<p>@TrinidadJames22, then what was the effect of him having worked so hard in high school? It would be as simple as you think it is if we were talking about one school, but the idea of getting rejected from all those four schools, even with Cornell’s higher acceptance rate, its not as simple as “they didn’t want him.” If it was simply based on who they “want,” what is the purpose of 4 years of high school? Why not stop at 2 years or 3 years, if they are just going to judge you on your “personality.”</p>
<p>@bclintonk, there were four other students accepted to cornell in that year. None had any special qualities. None had national awards. None had legacy. None had any significant leadership role. No one had anything other than the “run of the mill” activities you described. And obviously none had the scores. I sure hope you have a good 3 paragraph reason to explain this.</p>
<p>I stated “tons of extracurriculars,” because to be honest I am not sure of all the activities he did outside of school. But several of the clubs he was a part of went on to state and national contests and conferences. Not to mention he was a National Merit Finalist (but of course, that would only have hurt his application.</p>
<p>3girls3cats, like I have repeated in several other responses, it is not eating up my friend. I was just curious as to how these instances could occur. For example, why are students encouraged to study for the SAT, when it is just one of 20 other “more important” things that colleges want nowadays. Thank you for your advice, but it is much different when you actually are living through college rejections… and with his stats and dedication, I don’t even want to think of how he initially took being rejected from each of those FOUR schools.</p>
<p>@jsmike, I was just trying to help. It sounded like you were really upset by this.</p>
<p>I’ve been through this process twice already and I actively counseled my girls not to count on any acceptances when they went through. They knew going in that the chances of acceptances at highly ranked schools were slim without an obvious hook. One never even noticed the prestige schools and was bowled over by some of the very generous merit offers she received from highly ranked LACs, and if she were applying now I’d counsel her not to expect admission to those LACs either, let alone merit $$! The other discovered that she didn’t care for the elite scene after all, spent as much time working off campus as possible, and has been a happier camper since graduation. During that time and since then, I’ve watched many deserving, even some truly brilliant kids ( and I don’t use the term lightly) denied from schools that (imnsho) should have drooled over them. I won’t deny that there was disappointment–rejection is hard for sure–but one of them is graduating this year with an amazing scholarship to study at Oxford, another landed a dream job over applicants coming from those prestige universities, and another left a prestige university to study poetry and is now pursuing an MFA. So I maintain the best way to deal with the unpredictability is to cast a wide net and go into it with very low expectations. </p>
<p>By all means study for the SATs and do your best because the scores do count–but don’t expect that a 2360 gets you in anywhere. Do your best and if it’s high enough to buy you the lottery ticket and the lottery is what you want to play, go for it. </p>
<p>OP, you are looking at this very unilaterally-- ie,he has stats and rigor, is involved in something or othr, what’s wrong? Don’t they want high performers, don’t they value his activities, etc? Posters have explained umpteen ways and you come back to the same. Why? </p>
<p>'There’s another thread you can hop about kids getting shut out of Ivies. Of course kids should aim to do well on SATs and ACTs. But because so many kids can’t believe it’s not “all about stats,” they miss this critical additional points adcoms look for. If you don’t get it, please read up.</p>
<p>@jsmike123qwe</p>
<p>Who knows, say he applies to Brown or Yale and they accept him, do we have this thread? I don’t know, Well here’s a snippet of my story, if it helps.</p>
<p>Nothing I ever did was part of a master plan to go to a good university. I was pretty sure I’d get into the program I wanted in the Caribbean, just because of grades and the school I go to. But I still worked hard, just at other things. Things that I guess, if you had the objective proccess you so strongly desire, wouldn’t even factor in.</p>
<p>So we have milk cows and sell chickens, that’s how my family makes our money. So if I don’t milk and herd the cows, my dad has to do it, or worse, my sister. He’s sick, she’s young and just not good at these things. So I do it…was this a master plan to evoke sympathy from admissions guys? Nah, it’s just reality. Does this show up on a resume? Nope. But I think it should show up somewhere.</p>
<p>I was pretty good at school, and I happened to like it too, it was a break from my village, like an hour and a half away, in a city, with intersting things and competitive people. Learning about things was just my comfort zone, so I gravitated toward school. I knew it would generate opportunities (Not on the scale I imagined - but still, at least law school at my local university - which is huge where I’m from). Understandably, your friends expectations are different, he came from a different life, but I’d like to think he has similar reasons. Curiosity, ambition. That’s why you stay in school.</p>
<p>Honestly, this is why I applied to American schools. I dislike America, it’s an arrogrant country, but for me, this proccess is so much more fair than Cambridge or Oxford. I have the scores for both (just about), and I would have gotten interviews had I applied, but who wants to spend the next four years of their life with guys who just spent the last seven trying to pass a test? Not me.</p>
<p>That’s why when I see decision threads, and I see, 2400, president of 15 clubs, national merit whatever, - rejected, it don’t bother me. Makes me think that these schools are trying to compile a group of people rather than a group of statistics.</p>
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<p>Maybe you’re right-- maybe it’s not so simple. Perhaps there was some glaring flaw in his application of which you’re not aware. Maybe that’s why he was rejected from all four schools.</p>
<p>On the flip side… what’s wrong with being judged on your personality? Some students are more confident, empathetic, articulate, innovative, entrepreneurial, mature, and/or compassionate than others. They’ve usually worked to develop these traits through their activities and are genuinely interesting people. Others come from difficult or unique backgrounds. I imagine they also contribute a lot to a college community. These soft factors can play a big role in the admissions process.</p>
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I haven’t read through all the comments in the thread, so I may repeat some earlier comments. Your friend doesn’t sound like a top applicant to me. Many applicants have excellent grades and test scores, many more than selective colleges could possibly admit. With more qualified applicants than spots, selective colleges generally do not try to find the pinnacle of test scores among all the top scoring students, such as admitting all the 99.9th percentile scores rejecting all the 99.0th percentiles. Instead the rest of the application can have a large impact. What does the applicant do outside of classwork that would look impressive on more than just a HS/regional level? His stats may have better than most applicants, but how do his ECs, awards, LORs, essays, or other that makes his application stand out compare to the tens of thousands of other applicants? Selective colleges are not just choosing the students who are likely to graduate with the highest GPA. They are choosing the students who are likely to make an impression on the college and world beyond.</p>
<p>Colleges also consider things like distribution of majors and likelyhood of matriculating. For example, Cornell’s engineering college is probably more selective than some of the ivies, even though it is often thought of as the least selective ivy. Engineering applicants generally have a different degree of selectivity than humanities applicants. Cornell’s hotel school has some of the lowest stats of all the Cornell schools. The document at <a href=“http://dpb.cornell.edu/documents/1000176.pdf”>http://dpb.cornell.edu/documents/1000176.pdf</a> mentions a 25th percentile SAT verbal of under 600. One of the reasons for the low stats is they are likely to reject a top stat student who doesn’t have experience working in the hospitality industry (~90% of entering class has relevant work experience) and/or doesn’t seem serious about going into the hotel industry during the interview (interview is required for hotel school). It’s not that they aren’t selective. It’s that they are emphasizing non-stat qualities. Brown goes so far as to list many non-stat criteria as more important than both grades and test scores in the CDS. Things like course rigor, talent/ability, character/personal qualities, and level of interest are all marked as more important that stats.</p>
<p>Harvard has the lowest overall admission rate for ivies, but it has the highest admission rate of all SCEA colleges. It’s SCEA admit rate was 21% this year. Based on the number of remaining spots, the RD rate is expected to be 3% or less this year. Harvard will likely have the lowest RD admit rate of the SCEA schools, even though it had the highest SCEA admit rate. Harvard’s selectivity appears to differ significantly depending on whether you indicate a first choice by applying SCEA. Some of the other ivies show a similar pattern, to a lesser degree.</p>
<p>Wow. Some mighty powerful posts here. Agree Data. And yay, TJ and WD. </p>
<p>@jsmike123qwe…when 19 out of 20 applicants are rejected to these schools and most have awesome stats…how is it shocking to be rejected? It’s very, very likely to be rejected. What would be shocking would be to be accepted. </p>
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<p>How do you know? Did you read their essays? Know what they did outside of school? Know all their stats, courses, what they did in summer, free time, for fun or for service? Did you read their applications??</p>
<p>jsmike123qwe-</p>
<p>No one here can explain why he was not admitted. Frankly, it’s not our job. We can posit some possible explanations. Among them:</p>
<p>-His recommendations weren’t as strong as he or you thought. He rubbed one of his recommenders the wrong way and it was reflected in his letter. One milquetoast rec. can really hurt a candidate to top schools.
-His competition was much stronger than you think. Not everyone trumpets his or her accomplishments. I have a kid who won a national award, presented in DC by his senator, and had a professional accomplishment that would make him literally one in two million among his peers. No one at school knew about either. He just didn’t like to be in the spotlight.
-His essay wasn’t great. I know you thought he wrote a strong essay, but it can sometimes be hard to judge the essay(s) of someone you know well. You don’t have the distance/perspective to read them as the admissions reader will. Perhaps what you though was witty the admissions officers though was corny, or what seemed sincere to you sounded smarmy to them.
-As others have suggested, he may have been from an oversubscribed demographic with nothing in his application that really stood out.</p>
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<p>If you think that the only reason for working hard in high school is to be accepted at one of a small handful of colleges then you’re implying that working hard in high school is a waste of time for pretty much everyone, because only about 10-20,000 students will be receiving acceptances from those schools. </p>
<p>This isn’t the way life works. Working hard doesn’t always bring the desired result. It doesn’t always mean that you get the job, the salary, the girl or boy. It doesn’t mean that you get to the Olympics or receive the Pulitzer or the Nobel, that you win the election. </p>
<p>“Seemingly perfect students get rejected from the ivies” because (IMO):
- They’re Asian. There are many “seemingly perfect” Asians, and Ivies are biased toward URMs (who are allowed to be less “perfect”). Sad, but true.
- Holistic admissions. They’re not the exact type of perfect that the college is looking for. I think this reason isn’t as common as reason 1 though.
- Unlikely, but crappy essays and recs. (Although, why would a “seemingly perfect” candidate write a bad essay and get a rec from a teacher who won’t write a good one?)
- They’re poor. Also unlikely, because Ivies call themselves “need-blind.” But we have to take their word for it? IMO, I think that out of the “poor” applicants, the Ivies choose to accept the most “perfect” who they think are worth their money. It’s a business, after all.</p>
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<p>IMHO, this is the essence of the problem. There was a lack of focus in his application strategy, and I suspect,that lack of focus showed somewhere else in his application. Life in Hanover, NH is insurmountably different from life in Morningside Heights. I’m not saying one is better, but they are very different. He would have been better served applying to colleges that “fit” him better.</p>
<p>Excessive homogeneity of anything leads to loss of contrast and dulling of the senses.</p>
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<p>Between the 8 Ivies and your average, local public institution lie many excellent colleges that are very selective, but not total crapshoots. The OP got into Tufts and Boston College,for example. He may very well have been admitted to other schools just outside the US News top 20 (or maybe one or two inside) if he had applied.</p>
<p>I have not seen stats distributions, like the ones bclintonk cited for Brown, for all the other Ivies. I’ve seen similar distributions for Georgetown, the US News #20 national university. At Georgetown, an applicant who ranks in the top 5% of the HS class, with one perfect 800 SAT score, has something like a 35% to just under 50% chance (depending on which of Georgetown’s undergraduate programs we’re talking about). I think as you move past the T20, or among some of the national LACs even inside the T20, you’d start to see odds well over 50% for kids with stats that high.</p>
<p>If the OP’s friend were seeing multiple rejections by schools in that range (say, the #21 and above national universities, or some of the LACs outside the top 10 or so) I’d begin to suspect there was something negative (or at least very unenthusiastic) in a LOR, or a screw-up by the HS in processing his paperwork. But of course, we can only speculate.</p>
<p>As experienced posters repeat over and over on CC, the Ivies (including Cornell) are reaches for virtually everyone. The exceptions might include movie stars, Olympic medal contenders, Intel prize winners, or Kennedy Kids … who also happen to have solid stats. If the OP did not fall into any of those categories, or have a more run-of-the-mill hook, the real odds of admission even to Cornell A&S/Engineering would be fairly low.</p>
<p>These schools look for the same characteristics, plus fit; they’re not unrelated, ie., if you apply to 4 you’ll get into 1. That’s not how it works. In addition, remember that your friend probably didn’t apply to Cornell Ag so stats are deceiving.
There are 50 colleges in the US that offer an amazing undergraduate education and there are several for each kind of personality types. Your siblings and friends should focus on a variety of colleges, not just Ivy League. </p>
<p>Quote - I don’t want the same thing happening to my siblings or kids in the future… How can I tell them to work hard in high school, when there is nothing to work towards besides four years in a city or state institution (not that these are in anyway bad).</p>
<p>OP, the concern is understandable. But the value of hard work goes deeper and longer than the college acceptances. My S is similar to your friend, so going into this application season, we weren’t sure about the outcome. Do we care? Sure! But if he doesn’t get in his top choice, will we question the hard work that he put in throughout the middle and high school years, which has made him incredibly focused, disciplined, efficient, and mature? Absolutely not! Those intangible values will benefit him for the rest of his life, and he clearly is aware of that.</p>
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<p>I disagree that just because the college towns are different that the student didn’t apply based on fit.</p>
<p>It is not unusual for a college student to be more interested in what the college has to offer than what the surrounding community has to offer. For example, although the environments are very different, the math program at Cornell has a lot to offer ompared to the math program at Princeton.</p>
<p>Secondly, it isn’t as if college age students are so stuck in their habits that they wouldn’t find as much interest in a snowy NH environment or exploring what NYC has to offer. </p>
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<p>I have little interest in sports but recognize the truth of this. Did any of you see this article in the NY Times? <a href=“Harvard’s Latest Basketball Success: Winning Over Its Campus - The New York Times”>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/sports/ncaabasketball/harvards-latest-basketball-success-winning-over-its-campus.html</a> From the professor of Christian morals:
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<p>I agree with others that something else may have gone wrong with Mike’s app. Years ago, a similar student was rejected by most of the top colleges. I happened to be in a position one day to ask an admissions rep at his dream school why he was rejected. He checked and told me his essays killed him. I asked the student what he had written. When he told me what he had written in response to one question, I knew why he hadn’t gotten in. The sad thing? His English teacher and his GC both told him it was a great essay. </p>
<p>Or maybe it was his recs. They may have been generic “Mike’sFriend was in my class. He got an A. He is an excellent student and I’m sure he would do well at Columbia or __” Most public school teachers are just plain awful at writing recs for top colleges. And I’ll tell you my own personal hunch–many teachers think that the Ivies are just hype and that it doesn’t matter where a kid goes to college. I doubt that teachers who feel that way write good recs. They aren’t intentionally sabotaging anyone, but they aren’t going to do a good job convincing someone that the kid BELONGS at a top college.</p>
<p>But the most likely reason is that he just didn’t convince the admissions committee that if it didn’t admit him there wouldn’t be someone else in the class who would everything he could do during college just as well as he could. Maybe he could have offered something special, but, if so, he failed to tell them what it was. </p>
<p>Oh re Cornell. Maybe things have changed, but…it used to be one heck of a lot harder to get into Cornell ILR than into Cornell A &S if you were a NY state resident. There’s a HUGE differential in tuition since ILR is one of the “public” colleges within Cornell and that meant lots of kids applied to it. (This has nothing to do with Mike’s friend. Just in response to some comments above.) </p>