by credentials, I mean lesser grades and scores. ^^^You are helping me make my point: it’s not all about grades~!
@queenmother Not sure what you are trying to communicate. That data looks totally out of context, # per class, total #???
Students of color make up a large and increasingly so proportion of students at elite BSs.
SPS: 18% international students and 39% domestic students of color, including 10% African American, 15% Asian American, 5% Latino/Hispanic, and 9% Other.
@doschicos What you said about any individual’s admission chances being irrelevant to the hooks they don’t have is true. However, a group of people who bear or do not bear certain hooks are affected by such admission policies as a whole. It is, after all, some sort of zero sum game, given the highly selective schools have set numbers of open spots and more qualified applicants than they can admit. Note that I am not complaining about such policies but rather just pointing out an implication of these diversity initiatives.
Allow me to share a bit more of our experience.
FefeKid1 attended a Waldorf school for grades five through eight. She received no help whatsoever from her school. Yet I’m not sure that such help would have made a difference in her outcomes.
FefeKid2 attended a junior boarding school for grades six through eight. The school extends through ninth grade, however, and it obviously prefers to see kids stay on. Surprisingly, the school provides very little assistance to kids who apply out in eighth grade. They manifestly devote most of their attention to the 9th graders, as those kids have no choice but to move on, while eighth graders who are shut out on March 10 can at least stay where they are for ninth grade.
My daughter had to “fight” her way into the the SSAT prep class at her school–and she was only one of three eighth graders to be admitted to it. Otherwise, there was no help for us–apart from one brief phone call to the secondary school counselor in the spring of my kid’s seventh grade year, and a couple of hallway meetings between the counselor and my daughter in her eighth grade year.
Ninth graders, however, got a lot of help from the school. There were programs for parents, workshops for kids, and meetings with representatives from the secondary schools–and, of course, individual meetings for kids with the secondary school counselor. My daughter asked to see some reps, but they wouldn’t let her. We selected the schools and completed the applications essentially on our own.
Nonetheless, her school did provide us some assistance by “working the phones.” I’ve described this procedure before on this forum, and anyone who has read Khan’s “Privilege” will recognize it from his description of how he presumes St. Paul’s works the phones to get their kids into colleges. (It’s only a presumption on his part because no one on the SPS college counseling staff would confirm it.) But I can tell you that a teacher and an administrator at my daughter’s junior boarding school did, in fact, confirm for me what I will outline here.
My daughter applied to five schools. She interviewed at all of them. During January, the secondary school counselor caught up with my daughter in the hallway and asked her where she REALLY wanted to go. My daughter named her top two choices. Every kid who was applying out got the same question.
Then the secondary school counselor got on the phone. She called the two designated top choice schools to see where my daughter stood with them and to relay her continuing interest. Presumably, these two schools related that they were, in turn, interested in my daughter. Armed with that information, the counselor then phoned the other three schools and informed them that my daughter was no longer interested in them. So, as we can see, there were favors going in both directions.
FefeKid2 was accepted at both of her top choices (which, coincidentally, were the most selective of the five). She was waitlisted at the three other schools, which helped to preserve their yield figures. We received full financial aid at her presumptive first choice school, and were asked to pay 10% of our income at her second choice school.
A phone call to the second choice school resulted in a tentative agreement to match the full financial aid offer of the first choice school–pending my submission of proof and confirmation by formal ruling of the financial aid committee. While my daughter was a bit undecided at first, after about a week she signaled her acceptance to her first choice school, and I phoned the second choice school to withdraw our petition for the financial aid match. I’m happy to report that my financial aid discussions with these two schools were very cordial, and they both provided valuable assistance. My daughter’s junior boarding school strongly discouraged kids from attending revisit days, so we stayed home.
We don’t know for sure how many kids applied to my daughter’s two top choices from her junior boarding school–but there were applications from eighth and ninth graders to both. As far as we can tell, my daughter was the only one admitted to either school on March 10. During the last week of August, another child from her junior boarding school, a legacy and a repeater, was admitted off the wait list into my daughter’s present ninth grade class.
Of course, I don’t know how much the phone calls from her secondary counselor helped us–though I’m sure it didn’t hurt. I would think, however, that the fact that my daughter was a proven performer as a three-year junior boarder did help.
@DonFefe - we were told at Andover that the phone calls to colleges do not work this way anymore. They used to, and certainly the BS have relationships with college AOs. 50 years ago the college counseling office would call and say to Yale or Harvard - these are the boys you will take. 30 year ago they said these are the kids you should consider. Now the system is different.
@MA2012 - I’m not surprised to hear that. Khan was last in residence at SPS in 2005, and I suspect a lot has changed there, and everywhere else, since then. Thanks for the information.
Yes, A LOT has changed since Khan’s time at SPS.
“However, a group of people who bear or do not bear certain hooks are affected by such admission policies as a whole. It is, after all, some sort of zero sum game, given the highly selective schools have set numbers of open spots and more qualified applicants than they can admit. Note that I am not complaining about such policies but rather just pointing out an implication of these diversity initiatives.”
You can choose to look at it that way, I guess, but why torture yourself? Those spots just aren’t open to you. If they represent a desire to reflect the real world, so be it. You might not agree with it, but the schools frankly don’t care. They are private institutions and even full pay students don’t pay what it really costs to be there. You can thank those who went and donated long before your student arrived. I’d argue that everyone should embrace the school’s diversity initiatives because it is good for the schools and the students that are there. I’d argue the schools would be a lot less desirable to many if they didn’t embrace both socioeconomic and racial/ethnic and other forms of diversity. I sure wouldn’t want my kids there if they were the same schools they were 50 or 100 years ago. For me, they represented more diversity than what was available in our local public school. That was a big draw for us and part of the reason why we were willing to part with our family time and a good chunk of our $$.
I also feel that the kids who contribute the most to the school community often aren’t those with the highest test scores and middle school grades (which really aren’t fungible from middle school to middle school anyway). So, unless you are advocating for a system by which admissions are decided upon based solely on test scores with zero weight given to anything holistic or less consistent, it really isn’t something to worry about.
As far as being a zero sum game, can’t that be said for many things in life? College, for sure. Jobs, for sure. Might as well get our kids used to the reality of it. I just find it interesting that people tend to focus on URMs so much more than athletic, legacy, development type hooks.
Ok–so now I’m going to ask this question --in the same way that some of these JBS/lower prep schools make phone calls for kids, for those of us remote/without such resources people, do you recommend spending the money on an educational consultant to do this for us?
@doschicos Exactly what I would say to people who are “complaining”. All valid points. I was just going along with the reality checkers.
“do you recommend spending the money on an educational consultant to do this for us?”
I honestly don’t think it is needed. Between what one can glean here and elsewhere, I think that is sufficient. There really aren’t secret tricks to getting in. Schools know kids coming from junior boarding schools/private preps are groomed. They aren’t going to look at your kid and and Will Moneybags, Jr. the same way. They factor in where an applicant comes from and their background.
Maybe if you are some super busy executive with more money to burn than time, a educational consultant might be worth your $$. But, it definitely isn’t needed.
There are plenty of us here who did not use a consultant nor did we send our kids to private schools with placement counselors and we did just fine.
@buuzn03, I think your current experience proves that you don’t need any assistance other than the (free) sage advice you’re getting here. Just think how well-armed you’ll be for buuznkid2 in four years. 
I can guarantee you that geodiversity was the reason for ChoatieKid’s admission. He and a young lady were the only students from our state his freshman and sophomore years, and he was the only kid from our state his junior and senior years. Plus, I asked the AD directly during kiddo’s senior year just what Choate found so compelling about him. In addition to the usual blather, “it didn’t hurt that he was from .”
^^thank you @ChoatieMom I agree with @doschios that diversity adds to the student experience. Its essential. However, I think why so many of us focus on URMs as a box is because we have ORMs. Agree that ORMs although counted in “students of color” to make the school more attractive to candidates, hurts our ORM students in the admissions game. I add this to underscore the point I am making that its not just about grades and scores. There are so many other factors that can explain why X student was chosen over Y. Sure if you’re not behind that door, it’ss not open to you, but it helps to explain why some of our students are passed over in favor of others who have that door in front of them. And that’s what this thread is about, no? unraveling the mystery that is college admissions and why bad admission decisions happen to good students.
How do schools evaluate applicants that don’t check the race box? I don’t remember it being required… Do they “assume” an applicant’s race based on the interview and mark it somewhere on the application?
^^^oops, I meant BS and college admissions.
Probably, although the school will not tell you. For college, where interviews are not required in most cases, they may also make the further assumption that if a race box is not checked, that the students is not URM
At the risk of sounding un-PC, if I was to counsel the family of a young ORM, I’d suggest they have their kid gravitate to less stereotypical ECs. For example, skip the violin and piano and pick up some more obscure instrument like a brass instrument which are needed to build school orchestras but much more difficult to find. That means, however, being willing to wait until your kid is old enough to play such an instrument, something they can’t do at the age of 5. 
I know this is about BS admissions, but there are a lot of similarities between BS and College Admissions when students compete for top institutions of learning. Why on the college Common App is one of the first questions in regard to whether a student is black or hispanic? It leads one to believe the app process then bifurcates into two different processes. If yes, you go down a different path. As a parent of an ORM, we’re sensitive to this. I hope BS admissions never comes to this. MLK’s dream is for everyone including students seeking opportunities in BS and college admissions.
“Why on the college Common App is one of the first questions in regard to whether a student is black or hispanic?”
You’re reading too much into it. It is up there because that is where the statistical info is asked for - name, address, ss#, phone number, birthdate, etc. Do you think they are bifurcating based on state?
Asians are 5.6% of the USA per the last census. If anything, they are overrepresented at schools. Greatly, at Pomona to use your previous example. For colleges, you can always apply to schools where race/ethnicity is not factored in.
^^<> And that would be…? only the California state schools. All the ivies take race into account. No, I’m not reading too much into it. The second question on the CA about race? You bet this is part of a decision tree. I’d agree with you if the race question was a box at the end of the app.