<p>No apology necessary and no offense taken in the least, JHS. Just relaying a data point that I thought was of interest; I hadn’t realized how tightly you were defining elite. (As in: the people who wouldn’t have let “your kind” in just a few generations ago!)</p>
<p>As an alum, I was put off because really, I don’t give a damn whether NU goes up or down a few points in the rankings. It doesn’t change anything of any significance.</p>
<p>To the OP:</p>
<p>While I don’t disagree with your argument that selective schools love to drum up their application numbers, you absolutely do not need to be a NMF or even semi-finalist to get into Yale. Of the four accepted from our school, only one was a semi-finalist but even he was deferred EA round. The two accepted EA absolutely were not semi-finalists and one had no hook whatsoever except she is such a great kid I don’t think she was rejected from anywhere (choosing between princeton and yale now).</p>
<p>Now that my son is having to decline acceptances, I notice every one of them asks where he will be attending. They certainly do want to know who is their competition. My husband insisted my son not feel obligated to give them this information, but it was:</p>
<p>_________ I am sending in my deposit of $00? to join the class of 2014</p>
<p>_________ I am declining the offer of acceptance because I am attending ____________ instead.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, it might have just been a misguided attempt to convince you to donate.</p>
<p>Your son does not need to be a National Merit scholar to apply to Yale or any other top 20 school. I would be curious to know if he has above average scores…Yale would not send info out if his scores were not in the range.</p>
<p>From a Boston Globe article about Harvard admissions last May:</p>
<p>"Students of modest means have attended Harvard on scholarship for decades. But with the school making an unprecedented push to recruit more of them by offering virtually free rides, the number of students from families making less than $60,000 a year has surged 30 percent over the last five years - to about one-fifth of all Harvard students.</p>
<p>"As it increases its outreach to such students, Harvard is doing more to help them adjust to campus life and address the disconnect that many experience on arrival, said William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, who himself was a scholarship student at Harvard.</p>
<p>“To make the transition easier, Harvard has quietly expanded a fund that students can tap to pay for such things as admission to dorm dances, tutoring, winter coats, even plane tickets home. Financially, at least, their four years at Harvard would appear to be worry-free, as the school covers tuition, room, and board - close to $50,000 a year. The university has nearly doubled its investment in financial aid since 2004.”</p>
<p>Fitzsimmons has on many occasions spoken to the altruistic merits of seeking socioeconomic diversity on campus, but he also makes no bones about its inherent value for Harvard. He points out that for many years, Harvard admissions drew from a limited socioeconomic pool, assuming that that was the source from which genius was most likely to arise. Having learned that in reality, genius emerges in random ways from all kinds of backgrounds, and realizing that students with those talents are likely to become leaders of the next generation, he points out that it’s time for Harvard to stop ceding that talent to other schools and claim its rightful share as Harvard alumni. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds with lower stats but compelling stories are not just boosting application numbers but are actually getting accepted there these days.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt the sincerity of the initiatives to recruit lower-income students and create greater diversity on campus. I just think that should not be used as an excuse for promotional campaigns that cast as wide a net as possible to draw in the greatest number of applications. Nowadays, these schools have the means to fill their classes with qualified URMs and low-income kids just by working with high schools that serve these demographics. These same colleges spend enormous time and energy on identifying and targeting qualified athletes, not by sending encouraging letters to every kid that plays a high school sport (I don’t think) but by going out and seeing them and talking to them. The mass mailing campaigns hit students, I guess with a certain PSAT score, that may have no other qualifications that would make them a reasonable candidate for these schools. Many know enough not to buy into the flattery, but many don’t. </p>
<p>At my not-so-underprivileged international school, the kids that receive them are mostly ordinarily good students who otherwise have no special qualifications that would make them likely top-tier candidates (D1 was one of these). Which is not to say these kids shouldn’t apply with the right attitude, the problem is, that a few letters from top schools skews their whole outlook on their college admissions possibilities, making them aim higher all-around and thus being more disappointed all-around. These are the same kids (and parents) that think attending an “invitation-only” summer leadership program is going to give them a leg-up in admissions. Our very nice GC is not going to risk bumping into egos and being proven wrong by discouraging kids from their wish list, except in extreme cases.
Thanks to CC and other research I was able to keep the process very realistic and grounded in our family, but I wasn’t about to interfere with other people’s choices by suggesting that their expectations might be too high.</p>
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<p>As you state it amounts to the same thing. But can you honestly say that if Yale next year beat Harvard for the first time with a lower admit rate it wouldn’t be all over the news? …That there wouldn’t be euphoria among Yale staff, students and those oh-so-generous alums? And there wouldn’t be a bit of a pall over the Harvard crowd? And that there aren’t foreseeable consequences to this? </p>
<p>It has sadly become a race to keep up, and as I said on another thread, the international applicant pool they can tap is virtually limitless. As this continues, they’ll garner an increasingly disproportionate amount of foreign applicants although they’ll never let them make up more than around %10 per cent of the class.</p>
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<p>But the two admission rate and # of applicants are intertwined and dependent on one another. The more applicants you attract, the lower your admission rate, plain and simple…unless, they are planning to open up an equal # of enrollment slots, there’s no way their admission rate would not go down. If that were the case, I would say they don’t care about their admission rate. The only other scenario I can think of is that quality of their current applicant pool has declined to such a point that they need to go looking for more qualified applicants. As we all know, that’s not a likely scenario.</p>
<p>I don’t think that the elites use admissions as a profit center. The $200 per application fee is wildly overstated, its closer to $50 and many times the poor can get a fee waiver.</p>
<p>My junior D has not gotten any mailings from the Ivies (much to her chagrin), but has heard from just about everyone else (privates at least). So from my perspective, the elites are not mass marketing to everyone.</p>
<p>I do think that elites are trying to get as many qualified people to apply. Maybe a side benefit is that they get a lower acceptance rate. But when you consider the amount of financial aid a student gets from the lower and middle classes - its laughable to think that the elites are marketing to them to make money.</p>
<p>Just an anecdotal observation- Harvard sent thick, paper applications last year to every student at my daughter’s top New England Boarding School who scored over a certain level on the SAT. The kids quickly figured out what that number was, and it was estimated that half of the class received them. Many of those packets went straight into the bonfire that they had last week to purge college materials. What a waste of paper!</p>
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<p>Yes. I don’t think anyone connected with Yale would care about that. The press might say something (although they don’t care so much, either), but Richard Levin wouldn’t even mention it in his meeting with the admissions dean. Alums would think it was sleazy to mention it.</p>
<p>Yale cares about attracting diverse, qualified applicants, admitting a diverse, cool class with enough, but not too many, legacies, and winning head-to-head contests with Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, Princeton, and maybe Stanford, in that order.</p>
<p>Yale probably COULD have the lowest admit rate, if it avoided admitting anyone who was also accepted at Harvard. Doing that would get whoever did it fired, not rewarded.</p>
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<p>JHS, I think your posts are generally very reasoned and balanced, but it seems you have a blind spot here when it comes to the very top schools. To say that they really don’t care about their rankings and selectivity rate smacks of elitist denial–as if these schools are too far above caring (not like NU and WashU). If Harvard were to drop to 5th place suddenly in the U.S. News rankings, you could bet there would be all kinds of reactions within and efforts to identify the problems and correct them, especially if this standing were prolonged over a period of years. Too many people, rightly or wrongly, put stock in those rankings. A different thing is that they would not show any outward expressions of concern–as they must project grace in these rivalries. My double-Harvard-alum sister, who is really quite down to earth and non-competitive, has internal pride about her alma mater’s standing and would secretly feel some disappointment if it were to fall.</p>
<p>I am not one of those cynics who think the elite schools are all about image and are just businesses. As with individuals, motivations are complex and I think these institutions have worthy goals in education and diversity. And they certainly have the right to shape a class based on their own criteria. But they also have an extreme interest in maintaining their brand and IMO, they don’t have high school students’ best interest at heart when they encourage unrealistic applications. </p>
<p>And yes, while there is the oft-repeated truism that Harvard could fill “three classes” with just as stellar applicants, what about the other 24,000? Many may be contenders (if you have any statistics on their actual qualifications, I’d like to see them) but I would suggest that most are just good to great students with no oustanding talents or accomplishments that these top schools are looking for. Many of them were sucked into the idea that they had a real shot at the top, and come from areas and schools where there is no one really to set them straight.</p>
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<p>Wildwood11, I could not agree more. Also, despite (or perhaps because of) being an HYP graduate, I do not believe in HYP exceptionalism either.</p>
<p>Wildwood, it’s not elitist denial, just plain elitism. If Harvard were to drop to #5, there would probably be some concern over the conditions that caused that – e.g., Hell freezing over, an attack of flying pigs, the end of the world – but no one would give much of a crap about U.S. News. They didn’t care when Harvard was #3 . . . as far as they were concerned, it just made U.S. News look stupid. (That was my read, too.) Harvard is a much bigger brand than U.S. News & World Report.</p>
<p>A whole bunch of kids that I have seen get accepted at HYP could easily be described as “just good to great students with no outstanding talents or accomplishments”. On the whole, I think they do a good job of finding the students that other students and faculty who know them well respect, but I’ll bet anything that if I gave you the qualifications of the five Harvard applicants in my son’s class in a “chances” format, you would have about a 20% chance – probably less – of guessing which one was accepted, or really of guessing whether any of them would be accepted (except for my having told you). All of them were accepted at one or more great colleges, including Yale, Stanford, MIT, Brown, Amherst, Dartmouth. One was given a full-tuition merit scholarship at Michigan. One was a URM who was without a doubt the top academic performer in his ethnic group in this region. (Hint: Not he.)</p>
<p>I’m sure there are hopeless Harvard applicants out there, but I don’t think that represents a huge portion of the applicant pool. There are lots and lots of really great kids out there, and Harvard takes some but leaves plenty on the table, because it has to. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t want to look through the whole pile before picking.</p>
<p>JHS you couldn’t be more wrong.</p>
<p>JHS, I’ve seen you write about your kids’ schools before (one private, one good public in the Philadelphia area?). These are NOT the applicants I’m talking about. I’m sure at both of those schools kids were provided with counseling and an environment that allowed them to understand their chances and apply to an appropriate range of schools. But there is a whole big world out there away from the East coast suburbs in which there are many schools that do not steer kids appropriately. Many students and parents far from your world go into the process fairly uninformed and naive. They include applicants that probably don’t come close to comparing to those five applicants from your son’s school, who were obviously all legitimate contenders based on their great results. I don’t know what percentage of the Harvard pool are made up by these less stellar applicants but I bet you it’s a lot. My own experience is with applicants living abroad, but I would bet there are plenty of places in the U.S. where the lack of college knowledge is similar and where people are easily swayed by the promotional material.</p>
<p>My daughter, who did apply to some highly selective schools and is now attending one, received very little mail from those schools. We found their mail to be unusually informative as compared to other schools. </p>
<p>A big focus of those letters was about their new financial-aid policies. They probably targeted our zip code as being a neighborhood of people who wouldn’t qualify for financial aid at most schools, and might not realize we could qualify for aid under their new changes.</p>
<p>The quantity of their mail was miniscule compared to the public universities marketing heavily to National Merit finalists. University of Oklahoma, University of Alabama, and Texas A and M were the schools she received tons of mail from.</p>
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<p>Bingo. That’s what makes them elite :-).</p>
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<p>JHS. The very fact that there are five Harvard applicants in the class already tells us that it’s a privileged, out of the ordinary high school. (Not like we didn’t already know this about you, of course.) What % of high school students in this country attend high schools in which there are ANY Harvard applicants in a given year? Much less five? Come out of the Main Line every now and then!</p>
<p>Folks, the high school I am talking about is a city public school with 2,400 students. Sure, it’s an academic magnet, and one of the oldest public high schools in the country, but its average SATs are ~1750, a huge percentage of students are low-income and/or immigrants or first generation, and it sends a hundred kids to community colleges for every kid it sends to Harvard. It’s not even the most glamorous public high school in the city (but don’t tell them that!); there’s a much smaller magnet that is the “public private school” with much better numbers and admissions. It has some privileged students, but it’s hardly a privileged place. (As the principal says, “We have students who sleep in mansions, and students who sleep in cars.”)</p>
<p>The good students get plenty of support from the school, but no real advising whatsoever. The GCs’ job is to make certain everyone applies to college somewhere. That’s usually not a problem with good students, so they don’t pay attention to the good students. The GCs hand them some LAC brochures (all the GCs’ kids went to LACs) and ask them to get their transcript/recommendation requests in as soon as they can. The kids essentially self-counsel (which is why they all know where everyone else is applying).</p>
<p>I have seen several kids from this school get into HYPS over the past x years, and only one of them had the kind of public accomplishments that most of you think is required. (He got rejected at Princeton, though.) </p>
<p>My point is that more students than you think genuinely have a realistic shot at HYPS, even if that shot is only 1-in-20. There’s no clear, ex ante difference between the one and the other 19. Further, to the extent Harvard (or anywhere else) believes there is a meaningful, nonrandom difference between that one and the others, it’s a difference they would not be confident in identifying without a full application, including essays and teacher recommendations. I don’t buy that Harvard is beating the bushes to produce applications it isn’t going to consider in good faith. I think it’s beating the bushes because that DOES produce applications they DO read – and occasionally accept – in good faith.</p>
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<p>Do you also think that’s equally true for NU / WashU / Vandy / Duke / USC / U of Chicago / all those other parvenus, or do you think their collective bush-beating is driven primarily by trying to produce applications for application’s sake and therefore drive down admission rates and look studly in USNWR?</p>