In my opinion. Kids who have an impact, and not through a highly structured organization (eg model UN) but by pursuing their own interests in their own way.
Gift article:
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But I think they are also interested in the kid who takes all the hardest courses available and gets great grades, is passionate about learning for the sake of learning, is a joy to have in a classroom, is always nice and helpful to fellow students . . . and is super into Model UN.
Indeed, if you look at the Harvard admissions lawsuit documents, listen to the Yale Admissions Podcast (or read the transcripts), and so on, it becomes clear a lot of successful applicants “only” have more or less normal high school activities. Where they were dedicated and eventually successful and eventually leaders, but still they mostly just did the normal HS things they loved, rather than going outside the scope of normal HS things.
And then some also have the sorts of things that might get you written up in the NYT, but that is the less common path.
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Totally agree, very few kids can do something like this. So of course schools take more typical kids. In my opinion, these schools want kids who will make an impact in the world, so this is their ideal.
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We were just talking about this last night. This is the type of kid who gets into Harvard.
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But they also want kids who will make a big impact in their college community.
I don’t think that is any less of an “ideal” for them. Or maybe the better way to put it is they have a variety of institutional goals they are working to satisfy, and any kid who is a good bet to satisfy their goals is a good admit.
So, the faculty are stakeholders and want students who they will enjoy teaching in advanced classes.
The other students are also stakeholders who want fellow students who will be enthusiastically collaborative, interesting, and generally enjoyable to work with.
And then they have a long list of important student activities, all of which need a constant pipeline of new students to begin as participants, and then eventually become leaders, and then they will graduate and the cycle continues. They see all that as a critical part of the experience, and indeed part of developing lifelong and multigenerational relationships.
So I don’t think if they see a kid’s application and have a clear vision of how they will be a great participant in their college community that they are somehow settling for second-best when they admit such a kid. They are perfectly happy to admit such kids because that is actually their job, to sustain the college year after year by replacing the kids like that who are graduating with new kids who will do it all again.
At sub 25% acceptance, the kid needs to “have something” but what that is can’t be defined precisely (it’s a matter of “knowbit when you see it”) but in addition there are institutional needs and affinities… and not all fantastic kids can be admitted.
So, kids like that one, doing what they’re best at and being noticed for the right reason, are definitely sought after, but all sorts of achievements can work, not just the “nationally known” kind.
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I agree. To be clear, one can have an impact and not be nationally known.
I think this kid embodies the MIT Applying Sideways ethos. He’s clearly very interested in politics and is pursuing it very well, and not as some box to check off.
There are tens of thousands of valedictorians, and class presidents, but I would guess there’s only one kid who’s been kicked out of an event by Ron DeSantis’ campaign (for asking a serious, and respectful question).
I realize this is an almost impossible bar for most kids but to me it’s such a perfect example of that something extra super selective schools are looking for.
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I note if you have three factors, even if there is some conditionality, you can get down to under 4% if the conditional probabilities are 34% each (meaning 0.34 * 0.34 * 0.34 is 0.039304).
The Harvard lawsuit indicated that was approximately how it worked with around 90% of their unhooked admits. Maybe a little more generous with academics and activities (meaning at that time, it would be more like 40-45% for those), a little less with personal ratings (more like 20-25%), but the point is you just had to be very good, but not the tops, in all three of those categories, and then that “triple-threat” combination was rare enough to make you likely for admission.
If you then listen to the Yale Admissions Podcast (or read the transcripts), they make similar points. Like, here is a critical passage on activities and recommendations:
MARK: –when it comes to things like your extracurricular activities and your letters of recommendation, we use a 9-point scale. So 9 is the strongest. 1 is the weakest. In practice, we primarily use the middle of a scale. You’re almost never going to see something that isn’t a 4, 5, 6, or 7–
HANNAH: Right.
MARK: –on a printed slate, even across hundreds of applications in a typical day.
HANNAH: Yeah. So for example, when we’re rating your extracurricular accomplishments, we occasionally see some super, super extraordinary extracurricular accomplishments, like an Olympic medal.
MARK: Yeah.
HANNAH: So we reserve those top, top ratings for something like that. Most people are going to fall in that middle range.
MARK: Right. We also read some really extraordinary letters of recommendation that give some amazing details about how a student transformed a learning environment and was absolutely singular in an educator’s career, and so we’ll reserve that 8 or that 9 for that kind of letter.
They also discussed the popular “spike” theory:
[Mark] Yeah, and this relates to something that we actually got a listener email about, which is– it’s a good question, is about, do you need to have a spike in your application? And this is– what’s interesting is this is not a term that I had heard before. But it sounds like it’s pretty common out there among students who are talking to each other. So, Hannah, can you like– what’s the concept of a spike?
[Hannah] Yeah, so the idea is that you could either be well-rounded, or you could be pointy in your activities. So if you’re well-rounded, you do a lot of different varied things. And if you’re pointy or you have a spike, then you have one thing that you’re really, really, really good at.
[Mark] Yeah, and I, over the years, have gotten tons of questions from students, saying, do you prefer well-rounded students, or pointy students?
[Hannah] Right. Yeah.
[Mark] And my answer is, yes. All kinds.
[Hannah] Yes.
[Mark] And it’s interesting, because I know that this actually is a line that admissions officers have used over the years, where they explain that what they’re looking for is a well-rounded student body, not necessarily well-rounded students and I can understand where that’s coming from, but I think it’s much too dismissive of the well-rounded student, who maybe isn’t particularly spiky in one area. So I think people hear that and say, oh I’ve got to be spiky so that my spike is going to join all the other spikes and then together–
[Reed] Right.
[Mark] We’ll be this big spiky wheel or something, I don’t know.
[Hannah] Yeah, like whatever you do, that’s what you should do. I mean, if you happen to be the kind of person who wants to pursue a lot of varied things, if you’re a little bit of a jack of all trades, that’s great. Do that. And if you have this one clear passion, or spike, that you’re exceptionally good at, then do that. But one is not better than the other.
[Mark] And we see students go in the wrong direction both ways, right? We see students who are passionate with a capital P about something, but they think that they need to have a bunch of other stuff in their applications.
[Hannah] Right, yeah.
[Mark] So they’re just participants and involved, but it doesn’t mean much for us. And we also see students who really would love to be pursuing really disparate interests and contributing a lot different ways. They say, oh, I’ve got to have a spike. And so I need to abandon these things that I care about to double or triple down on this one thing. And no, you don’t need to do that at all.
[Hannah] Don’t– just don’t make these decisions based on how it’s going to look on your resume or on your college application. Make them based on how you actually want to be spending your time.
[Reed] Yes, there is a whole spectrum of activity, from the student who does it, all the student who does one thing. And when you get to college, we are not going to expect the student who does one thing to suddenly become a jack of all trades. And we’re not going to expect the student who loves doing it all to suddenly focus in on their extracurricular activities in college. You’re eventually going to have to select a major or majors. You’re not going to have to focus down your activities to one.
[Hannah] Yeah.
This is all consistent with the Harvard information, and is consistent with a model where only rarely does someone get in because of an 8 or 9 scores on something. But a combination of, say, all 6s and 7s might be rare enough to make those Yale applicants relatively strong for admission.
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Can I be clear and say I do not think this kid’s path is the only way to get admitted?
But it’s a great example to show all those outraged parents come springtime, when their “average excellent” kids get shut out of HPYSM.
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But I think a large part of what is going on is the combinations start to become rare.
Like, yes, there are a lot of valedictorians. And a lot of football captains. But how many valedictorians are also football captains?
That’s already a much rarer combination than either alone.
And then how many valedictorian/football captains also get teacher and counselor recommendations saying they are very nice and always trying to help out their fellow students?
That “triple-threat” combination is going to be even more rare.
So I really think a lot of the mismatch between what seems like a fairly generous way of looking at things by, say, the Yale Admissions Office, and the observed very low rates of admissions, is people may not understand exactly how rare these combinations actually are.
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I guess my concern is that this leads to pushing kids to not just be kids.
Like, I love the Yale Admissions Podcast in part because it is so humane. Same with the MIT Applying Sideways Blog, and so on. If you are a smart kid who likes school and then follow their advice, you will very likely have a great high school experience. And maybe you will get into Yale or MIT, or maybe you will go to another college that is a bit less selective, but all that will be fine.
If you instead believe most people get into Yale, MIT, and their peers because they do something outside the scope of a normal great high school experience, you might be tempted to sacrifice having a normal great high school experience in pursuit of such a thing. Of course if that is just what you want to do anyway, not to get into Yale or MIT, then great. But if you think you must do something like that to get into Yale, MIT, and such, then you might not have such a great high school experience.
And sadly, we hear about that all the time, kids who were at one point happy, successful kids, who then got caught up in trying to get admitted to some hyper selective colleges, and they ended up making themselves miserable. And if anything, all that was incredibly counter-productive.
So, while I get that some parents might want to hear that their extraordinary kid got beat out by an even more extraordinary kid, I really wonder if that is what the kids need to hear. My own feeling is the best message for them is more along the lines that these colleges have all sorts of complex institutional priorities, and if some of these colleges don’t admit you it just means you didn’t strike them as one of the best bets to satisfy some of those priorities, but that is no big deal because undoubtedly some great college did want you, so it is all good.
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I think you’ve missed my point, which means I’ve been unclear.
I did not share the article believing this kid to be some sort of template others must follow.
Rather, to me, he embodies exactly what the MIT blog talks about. He’s extremely interested in politics and is pursuing that interest extremely well – and (as far as I know!) he is not pursuing it in order to get into a selective school.
Doing almost anything for the sole purpose of getting into hpysm is unlikely to be successful, in my opinion.
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I am definitely reacting to the “and not through a highly structured organization (eg model UN)” part of what you wrote.
This may indeed not be what you intended to suggest. I just wanted to make it clear that I think if a kid wants to do a normal HS activity like Model UN as their main thing, they should do that and not worry about whether it will look good enough to highly selective colleges. Because it very likely can look good enough, in combination with the other things they look for.
And then if a parent has a kid who loved Model UN and yet that kid doesn’t get into some highly selective college, and that parent is looking for an explanation, it almost surely is not that loving Model UN was a bad choice for that kid. Again, you may not have intended to suggest otherwise, I just think the right message for those kids would not include a suggestion that loving normal HS things is bad, not ideal, or whatever for these colleges.
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If the point of the post is just for parents to realize that their great kid is not the be-all and end-all, then it might serve that purpose. But this kid is likely just doing what he loves, and may not even apply to Ivies+ and he’ll be just fine, like Steven Spielberg, with his many movies as a teenager may have applied successfully to a top school but it’s irrelevant because he was making his own path outside the usual channels.
To me the idea that you have to be a world-beater to get into a top school feeds into the incredible pressure kids feel for adult-level achievement while still teenagers. Some can do that and will (often people with supportive, well-financed home lives) but most kids won’t and I think these articles about these unicorns feeds into many accomplished kids’ sense of inadequacy, and also feeds into the notion that you must publicize your passions and receive media coverage for them to be real, which is a kind of thinking that contributes to a false sense of self and has the effect of undermining mental health.
(I apologize if the above sounds preachy; I just feel like the article combined with the criticism of Model UN, a normal, valuable high-school activity (like student council, debate etc), is confusing for students and not really right, since most admits to Ivies from my kid’s school have been leaders in Model UN, student council, debate etc. among other activities — including sometimes something unusual but not covered in the national or even the local media — and were also stellar students, with great relationships with the faculty and other students.)
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