seriously, there are not a lot of kids who will have the fake Mackenzie Fierceton profile. I acknowledge the fact that all schools are looking for those touching stories and try to help those kids. However, the majority of kids are just kids and they are doing what kids are supposed to do… It is very disturb for me to see all schools are going extremes.
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It’s difficult to gauge the reasons why some are waitlisted and others aren’t. DD1 was accepted last year but her twin was waitlisted. DD2 had better grades and submitted a good SSAT score; DD1 had a better interview, didn’t submit SSAT and filled a specific position on an athletic team.
This year, DD2 was accepted but her friend who also has a sibling at the same school (plus numerous relatives who are alumni) was waitlisted. Her friend has slightly better grades and SSAT scores than DD2 and is an excellent athlete in a core sport. Unfortunately, her friend didn’t travel for, and didn’t have a great, interview. DD2 seemed to have had a strong interview, is a tri-varsity athlete in 2nd tier sports for the school and made it clear that this was the only school to which she was applying.
Why was one accepted this year and the other waitlisted? I think it was the interview and the perceived commitment to attending the school. But maybe they saw value in admitting a kid who could fill roster spots on three teams. It could have been some quirk like DD2 umpiring U10 softball games when she injured her shoulder and had to sit out her season, or that she wakes up at 3am to see comets. We’re partial FA so it certainly wasn’t ability to pay.
DD1 and her friends constantly advocated for DD2 with admissions and coaches, reminding them that it would be great if DD2 could also attend. That may have played a part but, again, who knows.
We sat through a presentation from admissions on what data points they use to differentiate somewhat similar applications. There were obvious things like artistic and academic expertise, athletic abilities and minority representation. But they spent a lot of time on how they parse recommendations to identify positives and negatives about the applicant; how they use SSAT scores to make positive decisions on candidates who have less than stellar grades or to validate grades from schools where they’re not familiar with the academic rigor; and how they use feedback from the interviewer to add a school specific perspective. While it didn’t explain the process in as much detail as we would have liked–nor were obvious topics like legacy and donor status discussed–it was an educational experience.
Ultimately, my two daughters and their friend would all do well at the school, as would many, many other kids. Being placed on the waitlist doesn’t mean someone isn’t “right” for the school, nor does it mean that they aren’t as “good” as the folks who were accepted. There may simply have been a slightly weaker part of the application or the school didn’t need the child’s specific talents for this year’s class.
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As has been said, perfect grades and scores are not significantly distinguishing factors in these pools as all admissible applicants are high achievers, that goes without saying. All schools are looking to meet institutional needs and build/maintain their specific cultures, so there are many buckets that need to be filled by various abilities, personalities, etc. I think it helps to understand how shallow those buckets actually are to get a better idea of how few seats any individual is actually a match for and thus why not getting a seat should be the more likely expectation.
As an example that I’ve posted many times, the year our son applied to Choate, the incoming class ended up being 112 boys and 112 girls, so he didn’t have a shot at 224 seats; chromosomes limited him to, at most, 112. By the time he matriculated and we attended the AD’s opening speech which laid this out, we realized that our son’s profile put him in a bucket of fewer than 10 seats because the class was broken down by:
Male/female
Foreign/domestic
Domestic geographical
Boarding/day
Full pay/FA
Diversity
Legacy (development)
Siblings
Athletics and other talent (music, academics, etc.)
Various other institutional requirements
And Choate is one of the larger schools. You have no way to gauge how your child compares to any other high achiever also competing in a very shallow bucket in any given year. If there are only ten spots for a full-pay musical/technical domestic male boarder from a particular geographic region at a larger school, for example, you can understand why casting a very wide net makes a lot of sense and why a rejection or WL decision is always the most likely outcome and is no reflection on the student. I think understanding how few seats there were in your applicant’s bucket helps take some of the sting out an unfavorable decision. Truly, it’s all about too many qualified candidates for too few seats.
And, as I’ve also posted several times, had we known our son would choose the military, I’m pretty sure we would have kept him home for high school. Once he left for BS, he never really lived here again. We didn’t even get him for summers during his academy years as summers are for field exercises and completing other commissioning requirements. I’d give anything to have his high school years back – at home. So, @AnonMomof2, perhaps that WL is a blessing.
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Don’t tell that to MIT. And if I were a betting man I’d say that they won’t be alone in that regard.
They are looking to build a varied and interesting community. Every commonly discussed school here could accept a complete and completely different class 2 or more times over from the applicant pool, each kid with extraordinary academics/scores.
Exactly. This is the math that people really need to get their heads around. And why the standard advice here is to apply to more schools including some with meaningfully higher acceptance rates.
Uhh. Not sure what you mean by that.
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Did you mean to reply to me?
yes, on the resilience part
The thing that I saw valued at a couple of schools (and even mentioned in acceptance letter) was humanity and humility. How is this child showing they will contribute to the community beyond sports, academics and the arts? Is this a person you would living among you. It is VERY hard to fake that and it is exactly what will come across in a good rec. I was advised by multiple parents that several schools are particularly screening for “character” in boys.
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Then I think you misunderstood my point.
Schools are not looking for kids that have survived horrific childhoods, that is not what I meant by resilience.
Resilience in the face of normal teenage setbacks. Many kids do not have this, and have a hard time coping with boarding school. The schools want to avoid this situation if they can.
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I think I just question how a school will judge most of kids when they lack certain experiences unless there are some indicators. Most of kids will be pushed to be independent and responsible. that is one of the purposes of going to boarding school.
My son goes to a school now with a lot of exceptional book smart kids who offer nothing of themselves to their peer group. They don’t play sports (other than individual ones), don’t hang around the common rooms, don’t go to watch their peers participate in team sports etc…You can do all of that via remote learning and get your A’s.
Sadly, many parents believe that is the path to success. Your kid needs to be the top 1% academically. Life does not work that way.
My son has been through the process twice, and the schools are looking for character. That is becoming more and more the difference maker and will be actively involved in the school community.
To my earlier point, admissions people who are good at accessing character are the key. A letter of recommendation also goes along way.
I will give a more concrete example. One of my older boys applied to Mcgill law (probably the most difficult law school to get into in Canada). Their median GPA is 3.7 and lots of 3.9’s get rejected. The faculty has an admission committee that spends months studying the application and recommendation letters to get a sense of character.
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You sell these schools short! They have been in the business of educating teenagers for 100+ years. While they don’t always get it right, they do actually know what they are doing.
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MIT will be the exception not the norm in the future.
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Humanity and humility are wonderful qualities to have in a school community. I just wonder how kids were able to adequately showcase such qualities if they were doing remote schooling for half of 6th and all of 7th grades. When my daughter started back up in 8th grade, she was basically readjusting to being in school and being around people outside our immediate family.
But alas, that’s how it goes.
It’s not a perfect situation, and nothing is fair. I’m actually very pleased we went through this process. I think my daughter learned some basic but valuable life lessons at a critical life stage.
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interactions with siblings, family members, how they handled zooming, peer pressures around everything being virtual, volunteering, etc. most of the things he wrote about had nothing to do with school itself.
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We shall see. They didn’t reintroduce the testing requirement accidentally.
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Certainly not easy to show in many instances, but my own did in two ways. One, he babysat his younger siblings during the first summer of COVID so that his parents would have an easier time working at home. (Andover even mentioned this within the letter of acceptance.) And two, he helped me coach a basketball team of little ones.
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well, I saw some kids who have perfect everything including babysitting younger siblings and helping neighbors’ kids, and coaching tennis etc got waitlisted…
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Yes and as has been repeated again and again, it’s simply a numbers game. The kids who were admitted aren’t “better” yet are just as wonderful, in ways both similar and different.
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I would rather repeat the “private” school’s admission game is more like a business, the acceptance/WL/rejection does not tell who your kid is, it is just a game, or a game of lottery for now days.
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