<p>Thanks Marite for editing your post ;)</p>
<p>I wasn’t trying to pick on ParentOfIvyHope although I’m sure if I went back and reread this thread I would agree that it seemed like I was, you are right his and my views don’t agree. He’s been saying he is just trying to be helpful. Well, maybe I thought hearing the point of view of some of the rest of us might be helpful to him. I’m not being sarcastic, I’m being serious.</p>
<p>My mother passed away recently from cancer, which is probably why the remark about high school kids curing cancer bothered me so much. If that was true she would still be here. Like all parents my mother did some things wrong and some things right. One thing that she got right was my older sister went to Harvard, but I never thought anyone expected me to go that route. She knew and I knew the Ivys weren’t the right place for me. I went to a small LAC, not a school that would be right for everyone but it was a perfect fit for me.</p>
<p>The college decision is an important one. We get the particular education offered by that school, we become part of the alumni network that helps us get started in our career. Not everyone would be a good fit for the Ivys, even it a model can be invented that would guarantee their admission.</p>
<p>Pea:
</p>
<p>Let me put this on record that I’ve never aspired my DD to be PCP “Ivy-Caliber”. I’ve always looked into her strenghts and weakness and provided her the best possible resources to excel. </p>
<p>My user name POIH is only because when I created this account DD wanted to be a pre-medical student at Yale and since I had no prior US college experience, I came on CC to find information.</p>
<p>Over the high school years DD drifted away from medicine into computer engineering and after taking the tour of different colleges, she put Cambridge her preferred town to Matriculate and Harvard and MIT as her top choices. She decided not to apply, to Yale/Columbia/U. Penn, if she gets in EA into MIT. She didn’t like Brown and Dartmouth for her major/minor so she cut those off from her list all together.</p>
<p>She did apply to all other colleges before Dec. 6th including Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, and Cornell.
She got in EA at MIT/Caltech and subsequently got into all except Harvard where she was rejected outrightly.</p>
<p>During all this process of DD selection/application/matriculation, my role have only being there as and when she needed me. </p>
<p>She choose to matriculate to MIT as that seems to her the best fit for her major/minor combination. </p>
<p>In What way you think I aspire to the Ivies.</p>
<p>Kelowna:
I know you were not trying to be offensive.
Anyway, I am glad that you caught the mistake you made in reading Dbate’s post. In fact, what he did was what Interesteddad calls “the one pony trick” namely, shaping the application to highlight the one specific strength you want the adcom to focus on. Interesteddad’s D got into Swarthmore.</p>
<p>PCP, I agree with you 100% that nothing you do or learn now will change the outcome of your son’s admissions results. But there is much you can do now which may change the outcome of your relationship with your son going forward.</p>
<p>Give up your quest for him to aim high- as a starting point. He may decide that a lower ranked school is a better fit for him than a higher ranked school- and if you are telling him between gritted teeth “son this is your decision” that will impact both his decision as well as how candid he chooses to be with you once he gets to college.</p>
<p>Give up your need to “help” other parents learn the secret sauce or break the code. There is no sauce, there is no code, a kid in a housing project in the Bronx who takes three buses to get to 10th grade at Hunter or Sty (elite public HS’s in NYC) doesn’t face the same hurdles as a kid in Winnetka who has the nanny pick him up after school to ferry him to fencing class.</p>
<p>Give up your compulsion that everything can be reduced to a number or a rank or something measurable. Adcom’s at top 20 schools have enormous latitude to exert professional judgment- a luxury which comes with being able to reject such a high percentage of their numerically qualified applicants. Some of them are quirky in how they exert that judgment- so kids who seem off-beat or independent in thought are more appealing to them than the traditional “groomed” applicant, and some of them are risk averse, and don’t want to admit kids whose all-over-the-map academics suggest that the kid works hard when motivated but slacks off otherwise. Your insistence on building an algorithm misleads more naive parents into thinking that there are schools which will find their kids C in math charming and quirky whereas other schools will find it off-putting.</p>
<p>The reality is that every single top 20 school admits the occasional “how did that kid get here?” student, on the basis of the professional judgment of an adcom who was able to persuade his or her colleagues that the upside was worth taking a chance. But naive and competitive parents hear this and get so excited that if only little Tommy applies to all 20 someone will read his essay and wave him in despite a GPA below the published stats.</p>
<p>Yes, it happens. And yes, it could happen to little Tommy. But I think experienced parents here can be really helpful in counseling those naive parents that the energy spent on those 20 applications might be better spent finding a school which will really want the kid, where the kid will fit and thrive, even if jaws won’t drop down at the Waffle House when you tell them where Tommy is going.</p>
<p>I know many parents like you in real life. I know from reading your posts that you are a loving and involved dad who has a close and positive relationship with your son. So you are at the bottom of the ninth inning right now- dial back your obsession with cracking the Ivy/Elite college code for a couple more weeks, so you can enjoy your son, and so that you can be delighted and proud and filled with joy at whichever school he decides to attend, even if it’s not the “highest” school to which he was accepted.</p>
<p>And then you will really be doing a service for other parents. They will read the sweet and proud posts from you next year and realize that they, too, can be proud of wherever their kid ends up- even if it wasn’t the highest rank school.</p>
<p>“Just for the record, I think that being a facbrat is a far stronger hook than being a legacy, a URM, or almost any other kind of hook.”</p>
<p>I know. that’s why I said this:</p>
<p>“local HS’s close to Stanford have many Stanford faculty kids attending. Those kids are more likely than almost any others “tips” to get a “finger on the scale” when it comes to acceptances at Stanford,”</p>
<p>
What you call bias, I call a goal. I don’t think there is anything wrong with aiming high, and I really don’t know why my aiming high bothers people. I came to cc to understand how high my son can aim. I expressed my desire and my goal very clearly in the “Under 3.6 (GPA) and Applying Top 20 Parents Thread”. Notice the “Top 20” name is used rather than “Ivy League”. Most of the schools S1 applied to are non-Ivy.</p>
<p>
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<p>Why do you think the best departments in his major can’t be found in elite schools? Why do you think they are disjoint? In fact, the best departments for his major ARE found in many of the top unis. You’re assumption on my son or my relationship with my son is purely speculative. Didn’t we just talked about how best not to talk about speculations as facts? That said, I agree kids get cues from parents all the time, but the state of the relationship is not determined or dominated by just “what college I think you should apply”. In fact, the strength of the relationship determines what CAN be talked about and how much consideration kids truly give to their parents’ advice. </p>
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<p>I only found people obsessing at slamming others. Sorry, can’t resist.</p>
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<p>Now, I’m really confused. What have I done to deserve this? I thought I’ve been very honest about my goal and intention. I want to build profiles of “Ivy caliber” students – applicants who have good chances of being admitted to top schools. Please tell me what I’m not being honest about.</p>
<p>MPM:</p>
<p>I think it’s more than a finger; that’s what I was trying to convey! I don’t know what kind of deal Stanford gives to its faculty re: the kids’ education, but aside from familiarity, it might be another factor tipping the kids toward Stanford.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But NONE of those things are hooks!</p>
<p>PaperChaserPop:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No. That’s not true.</p>
<p>Just kidding. It hurts a little bit but that’s OK.</p>
<p>We are just anonymous online users.</p>
<p>Stay calm and apply principle of certainty in disagreement on CC.</p>
<p>Blossom: You nailed it in post #433. </p>
<p>And I whole-heartedly agree with Sybbie that there is no Ivy profile. None of my kid’s friends at H are remotely similar to one another; they certainly do not fit a profile. (In fact, that’s the one thing that makes H special!) I couldn’t tell you about SATs or GPAs because no one ever talks or cares about that once they get accepted. Some have won national awards and many have not. Some are legacies and some are athletes. Most are neither. Some are poor and some are insanely rich. Most fall somewhere in the middle. Some are good writers and others dislike writing. Some wanted H as a first choice and some wish they got into Y or P or would have rather gone to another school but they couldn’t turn down H’s great financial aid. It truly is a melting pot there. My kids’ high school friends who go to other Ivy schools - as well as wonderful non-Ivy top schools like my other kid - say the same thing.</p>
<p>And by the way, my kid in the top (not tippy top) LAC got just as good an education - maybe even better - than the one in the Ivy. In fact, my kid at H has profs who have sent their own kids to LACs for that very reason.</p>
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<p>Yes. I love Harvard because of their financial aid initiatives and because of their outreach. They set the standard and the other schools follow. They aspire to be a melting pot and they succeed. Good for them.</p>
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<p>Some people, myself included, want the environment that a small LAC provides for out kids.</p>
<p>blossom:
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<p>That is not a rule but exception and PCP is looking for applicants that are there by rule.</p>
<p>For most applicant to any school, you can analyze and find out why the applicant was selected to begin with. Whether it was a hook or the applicant is really “Ivy-Caliber”.</p>
<p>PCP is interested in finding that sets of characteristics or measured parameter that will let you say yes the applicant belongs here.</p>
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<p>It isn’t an either/or proposition.</p>
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<p>And many of us have said there are no rules that allow you to predict whether someone will be admitted to a top school. It’s easy to say so after a student has been admitted; much harder to predict. Even harder to predict which top school will accept or reject a student.</p>
<p>^^^:Marite
</p>
<p>Ok, even if it is not either/or proposition, the thread can still look for characteristics that make the “Ivy-Caliber” applicant from the set that got in without any hook.</p>
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<p>And the PCP main idea is to gather the data, after the fact, of an applicant that have been admitted.</p>
<p>I think what PCP wants to do after gathering the data to apply to prospective cases of the applicants and see how accurate the model is about predicting Ivy acceptance.</p>
<p>I don’t see anything wrong in it. It is viable to do so.</p>
<p>I standby my model of #71 and would like to see failure against it from prospective applicants.</p>
<p>POIH: many posts later, you still persist in defining a hooked candidate as someone who was not “Ivy-caliber” but was admitted anyway. What everyone is trying to tell you is that in most cases the so-called “hook” just pulls a candidate out for notice from among the files of equally-well qualified Ivy-caliber applicants. My D has a hook–she’s a good athlete. She also has SAT’s in the 2300-2400 range and has taken a rigorous curriculum of many honor and AP classes. Did she get in HYPS because of athletics? Definitely. Does that mean she’s not Ivy-caliber? No. She’s no different from the French horn player who got in over the trumpet player because the orchestra needed French horn players that year. Why do I say that? Because if last year that particular HYPS team had gotten 5 girls who were talented in D’s same athletic area, then she would probably have been passed over in favor of a hurdler or pole vaulter. </p>
<p>You seem to make a false separation between academic credentials and non-academic credentials. You seem to believe only academic credentials make a student “Ivy-caliber”. Any other factors you demean as hooks which you think cause special consideration of an applicant despite lesser credentials. You’re wrong. The academic credentials are a starting place only. These schools are admitting flesh and bones people–not collections of numbers and titles.</p>
<p>(cross-posted with marite)</p>
<p>^^^:TheGFG you can still apply your DD stat against #71 model with your DD athletic abilities as quantifiable EC in #4 by reporting state/national award in her sports. Model only doesn’t accept HOOKS which are recruited athletes or legacy or Faculty children or URM status. Sports is EC for most applicants and is very well accepted as part of #4 in the model.</p>
<p>Here is the model again.
- Smart : No matter what anyone else says the standardized tests does indicate level of smartness as required by the top institutes including Ivies.
To Qunatify: Above 2250 on SAT1 and SAT II (3 Subjects)
A NMSF, NMF, Presidential Scholar Candidate</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Academic power house: Any good applicant to top school need to be an excellent academic achiever.
To Quantify: A/B Student with a very rigorous curriculum in context of the high school. A modest to high number of AP Classes with AP Score of 4/5.
AP Scholar … AP National Scholar by end of Junior year.</p></li>
<li><p>Excellent Writer: A strong applicant to top school is an excellent writer and can convey passion thru the essays.
To Quantify: SAT1 writing score > 750, AP English Language and AP English Literature, AP Euro History score of 4/5</p></li>
<li><p>Passionate about extra -curricular activities: A strong applicant to top school has few but strong extra curricular activities. It can be anything from debate, research, sports etc.
To Quantify: TOC in Debate; Seiemen/Intel in Research; etc…</p></li>
</ol>
<p>POIH:</p>
<p>That list is fine. It can predict whether a student will actually get admitted into a top school, but that top school list needs to be defined far more loosely than you have. There are too many with the stats you list who got rejected by the schools on your short list, and too many who did not bother applying to those schools.</p>
<p>I think PCP idea is to fine tune the above model.</p>
<p>e.g. whether a 2400 get rejected from all Ivy+ with what type of stat in the rest of the category.</p>
<p>or 2350+ always get in if AP National Scholar or Intel or Debate TOC etc. </p>
<p>You can any time fine tune the model if you have sufficient data and get accurate prediction.</p>
<p>PCP said: “I don’t think there is anything wrong with aiming high”</p>
<p>Several posters have told you exactly the sort of harm it can cause. Here it is again.</p>
<p>Parents who are too personally invested in their kids’ college “race” are asking their children to aim high with the message–this is the prize that is worthy now bring it home. Pressure much? But this isn’t aiming high in the science fair. Or aiming high at the track meet. They are asking him to compete in a “game” where his life, his abilities, what his teachers think of him, what he’s chosen to do during his teen years are being judged by strangers with power. The outcome will then be judged by his peers, teachers, and most of all the parent he wants to please. It’s certainly not wrong to encourage children to reach for the stars, but take heed of the damage it causes. Even kids who do bring home the prize to their parents may resent being judged by their performance rather than just being the kid on the couch.</p>