Why do elite college recruit so much?

Parents Forum
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<p>To be honest, I don’t think an admissions dean at any of those colleges would get fired for saying “This is something we ought to do to improve/defend our USNWR rankiing.” At Harvard, I think the dean would be fired for that.</p>

<p>That said, I really don’t believe the effort is anywhere near as cynical as many here are suggesting. Let me be snobby and direct, at the risk of offending scads of you. A generation ago, Northwestern, WashU, Vandy, and USC were high-quality but regional institutions. For them, improving prestige and getting recognition meant going national – which required raising their profile nationally, and getting qualified applicants to apply from outside their home regions. All of them have pursued aggressive strategies to do those things, using a ton of direct mail, but also merit scholarships and other means. Does anyone remember Vanderbilt’s public courtship of New York Jews 7-8 years ago? They put out a press release to the effect of “We have noticed that national prestige and recognition for a high intellectual tone seems to require that you have a lot of New York Jews on campus, and we don’t. So we are targeting them for admissions.” It was shameless. But I bet it worked – in getting everyone’s attention, in emphasizing that the university had national intentions, in attracting applications from Jews in NYC and elsewhere in the Northeast, in getting some of them to go to college there, and, guess what?, in increasing Vanderbilt’s prestige as a cumulative effect of all of the above.</p>

<p>Duke and Chicago were in slightly different circumstances – Chicago clearly a high-prestige national institution with a terrible reputation for undergraduate life, and thus a very self-limiting applicant pool, and Duke a national institution with a chance to follow Stanford’s game plan of riding sports, money, and changing national demographics to join the top tier. Chicago has spent 20 years painstakingly rebuilding its whole undergraduate program, and under its relatively new President it is clearly on a mission to claim prestige at the undergraduate level equal to its graduate level prestige. Which means, as a first step, increasing awareness nationally, and getting more desirable students interested (and doing that without jettisoning the relationships and market identity that sustained it in the wilderness for 40 years), and getting more of them to apply and to come if accepted. Its efforts have been pretty darn successful, and certainly worked with my kids. (Back in the Dark Ages, by the way, I got direct mail from Chicago – which was practically unique at the time. It was keyed into NMSF status. So it’s not like Chicago just discovered this idea.) </p>

<p>Until this year, I was tremendously impressed by how Chicago’s marketing efforts were really pitched to attract the kind of students who would like it there, and maybe to turn off the kind of students who wouldn’t. They were very substantive marketing efforts, and anyone with a low tolerance for intellectual pretension would have had the immediate reaction “**** that ****!” They have broadened their message somewhat recently, but it’s still pretty high-toned, with a lot more focus on intellectual activities and a lot fewer pictures of pretty kids having fun than your average WashU extravaganza. And their merit scholarships are still utterly inscrutable – vs. other colleges’ apply-stats-here-and-push-button approach – and thus unmarketable. Commendably, lots of their efforts have been directed at increasing minority and low SES applications, acceptances, and enrollments. Unlike Vanderbilt, Chicago is not short of pretentious Northeastern Jews, but it will never compete with the Ivies until it does a better job of turning talented poor kids into successes. It’s trying.</p>

<p>I’m not aware of what Duke is doing, other than winning the national men’s basketball championship. That, I’m sure, drives more applications and enrollments than any mailing campaign anywhere. And I bet anything Coach K is very visible on accepted students’ weekend. Does anyone think Duke is winning basketball games cynically to improve its ranking?</p>

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<p>I think this is pure speculation on your part and it’s what you want to believe about Harvard’s attitude. We’ll never agree because my speculation runs in a different direction: I think HYP are quite confident in the stability of their status at the top, but that doesn’t stop them from always glancing over their shoulder to ensure that nobody will unseat them and racing against each other in the admissions and yield game. If Harvard were to drop to second place in selectivity, after a while, it would affect their yield. Most matriculants, given the choice, will go to the school they perceive is the very best, and for many that means nothing more than the hardest to get into.</p>

<p>Why do you think the outreach strategies you describe are more about status for the other schools, but Harvard’s low-income and international strategy are completely altruistic? I think there are mixed motivations for all of them. I saw a figure somewhere a while ago that gave the number of international applicants to Harvard from which you could conclude that the admit rate was much lower for foreigners as they only make up 10% of the class but are a much higher proportion of applicants (MIT is very upfront about their figures in this regard). If you eliminated foreign applicants from all the schools’ statistics, Harvard might even have a higher rate than several others, because it is undoubtedly is the biggest draw abroad. This gives it a vast pool of students from which they can solicit the needed number of apps. I believe Harvard, just like everyone else, will always do what is necessary to ensure that it remains the most selective of its peers over the long run. After all, that is an integral part of its brand.</p>

<p>Btw, I sincerely doubt that the five applicants from your school, or .02% of the class weren’t much more qualified candidates overall that the five last year from our school (nearly 10%) who were all rejected not just by Harvard but most other top schools–We have Naviance and know a lot about each other at our small school.</p>

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<p>JHS, not offended at all. Just delighted that you deign to talk to me :-). I would also characterize Duke as having been a bit more regional than national a generation ago, but whatever. I don’t disagree with the general substance.</p>

<p>I do have a question, however. And I’m being totally serious.<br>
It wasn’t that long ago that the bulk of Ivy league students came from either the elite NE prep schools or the upper middle class concentrated on the Eastern seaboard. Likewise, a generation ago, the schools you mention had the bulk of their students coming from (generally more privileged than not) their general backyards. </p>

<p>Why is it that when schools elsewhere reach past the midwest or the south, they are deemed regional, but no one says that the Ivies (or the Amhersts, Williamses, Bowdoins, etc.) were regional when the bulk of their students were coming from the eastern seaboard? Put another way - why is (say) Carleton regional because nobody’s-heard-of-it-from-outside-the-midwest but Bowdoin not even though nobody’s-heard-of-it-from-outside-the-east?</p>

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<p>I don’t know what Harvard does to attract foreign applications other than (a) be Harvard, and (b) be one of the handful of colleges that will award need-based financial aid to foreign applicants. Neither seems particularly sinister, nefarious, or exploitative to me, and they pretty much fully explain why Harvard would be deluged with foreign applications. What’s more, I would guess that they reject some pretty darn strong foreign applicants, too.</p>

<p>As for your school, Wildwood11, there’s kind of a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Of course, it’s easier for admissions staff to deal with high schools they know. Harvard has been admitting a trickle of students from my kids’ school for 50+ years, and some of them have done things like won Nobel prizes, so there’s probably a decent mindset there. They know that the 20th kid they take from Andover is going to be a first-rate student, no question. Whereas when they get applications from a little school they don’t know, it’s a bit of a pig in a poke, since so much of evaluating a candidate depends on understanding what kind of context he or she is in.</p>

<p>But if kids don’t apply from your school, then the Harvard admissions staff will never develop a sense of what a really great candidate from that school looks like. The first wave of applicants from a school may be doomed (unless they are recruited athletes, or have some national awards), but they may be laying the groundwork for subsequent successful applications. Is it really wrong for Harvard to solicit those applications, even though an objective observer might say that most of the applicants had no meaningful chance of admission? I don’t know. (NB: Chicago has a program for waiving application fees from high schools they have targeted as under-represented in the applicant pool. So if they are doing this, at least they are not making people pay for it.)</p>

<p>Pizzagirl: I knew someone was going to ask that question!</p>

<p>It’s simple: Northeast Corridor (roughly) = Normative. Everywhere else = Regional. Rural New England = Our Agrarian Roots. Wellspring of the Republic. Charming Accents, Laconic Wit. Rural South, Midwest, West = Ugh! Republicans! Scary, Dumb People Who Can’t Talk Right. </p>

<p>You didn’t already know that? What the heck did they teach you at that regional school?</p>

<p>And, by the way, I know kids from here in the Carleton classes of '09, '10, and '12. So that part of your premise is wrong. But Carleton has yet to produce anyone who wrote The Scarlet Letter or The House of Seven Gables, and Bowdoin did.</p>

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<p>So much for giving a **** about “diversity.” And I’m sure it’s not much consolation for Smart Kid From Unknown School that four years later, another smart kid from his school has a chance. The linking of kids as being de facto representatives of their schools really, really bugs me. </p>

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<p>LOL. Believe me, as someone who moved from the Northeast to the Midwest (and thought that we were moving to the far ends of the earth), I totally get the mindset. But now I know better.</p>

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<p>To clarify, I wasn’t complaining that Harvard didn’t admit qualified applicants from my school–actually two years ago it did admit one, a Chinese girl who was val, had solid scores and played the harp, among other accomplishments. What I’m trying to say is that other applicants were not really qualified IMO, from everything I’ve learned about Ivy admissions. They had scores in the 2000 to 2150 range, most not at the top of the class, (the val didn’t go to the U.S.) and no stand-out achievements or talents. One might not need all those elements to be accepted, but they need at least one of them. I think this level of applicant is not unique to my school and there may be a lot of this type from other schools where parents and GCs aren’t so savvy. This year, D2 got into P and other Ivies, but didn’t make it into H and Y. But she was a strong applicant and it made sense for her to try. Last year, D1 who got the letter, was not (and had no interest). </p>

<p>The solution I think is for colleges to simply be more explicit in the promotional material about the odds, and the things they look for. I wish I had that letter from Harvard in particular to see if at all emphasized the high standards that it was looking for in its admits. I really think it did not.</p>

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<p>Cow-tipping.</p>

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<p>Some people consider acceptance rate is considered a pretty substantial factor in determining the prestige of a college. Mass advertising helps draw in more rejections :)</p>

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<p>^^Yeah, well as Pizzagirl knows, I went to that same regional school and learned that I might as well have stayed close and gone to Northeastern for all that the name impressed back home then.</p>

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<p>I don’t think anyone means to treat kids as being de facto representatives of their schools. The problem is that, for all but the most impressive (and aggressive) of kids who are already playing on a national stage, you need to understand their school to understand who they are, because a whole bunch of information about them is wrapped up with the school. So if you don’t feel confident you understand the school, then it’s going to be hard to feel confident you understand the kid.</p>

<p>I’m sure some kids break right through that with their brilliant essays, or externally verified achievements. There are definitely kids from Nowhere-Nohow Regional HS at every college. But others . . . well, it looks like they are at a disadvantage, right? Still, are you going to tell them not to try? Why?</p>

<p>Jersey13:

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<p>Some people are in high school. That’s a heuristic which is pretty much limited to high school use. It is, pardon the expression, dumb.</p>

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<p>But it’s not being from a certain school that puts them at a disadvantage, that’s a whole separate issue, it’s being a mediocre applicant by Ivy standards. You will argue that this can never be known prior to submitting the app and having someone review it. I believe that for those who are familiar with elite college admissions, it can be pretty obvious in many cases when someone is a real long-shot. Is there no harm in letting kids unlikely to be admitted apply and dream? I’d say that depends on their expectations, where else they’ve applied and their understanding of the odds. There have been too many kids from our school who have, at least initially, been dissatisfied with their results and having to attend a school low on their list. Hopefully they’ve ended up happy after a while, but it’s a lousy way to start off feeling about one’s college.</p>

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<p>Practically everyone who applies is unlikely to be admitted (since the general definition of “unlikely” means a probability of <50%), and by definition most RD applicants are going to have a probability of admission <5% – and yet that’s a lot more than 0%, especially for the one kid in 25 or 30 who IS accepted. (Actually, if we could evaluate things properly, we could probably separate the unhooked applicants into one group with a probability ~25-30% and another with no chance, but “stats” and things like that completely fail to tell you which kids to place in which group.)</p>

<p>Anyway, if kids at your school have unrealistic expectations and get disappointed, that sounds like a failure of the adults in their community, not of Ivy League mass-mail authors. I believe that, as bad as April of senior year can be for some kids – and that’s pretty bad – the hurt fades pretty quickly for all but a tiny number, who have other problems anyway. The world doesn’t and shouldn’t revolve around 12th graders, and certainly shouldn’t revolve around preventing transient feelings of disappointment in some 12th graders.</p>

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<p>I think this link to the Princeton class of 2013 is interesting. On the bottom it shows the type of secondary school they pulled from. But what I found more interesting was the map showing the number of kids from each state. (click on map on upper left side). This would have been a good year to be from Montana!</p>

<p>[Princeton</a> University | Admission Statistics](<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admission_statistics/]Princeton”>http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admission_statistics/)</p>

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<p>Of course Harvard cares about how low their acceptance rate is… otherwise, they wouldn’t post it in their newspaper.</p>

<p>[Admissions:</a> An Ivy Comparison | FlyByBlog | Harvard Life. To Go.](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.harvard.edu/article/2009/4/2/admissions-an-ivy-comparison/]Admissions:”>http://www.thecrimson.harvard.edu/article/2009/4/2/admissions-an-ivy-comparison/)</p>

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<p>It pretty obviously wasn’t a good year to be from Montana at all! Do you think no one applied from Montana? That vastly higher numbers applied from Wyoming?</p>

<p>And that was the Crimson staff doing that, not Admissions. Did I say that Harvard didn’t have a bunch of mindlessly competitive, triumphalist undergraduates? If so, I didn’t mean it. They grow out of it. The Crimson isn’t Harvard’s official organ.</p>

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<p>JHS - What I meant was that because Montana is underrepresented it might have worked in your favor.</p>

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<p>I think your Northeast to-the-manner-born background is blinding you here. I think it’s being totally unrealistic to expect the adults in most communities outside of the most upper-class Northeastern suburbs and maybe a few pockets elsewhere to have a “real feel” for what it takes to get into the Ivies. I mean, look at how you casually toss off that you have x number of relatives who went to Ivies, and you can talk confidently about the differences between Brown and Dartmouth and Amherst and what-not. Those are your social circles. You really expect the adults in some middle class suburb of Des Moines, where there are relatively few people who aspire to Ivies / similar elites in the first place, to have a realistic view on what it might take to get into those schools? </p>

<p>I’ll give you an anecdotal example. I ran into the mother of one of my daughter’s friends, and “where are they looking” came up. She said her D – who I believe is a reasonably good, but not outstanding student – is looking at Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Kansas. Oh, and Stanford too. I said nothing – but she (the mother) doesn’t know Stanford from a hole in the wall other than “you hear a lot about them, they must be a good school, and probably smart kids go there.” She’s got absolutely no clue what kind of ballpark her D needs to be in to make it a worthwhile reach application. But – I bet she’ll toss off an application to Stanford. Why the heck not. My business partner, who is quite sophisticated, had her D apply to Yale, Brown and Penn. I thought she was nuts because her D is a fine accomplished student but not in Yale-Brown-Penn land. But they thought why the heck not. I think there are kids like this all over the country – you just don’t see it, because you are in a certain elite-education circle and so you assume that the level of info you possess is common knowledge.</p>

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<p>I’ve read MOST, but not all of the posts in this thread. </p>

<p>First, the Harvard Crimson is published by a corporation which is controlled by students. It has no official connection with Harvard U, believe it or not. There’s no faculty adviser and nobody in the administration screens what’s published. So, sure Harvard STUDENTS like bragging rights to lowest admission rate. So, they publish the story. Lots of alums lap it up too. But seriously, do you think when US News ranked Princeton U above Harvard that anyone in the administration CARED or was worried about his/her job? NOPE. </p>

<p>The OP is from the Midwest. With the exception of Chicago, the Midwest tends to be an area which is underrepresented in the student body of top Eastern schools. So, yes, many of those schools made a particular effort to send materials out to the Midwest to encourage applications. </p>

<p>Many of the college counselors and administrators in the Midwest think that it’s a mistake to send kids to the East for college. Years ago, Newsweek did a story about college admissions, focusing on different kinds of high schools. I remember a guidance counselor in Kansas telling the kids that there were only two words they needed to know: “Truman State.” Do you think that if Harvard sent a rep to that high school the GC would really try to encourage a few kids to apply? There are plenty of folks on this board who think that it makes sense to go to state U in almost all circumstances. Assume for a moment that many GCs and teacher think that too. Do you really think they are going to encourage the kids to apply to Harvard or Yale or Princeton? </p>

<p>And reality is that sometimes the kind of kid who really would benefit from going to a college like Harvard isn’t the kid who has made him/herself beloved by teachers. And, even if they are well meaning, the teachers and counselors may not understand that attending Harvard might not cost more after fin aid than state U does. </p>

<p>Moreover, the College Board, NOT Harvard, decides what info Harvard gets about students. It sells the mailing list to colleges. It just gives them general categories–students with SAT scores above X who self-report their gpas as B+ or better or some such thing. So, nobody working in a college admissions office gets much of a chance to screen out applicants before the mailings; they just use the mailing list from College Board. </p>

<p>There was a young woman who is now about 30 who went to Yale. She had SATs in the 1300s. That was in large part because she had a math score in the 500s. At the end of her freshman year, she won a prize for creative writing open to ALL undergraduates. She was the first freshman to win in over 100 years. The point is simply that if you’d ONLY looked at her SATs, you’d think she’d never get into Yale. But I’m sure Yale didn’t feel it had made a mistake in admitting her. </p>

<p>Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and lots of top colleges want to find the diamonds out there. The kid from Nowheresville High who may write the greatest novel of the 21st Century or be the Bill Gates of his generation. Like a prospector, the admissions officers are more than willing to look through stacks of applications in hopes of finding the diamond. It’s inevitable that they will miss some kids who genuinely ARE diamonds in the process, but give them credit for the fact that they really, really want to find them and give them a chance to attend.</p>

<p>That really IS the reason Harvard and other colleges mail out all those marketing materials. They hope that doing so will net them a few special kids who would not otherwise have even thought of applying.</p>

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<p>My son received zero solicitation letters from any of the Ivies or any T20 school that I can recall. His PSAT was spot on to his first SAT score (he was “Commended”). He was not Val or Sal, and in fact finished just outside of the top 5% of his class. He had no major hooks and his ECs would probably be described by CC “experts” as ordinary for T20 schools, let alone the Ivies. Nonetheless, he applied to three Ivies and and three T20 schools and the rest of his schools (3) were T30 (except for Big State U). He knew that the Ivies were probably a reach, but his stats were well within their ranges. His SAT superscore was 210 points higher than his first SAT.</p>

<p>At his public HS, probably 80% of the kids who go to college go to local state schools. In a class of about 400, I think about 5-10 applied to one or more Ivies, and probably twice that apply to T50 schools or LACs. But every year it seems like at least one or more get into HYPM (I would include S, but usually several kids get into S) so at least the school is known outside our state. I found that Naviance is your friend.</p>

<p>I agree with JHS, that the “Elites”/HYPSM/Ivies (however you want to describe them) are looking for the best students that they can find. They are not soliciting students who have “no chance” at being admitted, but rather students who are within the statistical ranges of generally accepted students for their demographic, especially students who have a “hook” like URM or lower income. Does that mean that they are going to accept all of them - of course not. But how will they know who they want on their campus unless they can get the students to apply. Point me to an unhooked student who had a PSAT of 180 or an SAT of 1800 who received a solicitation letter from one of the “Elites” and I may amend my position.</p>

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<p>Jonri- I completely understand that Harvard might be casting a net for unknown diamonds in other parts of the country. But why blanket a large boarding school in New England with all of that paper? Maybe the list that they use from the college board isn’t that refined that it can sort by state or school? (And the kids at the school figured out what the score cutoff was to get the application. PM me if you are interested.)</p>