My daughter is a sophomore in high school and we’re trying to even see if she’s “Ivy League Material”. She did a summer program at Yale last year and loved the East Coast (we live in Los Angeles). So in doing some preliminary research it looks like if you’re not a legacy, athlete, or URM you need what one article called an “artistic, scientific, or other academic” talent as your hook. My daughter taught herself Sign Language because there was a fear her sister was going deaf. It’s not something she is going to major in but she fell in love with it. She then started a Sign Language Club at her middle school and high school. She also signs at her school masses and school plays and has developed a following on social media and teaches kids around the country. We honestly don’t know if this constitutes a “hook”. I know more and more Ivy League schools are starting to offer American Sign Language as a language but that doesn’t mean anything regarding acceptance. I appreciate any input and obviously we know her grades have to be stellar, etc to even be considered. Thank you
Not a hook, but a strong EC, especially because it is unique and she has done it for a long time.
“you need what one article called an “artistic, scientific, or other academic” talent as your hook” Keep researching. See how the colleges, themselves, put it.
ASL, starting a club, etc, are not a hook. Just a nice thing on the side. And at tippy tops, may pale in comparison to the challenges other kids can show they took on, how they rolled up their sleeves and did some good, in and out of the hs. There is no one “thing.”
Starting a sign language club at her middle school and high school is (a very good) EC. Being the daughter of the donor for the new American Sign Language building is “a hook”.
The EC you describe is awesome. And glad she cared for her sister that much to learn ASL.
I think it will say a lot about her and her values. Those values are very important.
But it is not a hook as they described in what you read.
Hooks get your application to be considered in a different pile.
This includes athletics for a sport in which they need and want you. Certain ethnic backgrounds and geographic diversity to balance a class. Donor development at the highest levels. First generation college. Legacies. High profile celebrities and politicians. Prodigies in the arts as well. Employees and professors of a school also can also give you the extra look while being reviewed.
However. Here is the really good news.
There is life beyond the ivies. Schools with brands nearly as selective and prestigious. Not that it really matters in the end, but foolish to say it doesn’t exist.
And schools that would be equally good at educating your daughter. Schools that perhaps would really connect with her EC and application.
If she likes the east coast. Think of the top flagships in the east UVA UNC GTech and Midwest like Michigan. Really any state flagship in the east and NE would be great.
East coast/mid atlantic private schools like Duke NYU Georgetown (who seem to love quirky language ECs) and Emory. in Boston you have Boston College BU NEU.
Not to leave out the Chicago schools like UChicago and Northwestern that have the same type of environment as the traditonal east coast schools.
And so many liberal arts colleges in the east and New England. Just to name a few. Tufts Williams Amherst Wellesley Vassar Swathmore Bowdoin Wesleyan Smith Colgate. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
And some of these schools will love the ASL EC snd backstory.
Coupled with a statistically powerful application and well written essays. Teacher recs. Course rigor. The entire package is looked at and considered as the full picture.
Good luck and sounds like a wonderful child you have there.
Great stuff. How in the world do you ever whittle the list down and decide which to at least visit. Hopefully her counselors can help her.
The kind of hook you are talking about for schools like Yale is being nationally or internationally known for something. Famous actors, top athletes in sports that aren’t college team sports, top competition winners in sciences, national champs in academic competitions, etc. It is not impossible, but very, very difficult to break through and differentiate yourself for the very top schools if you don’t have one of the more traditional hooks.
So… do yourself & your kid a favor. Focus more on match and safety schools starting fall of junior year. For every top school she visits, go see 3 others that are matches or safeties. For some students it is harder to find some they really like, so it takes more elbow grease.
As a parent, don’t talk about “Ivy material” (how is that going to make her feel if she doesn’t get into one?). Your job is to set the tone for her search. Focus on finding a list of safety, match, and reach schools, any of which she would be pleased to attend. Keep the focus on the list, not on one favorite school or just the reach schools. Look at academics, ECs, vibe/environment, affordability (if you need to). On visits, dig in past the tour, which is a marketing tool. See if she can sit in on a class, and eat in the cafeteria. Eavesdropping and people watching there can be quite revealing. Encourage her to read the student paper to see what students are talking about.
Neither of my kids went to the top ranked school they got into. One turned down a top 3 university for fit reasons, and several years later is very glad she did.
Here’s the thing. Lots of kids are “Ivy Material”.
I know kids who weren’t legacies, athletes or big donors who got in. If you looked at the list of stuff they did I don’t know how many would predict they’d get in. Even legacies mostly get rejected. The kids I knew did one thing really well and in a variety of ways. So for example the musician, played in both the jazz band and orchestra at school, and had his own band that put out an EP and performed locally. He was a counselor/teacher at a local music camp in the summer. He also taught Hebrew School. And he was in at least two musicals in high school. Another kid did Science Research and got an Intel award. A CS kid (who was also a legacy) took AP Comp Sci as a freshman, had an award winning mod for an online game, did some CS work for a med school prof that got acknowledge in a paper and his program still gets used to analyze proteins. He worked in CS and got a recommendation from the president of the company. He also volunteered at the senior center. They were all genuinely nice kids that the teachers loved. They were also all fairly well rounded along with being pointy at one thing. But with tiny admissions rates, there is just no way of predicting who will get the nod.
There are definitely lots of great schools out there. One of the guides used to have a “If you liked Yale, look at…”
I think her ASL achievements are very nice. She should continue working on building what she has done. Starting a club isn’t enough, but if she’s the kind of leader that has that club doing significant work, that is note-worthy.
Anyway, good luck, I’m sure your daughter will have great choices, she sounds like a really nice kid.
It could become a hook if the LA Times does a feature article on her efforts.
A hook is a reason why a college would want one particular student on campus as opposed to other similarly qualified candidates. Some examples of a hook would be a student/athlete being recruited to play quarterback on the college football team, the child of a huge donor (in the hopes of getting additional large donations), a person whose accomplishments would bring positive press to the school (ex. Malala).
Very few people have hooks. What your D has is an excellent, meaningful EC activity. That is great!
And as a bit of unsolicited advice…your D is a sophomore. Please do not set up Ivy schools as a goal. Admissions rates for the Ivy League and equivalent colleges are generally under 10% and there is simply not enough room for all of the well qualified candidates. Instead, when junior year comes honestly asses her academic stats (including GPA, standardized tests, course rigor) as well as your financial needs and have your D apply to a wide range of reach, match, and safety schools that appear affordable (run a net price calculator for each school) and that she would be happy to attend. There are so many wonderful schools out there where your D can have a great 4 year experience and get where she wants to go in life.
You have several posts along these lines. I can see you really look up to the Ivy league, but perhaps it’s better to first focus on finding a good fit she’s likely to be accepted to instead of starting with the longshots. Keep in mind, too, that Brown and Dartmouth and Columbia are all Ivies but few students would be equally happy attending such disparate schools. Unless all that matters is being able to say they attended an Ivy I suppose.
You write she loves the East Coast. So find schools of the size & location & type she likes. If it turns out some Ivies are in the mix, that’s fine, but IMHO you’re starting from the result and working backwards. At schools with sub-10% acceptance rates (and that’s probably overstating it for the non-legacy non-athetic-recruit applicant) that is a recipe for disappointment much more often than not.
Right. It’s a bit like the expression, “If you have to ask, you don’t know.” Of course, you don’t. But the surer thing is to dig deep into those colleges, what they say and show, what they offer, what they value (as a college and for an admit,) and what it really takes to get in. That’s not blogs from pro counselors trying to impress you that they know the recipe for the secret sauce.
And you don’t choose the right, feasible colleges, where she can thrive, based on a summer experience and loving the area. In fact, an answer like that on the Why Us wouldn’t get an applicant far.
Agree with not using “ivy material”. There are “elite” kids at many institutions of higher learning. Focus on fit. Absolutely throw your app in some reach places you like but focus on safety/match schools. My 99% stat/deep extracurricular resume kid is not going to end up at an elite school but I still think he’s going to have amazing choices.
Agree with everyone else. It’s great she liked the East Coast, but anyone can pay to do a summer program at Yale, and Harvard and many others.
I suggest not looking at anymore reach schools without first looking at match and safety schools. Those are the ones that really matter. Everyone likes the reach schools. She needs to find realistic schools she would be happy to attend.
I wrote it after making a similar mistake with my “average” excellent daughter, now a junior in college. My son, a HS senior, has visited no reach schools, but if he is admitted to one, he will. ETA: he did visit a couple, en route to others, but didn’t apply to those. My bad.
Hooks are actually pretty rare, and some hooks that were quite useful just a couple of years ago are becoming much less certain.
I don’t think that legacy status alone (i.e., without substantial donation dollars) is a true hook when you are talking about Ivy level schools. I’ve seen too many high achieving students at my kids’ HS who have been rejected by their parent’s Ivy League alma maters. Some of these schools (Penn and Cornell) don’t even consider legacy status except in the ED round. I also agree with what the others have said about “Ivy material.” With true admission rates at or below 5% for unhooked applicants, spending your HS years gunning for the Ivies is usually a fool’s errand.
@TheBigChef That is what the “courtesy waitlist” is for — waitlisting kids of alums that they have no intention of admitting, but it makes the parents feel slightly better.
Great advice on this thread. Although my DD was admitted ED to an Ivy in December, I would never have considered her “Ivy material” looking at her class rank and GPA. She did have great leadership ECs with strong essays and fabulous teacher/counselor recommendations – all of which I believe collectively carried the day for her at the Ivy.
Her 10 other applications were to lower reach, match and safety schools that were a great fit for her and where she might receive merit money or qualified for in-state tuition.
We rarely talked about the ED Ivy school and were focused on visiting and “learning to love” her more realistic admit schools. We were actually visiting two of her “match” schools the very week she got her ED acceptance.
@cupugu Echoing cupugu’s post above, I think it’s pretty hard to figure out whether your kid has what it takes or even wants to attend a high ranked college. For example, I never thought or encouraged my kid to shoot for an Ivy or HYPSM level of school. I wasn’t all that enamored of an Ivy college, having went to one. Now that 2+ years have passed since my kid’s college admission process, I can say with a greater honesty and objectivity that yes, we hoped he could get into top 10 ranked college when he moved up to high school, but once I realized (I was the designated parent to advise my kid in this kind of matters because my spouse felt I was more qualified because I went to an Ivy and went to law school) that it took too much effort to try to get into high ranked college, I just focused on advising my kid to improve his writing (we moved back to US from abroad when he was 10, so he had to improve his English quickly) and challenge himself with good ECs, looking beyond high school ECs. At the beginning, my kid’s goal was to shoot for a mid-level UC, i.e., UCSD or UC Irvine, but when I realized that for most hard to get in colleges had a noticeably higher GPA or test score standards for STEM applicants – and since my kid was clearly not a STEM kid – I felt that GPA and test scores did not have to be perfect. By the time he was a sophomore in high school, I felt comfortable that our kid would at least get into a mid level UC as a non-STEM student because his GPA was 3.9 with many AP/Honors classes, so I was not worried. When he became a Junior, maybe due to his classmates or his own expectation of how far he could go, our kid’s goal became getting into one of UCLA/Berkeley as a non-STEM major. When he got 33 ACT with pretty high scores in Reading/Grammar, I was confident that he would get into either UCLA/Berkeley because I felt his ECs were relatively strong and focused in non-STEM areas. UCs didn’t require any letters of recommendations, so that was great. Now, I never expected my kid to score high enough on PSAT to be NMF in CA because his SAT score as sophomore was around 2150 and his ACT score as Junior was 33 composite; but when I compared his PSAT score to the NMF cut-off score for CA in the past, I realized there was a very high chance he would be NMF. That’s when I began to think maybe our kid should apply to at least one of really “reach” college but then I didn’t tell him because my attitude was “why get rejected and feel bad?” And besides, UCLA/Berkeley was darn good and cheaper because I knew we would in all likely be full pay at expensive private colleges. But then, right before college application process, our kid asked me if he applied to Stanford as an early applicant and somehow got in, whether we could afford the tuition. I wasn’t all that happy when he asked me this because I knew we would be full pay, and also because it was pretty hard to get into Stanford, so I didn’t want him to feel bad from rejection. But his attitude seemed to be that he knew he would likely be denied, and he would be happy just to get deferred, so I told him he can apply but he better make his essays really stand out. Now, I am the type of parent who gives his kid a lot of freedom but once I realize my kid wants something, I try to give him the best advice, so I told him that he should research everything he could about Stanford, find qualities in himself that he thinks Stanford is looking for and make his essays very personal to a point that the adcom reader would have a good picture of what kind of person he was. I told him every one of his essays, ranging from short to long ones, had to paint a picture of himself, so that after reading his entire application, the adcom reader would feel that he or she really knew him and liked him. I told him not to make his essays about his accomplishments but what he cares about and his failures and what he learned from them and how they molded him into the kind of person he is today and show the adcom he is the kind of person who would definitely make Stanford campus a better place and most importantly, he would enjoy and appreciate the Stanford community. I told him he better revise his essays many times to find his voice. I told him when I thought his essays would not impress the adcom and that he could do better. All my advice came from my background as an English Lit major and having watched many movies and read many books. We stayed away from any college consultants and essay consultants because I felt I knew my kid the best.
I looked at his high schoo’s Naviance record, and in his school’s history “only” 8 got into Stanford (similar number for Harvard), and he was told no one got into Stanford as an early applicant. Therefore, we focused on getting as good letters of recommendations from his high school teachers and counselor; I told him to put some time and effort to drop by get to know his teachers better and tell the teachers who would write recommendations to talk about his non-academic traits/qualities, knowing my kid is definitely not a kind of student whom teachers would write “He probably has been a top student in my 5 years of teaching this class etc.” because I felt my kid’s selling point was his non-academic traits although he was around 20th out of 500 students GPA wise. Basically, he coasted through high school with many A minuses and 2 B+s, by putting more efforts into his ECs. We also limited his school selections to only 4 UCs, two Honors Colleges for merit based on his NMF status and Stanford. There was no way he could put that much time into making his application to other top colleges as strong. Basically, when our kid turned in his application to Stanford, we did not know if it would be good enough but we felt it was the best application our kid could submit. I felt confident that not many applicants prepared their applications with as much focus.
Anyway, I found out around 70 kids applied to Stanford from his high school (many of them with better GPAs and test scores), and he was the only one who got in. Also, in his school’s history, he was the only one who got into Stanford early. His school counselor was shocked, as was my kid. But to be honest, I wasn’t that shocked because I already knew that although my kid would never get a Regents scholarship from UCLA/Berkeley, he had certain qualities that top colleges were looking for, which they could see from his application.
My kid had no apparent hook of any kind. I will be honest: had my kid applied as a STEM intended applicant, no way he would have gotten accepted. My advice is to build your application around your kid’s interest and make the application as compelling. But I am here to tell you that it’s hard to gauge whether your kid has what it takes because each kid progresses at different pace and different ways.
Basically, I am happy if my kid is happy, so since he’s happy and feels he’s learning and sufficiently challenged at Stanford, I am happy. I would feel the same had he gone to UCLA or Honors College with merit money.
Congrats on your daughter’s achievements. It will make her interesting, personal and unique for her college essay.
But don’t even think about talking to your kids about going to any reach school. If so, you will all be disappointed. If it happens naturally then great. My kids both got accepted, rejected and wait listed by some really great colleges. It’s not about them, it’s what the school needs at that moment in time to build their class. It’s a numbers game and don’t take it personally.
What we did living in Chicago was to go have lunch at Northwestern and University of Chicago. We are from Detroit so we would stop off at University of Michigan to walk around(and get a hot fudge chocolate chip shake from Pizza Bob’s) . This way they got a taste of different sizes colleges. Then we made vacations around colleges choices. My wife took my daughter to the east coast to see private Lacs and my son saw a lot of Big Ten and other schools.
We found out our high school counselor wasn’t that great so do some research yourself also.
“My advice is to build your application around your kid’s interest and make the application as compelling. But I am here to tell you that it’s hard to gauge whether your kid has what it takes because each kid progresses at different pace and different ways.”
Agree, and congrats on your kid getting into Stanford! You must be very proud.