@Agentninetynine, my son got into some very good schools and chose to attend a top LAC. The day he arrived, a kid in the room next door asked him, “Are you a recruited athlete?” “I hope not,” said my 6’4" but not athletically gifted son. “Are you a legacy?” “No.” “Well, you don’t look like a minority, so you must be really smart.”
^Hahaha! @shawbridge. Good for him!
@shawbridge —the story is funny, but pathetically true. So, absenting any of those hooks, he was just there on his own merit! I know it is the reality, so not sure why I am even commenting.
@shawbridge, if you add to your list celebrity (“Have I heard of you before?”) and developmental (“Is your family’s name on any of the buildings?”), you have the remaining (“you must be really smart”) cohort. I wonder if anyone has figured out what percentage of selective school slots are available for “really smart” kids that don’t tick any of the other boxes.
My kids were accepted early to their first choices, which is mostly a wonderful thing, and makes for a relaxed senior year. However, since they never applied after the early round and to a large number of schools, I’m missing data points for this discussion (other than what I know of their classmates).
ETA: I guess I missed first generation college.
I have to laugh about names on buildings. We happen to be extremely good friends with a family who have names on a number of structures/places at my D’s chosen college. They are delighted that she is going there, but they love to tell me how such and such cousin with name, or such and such nephew of Named Buidling Person, applied to this college, and DID NOT get in. They think it is hilarious, and my D was cracking up (silently) when they did a campus tour at her college and stopped at the named outdoor place. Perhaps one needs to be the offspring of a building contributor:-)
Or the offspring of a FUTURE building contributor…
@shawbridge I agree with you. I should have been clearer that I do not think the alumni interviewer made a critical difference in the admission decision. I just thought the interviewer was annoying and off-base. My son put in just one Ivy application at my suggestion; it was a lottery, and what the heck. He didn’t visit the campus prior to applying. He himself was more focused on what he described as “colleges where it’s safe to be a thinker.”
i think many “average” excellent students live in the bubble that is their local world, in which they probably are a rockstar–in that context, why shouldnt they presume they are ivy material? for the most part, a high schoolers world is very, very small—only here on CC are they traveling all over the country to pursue some random interest or competition. most kids compare themselves to their peers, and to them, peers means the Podunk High’s Senior Class.
and i think that many “average” excellent students have lousy advising. many of them dont have parents that obsessively look at stats and common data sets,and depend on overworked guidance counselors who may or may not know their nose from their elbow.
i have said it before, CC’rs assume everyone thinks like them. i do not know a single “average” excellent student personally…and i also dont know an “average” excellent parent in real life. we assume that kids should be able to analyze the plethora of data on their own and then when they cant navigate it alone we monday morning quarterback about how ridiculous it was that they applied to impossible reaches and got into none. then we get annoyed when the GC directs them to apply to lousy choice local instead of some top prestigious LAC that kids locally have never even heard of. its an impossible situation for a kid.
personally, i would find it helpful if colleges flat out said, hey, we dont accept blonde girls from the east coast with perfect scores ever. it would make life much easier.
I went to a talk made by an ex-Adcom from a local elite school and he listed the various categories in order that the Adcoms consider to paint the picture of what your unhooked candidate is up against.
@mackinaw, there’s even one more category – important professor at the school. Quie a few kids of Harvard prof friends of mine are admitted. Harvard reputedly has something called the Z-list and the kids of profs and celebs and hedgies who are capable enough to perform well at the school but would not get in are told that they will have guaranteed admission if they take a gap year and use it well. A number of professors’ kids whom I know are there or went there via that route. All did fine but none would have gotten in on their own.
@IxnayBob, ShawSon was both really smart (still is, remarkably) and severely dyslexic and I just didn’t know how schools would react to him. He didn’t take languages in HS and did fewer ECs, though his were interesting. So he applied to 14 or 15 schools.
ShawSon and I agree with the OP’s advice not to visit highly selective schools unless they are "show the love’ places. ShawSon refused to visit schools with 10% or lower probability of admission. He said, “Why fall in love when I am have a 10% probability of success?” I think with his stats and recs he was better than 10% but that took him to 25% or 35%. In fact, the only highly selective school where I thought he was at 50% or above was my alma mater, which to my surprise did not accept him (although because of the dyslexia I didn’t want him to go there and strongly recommended the school he attended). Because he got into quite a few, we then could do triage and limited the visits to three.
My daughter is finishing a successful year at what was her safety school. I don’t think she would be any happier anywhere else, and I would have $30,000 less in the bank because admission to the safety came with a substantial merit scholarship. (None of the schools where she was denied admission or waitlisted offer merit aid.)
I spent hours on Naviance and reading CC and searching for college admissions websites for statistics that would inform my understanding about her odds, so I knew they were long, but I was still disappointed at this time last year. She scored between 700-750 on all three sections of the SAT and two SAT II subject tests, 3.9 GPA, scored 5s in the three AP courses she took, was a National Merit commended student, editor-in-chief of her school newspaper, on the editorial staff of her school literary magazine, four year member of the mock trial team, and served on a youth advisory committee at the local public library. All of which is fantastic, but run of the mill when it comes to elite college admissions. I was very aware of all the things she was not: a star athlete, a talented musician or singer a performer, a budding scientist, a philanthropist. To make matters worse, in addition to being female, she is white, from a suburb of a major city on the East Coast, attended a private high school, and has two college educated parents. None of those things worked in her favor in her applications to a handful of top LACs in or near Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Despite test scores and grades that were above the median and in a couple of cases at or above the 75th percentile, she was denied or waitlisted at all of them.
Her one “hook” was that she was a legacy at the local Ivy I attended. She liked the urban campus and it fit her idea of what she wanted, so she applied there early decision. It is the only Ivy she applied to, and the only one where I thought she had any real chance of admission, and even then only because she was a legacy. Alas, she was deferred and then denied. And I know two other girls with almost identical profiles who were also legacies at that school who were also denied admission. There seems to be a perception on CC and in the NY Times, where they are often caricatured as the dull and lazy offspring of big donors, that legacies are generally unqualified for admission, but I don’t think it is true. On the contrary, I think the pool of legacy applicants at any Ivy is probably one of the deepest and strongest in the entire applicant pool, but the ones who are admitted shine just a little brighter.
The important thing, though, is that she landed in a good place, at a very good price, and she is happy there. You really can’t ask for more than that.
Some of the legacies and celebrities are also really smart. In fact IME a legacy doesn’t get into Harvard unless they are really, really smart.
http://chronicle.com/article/Legacys-Advantage-May-Be/125812/
("A researcher at Harvard University recently examined the impact of legacy status at 30 highly selective colleges and concluded that, all other things being equal, legacy applicants got a 23.3-percentage-point increase in their probability of admission. ")
Where this gets confusing for me is that we have seen real life cases of kids, like the geology student mentioned above, who were strong but not brilliant students who nevertheless get admitted to a top school. You simply don’t know exactly why, but let’s say you presume it was due to the unusual EC because in your experience the academic record seems insufficient to have tilted the scale. This example then gives you hope for your own kid, who also has an unusual EC. However, even then it’s hard to know if your kid’s unique passion is actually truly unusual on a national level out of thousands of applicants (are there Common Data Sets for how many high school girls nationwide work in geology internships?), and if so, whether the school in question will care one whit about that particular interest of your child’s.
A parent also suspects that certain other factors may weigh in the kid’s favor, but can’t really know if or how much those factors will favorably shift the odds. For example, my D is a URM (but with college-educated parents, which seems to detract from the weight of that status somewhat), a strong recruitable athlete for Div. III (where coach influence on admissions is nebulous and highly variable compared to Div. I), has what I think are rather unique EC’s, but her academics are definitely not tip-top. Then add in the other unknown of how test optional schools think, and it’s very murky. Does she have a reasonable chance at a top LAC such that she should use her ED silver bullet there? I have no idea, and I’m a seasoned parent who has been on these boards for years. If she were to get rejected, I’d say “well duh, her stats weren’t that great.” But if she were to be admitted, then I’d think we had great foresight.
Which is why I said, way back in my initial post, that a student should apply, by all means, just don’t expect it will happen.
It isn’t impossible, it just isn’t likely.
Since starting this thread I have seen several instances where a kid defies the odds and gets into a Top 20 school. They haven’t got incredible stats, but they are like the geology student. Heck, a kid in our school got in with seemingly nothing spectacular or really interesting whatsoever. He kept it quiet, and all the kids have since been marveling at how he got in. It CAN happen, and I guess that is why people apply despite the odds. I think the important thing is understanding how unlikely it is.
^THIS! No one is saying “don’t bother”. They are saying “don’t put all your eggs in the Top 20 basket!” And stop being shocked that you applied to 12 of them and were shut out and only got into a safety! A Top 20, (or even 50,) is a reach for most kids. Realistic matches are important. How many kids think Vandy is a match? Or UNC when they are OOS?
Exactly!
Not a fan of the scattershot apply to top X schools. They’re all so different in terms of fit, it doesn’t make sense and you can’t do a quality application to each one without a ridiculous amount of effort.
But taking a flyer on a couple of high reaches, however defined, because everything else about it seems like a fit? Absolutely. Just be sure you know why you think it’s a good fit. I had my kid’s schools ranked from shoo-in to fuggedabout it, and surprise surprise he got into the one I’d identified as the one he was 3rd least likely to get into. (And didn’t get into the one I thought was a solid match.) Hey, you never know…
I was reading @quietdesperation’s thread last night. The parent is looking at how to sort schools into the 3 categories and was using her school’s naviance to help. I was blown away, by how well his/her public high school does in admissions. I read here how much of a longshot these schools are, but at some high schools it seems your odds improve drastically by virtue of attending. In my city, if you attend a top private or a specialized high school such as Stuyvesant, you already have that extra bonus before even starting.
We see something similar in our public school system. When @HRSMom asks “How many kids think Vandy is a match?”, well our Naviance scattergram indicates it is a match for the top 20% of students and a safety (i.e. nobody rejected in the last 10 years) for the top 10%.
But it varies by school. Tufts, supposedly less selective than Vandy, accepts both students lower than top 20%, and rejects some of the tippy top students in our school (the famous “Tufts Syndrome”). Among Ivies, our acceptance rate to Harvard is 3x the national average, but Brown’s is below the national average.
The Chronicle article cited above actually underscores my point about legacy admissions. The author noted that his research showed that legacies tended to have higher SAT scores than the general population of applicants to elite schools, and that legacy status was more of an advantage the higher the SAT scores were. A legacy with a 2300 is more likely to be admitted than the non-legacy with a 2300. A legacy with a 1900 is just as unlikely to be admitted as a non-legacy with a 1900. It would be interesting to know whether a legacy with a 2150 is more likely to be admitted than a non-legacy with a 2250, but there are limits to the research methodology and it probably varies from school to school and perhaps from year to year. I am not disputing that legacies are admitted at a higher rate than non-legacies, but my sense is that the legacies who are admitted are usually highly qualified, and the competition among legacies is stiff. There are many very qualified legacies who are denied admission.