<p>Well, everyone in the country thinks of their own kids as rock stars. That’s the part that is the hardest - recognizing that there are thousands of kids as accomplished and worthy as your own, who are the competition here.</p>
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<p>In the overall scheme of things, HYP applicants and admits are only a tiny percentage of college-bound high school students applying to selective schools. For the great majority of such students, being able to look at Naviance or some such can be helpful in determining admissions reach/match/safety when making the application list. Would you rather have high school students apply blindly, perhaps increasing the risk of being shut out (due to choosing “safeties” that really were not) or not applying to some suitable colleges (due to incorrectly believing that they are out of reach)?</p>
<p>Of the four, there’s probably one true rock star in the group (the kid who applied ED to MIT and was rejected ultimately got into 6 Ivies). The rest are just nice, smart kids. All four are happy at their chosen schools and are doing well. So all’s well.</p>
<p>I didn’t say I had a problem with Naviance (though I personally found it of little use, mostly because my kids were looking at schools to which relatively few from our high school applied in the first place). My comments about knowing about / resenting other kids’ successes is more directed at people who seem to know, care and catalog the specific SAT scores, GPA’s, and accomplishments of their kids’ high school classmates, which just strikes me as both nosy busybody and a tremendous waste of time. I couldn’t tell you a single SAT score or GPA of any of my kids’ friends, and I only knew their college strategies in the most general, broadest terms. </p>
<p>I hope they are all happy where they got in. It’s just not my business or concern beyond that, and I don’t want to BE the kind of person who sits there and harumphs that Suzy got into School X and my kid didn’t because I know for a fact that Suzy only had a x.x. GPA and XXXX on her SAT’s. There’s just something very ugly about being that kind of person.</p>
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<p>Ummm, doesn’t MIT have EA rather than ED?</p>
<p>UCB - I don’t know. I assumed ED (always dangerous - I know!). At any rate, he was denied outright so that was that. But is very happy at Princeton. Things work out.</p>
<p>I think it’s the lack of predictability and the lack of control that drives the unease and the sense that this process feels like a lottery. I also don’t think it’s a matter of thinking that you and yours are rock stars or more entitled or any of that because what may have once been contained to the uber-elite universities has spread well beyond that limited pool of schools. It’s a matter of trying to figure out what makes sense, counseling your kid to choose wisely and do his best, and then holding your breath and waiting for anything. It can drive you crazy and while it may not be a crapshoot from the point of view of the university, for most of the students it certainly is because most of the factors that are decisive are not within the student’s control.</p>
<p>3girls - exactly!</p>
<p>Also, I think some people get mixed messages that can be confusing. They have some people telling kids “you’ll get in everywhere,” while also hearing horror stories of people who got in nowhere.</p>
<p>It feels like a lottery from the outside looking in, but it’s most assuredly not a lottery from the inside looking out. Both of those things can be true. </p>
<p>But a lot of life is a lottery in that sense. You were born into a household that made $X vs $Y, or had this dysfunction or that dysfunction, or had no health issues versus xyz health issues. Many of us felt that we were shaped by where we went undergrad - well, we might have had equally happy endings elsewhere, just different ones. There’s a lot of randomness in life, no? Is it all scary?</p>
<p>I don’t think it is a crapshoot at all, and I think it is an insult to highly trained, extremely hardworking admissions officers, tasked with a specific institutional mission, to even suggest that it is. How it works out for each individual applicant is another thing. But there is no roll of the dice.</p>
<p>I guess I don’t see what the “highly skilled” aspect is. It’s not rocket science…build a class that has kids from every state/region, that is ethnically diverse, and that consists of enough different majors that the various classes will have enough warm bodies in the seats. </p>
<p>I think many of us could do it just using walking around smarts.</p>
<p>When I think of highly skilled, I don’t think of adcoms.</p>
<p>Scary? I’d rather it not be described as that.</p>
<p>It should be enthralling. It should leave one in wonder…contentment…eager even. </p>
<p>If the randomness of life is to be “scary”, the fear you experience should motivate you to jump in to the water rather than being paralyzed.</p>
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I believe the roll of the adcoms are harder than you’re making it out to be if their role is the role you described. I wouldn’t consider adcoms to be “highly skilled”, but they require good judgment among other things which many of us would not be able to do.</p>
<p>roll of the adcoms</p>
<p>Maybe that’s it…roll of the dice rather than a highly-skilled role.</p>
<p>Simple typo, but my belief is that you oversimplified their role and overlooked the sheer volume and variety of applicants they receive. </p>
<p>They’re not perfect by any chance, but unless we get these people trained…what else can you expect?</p>
<p>Naviance was very, very useful when my son was applying as his targets were popular at his HS and as I look back, his accepts/rejects were dead-on with the Naviance data. So I do absolutely think it can be useful in creating a list in that sort of case.</p>
<p>Obviously if few kids from your HS apply to where your child is, it is less useful, and if the list includes super selective schools, it’s also less useful. </p>
<p>I only brought up Naviance because OP was more or less accused of finding out and caring about specific classmates’ stats. Clearly that’s not what went on here; OP said so in an early post.</p>
<p>Yes, Naviance can be useful since it has data from the particular school. Often the best use is to see the many rejections of high-stats applicants at the tippy top schools.</p>
<p>My very first experience with DS1 was an info session with a university of Chicago admissions counselor. She was a very good speaker and I will try my best to paraphrase her explanation. </p>
<p>She was quite persuasive about the qualities of her school, which included varied student and activities and a close knit community. She explained that faculty was a real part of the community and you would see them all the rime on campus. Her presentation moves onto the admissions process. She said that invariably, parents call and ask why their child didn’t get accepted when someone else with lower scores did. </p>
<p>She became blunt for the first time and explained that we parents and students were not her clients. The swim coach and orchestra director, were. She said that when they asked if there would be a backstroker or a French horn player in the freshman class she needed to be able to say yes. That means that some very smart kids that don’t have those talents might get wait listed. She pointed out that if you only look at the numbers you don’t see those qualities. </p>
<p>If that is a “crapshoot” then yes college admissions is a crapshoot. But her message is one that is true in life : if you want to get noticed, develop a unique talent or at least an unusual one or at the very least, a needed talent.</p>
<p>^Very true. It really is all about differentiation. Too many kids try to be all things to all people and thus cannot really show who they are when applying to colleges. Yet there is such an accepted formula now that few will try to take the road less traveled and not worry about doing all the things that they think “look good” to colleges.</p>
<p>I don’t subscribe to the notion that kids should develop unusual talents so that they look good in college admissions. I really don’t like the notion that kids should not only pursue these unusual activities but also develop them to a point that is adult level and “perfect.” It just becomes an increasingly relentless rat race with a lot more fiction and packaging thrown in.</p>
<p>I don’t really subscribe to the unusual talent theory either. My older son had a pretty common talent - computer programming - but because he was obsessed, he had a very high level of achievements he could show off. We never planned it, it was his interests and we just nurtured it here and there. (Mostly by not nagging him to get off the computer.) Younger son was a typical bright well rounded kid, and while he liked folding origami and wrote about it, he’s no genius origami artist. I’m pretty convinced that was got him into Chicago was his “Why Chicago?” essay. It was a funny essay about how he thought his parents were crazy to suggest Chicago to him since it wasn’t on a coast, it was an urban campus, the only person he knew who went there was a lawyer and he didn’t want to be a lawyer and a couple of other reasons. Then he went on to say how he discovered that these things weren’t quite as bad as he thought. (Lake Michigan is like a coast!) They commented on it on the holiday card they sent him. I’m sure they were thrilled to get someone who didn’t take the whole application process so seriously.</p>