<p>@SlitheyTove, That is precisely what frustrates me about the modern college admissions process. There are a group of people, who consider themselves “holier than thou” sitting in a room reading through papers, automatically rejecting - most probably influenced by what they are feeling. What if someone had a bad experience with pianists? Or smart students? Or White students? Or Hispanic students? Their inherent prejudice will skew the process to a level that is unacceptable. The whole thing is uncomfortably subjective, and there needs to be a more of (not complete) a numerical approach to this ridiculous “admissions process.”</p>
<p>jsmike, settle down. “Boycott” was not my word, although I agree with those who have used it that it is really silly to be obsessed with schools you find so lacking in the integrity of their admissions process as well as the students they admit. If you don’t like the policies, GO ELSEWHERE.</p>
<p>In any case no one has said anything about “boycotting your own education” (and that doesn’t even make sense). Again, what did your friend decide to do after all the rejections? Is his life really over? Or is he making the best of the situation he finds himself in?</p>
<p>You really haven’t read anything any of the nice people here have taken the time to post, have you? You are fixated on a ridiculous point of view and refuse to consider that some of us–adults with decades of real-world experience–might have some valid perspectives. When you’re done with your tantrum, maybe we can have an actual discussion.</p>
<p>jsmike:
There was nothing wrong with your friend’s application. It’s just a numbers game. 1 in 20 means 19 kids get rejected, 15 of which are qualified. Your friend was qualified, but so was his companions in rejection. I’m sure he got into a great college and is thriving there.</p>
<p>I’m going to try again (then I’ll stop because I’m not sure you want to hear what people in the know have to say, it seems you just want to vent.)
There’s no meaningful difference between 2160 and 2360 from an adcom point of view. What that 2360 mostly correlates with is parents’ income. I’m sure your friend worked very hard to get it, but that’s not the point.
Another point that has yet to get accross is that you focus on the wrong degrees of things that Ivy League adcoms look at. (Not the wrong elements, just the degree of it.)</p>
<p>As for Cornell, for a last time: your friend didn’t apply to ILR or Ag. </p>
<p>What I’m hearing you say is that you’d love to attend a college where all students would be like you and your friend. Is that right?</p>
<p>Are you in college right now? Or are you in high school?
Because if you’re in high school, you can apply to British universities (except Oxbridge to a certain extent), to Irish universities, to Chinese or Indian universities, even to French Grandes Ecoles etc. Their admission process is mostly numbers-based and they’ll be glad to have an American student.</p>
<p>There are personality factors, too, jsmike. You’re insane, by the way. You set up these bizarre expectations for collectives you have no input to, then get all hot and bothered when they violate your expectations. That’s just setting yourself up for disappointment. If you dislike the admissions process in whichever schools, then apply to schools that go by the strict rules that you telepathically dictate for them, which, I believe, totals zero schools. Good luck living that dream, Mr. 2360.</p>
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<p>Officially closing this account at Post #600. It’s been a blast! Cheers, people.</p>
<p>Bye, PolarBear! Enjoy your post CC-life. :)</p>
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<p>No. That’s not how it worked/works. Not at all. </p>
<p>The blogged meetings were committee meetings. Each applicant was “presented” by one adcom, and then that applicant was discussed by the group. Sometimes the discussion was short if an admit/reject was clearcut; other times the discussion was more protracted. It was clear from the liveblog that people were rooting for each and every student, that they hated having to reject. It was by no means automatic. They’re not holier than thou, but they cannot admit everyone. They need to make choices. </p>
<p>Of course it was subjective. Tufts prides itself on having a highly holistic take on admissions, stresses that to applicants. Other schools choose a more numbers-driven approach. </p>
<p>As Pizzagirl said, life is full of times when folks make choices about us that are highly subjective. I’ve applied for positions where my c.v. is a perfect fit, the interview’s gone swimmingly, where I’ve been told I’m on the short list…and the job’s gone to someone else who also was a perfect fit/had a good interview/was on the short list. Shrug. That’s life. </p>
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<p>A high score on the SAT does not mean that the student worked hard. He may have, but someone with a much lower score may have worked just as hard or harder for their scores. </p>
<p>The admissions committees do not base admission on who they think worked the hardest. You are not owed admission simply because you believe you worked harder than someone else.</p>
<p>These schools have no intention of making admission a matter of scores and stats. </p>
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<p>You are really going to be frustrated when you apply for a job, and find that the process there is just the same as it is at colleges.</p>
<p>Why are people assuming that URM are automatically less intelligent than their ‘majority’ counterparts? As if the only reason they got in was because of a man-made classification that is literally just a means to separate them from everyone else…</p>
<p>They like kids who…can consider alternate points of view. :)</p>
<p>And, ha, they aren’t holier than thou. But I do detect that attitude in some posts here, trying to tell a private college how to assess. Who are “you” to tell them? Really, a parent or a kid? These colleges are accountable to their institutions, not to you. You simply can’t get that point.</p>
<p>This is the old Friends and Family sinkhole. OP thinks his friend deserved “better” than a Cornell rejection. OP, a high school kid. </p>
<p>^^^^^^^^^^LOL. :D</p>
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<p>…and athletes are lunkheads and legacies are rich brats. At least the athletes and legacies can fly under the radar. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to put in all the work it takes to be admitted to a highly competitive school only to be told by people on the internet that the only reason you got into your school was the color of your skin.</p>
<p>Much2learn, you have a weird way of looking at things.</p>
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<p>This is just ridiculous. Smart students who don’t get into Ivy League schools are not tainted for life. They are still smart. They just have to take a different path to their success. Of course a bajillion high school kids each year “wanted the Ivy League specifically.” Well, guess what? A bajillion high school kids also want to play major league baseball or star on Broadway or win the Nobel Prize. But unfortunately, not everyone gets a trophy in the adult world. Why is that so hard for some to accept?</p>
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<p>Why WOULD adcoms be let go for their decisions, when year over year these schools have strong entering classes and more and more kids are clamoring to get in?</p>
<p>I just don’t understand why people can’t just tell their rejected kids–“You are amazing but there were too many applicants for the limited number of spots.” Why is this so difficult?</p>
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<p>I have a 2390 SAT (1600 M/CR subscore, missed only two MC questions on the writing section) and 4.0 unweighted GPA with a rigorous schedule. I have completed almost 500 hours of volunteer work, held significant leadership positions in two time-consuming ECs, and won state level awards in one of them. And I wasn’t accepted by two prestigious liberal arts colleges that have HIGHER acceptance rates than most of the Ivies.</p>
<p>I could moan and gripe about how I deserved to get in because the “holistic” process is inherently unfair and not transparent or objective or accountable. But I don’t, because I know others who were accepted. A friend headed for Yale whose native language is not English, who was the star of the soccer and mock trial teams but sometimes had to sleep in the bus at weekend tournaments since he couldn’t afford hotel rooms. A friend who’s going to Pomona who has won national computer science awards and designed programs now used in curriculum at our school district. An acquaintance going to UPenn whose two older brothers are both in gangs, whose parents never graduated high school, who had to work two part-time jobs all school year to help support her family.</p>
<p>The college admission process isn’t perfectly quantifiable because people aren’t quantifiable. People have stories. Admission officers don’t want classes of 4.0/2400s, they want classes of people with unique perspectives and motivation to change the world that will drive them long after college. Is it unfair that these students, with lower SAT scores and grades than me, were accepted? Not in the least. If I had grown up in the kinds of situations they did, I would never have accomplished what I have, and I readily admit that.</p>
<p>The suggestion that the admission process needs to be more “accountable” in predicting future success is ridiculous on several counts, as others have brought up. But the idea I find most ludicrous is the notion that colleges “owe” us a perfectly fair admissions process (however you define “fair”). The Ivies do not owe me a college education any more than various companies owe me a job or Mercedes-Benz owes me a car. In fact, I don’t deserve anything from the Ivies or other elites; my life is my own, and I don’t need any admissions officer to swoop me onto the path of success.</p>
<p>As a side note, my first choice going into the application process wasn’t an Ivy or an elite university. It was a tiny liberal arts college with a 40% acceptance rate that no one’s heard of. It is a perfect fit for me academically and socially. I refuse to believe there are students who will never be happy and successful unless they get into an elite college. Perhaps if students were more thoughtful in their applications, we would have fewer threads like this. </p>
<p>The injustice is that someone who works hard and has achieved all the good grades and taken on rigorous courses, should do well in college admissions, and it’s just not always the case.</p>
<p>I think we all want to believe that “hard work pays off.” Otherwise, why should anyone put in the effort if there’s nothing in it for them?</p>
<p>We’ve seen too many fantastic tippety top students fall thru the cracks in college admissions. College admissions has gone too much the other way in taking kids who are legacy or athletes instead of taking on scholars; afterall they’re schools right? </p>
<p>If anyone wonders why students have taken to applying to 20+ schools, it’s not only because the Common App has made it easier to apply–it actually hasn’t. It’s much more cumbersome and wieldy than the old paper and pen, Xerox your essay application, esp when everything you put in gets automatically erased over and over again.
No, it’s because it is such a crap shoot on who gets in, that you might as well improve your chances by applying to as many great colleges as you can, and maybe just maybe someone will see something in you that gets you plucked.</p>
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<p>The question is, where does this notion come from?</p>
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<p>Is an acceptance from an elite university really the only reward for hard work?</p>
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<p>This, I think, is what’s unique about the American higher education system. Our best colleges and universities are not just places to go to class and learn. They are residential communities where students participate in activities, discussions, leadership, and community service. They are are incubators where students learn how to live as well as how to do math problems.</p>
<p>+++for warriordaughter. If only all high-school kids on this site were like you. You are going to go far in life.</p>
<p>Well, we all want to believe that hard work and success are inextricably linked in general, but that’s not necessarily so.</p>
<p>In the last recession, amazingly competent people were laid off and some suffered tremendous financial losses.
Some smart but not top college graduates get jobs through connections and do well enough to keep those jobs.
And then there are parents who work 2-3 jobs each but don’t make much money and never will.</p>
<p>As for college admissions, DS and I have become convinced that those essays matter. DS’s showed him to be someone who is creative and willing to put himself out there in his community. Readers could easily think that he’ll do the same at college.</p>
<p>Friends of his, including the val, whose essays had less energy and showed less creativity, have not done as well with admissions, at least not yet.</p>
<p>But what those essays looked like are not a simple function of the work put into them. The essays reveal the kids’ personalities and suggest what they’ll add to the college community. Of course, that’s a matter of judgment, which is what the ad comms’ jobs are all about.</p>
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<p>You can measure anything as long as you define it. If it’s just some ethereal concept of “success”, it’s impossible to measure. And expensive! I’m now imagining the cost of application fees if the school is going to track each applicant in order to figure out how well everyone does in life. </p>
<p>As a parent, I really don’t care if a school thinks its admissions folks are doing a good job. What <em>I</em> care about is how well a school will serve my child’s needs. Ideally, I’d like to know how my children would do at College X as compared to Colleges A, B, C, D and E, especially if C and D are going to be a fraction of the cost of X. There’s going to be some overlap with what <em>I</em> want to know and what College X wants to know, but our goals aren’t identical. </p>
<p>College X will be happy to tell me all kinds of things about their student body: about four and six year graduation rates, about the percentage of students who receive MDs/JDs/PhDs/MBAs, the number of Rhodes or Fulbright recipients. They may be able to tell me average reported income of their alumni, average giving levels, and so forth. But none of this will tell me what specific value I’m getting from sending my child to College X, as opposed to being children who come from the Tove household with all the benefits thereof :-). There are a few schools that do try to quantify their value by giving incoming freshmen and graduating seniors a test that is designed to assess how much their students learn over the course of their college educations. Great idea that still needs more work and isn’t being used by many schools yet.</p>
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<p>Forgetting for a moment the ridiculous comparison of elite college rejection forcing attendance to an almost as elite college with slavery or noble/peasant inequities, no one here has proven that the choices made by the Ivies are even “unfair.” There is no evidence whatsoever that using a holistic admissions process ensures that the better or “more qualified” students are rejected in favor of inferior students on any significant level because the term “more qualified” is inherently subjective unless GPA and test scores are the ONLY determining criteria for admission. </p>