Why do we allow college admissions offices to shape and pass judgment on our children's character?

Parents Forum
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“District in Ohio had 222 valedictorians in 2015. 2 of every 10 grads. What is the point?”

Probably happier kids, which is what posters on this thread say is really important. They don’t really look at it as devaluing the award as many judgmental adults do, more a validation of their hard work. I wasn’t even close to val or sal, so I may respect it more.

I think that’s the template that CC advises to students on the chance me threads. home state, stats, ECs, hooks etc…

“This suggests they don’t understand how different these schools are, that stellar is only the first hurdle, and the importance of finding the right one.”

@gardenstategal I went to HS in upstate NY and it was common for the top students to apply to a few ivies even if they seem different to adults. Kids don’t really look at it that way, they figure they can adapt to a campus like Cornell or one like Columbia or Brown with it’s more open curriculum. For LACs, they typically applied to Vassar, Amherst, Williams, three pretty different campuses.

“Strikes me that the colleges are pretty “transparent,” whatever that means.”

The holistic colleges are not that transparent, they can be a lot more. They don’t release acceptance percentages by race, state, legacy, first-gen, income (say no FA vs Pell eligible). They don’t release GPAs/scores by those categories as well. They have all this btw, it’s not that hard to publish it. They should also release more info about EA and ED.

The CDS is good, but some colleges have stopped releasing their CDS or putting less information than before. Its’ only the with the information on Harvard that at least for them and similar colleges, the public got data, and that was because they were sued and had to produce it.

And without a doubt, the colleges are not very transparent on financial aid. Even though for individuals colleges may be need blind, not surprisingly they’re within budget every year and somehow got the 50% of the class to subsidize the other 50%, or whatever number is their goal.

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So we have a thread asking “why we allow AO’s to pass judgement”, and because its make them happy, we label anyone above a certain threshold as valedictorian? When I was in school, we called that the cum laude or honor society.

Amusingly, each of the schools really only has one or two valedictorians. The term describes the person(s) who give a speech to the other graduates…not the person with the highest GPA (although that’s often how the speaker is determined).

There are 218 (+/- 1 or 2) people running around telling people they were valedictorian…happy to allow others to falsely assume it’s a performance based term. At this…maybe I should be happy AO’s will provide a bit of judgement. Somebody should.

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I guess we can agree to disagree. Enough info is out there, people just don’t want to hear it. Or don’t like it. Or don’t do the research.

A school can put out all of that information to a very granular level, but at the end of the day, if there is any subjective component to admissions, there will never be a perfect prediction for admissions for a specific kid.

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Why do we all let them pass judgement? It’s the price of admission. We not only allow them, we enable them by paying hefty application fees and having our kids write lots of essays for the privilege of being evaluated at “highly rejective” schools. Our kids or we parents or both want a chance at the elusive brass ring, which if caught, is likely to involve considerable expense.

Whether we internalize negative results is an entirely different matter, which is under our control, although a 17-18 year old applicant is unlikely to have enough life experience to accept rejection with equanimity.

Whether we think it’s worth the price, well, there are pages and pages of opinion on this topic on CC.

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I see rejection as part of life. People judging you is something will all have to get used to if we are to get anywhere in this world. If one goes into applying to elite schools with eyes wide open, understanding that rejection is the most likely outcome no matter how awesome your parents think you are, then the rejection is part of the life experience that builds up to equanimity. Put yourself out there, give it your best shot, allow yourself to brood for a few days if it doesn’t go your way, and attend a different great school with zeal. That is success in my book.

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Our school has a graduating class of a little over 800. GC do not meet with every kid and they do no college counseling. We do not have Naviance and they don’t know which schools you apply to. I assume the LOR is a template since they don’t know all the kids.

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Told my S21 if you don’t get a rejection from a college you didn’t reach high enough.

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True, rejection can be a useful life lesson. By saying that it was hard, I did not mean to imply that students should avoid rejection by aiming low. Rather, that as as adults, we shouldn’t underestimate how much that rejection might sting, even if the kid knows rationally that a great many qualified people will be rejected. Emotionally, they still hope they’ll beat the odds. I know a number of kids who are exceptionally well qualified who received multiple rejections and WL, and it was hard. Their natural resilience already had taken a hit with pandemic and it took a bit longer to bounce back.

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What if he did not desire any college that was a reach?

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Two of my three didn’t and they still turned out perfectly fine. One could have handled a more challenging place, but didn’t want to. The other didn’t want to at all. Both had specific things they were looking for in a college, found it, and are quite content as alumni.

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That’s not totally accurate - a 6% acceptance rate does not mean 6% for every applicant, as you noted with your point on Brown’s percentages for different score ranges and val/sal. The Harvard data showed that athletes with good academics had like a 70% of getting in, maybe a little higher. I think it was 6 out of 10 legacies with good academics get in. Yes that means that four get rejected, but most anybody will take 6 out 10.

“There are 218 (+/- 1 or 2) people running around telling people they were valedictorian…”

I don’t think kids are running around telling people they’re vals or co-vals, there’s no ceremony recognizing them as in the past, it’s on their transcript after decisions are in. High schools stopped ranking here in the bay area because of the stress, some stopped weighting courses for the same reason. So they essentially got of determining a preliminary val/sal at the beginning of sr year for students to put on their applications, like when I was in HS, early 80’s.

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But do most applicants understand that ‘athlete’ doesn’t mean you played for your high school when it comes to ‘athlete’ in terms of how Harvard defines it in admission hook? It means you were nationally/internationally ranked, not that you played 3 varsity sports for your non-competitive high school.

Something ridiculously low (like 2%) of all high school athletes play sport on the Division 1 level - 98% don’t have Div 1 qualities. Harvard is Div 1. They aren’t looking for athletic students, they are looking for Athletes.

So, yeah, I guess if you are in that 2% of athletes who have the skills to play at Div 1 level and in addition, you have strong stats/scores - you have a 6 out of 10 chance at Harvard. Not sure that is good news for most Harvard applicants.

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Wait a sec, I am pretty sure that “athlete” as being used here means recruited athlete. These applicants to Harvard are accepted at an 86% rate - just about a sure thing.

White and Asian legacies in the top half of the applicant pool by academics (so, “good” but not necessarily extraordinary) are accepted at about a 45% blended rate, similarly qualified blacks more than 75%, and Hispanic at around 50%.

Not a sure thing of course for any applicant, but the favored demographics certainly know they are being favored. At least they should.

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Also, “good academics” may also have a different definition in a high selective college applicant pool compared to a typical high school.

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Eh. What if you reached all the way up and got accepted? There’s no higher in that case. There will be plenty of rejection in life. It doesn’t have to come during college admissions.

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Harvard gives all applicants a rating of 1-6 in a category called athletic. It’s not just a question of whether the applicant is recruited or not. It’s a more granular scale. The regression analysis found that getting a high 2 athletic rating (high athletic rating, but not recruited athlete) was associated with a 4x increased chance of admission with full controls, including same hook status and same ratings in other categories. Roughly 10% of applicants received this 2 athletic rating. This is nothing compared to the boost for being a recruited athlete, but it’s still a significant advantage.

I suspect this granular 1-6 ratings relates primarily relates to a long history in which Harvard and other Ivy league colleges were more focused on wanting athletic students beyond just performing well in sports, with assessments of “manliness” and such. Today it probably has more to do with potential for athletic walk-ons and participation, beyond just recruited athletes.

If the Harvard lawsuit sample, the overall admit rate for recruited athletes (applicants who received a 1 in athletic) was 88%. The admit rate was 96% among recruited athletes who also received a high 2 rating in academic. Some athletes also receive a “likely letter”, which I expect corresponds to ~100% chance of admission.

However, rather than high academic ratings, the more stark differences were among applicants who received lower ratings in academic. For example, among applicants who received a low 4-5 rating in academic, the admit rates were as follows.

Harvard Applicants with Low Academic Rating
Non-ALDC – 0.01% admitted
LDC – 3% admitted
Athletes – 78% admitted

Recruited athletes with lower academic ratings had a ~8000x higher admit rate than non-ALDC (includes URMs). This partially relates to pre-reads prior to official applications.

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Would this be even more of a consideration at a small LAC that fields a full set of sports teams, meaning that participants in those sports teams make up an even higher percentage of students?

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I should have said cast a wide enough net.
We sometimes forget we are the consumer and there are many options available to us and it is all about exploring those options and picking the best fit. You need to cast a wide net. You make a realistic list; Safeties, matches and reaches, and my reach could be your match and my safety is someone else’s reach. Then you decide where you want to go.

Bottom line it goes to OP. Why do we allow college admissions offices to shape and pass judgement. We don’t or don’t have too.
We are the consumers, we are paying large sums of money for an education (product). You want the most complete picture of what’s available to you (admissions), based on your criteria (size, program, cost, location etc).

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Some people tolerate rejection better than others. I recall a friend saying that she felt like her older kid had a greater capacity for rejection than did her younger one and that they crafted college lists accordingly.

And as an observation, some kids handle rejections far better than their parents do. My kid went to a BS, and my overall sense is that the kids understood and accepted the college landscape much better than the parents did! They’d watched their older friends go through the process AND they knew that in the end, terrific kids ended up at all kinds of schools.

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Nvrmd