And it’s not the fault of Ivy Day, just like it’s not the fault of Prom Day, Election Day, Nobel Prize week, or Lasker Prize Day, or whatever… It’s the fault of the individuals who willingly play the game without adequate intellectual and mental fortitude.
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The environment and prevailing values at fancy independent private schools and top public high schools are absolutely toxic. The ultra high competition leads to unhealthy schedules of 6-7 academic classes, with 4 or more as APs. This academic rigor necessarily imposes trade offs on areas of social and mental health, and that is plain for everyone to see and feel; and the prize on which to keep the eye is admission to the tippy top. There appears to be tremendous anxiety among the top third achieving kids at these schools about others finding out that kid did or did not get into X or Y school, perhaps even more so than about not getting into that school per se, especially if the kid worked his, her or their butt off and was seen by peers as sacrificing everything and getting not much in return. Where you get into and post on the school’s Instagram account for the senior class becomes the single measure of success; and for top achieving academic students that do not get into tippy top schools it becomes a social media humiliation, especially if other kids who worked much less hard got into the same school and publicize it. Also many of these high schools tend to announce the college being attended at the graduation ceremony. The kid essentially, in these environments, socially becomes where he is going from the day of the post or graduation. Keep in mind that for these kids’ virtual and physical environments are absolutely immersive, and it’s hard to ask for them to have the life experience to have a broader perspective. Over time, if the extreme selectivity continues to the extent that T25 private schools can’t get a single kid into HYPM during RD (happened at ours this year), these high schools will be forced to change their culture and values to sell something a bit more wholesome than the elusive, and at this point and going forward arbitrary and irrational, Ivy acceptance or rejection.
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Perhaps they should be doing so now,it would be better for the kids. Parents should demand that.
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Exactly the logical conclusion I was aiming to reach, thank you for driving the point home. The main challenge is that exit is difficult once you find yourself in one of those environments (social trauma of changing schools for junior year is as bad), and by the time most parents realize it’s either too late or they have another kid right behind in a similar situation. The cost-benefit of change/reform for individual parents is not there and it is likely a collective action problem.
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One thing that kind of bothers me is that it seems like the more selective the school, the later the decisions come out — resulting in receiving rejections at the very end of the process for most applicants.
How much nicer it would be to have a single decision day for ALL schools, so students received their acceptances side by side with rejections, to balance it out.
That said, my D22 applied to only a few highly selective schools. She had already fallen in love with a school that accepted her early action before the final decisions came out, so she was not bothered when 9 acceptances were followed by a waitlist and two rejections. Cultivating a list of schools that are all genuinely appealing and celebrating all acceptances, irrespective of selectivity, is key.
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I have limited experience, however, what I have seen is that the kids at the top end of the private HS my DS attended are some of the most well adjusted and socially adept kids that I have ever seen.
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Not our experience unfortunately and I think it has a lot to do with the tone set by school admin and faculty.
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I agree. I wish the Ivies would post mid March- maybe around the time of MIT or UCLA. To make these kids who are pining for Ivies wait and only be disappointed is tough for them. This way they have more time to get over their likely rejections and focus on being excited about the places they have been accepted to.
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Perhaps it’s only a psychological problem for a student who applied to many of them and rejected/waitlisted by them all on the same day. But why did s/he apply to so many of them, which aren’t interchangeable, to begin with?
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It’s naive to believe that parents can fully compensate for the the conflicting signals many of these kids get from a thousand different places. If kids always listened to their parents the world would be very different in many ways. College is no exception.
Let’s start with these elite schools sending suggestive marketing materials and emails to these kids over-and-over. It is often is personalized and intentionally designed to create the impression the elite college cares about the student and actively wants the student to apply (and, the thinking goes, why would they bother if it wasn’t true). (This is a far worse sin of these schools than “Ivy Day.”) HS school counselors often do’t help, giving kids the impression its worth a shot to apply (why wife just looked at each other in frustration when that happened to ours). Often the kids have friends or peers at school who are getting into these elite schools. And of course it seems that almost every fictional character goes to or gets into elite schools. Spider-Man and all his pals are heading to MIT. How often do you see a character reference their state school?
Against all this noise, they tell themselves they have a shot. And they do, technically, but they over-index the odds. They may SAY they know they have a 5% shot, but in reality it’s probably >1% and they are thinking it’s more like 25%. And they apply to a bunch figuring if you role the dice enough it will work out (even, illogically, if they took AP Stats and know better). They put so much effort into doing this that it’s impossible not to get emotionally invested, even if they intellectually know they shouldn’t and keep telling themselves not to.
So of course when they get not just one rejection but many it will hurt. A lot. Of course it will be frustrating to compare themselves to the former or current peers who do get it. Of course they may feel embarrassed, even though they shouldn’t.
Some of you are blessed with kids who may listen to you enough to avoid all this, but many are not. I think we need to be realistic about that.
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EXCELLENT post.
Yes, the having-to-notify-last thing is a mind game - even more so with Stanford which has to flex by waiting until after the Ivies.
Basically, the presumptive Most Prestigious Colleges shouldn’t have to a) aggressively recruit as many applicants as they can, to maximize rejections and compete to have the lowest acceptance rates and b) play hard to get by trying to leave applicants hanging the longest. If they’re so inherently desirable, why is all this manipulativeness necessary?
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I am sorry to say that students at elite schools commit suicide. So students can be accepted to the dream school and struggle with depression and feelings of inadequacy even if admitted to their dream school. There is going to be competition and challenges at many stages of life. Perhaps all schools, high school and college, need to evaluate what more they can be doing to help students but talking to students about the need to have the resources to help with self-esteem issues in the face of failure (even self-perceived) is critical, regardless of what mail is sent by any college. When we attended information sessions at elite schools, including Columbia, they were very candid about the large number of applicants and how they could fill the freshman class many times over with high stats students who could do the work.
Or parents push the math accelerator to the floor and have their kids put in the +2 or +3 math track even when the math teachers recommend the +1 track.
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I can;t help but think that if the Ivies released their results on different days, someone would be complaining about the “abuse” of Yale holding admissions results until the day after Harvard releases them. Why stress the kids out for a whole week?
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I’ve always found this curious. I have to admit that our two kids (a Stanford graduate and an incoming freshman at JHU) never received any marketing material from any “elite” schools. Both received a few mailings from National Merit Scholar hunting schools. But aside from that,…nothing. Could it be that I always asked them not to have SAT/ACT info sent to colleges?
It’s devastating to think that any part of the college admission process would cause someone to take their life…
I wondered where the hype begins too and asked about it on another thread. Kids aren’t born wanting to go to an Ivy. Someone (parents, peers) or something puts the idea into their heads. Or maybe they are watching too much Gilmore Girls 
I agree with this too. No doubt they’ll be upset but it’s important for parents to teach their kids about perspective. It’s only four short years of what will hopefully be a very long and happy life and unfortunately, they are likely to face much bigger challenges and disappointments along the way.
I always told my kids that it was good to have these lessons earlier in life - like when they didn’t didn’t make sports team or the cheer squad, or just missed the cut off for some academic honor - then they have time to see for themselves that the sky doesn’t fall, and life continues on.
The whole college admissions process has its cruelties (intentioned or not). Ivy Day doesn’t seem intentionally cruel unless parents are letting their kids apply to all 8 (hopefully not many are doing that) and hopefully parents are having discussions with their kids about how to handle rejection in a healthy way.
We can always choose not to apply to any college (or colleges) whose practices or policies we don’t agree with. For as late as Ivy Day is in the spring, there are hundreds of colleges that have rolling admissions and will give your kid an answer pretty quickly. Kids can apply to 20 colleges with rolling admissions and potentially have 20 “Yeses” by Thanksgiving.
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Anytime there is a huge discrepancy between supply and demand, there will always be people that complain about the process. It doesn’t matter if it is college admissions, concert tickets, or the new Nike’s.
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Suicide is indeed horrible. But absolutely zero blame for that goes to colleges sending rejection letters. Rejection is a part of life, whether it be colleges, jobs, girlfriends/boyfriends, etc. Learning to deal with rejection in a mature way is part of the path to adulthood.
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It may seem like a quibble, but it’s not a deliberate mind game or manipulativeness: Ivy Day has been where it is (late March / early April) for at least 50 years, well before the whole college admissions thing became such a circus. They have just kept on doing what they do in a very New England way- but the world has changed around them.
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