I think the statement about the 3.8 and 1500 is absolutely true. Top schools want kids who can do the work, and that is enough to prove it. After that, they want kids who are interested and interesting. They want to know what else you’ve got.
@socaldad2002 I also don’t agree with you. There’s way too many other variables to take into consideration when applying to the top tier schools. Your GPA and test score will keep you from being rejected outright, but it certainly won’t get you accepted. The top schools will not be comparing just to other applicants all over the world, but also (and sometimes even more so) to the other students in your own school (i.e. to what’s noted on the official school report). That’s the whole point of holistic admissions; it keeps the playing field level even though applicants are coming from all walks of life. Now, I would agree with you if it came down to two students who are EXACTLY the same in all those other areas but one had the higher GPA/test score, but there’s too many other factors to make that likely.
Anecdotally. Close friends kid now a freshman at Harvard got in to every colleges she applied RD including H, UPenn, Brown, Cornell, Duke, and UCB regents scholar. Single sitting 36 ACT, 4.0 GPA, Sal (she wanted to take band all 4 years so hurt her getting Val). No hooks, no stellar ECs. What separates her from her peers is her scores and likely her LOR that said she was the best student that her HS has seen in 20+ years.
I highly doubt she would have have had a perfect acceptance rate at top 15 colleges with a 1500 and 3.8 GPA and no hooks.
Start writing essays in summer - I knew this, but my kid didn’t believe me and was sorry afterwards.
What I didn’t know is how large an advantage being a recruitable athlete gives you even in the most highbrow schools.
But I bet she’d have gotten into some, and if she had interesting and unique EC accomplishments, she might have had the same results without perfect scores or grades. I had a kid who had almost perfect test scores, but a slightly soft GPA who got in everyplace she applued, including some top schools. She is a unique, intellectual kid with some interesting ECs. Not a grinder type of applicant, but an intriguing one. That is catnip to schools.
I wish that we had understood that colleges that are elite and non-elite have similar issues. I don’t feel that it is worth the cost of the elite college. Our child at an elite college has larger class sizes than our other child at a state college. Universities have great professors, average professors and poor professors, and they are at every college so being at an elite college doesn’t mean that you will get the best professors, small classes and all of those things that you might think that you are going to get for the tuition being paid. You need to be realistic and yes, it may look amazing on your resume later but really ask yourself, if I get in, is it worth it? So I say take a chance but they are difficult to get into because it’s about what the college wants and if you do get in, get serious about is it worth it? It might be worth it if the college is also known for the major that your student wants - e.g., majoring in engineering at MIT. I don’t see any difference between an elite college or a state college in many ways for an undergraduate degree (because many students that are undergraduates don’t get access to research anyway). We are in the middle and committed now but our child isn’t convinced that elite is worth the price tag.
Also elite is not the right fit for everyone, even if admitted. It is extremely unlikely that one will stand out at HYPSM. At a less highly ranked school, one may be a big fish in a small pond and gain confidence and opportunities one may miss in another school.
Find out what percentage of the school’s class is filled in the ED round and what the percentage advantage is of applying ED. You only have one ED/SCEA card, so play it wisely. Try to find out where other top students from your high school are applying so you do not pit yourself against a hooked applicant such as a URM or recruited athlete. If you are a legacy, the maximum value of the legacy connection is in the ED round. Have at least one affordable safety and several affordable match schools that you would be happy to attend if the elite application process is a bust. If you get deferred, or wait listed treat it as a nice rejection and move on. If you do happen to be admitted it will be a nice surprise.
The application requirement that stumped us the most–a graded paper/essay. Recommend they save a graded paper in English or History that they feel they did very well on. If it was submitted electronically, ask the teacher to comment on and grade a physical copy, or grade on a rubric that you can keep a copy of. In this age of electronic submission of essays/papers and electronic grading that becomes inaccessible after the grading period ends, it was very hard for my child to come up with a graded paper to meet the requirement on a couple of applications, especially since the entire English department of her high school departed en mass prior to this school year.
I would say to know what your skills are, know how you can fit in with that college, and be able to clearly speak to it with your supplemental essays. Choose LORs who know you well and will write the things about you that you know that college would value.
Be yourself on the common app essay. Don’t try to write the things you think will impress colleges. My daughter wrote about a ride at Walt Disney World, not about death or overcoming some huge tragedy. She wrote what she knows and loves and it was easy to write and showed her personality and the way she thinks.
Have back ups. My daughter loved her “safety” so much that it was actually very hard to actually make the decision to decline the acceptance. She put as much (maybe technically more) time into researching, visiting and applying to the safety as she did the selective. She knew without a doubt that she would have been equally happy and likely as successful at the less selective school. Did it help her admittance to her selective school? It might have. I think at the very least, her supplemental essay was more relaxed and less desperate and more focused because she already knew she was going to be accepted into the wonderful “safety” school.
Running the NPCs before applying is an important reminder. A lot of people don’t know about them. Reminding them that some schools give little or no merit aid (only financial aid), that some schools may not meet full need, that schools define full need and it might not match what a family defines, that NPCs are mostly for less complicated situations and may not be accurate for those who own businesses or are divorced…
Oh, SAT subject tests! Tell them to research carefully. Reeearch whether they are needed for applications, whether specific ones are needed, which classes to take before certain tests.
I hope this is to parents of Freshmen!
One thing we found out and just luckily because we toured colleges between sophomore and junior HS years…was the college requirements. For example, our kid might not have taken three LAB sciences which were required at several of her colleges…but we found this out early on.
Contrary to comments above, I’d say do not succumb to the pressure of applying ED unless the choice is very obvious in terms of academics, kid’s strong preference, and cost. If your kid has a solid list, they will end up at a school that works for them. Neither of my kids would have made the choice fall of senior year that was the school they actually picked after spring visits. Don’t panic and push for ED without a really good reason.
Do use EA and rolling admissions to your advantage. Getting an early acceptance to a school that would be an acceptable choice takes a lot of pressure off.
“All things equal, if a kid has 1600 and 4.0GPA they will have an advantage over the kid with 1500 and a 3.8.”
They do, at least from the info on Stanford and Brown’s website that valedictorians and 1600 have a higher chance of getting in.
“An admissions officer from an Ivy told us exactly what you do not believe. So you saying he’s lying ?”
I would not believe everything adcoms say, believe in their actions, and what the college says in their website and CDS.
“That a student (and parent) should not have a “dream school”, but should have a list of safety, match, and reach schools that appear to be affordable and the student would be happy to attend:”
This panel is on how to get admission into top 20-30 colleges, so basically how to get in, not that you need safeties, which you do. I don’t think that’s the focus of the panel.
“That my kid should start with finding matches and affordable safeties that they like before looking at reaches.”
Again, the audience is looking for information on elite schools (OP’s words). You’d be doing a disservice to the audience if the talk was on safeties and matches. Yes, mention it, but then focus on elites.
I actually thonk the message for this type of panel is that going into the college hunt with a focus on the top 20 schools is inappropriate for many reasons. It just sets up the mentality of a dream school, puts unnecessary pressure on students to tie their self worth to the rank of a college, and fuels the myth that the higher the school rank, the “better” the school would be for a given student (definitely not true for my kids). This panel sounds like a perfect place to pop the bubble for the unrealistic and frankly sometimes harmful focus on only a few schools.
I think I over-estimated the admissions benefit of being full pay. Based on the family income distributions at the elite schools, it appears to me that there are plenty of applicants who would be full pay students. Also, if you look at the destinations to which people have already traveled, in the thread about beaches in the Parent Cafe, you will get the idea that there is actually quite a lot of money floating around in some circles.
I lacked information on the number of students accepted from our state at various universities. For a number of elite schools, it is much lower than I might have guessed, and that puts the selectivity into perspective in a different way.
Picking the first semester classes is difficult. Later on, a student has a better sense of how challenging the classes are likely to be. But for a student who comes from a high school where not so many students go to any given top school, there is no word of mouth to rely on. I don’t know how to advise–a student doesn’t want to select classes that will be too easy, either.
With intense ECs in high school, there can be a lot of parent support for the EC activity that is difficult to replicate independently in college, and the ECs will become correspondingly more costly in terms of time.
What we knew that was right: If applying REA or SCEA to a top school, it will be really helpful to complete the other applications before the REA or SCEA decision comes out. This eliminates the potential need to bounce back quickly from the initial decision if it is a deferral or rejection. Also, it was a good idea to add schools further down the list after the initial feedback–not needed in practice, but it was good to have them there.
Also “one and done” may be a good philosophy to apply to standardized testing. Also, it is entirely possible to take three SAT II’s on the same day. In the “olden days,” many students did that. No need to be over-cautious.
The first school to send positive, personalized information of any sort is likely to have a boost in popularity–this is more something that admissions officers might benefit more from knowing, rather than the applicants.
I’d suggest focusing on more than the school being “elite” or being ranked in top 10/20/30 in your choice publication. Do some good research about the school and have good reasons why you want to attend the college that relate to more than selectivity and ranking. In the process of this research, you’ll likely learn more about the admission process at that college and what that college likes to see.
The highly selective colleges that are typically the focus on this forum consider a wide variety of criteria in admissions process – far more than just scores – so looking at scores alone only has a weak correlation with admissions decisions. While a higher score is better than a lower score, plenty of unhooked kids are admitted with scores below 75th percentile.
Some specific numbers from the Harvard lawsuit are below, comparing unhooked White admits to all admits. With normal distribution assumptions, 70+% of unhooked White admits had scores below 75th percentile, nearly the same as the 75% for all admits. Numbers are expressed as a comparison to the overall applicant pool. A z-score of 0 = average among full applicant pool. A score of +1 = +1 SD above average among full applicant pool.
All Admits
Math SAT +/- 1 SD range: -0.07 to +1.07 (75th percentile score ~= 0.88)
Verbal SAT +/- 1 SD range: +0.14 to +1.12 (75th percentile score ~= 0.96)
Unhooked White Admits
Math SAT +/- 1 SD range: +0.06 to +1.06 (~74% of unhooked admits below 75th percentile)
Verbal SAT +/- 1 SD range: +0.29 to +1.15 (~71% of unhooked admits below 75th percentile)
I’m guessing that sometimes students just get unlucky
Oh, also if you look at the admissions profiles at top schools, and see the percentages of students with 1600’s who were rejected, you are probably wrong if you presume that they had weaker GPAs or ECs. The information now available on CC helps a lot to counter this impression. It wasn’t available earlier on.
I would estimate the combined odds of someone with a 1600 SAT + 4.0 UW in rigorous coursework (APs, real college classes) + reasonably good ECs to be more or less the same as the published odds with the 1600 alone–because such a high fraction of the high scorers will also have the other objective qualifications.
On the other hand, if you look at the percentage of students who have 4.0+ GPAs who were rejected, you may not be wrong to think that quite a few of them had weaker standardized test scores. High school GPA inflation is quite real.
Students who think that the SAT verbal section requires knowledge of words that “no one ever uses” (and there are some such high schoolers on CC) are in for a shock when they encounter the college textbooks at the elite schools.
Admissions decisions are not personal, but they are likely to feel personal.
It’s one piece of advice I give friends- Don’t let your kid fall in love with a school you aren’t willing to pay for or cannot afford. There will be some great schools in your range. Focus on those.