In our district only top students even apply to top schools. I have never heard of a student around here not in the top 6% of their class get into one of these highly selective schools. Those are top students even if they aren’t all scoring 1500+ on the SAT.
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In our area stress about college comes from finances 95+% of the time, not admittance.
Granted if some of those low income students get accepted to nice schools, the finances go with it, but I honestly can’t recall anyone coming into high school aiming for that route and adjusting anything accordingly. It would only apply to very few anyway as most don’t have tippy top scores/grades to be competitive.
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… or with what is best for our kids?
I at least do not feel that admissions at top ranked universities is either predictable enough nor important enough for it to make any sense for a high school student to distort their life to try to guess what an admissions officer would want them to do. We have encouraged our kids to do what they want to do, do it well, and find a school that fits.
So far it has worked for us. Doing what we want to do and doing it well got me and my wife into top graduate programs decades ago, and got our older daughter into a great graduate program very recently. We will see if this same approach will work for our younger daughter.
My view on this might be distorted by the fact that my wife and I both attended top schools for graduate school, so perhaps we do not hold them in total awe.
I am not entirely sure whether or not this is a fair comment. Being ourselves has worked for us for admissions to top schools.
Regardless, I will keep my approach of “do what is right for you” for as long as it keeps working for us.
I also agree with @Creekland that paying for university can be more stressful than getting admitted.
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Perhaps only a tiny fraction of the colleges are considered holistic in their admissions and they only admit a tiny slice of all HS graduates. But they affect far more students than their numbers suggest. For every applicant, there’re many more aspirants. There’s a cascading effect, affecting even students who don’t have any chance of admissions to these schools. HS students aren’t superhumans. The current generation of HS students has easier access to more information but they aren’t any smarter in aggregate than previous generations, despite what we parents like to believe. Yet, they’re asked to do more, a lot more, because of college admissions. Often, what they’ve been asked to do are irrelevant to what they’ll pursue in their adult lives. Are the stresses necessary? Do they contribute to mental health issues that are far too common these days in both HSs and colleges?
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But it is a collection of the best and the brightest (and many best and brightest also don’t get in).
Best and brightest might include a dancer, someone who collects butterflies, a boat builder, a composer and a Revolutionary War reenacter. All with some academic talent, yes.
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No, it is a collection of students who fill the institutional needs that year for that college, and a fair amount of luck is involved as well.
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I already noted in my previous post that it was a collection that makes up the class that is the priority, and the inference which I left out, yes, is that they may need an oboe or a writer etc. but most of the diversity of interests is not to fill a need for the insitution but to have a diverse bunch of kids in the class - diverse in interests, talents, geography and socioeconomic as well.
I don’t see how the colleges are to blame for the behavior of families. Families need to relax a little: it isn’t the end of the world to not get in and there is no such thing as a dream school. The Selectivity drives the excesses just as something rare always does. Resist!
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It is precisely that emphasis on diversity of interests which leads to kids searching for offbeat extracurriculars. It is nice to be a war re-enactor or butterfly collector, but it it really better than the vast majority of kids who prefer debate or school newspaper or some mainstream interest? We do not care about a diversity of fat vs thin, or left hand vs right hand, or haircolor, though all those probably lend a different perspective to a person.
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Really? Most of the kids I know who were admitted to top 20 schools this time around had altogether mundane ECs – sports teams, robotics club, model UN etc.
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I disagree with this. I think there is a misunderstanding by many that everyone shares the same experiences that they do. Most people I have encountered here (by far) are looking for college their kid will like and that they can afford. And if people fall for the elite or bust myth, whose fault is that? I don’t feel sorry even in the slightest for anyone who does that and then complains about the consequences.
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We should all be concerned by the rising tide of stress related mental health problems among the young
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Based on what definition? What parameters? There are plenty of kids that attend elite schools who are neither by almost any definition. It’s a marketing tool in many ways designed to increase apps and thus the appearance of selectivity.
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True, but if you have a chance read the most recent class makeup releases from top schools and you’ll find if bunch of unusual ECs or international/national award winners in academics, sports or music.
And Covid affected this class as far as ECs.
We should be worried. Part of that stress is caused by parental dreams of the Ivy League etc. – particularly in affluent communities. I watched The Race to Nowhere with my son a few weeks ago and it is amazing that very little has changed since it came out. My biggest issue with CC (which I find to be a great resource in most ways) is that it reinforces the prestige mindset. The posts which get the most traction invariably address some topic relative to “elite”/Top 20 schools. How can we convince our kids that it isn’t important how they perform but who they are when everything around them is giving them the opposite message.
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Believe me, it happens.
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Plenty of kids do interesting things because they want to, not to get in. I think you are buying into the premise of the article. This thread is a little too argumentative for me so bowing out at this point.
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Harvard’s race bias actually is prevalent even before the college admissions process.
First, as discussed above, Harvard uses a search list, which is primarily compiled based
on potential applicants’ ACT, SAT, or PSAT test scores to help Harvard market itself to a
diverse array of high school students.For example, to make Harvard’s class of 2018 search list, a white male high school student from outside “sparse country” needed an SAT score of 1380, while black, Chicano, Hispanic, Native American, and Puerto Rican students needed only an 1100.
Honestly the soft race quotes present in top schools should be removed. I see people on CC say it all the time, “You are an ORM, that will hurt your application”. Your college application chances should be something you can control, like your grades, SAT/ACT, EC’s.
Piggybacking on this on this to provide an example of missing the forest for the trees.
It is false logic to blame URM admissions for any one applicant being denied at one of these universities. Once again, math is our friend in leading to an obvious conclusion.
Let’s take Princeton as an example. Primarily using data from their Princeton Review page and Princeton’s 2019-20 CDS.
-Princeton has 4773 undergrads
-Approx 19.5% are what are typically referred to as URM (AA+Hispanic) = 931 URM students. = 233 per year average.
-32804 applicants for the year. 1895 admitted = 5.8% admit rate.
-Based on math alone, 94.2% of applicants were denied. = 30901 students denied.
-Assuming an equal percentage of actual URM applicants as students (not true because everyone assumes URMs are admitted at a higher rate which would indicate URMs actually comprise a lesser percentage of applicants, but I’ll be generous with this estimate) 19.5% of total applicants = 6397 URM applicants.
-Remove every URM applicant from the numbers leaves 26407 primarily Caucasian+Asian applicants. Maintain the 1895 admitted students number, and we get an admit rate of 7.2%. That means that if Princeton had an applicant season with ZERO URM applicants, approximately 92.8% (24512) of all Caucasian+Asian applicants would still be denied, except now, they wouldn’t be able to blame the boogieman of URM and Holistic Admissions as the reason for why they did not get in.
-Maybe at this point, people will accept the math. It is not Holistic Admissions. It is not any policy related to URMs. The reason 90%+ of applicants get denied admission is because of the math. That is undeniable. It is the only logical explanation.
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It’s actually very cynical as well. The litigation documents showed that practically all the URM recruited with these lower numbers are essentially auto-rejected. Harvard just does it so it can cynically say that “x% of URM are admitted” and that “x%” is not a whole lot different than the overall admit rate. When you look at the admit rates by decile of academic achievement in the middle and higher deciles, though, the enormous advantage of the URM hook becomes evident.
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I completely agree with this.
The universities decide on the “buckets”. What % URM, what % academic superstars, what % legacy, what % athletes, etc. Applicants basically only compete within their particular bucket (some lucky applicants can compete in multiple buckets, as in a legacy URM).
No admitted student in a particular bucket took a spot from a rejected student in a different bucket - that spot was never open to her.
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