbers. That’s why I looked to our HS Naviance data. I can see the spread at least for this subset of the pool.</p>
<p>Among the 34 University of Chicago applicants, only 1 student has a 3.0 GPA or lower. This is at a very competitive private school, with a full IB diploma program and little grade inflation. Only 1 of these applicants has MV SATs below 1200.</p>
<p>Among the 52 Brown applicants, 5 have GPAs at 3.0 or lower. For the 65 UPenn applicants, the number is 8. For the 69 Cornell applicants, it’s 11 (and the same number have MV SATs below 1200).</p>
<p>No student from our school has applied to Macalester with less than a 3.0 average and 1400 SATs. Almost 30% of our applicants to Vassar have GPAs of 3.0 or below (though their SATs, too, are all above 1400).</p>
<p>There are big holes in the data. For example, I cannot see any results for Carleton or for Williams. However, the data I do see tends to confirm what you’d expect: the selectivity numbers for the eastern schools are depressed by what appear to be relatively numerous pie-in-the-sky applications. If you could subtract those applications, the selectivity gap between top eastern and non-eastern schools would shrink. </p>
<p>Ted O’Neill at the U of C has deliberately resisted the temptation to try to boost application numbers if it means getting pie-in-the-sky applications. That’s one of the main reasons for the off-the-wall essay questions they ask. Those questions deter drive-by status seekers from even applying.</p>
<p>Still, all these schools admit significantly fewer than half their applicants. To me, the most interesting question involves the criteria they use to decide among students with good grades and scores. My suspicion is that the Ivies and the NESCACs rely more on hooks related to “contributions to the community”. Chicago and the AMC schools perhaps rely more on evidence in the essays and recommendations to back up the grades and scores as evidence of intellectual ability. This might explain why, when you look at the Baccalaureate origins of Ph.D.s, the top-N lists (adjusted per capita) are not as stacked with Ivy League and NESCAC schools as you might expect. They are disproportionately populated by schools like Chicago, Oberlin, Reed, Earlham, Macalester, Grinnell, and wee little Guilford College.</p>
<p>I never said I thought <em>schools</em> were throwing apps against the wall. I said I thought certain <em>applicants</em> were throwing apps against the wall at Eastern schools with high name recognition. In fact, I said precisely what you’re saying:
</p>
<p>So Carleton and Bowdoin may have roughly equal numbers of high-quality applicants. Many of the extras Bowdoin gets don’t have a real chance of being admitted. </p>
<p>I think it’s an exercise in futility to try to divine precisely what any particular school or group of schools is relying on in making admissions decisions.</p>
<p>From an individual parent’s or applicant’s perspective, maybe so.
From the perspective of what is in the public interest, I think there ought to be some transparency. It would be unkind to expect earnest, high-achieving children to subject themselves to this process if the outcome really is just a crap-shot.</p>
<p>When a school starts getting 10,000 applications for a few hundred spots, you have to wonder how much care they can devote to all those essays and recommendations. The adcom isn’t Socrates. The University of Chicago deliberately discourages drive-by applications in an effort to manage this problem, even though this depresses their USNWR score by raising the selection ratio.</p>
<p>This gets back to my original point about “desire and strong fundamentals”. An applicant who has these qualities has some chance of submitting strong essays and recommendations, too. He has zero chance of turning himself into Steven Spielberg’s daughter or an Under Represented Minority. He cannot control how many other bassoon players apply from New Jersey. However, his thoughtfully written essay only matters to the outcome if it is being thoughtfully read, and fairly considered.</p>
<p>I agree that there are aspects of the college admissions process that would benefit from more transparency, but it’s just not going to happen. Still, I am in the camp that does not believe the outcome at highly selective colleges is a “crap shoot.” Colleges are looking for specific qualities in candidates. Even though from year to year institutional priorities may differ slightly (we need a bassoonist this year) the basic rules don’t change.</p>
<p>Rule No. 1 (IMO): Fabulous essays and ECs will not make up for a weak academic record. Unless an applicant has a genuine hook, s/he must get past the first hurdle with respect to grades, scores, and curriculum. Without passing that threshold, the rest just doesn’t matter. I sigh when I read posts from unhooked students on CC who believe their cool ECS and recs will make up for an SAT composite that put them in the bottom 25% at Superselective Dream School. Rule No. 2: Once a student gets past the basic academic threshold, then yes, I do believe that the intangibles – essays, activity resumes, recommendations – will be carefully considered. Specifically, I believe that an essay that tells a story only the student could tell and gives the admissions committee an indication of who the applicant is and how s/he became that person does matter. </p>
<p>There are human beings reading those files, and they’re trying to put together the best class they can. Although it can look like a crap shoot to us on the outside, I do not believe that the process is random.</p>
<p>The problem with hooks is that they are moving targets. Something that a school desperately wants one year, may be a ho hum the next. They also can differ from school to school and you don’t really know what school your kid will be wanting senior year when he is just a freshman.</p>
<p>wjb, I’d like to believe that is uniformly true.
Virtually every good college does have a systematic process in place. Presumably, most of the people, on most of the admissions committees, are working in good faith to carefully consider the intangibles.</p>
<p>However, from the outside looking in, what many schools seem to be saying is, “Trust us. We have specific qualities we are looking for in our candidates. We will know them when we see them.”</p>
<p>This is putting a lot of faith in the judgment of a few people who are, in many cases, just a year or two out of school themselves. It is an approach, virtually unique in the world, that calls for continual scrutiny to ensure it is working to achieve the desired results, in as fair a way as possible. I see reasons for concern in the ballooning numbers of applications to individual schools, applications to 10/12/15 schools, the inflated GPAs, the proliferation of Nerd Camps and SAT cram courses, the international vacations disguised as “community service” trips, the techniques colleges use to jigger the USNWR rankings, and finally, in the importance of what we vaguely refer to as “hooks” in college admissions , without any clear, shared understanding of what the heck we even mean by that word.</p>
<p>Although … somehow, when all is said and done, this is still the best system of higher education in the world. And I would not trade the crazy way we do admissions for the alternative used in France, Germany, Finland, China or Japan (a straightforward, day-long battery of standardized tests to determine university placement).</p>