<p>If you have no ECs, no job, are not a recuited athlete, legacy or URM, but you do have a 3.8 UW and a 2200, you are going to have a hard time with the AdComms at HYPSM, I suspect.</p>
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<p>So I’m mostly talking about MIT. And there are people here with sub-2000 SAT scores. Maybe not a lot, but I’m sure there’s enough for people on CC to be surprised. But maybe MIT’s not a top school?</p>
<p>“If you have no ECs, no job, are not a recuited athlete, legacy or URM, but you do have a 3.8 UW and a 2200, you are going to have a hard time with the AdComms at HYPSM, I suspect.”</p>
<p>So, are you saying that “a recruited athlete, legacy or URM *with *a 3.8 UW and a 2200” has an *easy *time with the AdComms at HYPSM?</p>
<p>Do you have a good state school option?</p>
<p>Also, don’t take this the wrong way, but your kid’s numbers suggest he would struggle a little at an elite school. My cousin had slightly higher numbers than your kid’s and limped though 4 years of Penn pre-med. </p>
<p>Your kid may truly blossom a little later, like my cousin did in med school (which he barely got into, but just finished up really well last year). Why not let your kid build confidence and blossom at an easier, but still very good, school? </p>
<p>My cuz would’ve been better off at Penn State I truly believe and after a few beers last Christmas he admitted as much to me.</p>
<p>The top 1% of schools mostly take the top 1% of students. What is so surprising about that?</p>
<p>Sometimes a student is “top 1%” because of extraordinary athletic ability, or creative ECs, or leadership, or amazing essay writing – instead of test scores/GPA. Why is that surprising, either?</p>
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<p>Really? The top schools have to scare up applications, because no one is otherwise willing to pay full freight and go? I don’t believe it. In fact, I believe that if, tomorrow, all the top schools banded together and said that they were no longer offering financial aid, sticker price or don’t show up, they’d still be able to fill their freshman classes with relatively little impact to their overall stats.</p>
<p>I don’t want to hijack this thread but obviously, Pizzagirl, we disagree on that particular point. Now if you are alluding to Duke, Stanford and a very select few other places then we are in complete agreement. Duke and Stanford could stop giving need blind FA and still select who they want. </p>
<p>There are very few other schools that could stop merit aid and other forms of FA and still get people to go and pay full freight as you called it. </p>
<p>Both Duke and Stanford, if memory serves me correctly, have about 12K to 15K students. Perfect size. Not too big. Not too small. </p>
<p>Speaking of small you hear a lot of chatter about how some of these tiny schools are tiny because they are so selective. Really? Is that the reason? Or is it because they struggle to get over 2,000 students? </p>
<p>And that is with healthy FA! </p>
<p>God forbid how many would enroll without it.</p>
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<p>You need to reboot your memory. Both Duke and Stanford have around 6000 undergraduates.</p>
<p>I think it is unrealistic for anyone with a sub 2200 SAT to think they will get into the top 10 unless they have a hook or tremendous EC. Sure, some will, but it is still unrealistic. The climate has changed dramatically in the past 2-3 years. I have older kids where that wasn’t the case.
Now the top 20-30 schools that is a little different. But, you have still have to have something that makes you stand out.
btw the #1&2 kids at my S’s school with top SATs got into none of the 12 Ivy’s they applied to, not even waitlist, not even sure they will end up at whatever you are calling top 20 or 30- and you will hear these stories again & again.
But why make the SAT a reason for them to overlook your app. If your kid is a Jr you still have time. My S tutored himself and gained 300 points from his psat. It took him some time, but it can be done.</p>
<p>We’re just coming off the peak of the Baby Boom echo. Give it 10 years and Harvard may once again as easy to get into as Upenn or Dartmouth is today and Northwestern and U. of C. will go back to accepting 27-30% of their applicants. Sometimes, one is just in the wrong place at the wrong time.</p>
<p>Like the Rolling Stones said, “You can’t always get what you want.” Even with superhuman stats, a super selective school many not happen. . . . but so what? Don’t lose sight of the fact that your kid is AWESOME and will probably thrive almost anywhere! Or as my 13 year old likes to say, “Chillax”.</p>
<p>As the mother of a “regular” (3.2gpa/1160SAT) kid and a regular lurker/reader here, I absolutely agree that many of the folks posting on these threads have kids with stats that are way north of “normal” (OP included!) . Often I am in awe of much of what is posted here and initially I didn’t feel like I belonged or could relate but I found that’s not really true. </p>
<p>I can feel still sympathy for the kid who had his heart set on an ivy or other super-selective school but got waitlisted because I know how my son felt when HE got waitlisted (FYI: his top choice was North Carolina State). </p>
<p>I can still relate when people tell a story about how they had a lousy college visit at Tufts because WE had a lousy college visit at SUNY Albany. </p>
<p>The gist of the advice and the sharing that goes on here is the same whether your kid’s GPA is 2.9 or 4.9! Look for a good fit, kids bloom where they are planted, love thy safety, don’t hock the farm to pay for a school you can’t afford, and so on. </p>
<p>Am I sometimes envious of other people’s super amazing, self-starting, driven, achieving kids and the wonderful options and opportunies they have? Yep. But when that happens, I stay away from here for a bit and focus on the good opportunities my “regular” son has (currently he’s deciding between University at Buffalo vs. UMass Amherst for engineering – we are visiting both in about 2 weeks!)</p>
<p>As an information junkie who is wound pretty tighty, reading here truly helped to keep me “off the ledge”. For me, these message boards have bben like the “What do Expect When You’re Expecting” for college. At the end of last August, I never thought I’d be able to help my not-so-self-starting son get through this whole choosing and applying to college process.</p>
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<p>I suppose it depends on what you mean by “very few”. There are easily 75 schools or so that cost about $50K/year, enroll about half their students at full sticker prices, yet still reject the majority of their applicants.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/687793-selectivity-ranking-national-us-lacs-combined-usnews-method.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/687793-selectivity-ranking-national-us-lacs-combined-usnews-method.html</a></p>
<p>Look at schools in the 3rd 25 of PapaChicken’s list of the most selective schools. Most are expensive, selective LACs. “Selective” means they reject most applicants (albeit, more like 60-70%, not 90%). In other words, the demand exceeds the supply. Therefore, their prices keep going up. Financial Aid definitely helps them stay competitive, but FA is a tool used by colleges across a broad range of prices and admission rates. It is certainly true that merit aid tends to be used more aggressively by schools near the bottom than by schools near the top of the 75. Students with qualifications a little lower than that “2200 SAT” level can use this to their advantage if they want a school with small classes, good facilities, and a serious academic atmosphere.</p>
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<p>I suspect so also, but it won’t be because of the 3.8 GPA and <2200 SAT score.</p>
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<p>If you fulfill an institutional need the college has, you’ll have an “easier” time, but even some of those categories may not make getting an acceptance easy.</p>
<p>“I think it is unrealistic for anyone with a sub 2200 SAT to think they will get into the top 10 unless they have a hook or tremendous EC.” </p>
<p>Yep. An the fact of the matter is that there are VERY few students even with 2200+ and perfect GPA great ECs that will get into top 10. For the the tippy top schools, acceptance should be a happy surprise, not an expectation. Every student needs a variety of match and safety schools too.</p>
<p>I haven’t read the other posts in this thread – just post #1. </p>
<p>But the 2200 “cutoff” claimed on CC is a lie. It is a bald faced, untrue, myth created by people who don’t understand how the top schools look at stats. </p>
<p>I was told the same thing about my daughter, not by CC’ers (because I wasn’t naive enough to ask for chances advice in CC land), but by a very well known and highly respected author of college admissions books. Advice: “Barnard will not even look at your daughter with an SAT under 1400. You might try Bryn Mawr.” Of course, D. was accepted to Barnard with test scores in their bottom quartile. People on CC do not understand the concept of “median”. It is NOT true that Ivies only accept students with stats that are in the upper reaches of their reported score range, and that everyone in the bottom quartile is a legacy, athlete, URM, or someone dragged in at the last moment off the waitlist.</p>
<p>They look at the big picture. If your kid’s scores are relatively weak in comparison to other applicants, then the other stuff has to be very strong to compensate – but they also look at the scores in “context”. “Context” does not mean that they simply tack on an extra couple of hundred points if the applicant is hispanic or african-american – “context” means they look at where you live, where your kid goes to school, whether the parents are college grads, etc. They don’t expect some first-generation college applicant from Kansas to have the same kind of test scores as a kid at a competitive private college prep academy in Maryland. </p>
<p>I would highly recommend a book called “Winning the College Admissions Game” by Peter Van Buskirk for a different perspective. It isn’t about getting into the Ivy League, but it is about how to select a best fit college and how to start looking at admission from the perspective of the college, not the applicant. Your son needs to figure out what he has to offer colleges that the colleges will offer. </p>
<p>Way back when I talked to the supposed “expert” on college admission who told me my d. was wasting her time to apply to Barnard (I had actually asked about Yale, and only mentioned Barnard in passing) – it was because I knew what my d. had to offer that was special, and I wanted to get a sense of whether it was enough to overcome the score barrier. In our case it was the fact that my d. had studied Russian extensively and even spent time as a high school foreign exchange student in Russia. I read an article in a Yale publication featuring the one-and-only Russian major graduating that year, making it very clear that Yale was badly in need of students to fill its Russian classes. So I wanted to know if my kid with the 1200 SAT should throw an app Yale’s way, preferably with a the words “Look here: Russian major” emblazoned at the top. We never got to that point because my d. didn’t happen to want to go attend Yale. (She picked colleges by cities: New York, Chicago, Boston. New Haven never had a chance of making her list of acceptable cities.). But Barnard also had a need for Russian-studiers, and also happened to be located in the right city, so all worked out in the end.</p>
<p>Anyway, it comes down to this: what does your son have to offer the colleges that is hard for them to find & that they want. The more that exists along those lines, the better the likelihood of admission at a reach school. It doesn’t necessarily have to be earth-shattering or remarkable; for example, males are at an advantage whenever they apply to a LAC where there is a gender imbalance favoring women. So a starting point in assessing chances at reach colleges might be to simply look at gender stats. 70% women? They are going to accept males with lower stats than their female applicants – it just works that way.</p>
<p>Anyway, good luck, and don’t believe everything posted on CC. You are looking at a very narrow and self-selected slice of the picture here. Also, kids often lie about their stats when they post them. (Every once in awhile someone actually lets it slip that their reported score is from a practice test they took at home, not an actual exam sitting).</p>
<p>great post, Sonsami–and one of the great things to learn here on CC is about all the colleges that aren’t “top 30” but are offering a terrific education to some terrific kids. We live in a time of crazy competition for college seats, but also of wonderful options!</p>
<p>Sonsami, Hope you have great visits with your son to Buffalo and UMass Amherst. Enjoyed your post. All the best!</p>
<p>Hear, hear, sonsami! Great post!</p>
<p>calmom and Sonsami, very well said. </p>
<p>Why do all smart, talented kids like the OP’s son have to go to “top” schools? What’s a “top” school anyway? I know this gets re-hashed a lot, but given the unprecedented hand-wringing that’s going on this year with (to paraphrase the Neurotic Parent) The Hardest Year to Get Into College in the History of the Universe, when will people accept that there are dozens upon dozens of excellent schools that are not HYPSM/Notre Dame/Duke/Rice? Places where even kids who have 2200+ and great grades and agile minds will be challenged and thrive? And maybe even get big merit scholarships?</p>
<p>I have a college junior and a HS senior. I know a ton of young people from the ages of 17 to 27. Some of the most thoughtful, well-read, and successful (both as students and, in the case of graduates, in actual careers) young people I know came out of Lake Forest, Hampshire, SMU, Puget Sound, Earlham, LMU, Bryn Mawr, Pitzer, Emerson, New School, Santa Clara, Fordham, Willamette, Connecticut, Grinnell, American, etc. Even, god forbid, Chico State and SUNY New Paltz. Some of them had high-end stats and could have gone through mega-anxiety trying to get into the top 20. But why? Really… why?</p>
<p>Well, actually Grinnell is a top #20 LAC, and Bryn Mawr isn’t much below. 
But your point is totally well-taken.</p>