<p>I see this term get thrown around alot here I was just wondering what common examples of hooks are? Would recruitment for D3 athletics count as a hook? What about starting your own business?</p>
<p>A hook is something that makes you a target for some form of special consideration or recruitment. Most hooks are not in your control (but one listed below is).</p>
<p>1.) Legacy
2.) Recruited Athlete
3.) Underrepresented Minority
4.) First-generation college student (to a lesser extent)</p>
<p>Something that makes you stand out isn’t automatically a hook. Starting a successful business might be impressive, but calling it a hook is using the wrong terminology. When people ask “Is this a hook??”, the answer is no, unless it’s one of the ones listed above (unless I forgot one).</p>
<p>i think a slight hook would be geographical location. Say a wyoming kid or an alaska kid applied to Yale, that would give him or her a slight but not substantial advantage over others who are similar in the applicant pool.</p>
<p>Being a URM or a recruited athletic is probably the biggest hook.</p>
<p>Being a legacy doesn’t really help unless your parents give the school a lot of money or are really involved in its community. </p>
<p>An emerging hook is being poor and coming from a family with a weak educational background. This hook especially helps if you are a minority.</p>
<p>The other hooks – such as being from Wyoming or being the critically important tuba player – were invented by affirmative action proponents who want to soft-pedal the importance of racial preferences by suggesting that all sorts of students receive special treatment in admissions. In reality, hooks are pretty rare, and most students are judged on their academic merits.</p>
<p>My definition of a hook is: Something that will get a student admitted even though they are academically unqualified by the school’s own standards. So, yes, recruited athlete, URM, first generation, parents giving millions to the school, parents politically powerful, parents or student very famous.</p>
<p>Then there are “tips” – something that makes a qualified student stand out in the pool of other qualified students. Starting a business might be a tip, an unusual EC, a special award, a fantastic essay. At most LACs, simply being a guy will add a little sparkle to the application. Location might or might not be a (slight) tip; LACs tend to value geographic diversity, and cash-strapped publics are looking on OOS’s with favor these days. OTOH, the elites get plenty of applications from every state in the union, so location isn’t much advantage there.</p>
<p>being black</p>
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<p>This is really ultimate hook. Nothing else can really compare to it in terms of effects on admissions.</p>
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<p>I think this is a good way of summarizing the issue: Hooks will help an a completely unqualified applicant get into a school. Tips will help a qualified applicant distinguish himself from other qualified applicants.</p>
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<p>Actually, it’s not. Being rich is the ultimate hook, and the more elite the school, the more true that is:</p>
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<p>[College</a> Admissions Corrupted | Education Sector](<a href=“http://www.educationsector.org/publications/college-admissions-corrupted]College”>บาคาร่า หากใครต้องการรับสิ่งใหม่ๆ ในการเล่นเกมต้องมาที่นี่เท่านั้น )</p>
<p>This article is a review of Daniel Golden’s book The Price of Admissions, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning series he wrote for the Wall Street Journal</p>
<p>Next time you hear someone complaining that their spot was taken by a poor black kid, tell them it’s more likely that it was taken by a rich white kid. That seems to make people feel better.</p>
<p>A college admissions “hook” is something that gets your application tagged and reviewed individually in light of a situation, talent, trait, that you have that a given school seeks. Athletes often have hooks. But only if that school wants that particular athlete. If that is the case, reasons to take the applicant are sought rather than reasons to deny him/her. In highly selective schools, the term “Admissions” is a huge misnomer since the main purpose of that office is to deny, deny, deny, the hordes of applicants. So if your application is tagged with the purpose to find reason to accept, it’s a big plus. </p>
<p>But what is a “hook” at one school is nothing at another. A great swimmer is a ho hum applicant at a school that doesn’t care about swimming as a sport or doesn’t have a NCAA swim team. Being a state level violinist doesn’t get you even a second look at a school that has to put in multiple orchestras to accommodate all of the violinists it gets. URM is only if the school doesn;t have a lot of your ethnicity in the student body. Asians are URMs at schools like Coe College, but not at, say, Berkeley. African Americans certainly are not URMs at HBCs. </p>
<p>A hook can be something like a great classics background at a school that has a big time classic professors who is rappiing at Admission’s door for more UG students in that discipline. Or if a school has just committed big bucks for a new program and it needs some bodies that qualify. </p>
<p>Most special interests and talents are “tips” rather than “hooks”. Yeah, the M/F is a bit disparate so one sex or the other is looked upon a bit more easily. But often just in an “all things equal” picture. Legacy can be a huge hook, or a top, depending on the school. I know a number of siblings who were WL or denied, and they were truly acceptance material at that school, whereas there are schools who have a pretty firm policy about accepting a sibling with a profile similar to one already accepted even if the standards have changed. MIT has no legacy preference, UPenn only gives it for ED applicants, some schools go ape with it and it means a big deal. Development has some strong hooks, with $ amount often designating how strong.</p>
<p>Is being a first-gen college student that much of a hook. I think I read that 17% of college students are first gen college students.</p>
<p>Being a native american. A friend of mine is 50% cherokee. She had a 3.1 gpa and a 1940 SAT and got into MIT</p>
<p>Being Native American is a gigantic hook.
"Next time you hear someone complaining that their spot was taken by a poor black kid, tell them it’s more likely that it was taken by a rich white kid. That seems to make people feel better. "
How right you are!
Azndarkinvader, we all know you’re bitter about AA. You don’t have to speak so crudely to get your point across.</p>
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<p>Not true. These hooks are often talked about in reference to the most selective colleges. These schools with <15% acceptance rates turn down many thousands of “academically qualified” applicants and even the vast majority of “hooked” applicants. The “hook” is the thing that gives you a 20% admit rate when the unhooked applicants fare worse.</p>
<p>Is being Mexican-American a hook? lol</p>
<p>^Being Hispanic is a hook, though it is becoming less so as more and more qualified Hispanics apply to top schools.</p>