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<p>That’s the way to go IMO.</p>
<p>I really hesitate to point to how schools let you know what they value and want. But Yale is a great example of a school that lays out what they look for. Not on a page with bullet points, but there for the taking. Stanford does it. Brown does. Etc. They don’t lay out a formula, no, but I did use the word “dig.” For me, it’s a matter of, the higher you want to aim, the fiercer the competition for limited slots, the more you do need to explore what those schools do present. </p>
<p>I don’t know any adcoms who say it is capricious. Maybe some, somewhere, have.<br>
Btw, it;s not as simple as take the AP and get an A. That’s CC. But I will say that kids who want STEM at a most competitive sure better have taken the highest level math and sci classes, been involved in math/sci activities, and be able to articulate their interest. </p>
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<p>There is no standard definition of “better stats and qualifications.” Therefore one cannot **demand **that these schools accept the “most qualified” students when there is no such definition. Nor can you hold one “accountable” for choosing Susie over Bill when there is no established or clearly superior criteria for determining which kid is more “qualified.” Susie may have a 3.8 while Bill has a 3.9; that is NOT evidence that Bill is more qualified than Susie. There will ALWAYS be a subjective component to college admissions, which means that someone will ALWAYS find it unfair, someone will ALWAYS be frustrated; someone will ALWAYS have a different definition of “qualified.”</p>
<p>"The process is mysterious and the decisions are capricious–the adcoms themselves will admit this! I guess I don’t get why it’s not possible to acknowledge it, shrug, and move on. "</p>
<p>Exactly.</p>
<p>Good lord, don’t any of you people ever hire people? The process isn’t any more opaque than the hiring process. You look for some general minimum criteria that meet your needs - ability to do A, certification in B, hands-on experience managing or supervising C. Then you interview, you get your team together in a room, and everyone adds their own observation of the person from the interview. Maybe this person has concerns that the candidate can work well on a team. Or a conversation another person had convinced them that the candidate would add real strength in such-and-such area. </p>
<p>Adults in the work force do this all the time. I do this all the time. It’s subjective and holistic, but it’s not “opaque.” </p>
<p>Maybe some of you work in the types of jobs where you just rack-and-stack your applicants according to performance on a standardized test or something. </p>
<p>@picktails, see it is easy to defend the “holistic admissions process” when it works in your favor, but it is quite different when it does not. Imagine working your entire life, eventually dreaming of getting into a top tier college, but are finally rejected as if your scores, activities and essays, mean absolutely nothing. </p>
<p>And to be honest, most people don’t know exactly how polarized the admissions system is in favor of those applicants with certain inherent qualities. Do you really think it makes sense that some people work for four years to maintain a good GPA, participate in activities they love, and get a perfect SAT score are in the end REJECTED from all top tier universities. While I am happy for your daughter, please try to put yourself in the mindset of people who weren’t as “fortunate.”</p>
<p>“Imagine working your entire life, eventually dreaming of getting into a top tier college, but are finally rejected as if your scores, activities and essays, mean absolutely nothing.”</p>
<p>There is no problem of smart, hardworking students not getting into top tier schools. There’s only a problem when they define top tier schools as being a very narrow set of schools (whether that’s Ivy League like your friend did, or Top 10, or somesuch). Really, the pool of top tier schools is wider than that.</p>
<p>The problem of good students not being able to afford college is a FAR bigger problem than the so-called “problem” that a smart student wanted the Ivy league specifically and didn’t get in. .</p>
<p>"The problem with the entire system is a lack of transparency and measurement. What are the school’s objectives and how well did they meet them? Is the objective to admit the best students within a diverse framework? If so, what does “best’ mean? Does it mean most likely to achieve high grades, to successfully graduate, to gain employment or admission to graduate school?”</p>
<p>YOU may not know what the criteria are at the broadest level, but I assure you the adcoms all know. They are not rogue. They are working within the strategic plan for their university. They have “accountability” insofar if they don’t deliver to the institution’s objectives, they’ll be outta there the next year. Just like anyone in any company. So really, now, get a grip. They aren’t just willy-nilly admitting random people for fun. It’s part of a strat plan. </p>
<p>What they need to track, within diversity categories, is whether, the best students they reject outperform the weakest students they accept. That would tell a lot about whether the committee did a good job of discerning among candidates."</p>
<p>How are they supposed to track the performance of students they REJECT? What, the kids that Harvard rejects who go to Yale … Harvard needs to track them? How should that work, precisely?</p>
<p>Do you also not get that no matter how brilliant of a class you amass (however you measure brilliant), half the students will be below average? </p>
<p>"Doesn’t matter if it’s a miniscule number. The point is that there are all sorts of drivers to this process that have nothing to do with merit and very often they aren’t even within the control of the applicant. "</p>
<p>Name me something else in life that isn’t like this, too. Were you “most qualified” to marry your spouse, or did it just so happened he liked something in you and vice versa? How about the process by which you choose or chose your friends? Or the process by which you got a job? Some people on here are just really put off by things they can’t control. Well, life’s a gamble. No guarantees. If you want a guarantee, feel free to apply to the hundreds of colleges in the country that will tell you automatically that with GPA of x.x and SAT of y, you’re in. </p>
<p>jsmike, everyone else worked hard also. Entitlement mentality always results in bitter disappointment. Even Tom Brady has a bad day sometimes.</p>
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<p>Yes, it makes perfect sense to me. It’s a simple supply and demand issue. More students with good GPAs and test scores than there are spots for them at “all top tier universities.” </p>
<p>The value of working hard in school should be learning a lot. The value of participating in activities you love is having fun or mastering a skill. And the payoff for both these things should be entering adulthood as an inquisitive, intelligent person with genuine interests. Being this person will get you to where you want to go in life, regardless of where you attend college.</p>
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<p>Exactly. And the policies will never be good enough until there’s a guarantee of admission for people who think they have done everything right. Which means we will never hear the end of these rants. :(</p>
<p>So @jsmike123qwe, what did your Ivy-reject friend end up doing after graduation? </p>
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<p>That’s what I’d like to know. And what would “tracking” that kid really tell them? Are we to believe that if Bob was rejected in favor of one of Harvard’s “weaker” students and went on to graduate summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa at State Flagship while Susie merely graduated cum laude at Harvard that it means that we can automatically assume that he would have done better than she at Harvard had he been admitted and that therefore offering Susie admission was an obvious mistake? NO possible way to determine that.</p>
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<p>Do you think it makes sense to assume that the kids who DID get accepted to those top tier universities didn’t ALSO work just as hard as you?</p>
<p>@Nrdsb4, well you can’t get much higher than a 4.0 GPA and 2360 SAT, with awards and extracurriculars on top, so I find it difficult to believe that all the 14000 undergrads at just Cornell (not to mention the other Ivies) worked harder than my friend. And given my own experience in my high school, I saw people who did nearly no work, cheated for exams, barely attended extracurriculars be accepted to these schools. </p>
<p>So if these schools are admitting such awful, lazy and unethical students year after year, why do you still put them on a pedestal?</p>
<p>Transparency can be overrated.</p>
<p>The Tufts adcoms, in a desire to make their admissions process as transparent as possible, liveblogged their ED1 committee meetings in 2009 and 2010. They obscured some details so you wouldn’t know exactly what applicant they were discussing, just see the ways that the process worked and what was the sort of thing that could make the scale tip towards admit or reject. </p>
<p>At a certain level, it was helpful and intriguing. It was clear that slacking off senior year was a really bad idea, for instance. At another level, it was disturbing, almost voyeuristic to read as they discussed an applicant who was an EMT but who was going to be rejected. And if you or your child was one of the applicants for that cycle, it was an especially bizarre feeling. </p>
<p>I’d point you towards the blogs, except that I can’t. Tufts no longer does the liveblog exercise, and they scrubbed the existing liveblogs from their webspace. Tells you something about how well transparency really goes over.</p>
<p>@sally305, boycott? BOYCOTT? Why would you boycott your own education? How much more right can you get from a 2360 SAT?? That’s every dang question correct. Don’t give me the holistic admissions nonsense. You know as well as I that it is a inherently unfair excuse to allow colleges to pick people based on race, disability, family stories, legacy admissions, and athletic ability.</p>
<p>A 2360 doesn’t buy you a right to anything. Neither does a 4.0. That’s sounding mighty entitled to me.</p>