Another thing Darth. If I felt as strongly about this, I would write a letter to the Director of Admissions. If nothing else it would get these feelings off your chest.
But leave out the Jewish conspiracy thought experiment…
Hahaha, Yes. that was genuinely just a thought experiment. Given my background, I have a lot of admiration for Jewish culture and their devotion to acquisition of knowledge.
Thank you. I might consider that. Your comments are genuinely thoughtful and kind and I appreciate that very much during this hard time for my family. Never thought that a simple University Admission decision could twist us so completely out of shape. Didn’t feel this about any other school, even his acceptances. I guess the actions of people you feel closest to, hurt you the most huh?
Yes, really sorry about your kid. I am seeing this same thing with some other families whose kids really fell in love with one school and just got denied so they are so hurt. And the parents are too. It’s really tough to see your kid go through that.
One family is Hispanic and another family is Asian. They were really positive that their kid would get their choice but it didn’t work out that way.
The sooner that you can move forward, the better for your kid too. They really pick up on our feelings and if we are having a bitter time then they will also.
My advise for anyone reading this is to have your kid cast a wide net and do not fall in love with one school.
Good luck to all.
@darth1289 I feel awful for you and your family. It sounds like your son is waitlisted at this point. I hope you are reaching out to his regional couselor as well as to the dean of admissions. My son got lucky and got in ea with a merit scholarship to boot but I can’t tell you why. He’s got near perfect test scores and a 3.8+ but I couldn’t tell you why he got in over the other kids in the pool. His essays just blew me away but I’m sure most of the waitlisted and rejected kids had great essays too.
I can tell you that the entire admissions group at UC has been extremely helpful, responsive, open, and receptive. Not just to my son but to others in our area. And I know UC doesn’t want people to harass them to get off the WL, but what do you have to lose at this point. It’s awfully hard to stand out in a sea of 35/36 2300+ straight A students. And judging from past history, it looks like Chicago is usually pretty active with their WL. I’m sure quite a few of those that were admitted are waiting for Ivy day next week.
I don’t think we’ll ever get the transparency you want because it’s such an inherently subjective process, like hiring people. My kid had a very strange admission season where he got accepted to his reaches and most of his upper level matches but got rejected by several low low matches and safeties. And we’re white and full pay. So I can’t blame it on an anti-Asian bias or on a neediness bias. It was just imperfect and random.
@goingnutsmom Thank you for your post. For some strange reason, I found it comforting to learn that we were not the only family going thru this right now.
A few days back, I found my wife sobbing alone in our room. She had been doing some Spring cleaning and had run into my son’s “What do you want to be when you grow up” assignment from his second grade. She showed it to me and he had written that he wanted to go to the University of Chicago and build a space ship. It really overwhelmed her.
Right now, my son feels like a boy who has been in love with a plain looking girl all his life but suddenly this girl has transformed into a beautiful princess and now everybody is clamoring for her attention and she can’t spot him in the periphery of her vision anymore even though he has been doing everything to impress her and get her attention.
When we encouraged his love for my alma mater, we had no idea that by the time he has ready to apply, it would become so insanely competitive. At first, I was kind of happy when Chicago started to make progress in the rankings game, but then as the application numbers soared and the admit rate plummeted, I started getting a little uneasy. It was a bitter sweet moment when the latest USNews rankings came out and I found out that Chicago had retained its 4th place rank. I knew we were in for a tough application season then.
But we snapped out of our fairy tale romance when he got deferred and scrambled and cast a much wider net. So he will do fine. Some schools have even been generous with a lot of merit money, but it always stings when the school you have your heart set on, says “Meh”
Our strategy will be very different for our second child though and given the current application climate, no falling in love with a school, till you have a firm admit from them!
@gluttonforstress Funny screen name. Maybe meditation might help? I have been doing a lot of it lately 
I’m glad Chicago worked out for your son. Hopefully, he will enjoy his time there.
Your son’s case and mine is why I would love to be a fly on the wall in these admissions committee meetings. Clearly there is a method to this madness, Someone picked your kid out of that large pool for a reason, but as you said, we don’t understand why and Colleges never share the candid story with us. It all remains an enigma
Yeah, I am not holding my breath on the application process changing anytime soon. It is what it is.
Okay, FWIW, here’s my version of the candid story. It’s not exactly comforting, but it’s not nefarious either and it’s not much of a story to tell or that satisfying a story to hear. Plus the telling of it could be counterproductive.
As someone who has been an alumni interviewer for undergrad admissions and who has been in a decisionmaking role in department-level graduate admissions, I think that standing out/looking interesting is a big factor. And what makes an applicant stand out or look interesting varies – there’s not a formula and there’s an element of subjectivity, especially wrt what’s interesting (vs. merely different). (Conversely, I think it’s arguable that what makes one application almost indistinguishable from a host of others is a more objective or less controversial factor. In other words, a formula – or formulae – could be articulated). When going through a pile of applications (or a series of interviews), it doesn’t feel like picking someone out for a reason so much as having a person or an application jump out of a sea of sameness.
On one level, I think of John Green’s admonition – “don’t forget to be awesome” and, on another, I imagine our stressed-out kids thinking “who has the time?” and am well aware of our parental tendency to recognize our own kids’ awesomeness even when others (including the kids themselves) don’t. But admissions officers don’t really have access to kids – they have to judge applications. And, as an increasingly competitive admissions environment pushes kids to check off more and more boxes and to maximize various stats, fewer kids have the opportunity to do something awesome or even to figure out what they think awesome is. And it’s a risk most parents wouldn’t encourage them to take because, realistically, there’s a lot of BS and floundering on the road to awesome. Time seems better spent on doing what must be done and by doing as much of it as well as it can possibly be done. That approach will pretty reliably get a student into an excellent college – and position that student to do well once admitted. But it doesn’t reliably get anyone into their dream school – if that dream school is one of a handful of highly selective colleges.
As a result, we risk a situation where the moral of the college admissions story becomes you can bust your ass to do everything right and it still doesn’t matter. You lose out to someone else who, at best, looks no better than you do – or, even worse, appears to have less impressive credentials but to have been accepted for some arbitrary reason. But, honestly, the parents and kids who feel this way aren’t seeing what admissions officers see – they have both more info (by virtue of having years of daily interactions with classmates or teammates) and less info (no teacher recommendations or essays, no sense of what the applicant pool as a whole looks like) than what admissions officers have access to when they evaluate an application which, in most cases, probably gets no more than 15-20 minutes of any individual reader’s attention.
Bottom line is, in the context of admissions decisions, it’s your application – rather than your record or your worthiness – that’s being judged. And it’s not a lottery – it’s an elevator pitch. You’ve got a few minutes to convince someone that what you’re selling is something they want more than what most other pitchmakers are selling. And, of course, when investors make decisions based on elevator pitches, they’ll inevitably make mistakes. But, given the volume of applications and the turnaround time for processing them, there’s no way college admissions can give more than a few minutes to most applications. So it is what it is, unless/until schools decide to lower the number of applications they’ll accept.
So what’s a parent to do? Help identify great colleges that are appealing to your kid but where admission is more predictable. Discourage belief in “the one.” Explain how the process works and what is and isn’t at stake . And encourage your kid to keep at the essays until s/he feels they capture what’s most appealing about their voice/personality/way of looking at the world.
If you’re in a position where you’re able to make decisions about which HS your kid will attend, don’t assume that the most demanding/rigorous/prestigious choice is the best one. Look for the place where your kid will have the time/space/motivation/resources to be awesome.
@darth1289 Hey Darth, I would really encourage you to send an email to the admissions office explaining the situation. It really does look like something went wrong here - but admissions will definitely be open to reconsidering the case in light of this information. Good luck, I hope everything turns out well.
@neweducation Thanks for the advice. Will do that.
@darth1289 You made a major mistake in ever encouraging your child to fall in one with any particular university. Chicago today is a very different university than it was 20 or 30 years ago and that has been part of a conscious plan by the university to change. Moreover, if you and your wife are both UC alums, the Adcom will assume that yours was a very intellectual family and that your child will have benefitted from this. Your alum status is thus a mixed blessing. Chicago has also been famous for never giving much preference to legacies. The former director, Ted O’Neill, was very opposed to the very concept. He’s written about that. No secret there.
I do not believe any “smoke and mirrors” are involved and you have provided zero evidence. Indeed, many former admissions directors have spoken on what is involved. When cases are discussed they DO discuss the various factors that may have affected a candidate, ie socio-economic deprivation, illness etc. Adcom members will highlight the fact that a given candidate received a 1950 on their SAT despite having been very ill, or in care, and this will carry more weight than the kid who actives 2200 with the benefit of private tutors. They will seek to admit international students that bring different perspectives to campus. If you are from Scarsdale, NY, you will be expected to have done better than the kid educated in Detroit.
Disenchanted alums are a part of life for highly selective universities. The dean of admissions at Harvard used to publish a collection of excerpts from the nasty letters he received when the children of alumni are rejected. But again you have not demonstrated why it would in any way be preferable to admit on “objective” criteria.
One final comment. You are absolutely wrong that Oxbridge admits on the basis of objective factors alone. Their process is very opaque as the interview figures prominently and it is well known that students from Eton and St Paul’s do much better than candidates from local comprehensives. Moreover, the government sets them absolute targets for the number of students admitted from various types of schools. Only just recently two Cambridge colleges admitted that 25% of their admitted students had failed to “make their offers”, i.e. they were admitted for “other” reasons.
I’m sorry you are so aggrieved. I only wonder if your child is as upset as you are. Chicago is a great university but it isn’t the only university.
@klingon97 However much the college may have changed, there are few traits that’ll help a UChicago applicant more than the presumption he/she is “very intellectual.” Those who use “intellectual” as an insult aren’t likely to find work with the U of C’s admissions office (or anywhere else that pays above $7.25/hour, but that’s another matter).
I think that Klingon was suggesting that an intellectual kid from an intellectual family may seem less impressive than an intellectual kid who has grown up in an environment that seems unlikely to have fostered/valued intellectualism. The latter kid, arguably, needs/“deserves” U of C more.
That clears things up some. Yes, legacy status precludes a student from being the first in his/her family to attend college, and means it’s less likely a student will be considered low-income. However, these things would be true for most students whose parents graduated from a top 1000 school.
On the whole, I doubt being a double legacy is anything but a net positive.
It’s a different issue than first-gen or income. It’s about (perceptions of) personality and values and aspirations and maybe even drive. On a really basic level, it’s easy to see that a kid is fiercely intellectual when s/he acts that way despite everything in the environment pushing in the opposite direction. By contrast, when everything in a kid’s environment says you must do well in school and aspire to attend a highly selective college, it can be hard to separate whether obedience/conformity vs. intellectualism explains what the kid does and why. And, again, the admissions folks don’t get to know the kid – they have to make this call based on the application.
@klingon97 I don’t want to debate this any longer. Based on the tone and content of your post, I don’t expect you to understand my perspective
For me, It’s time to move on now. Life is too short to continue to obsess over college admissions to a single university. My child is academically gifted and will do well wherever he goes. It’s Chicago’s loss if they want to deny admission to a kid who would have been an asset to the school and their choice to alienate an alum family
If they do that my money, support and kids will go elsewhere. It’s that simple.
There are many good universities that are courting us and will be happy to have my kid attend and take my money and support. Some will even pay him to attend. We thought we should give Chicago first dibs, and yes their treatment of our child stung but oh well… That’s life. Better we know now and not afterwards
@darth1289 I wish you well. I understand your pain. But it is to Chicago’s credit that they do not admit students merely to placate their parents who are alums. That’s not far off from selling places. I’m certain your child will do well and thrive elsewhere. Chicago is just one university.
Lol, That may not be such a smart strategy. Chicago is not Harvard. They have a much smaller endowment. Chicago is also one of the worst leveraged Universities amongst its peers because of the debt they have taken on to go on a construction binge. In fact their bond rating is in jeopardy right now. There is a reason they are in the midst of a capital campaign. They need to build up their endowment. And if you look at Harvard, Yale and other schools, you will realize that Alums play a very important role in keeping a University’s endowment size competitive. Generous alums make a lot of the “social experiments” that elite Universities undertake possible. You think that these universities can claim to be “Need blind” and conduct aggressive minority outreach without generous alum support?
If Chicago treats enough alum families poorly in the admission process, word will get around. Chicago needs its successful alums more than Harvard needs its alums or Chcago’s alums need Chicago right now. I don’t know about other alum kids but my kid is not a charity case for the school. He is not like former Senator Frist’s kid at Princeton. We did not bring him up that way. He slogged his butt off. He is eminently qualified to be a successful student at Chicago, even if Chicago decides to reject him because he doesn’t fit “a certain profile”.
So Chicago does not want him? Fine. He will go elsewhere. He is going to be successful and thrive. Given our background, his interests and his skills, he is probably going to found and run a successful company in the future. Well guess where his money will go? To his alma mater. Guess where his company will recruit. not Chicago. BTW, guess which University he will always remember with a bad taste in his mouth? … Yup, that’s right.
If Chicago’s admission policies become unwelcoming and/or hostile to alum kids, not only will Chicago lose the support of many current alums, it will miss the chance to build a strong alum family tradition. The same kind of tradition that have put Harvard, Yale and Princeton where they are today.
Sympathetic alums and their deserving alum kids who are rejected and land up at other Universities will become hostile towards the University. That is Chicago’s choice, but don’t forget history.
It is not an accident that Chicago went form having one of the largest endowments in the 1950’s (third largest in inflation adjusted dollars, behind only Harvard and Yale and bigger than Stanford, Columbia, Penn and many other schools) to currently badly trailing many of its peers.
Any University that pisses off enough current and former students is not going to be very successful in the long run.
^ Please go take a nice walk and breathe… Don’t read anymore of this thread. It’s not healthy for you to do this.
Yes, you have helped your son reach his best and where he lands will be fine because you have invested in him.
Just this year, we know one family whose D applied to Stanford and has legacy there- denied. Another last year whose S applied to Harvard with double legacy ( both parents)- denied.
The elites deny lots of legacies too. It was painful for them too. The one kid whose parents were legacies is doing great at another school. The one this year, I have no doubt will do awesome at her school too.
Things will work out on this new path…