<p>
[quote]
If this kids is worried about his/her chances of getting into school, where does that leave the rest of us?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>There is no evidence that the kid is worried. The posting is from a parent, not a kid.</p>
<p>And the parent is not just worried about getting the child into college, but getting her intro "a good school" with "full financial aid," given a very low EFC and an understandable reluctance to apply ED.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, in this country with a less-than-transparent admissions process, it is understandable that parents worry about admissions, even for as talented a student as this one appears to be.</p>
<p>Our admissions system must seem especially bewildering to immigrant parents like the poster on that thread. </p>
<p>In other countries, university admission typically depends on the outcome of a single well-defined, high-stakes entrance exam. If you score above the cutoff, you are in. Otherwise not.</p>
<p>In other countries, universities do not cheerfully boast that they turn down half the students with perfect scores on the entrance-exam in order to accept students with lower scores but with other--sometimes less quantifiable--credentials, like sparkling essays, fascinating off-beat EC's, or playing the right instrument needed for the orchestra. </p>
<p>In other countries, admissions officials do not boast that the entering class they admitted is "indistinguishable" from another class they could have gotten if they just tossed out the applications from the admitted pool and went fishing again for another class of equal size from the remaining applications.</p>
<p>In other industrial economies, tuition at the top universities does not cost on the same order of magnitude as the median family income. </p>
<p>In other countries, universities do not modify their admissions standards in order to admit star athletes, nor do they offer such athletes a free ride, all-expenses-paid university education.</p>
<p>In other countries, there is often a very clear "pecking order" among universities--with the ranking made explicit by the cutoff scores needed to gain entry, and parents naturally encourage their children to shoot for "the best."</p>
<p>So far as I know, other countries do not have a phenomenon where some universities reject or waitlist very strong students that they think will go elsewhere. </p>
<p>Reasonable people may differ about whether the admission system in other industrialized countries is better or worse than here, but it is certainly the case that other admissions systems are more transparent than ours.</p>
<p>I can certainly imagine that recent immigrants would be about as befuddled about the American admissions process as Lewis Carroll's Alice was befuddled by Wonderland.</p>
<p>Just to get to this country, green-card immigrants have had to jump through all sorts of arbitrary and sometimes mystifyingly inconsistent bureacratic hoops. </p>
<p>I can certainly understand why immigrant parents, new to our country and culture and language, would be wary of further unexpected booby-traps in the admissions process.</p>
<p>It's hard to know what kind of information to trust. The history of college admissions in this country (e.g., explicit and openly acknowledged discrimination against Jews less than a century ago, more recently things like Princeton admissions officers breaking into the Yale computer system to find out about the status of overlap applicants, antitrust proceedings against colleges for sharing financial aid informatino on overlap applicants a little over a decade ago, adcoms making statements about the effect of ED of dubious veracity, "merit aid" as sometimes thinly disguised discounting for yield management purposes, etc.) </p>
<p>None of this exactly inspires confidence in someone newly arrived in our country.</p>