It is a fruitless feeling, when a child with perfect grades / SAT / APs is denied admission to all top colleges. I had the experience fisthand, but it is very common outcome for our public HS, according to Naviance scattergrams. I imagine parents, who feel truly helpless at this moment.
BTW. Cornell had not accepted a single student from our HS for 2 years in a row. In comparison, Stanford accepted a couple and Berkeley accepts at least 20 per year. Conclusion - > Cornell has other criteria, not grades.
" Think about how to find a college that offers your major, is in the geographic area you want, the rural/suburban/urban area you want, has challenging academics for you, is the size you want. "
What is about a child, who doesn’t know the major, doesn’t care about rural/suburban/urban, geographic area, and size? Really, does not care at all. A child who wants a college with an excellent reputation, an academic strength, and name recognition?
I agree with others that you need to have realistic expectations and contingencies.
On the other hand, you asked “what is the point” about working hard for a single point? Small differences over time are what separates outcomes of large differences. If you were investing, would you choose an option that offered 1% less every year? Of course not. Would you accept the same results in yourself? I hope not.
The reason to work hard for the next 1% is not to get into HY… It is to know that you gave your best effort to achieve your best result. Of course, the countervailing lesson is to learn your limits.
“It is a fruitless feeling, when a child with perfect grades / SAT / APs is denied admission to all top colleges”
I’m sure it is frustrating but I’d also question how “top colleges” is being defined. There are so many great colleges out there and you don’t have to go down the rankings very far to find an excellent one that would be happy to have these kids, often with merit aid. Folks need to stop narrowly defining college “success” as a top 10 school.
“What is about a child, who doesn’t know the major, doesn’t care about rural/suburban/urban, geographic area, and size? Really, does not care at all. A child who wants a college with an excellent reputation, an academic strength, and name recognition?”
Then it should be even easier not harder as long as they aren’t putting all their eggs into the perceived reputation/status basket.
@dogandcat - For that child, I would have some schools on the list that works for the family and offer a range of majors. The list would include the top 2-3 public flagship universities in our state.
Thank you @TQfromtheU. Yes, we do include all Univ of Calif campuses and hope that she will be accepted (technically, she shall be accepted, at least to Merced). However, it is frustrating to think that my D will never be accepted to Ivy. No matter what she is doing. If this is not a definition of “glass ceiling”, than I don’t know what is. I don’t know what Hillary was planning to break - she got an Ivy education, all her family did. All Obama’s family got Ivy education. Trump and his children got Ivy education. According to Naviance, my daughter will not be accepted, regardless of her grades 
Yes, I know, life is not fair.
OP- Huh? Look at the variations on “Run your own race” in replies. Who cares what someone else does, you are the one learning the material- what they know/don’t know is irrelevant. Plus, working hard is not the same as getting good results. We do not get rewarded for effort in life, it is for results/work done/productivity (add other words). Then I see you are nitpicking about points in the near 100 % range. That’s certainly not “fruitless”.
Guess what. You may go to an elite U/college (there are so many excellent ones outside HYMPS et al). You may be shocked to find that in that peer group you are average. That is good. The school is neither too easy nor too hard. Or you may once again be in the top percentiles but then go on to grad or professional school. There you may be typical.
Life is not a race with one winner. College is not a place with student rankings- can’t make comparisons with the apples/oranges/peas/broccoli… that represent the diverse courses or numbers of credits taken or…
Prestige fall into the “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” saying. Those of you on the east coast seem to regard so many schools highly that are unheard of out of your region- even by those in the top one percent.
There are far too many excellent students for the elite schools to admit more than a small fraction of those “worthy” of them. Maybe that’s why the rest of the top HS students still do as well in life, and some end up teaching at those schools…
Which colleges do you include among “top colleges”? You can probably find some excellent schools that admit nearly all applicants with top stats according to your HS’s Naviance. However, plenty of schools do have more holistic admissions, so top stats alone is far from a guarantee of admission.
This type of statement has little meaning without knowing the number of applicants and something about those applicants. For example, I grew up in upstate NY, so the public HS I attended gets a ridiculous number of Cornell apps. Naviance shows several hundred – far more than all other Ivies combined. Being thousands of miles away, Berkeley and Stanford get tremendously fewer applicants. So it’s common in a given year for quite a few to get accepted to Cornell, while all are rejected at Berkeley. Does this mean “Conclusion - > Berkeley has other criteria, not grade”?
Among those several hundred Cornell applicants, the acceptances show a good correlation with GPA where the acceptance rate drops off tremendously below a ~96% average for all score ranges. And a lesser, but still significant correlation with scores, such that high GPA + >1500 SAT have a significantly higher acceptance rate than other high GPA groupings. However, there was still one kid who got rejected with a ~98% average (high enough to be valedictorian if HS ranked) and ~1570 SAT. Cornell is very clear that their admissions decisions depend on far more than just stats.
I’m not sure of the logic here. Do you mean your HS didn’t have any Cornell acceptances during the past 2 years, therefore your D will never be accepted to an Ivy, no matter what?
Past acceptance history is not a guarantee of future acceptances decisions. As far as I know, my HS had never had a Stanford acceptance. However, I applied and was accepted, even though my grades and scores were lower than many others in my HS and many other past applicants. That said, if your D doesn’t care about major, size, or much of anything about the school besides reputation / name recognition, that is not a good sign for holistic admission. It might be helpful to think about what she hopes to do after college, and what schools she thinks will best help achieve those goals and why?
When my older son was applying to colleges Cornell would have been somewhere between a safety and a match. We have hundreds of applications and his stats made it a good bet. Meanwhile I look at Stanford with a few dozen applicants. Only two have ever gotten in both with sub 1300/1600 scores. Turns out they are underrepresented minorities who play helmet sports. Oh and one is a close relative a pretty well known politician as well. Really I know nothing about what Stanford is looking for. (But my kid did provide another red dot, despite having stats well above the two admitted!) He also wrote a terrible supplemental essay for them. He deserved not to get accepted IMO.
Plenty of colleges have excellent reputation, academic strength, and name recognition. Of course, if your own definitions of such are unrealistic ones (e.g. “only HYPS have enough reputation, academic strength, and recognition to be acceptable”), then your most likely result is disappointment.
A child who had no preferences on ANYTHING needs to go on college tours and speak with guidance counselors.
A guidance counselor can go over the child’s grades and favorite classes extracurriculars and see if there is a tendency towards STEM, the arts, business, or the humanities. They can also reassure the student that it is okay to be undecided.
College tours of big/small, rural/urban, preprofessional versus liberal arts focused, can make these abstract concepts more concrete. Getting on a plane to travel across the country to get to a college can make near/far more real. Sitting in on a large lecture versus a small discussion class can be a real eye-opener, too.
Letting a student decide based on reputation and fame is letting external factors drive a process that should be student-centered.
Some kids have been pushed onto a narrow college prep track where everything they do is to impress someone else rather than to feed their own interests that they really don’t know themselves well. I find that sad. I wouldn’t continue to play into that problem by letting them pick a “well-named” school. I would work to correct the problem and try to engage in a little bit of personal discovery.
You don’t want the kid to get to college wth all these opportunities and choices and go, “Why am I here again?”
What do you want out of a college experience?
HYPMS are definitely not all the same. Each has a unique culture/vibe and MIT and Stanford are especially different from HYP.
Look beyond these schools.
For many (if not most) high achieving undergrad applicants, you are likely caught up in rankings, prestige, bragging rights, etc. It’s natural to compare yourself to others. “i’m as good as they are, so I need to get in to college X”. It’s actually quite normal but the problem with it is your satisfaction is completely controlled by how you feel others perceive you. At some point in your life, the earlier the better, you need to flip the equation and realize happiness comes from within.
As this relates to highly selective undergraduate admissions, the fact is there are many “top schools”. Another reality you will find is at some point, nobody (other than you) cares about where you attended college. Once you get that first job it becomes about your performance. Most forms of grad school (law, medical , business, and humanities) care far more about undergrad results and test scores (MCAT, LSAT, etc) than they do about the undergrad school. MANY people go on to very successful lives (great jobs, great grad schools - if that’s even how you define success) from the state university.
The point is: get clear about what you like to do, be the best you can be at it, and enjoy the journey. The journey is the fun part, not the destination.
Hypsm is not the end all go read somw of the horror stories about those schools. The pressure, out of the frying pan into the fire, perfectionism, elitism, cut throat of course not everyones experience, but sure isnt healthy for many.
We were at a family reunion last spring, and got to talking about college admissions. My kid, then a sophomore, said we had been looking at colleges but he wasn’t sure of what the dream schools were yet. Most kids from his school ended up at Towson or community college, but he wants more. He asked the guidance counselor, and she flat out told him that nobody from the school has been accepted into an Ivy League school in the 15 years she’s worked there.
So, we told the family this story. My cousin’s daughter spoke up and said she was the first person from her rural Massachusetts school ever to go to Yale. My father chimed in and said he was the first person from his school in southern California ever to go to Yale. Another cousin said that he was the first person from his high school (he was raised in Britain) to go to school in America.
So we have decided that it’s a family tradition to be the trailblazer and we are aiming at several schools where kids from our school usually don’t go. It’s one way to stand out from the crowd.
Again you feel empty and sad because the goal of Ivies et al may not be attainable, and admission to those schools was the reason for your hard work. Therefore, your motivation collapses without that goal. Here are two solutions:
- find another more authentic reason to work hard
- research other colleges
.
An important #3 is that you do not have to be “productive” all the time. Nothing wrong with a little binge-watching on Netflix!
This can be a moment of opportunity for you, to get off the conveyor belt and start exploring what your interests are and who you really are, so that you can find a good fit.
@dogandcat At my kid’s HS, there are always several kids who get accepted to Cornell (plus 30 to 40 kids at both UCLA and Berkeley) but barely one or zero for HYPSM. Almost no one in school history got into HYPSM as an early applicant. And this HS is one of top HS in County.
I would like to make one additional comment. Even though my kid will attend Stanford as a full pay, I am not 100% sure whether this will turn out to be the best decision for him. We feel it’s the best decision at this time but life has twists and turns and surprises. There are definitely risks with any decision, and a lot depends on you whatever environment and situation you are in. Give me a motivated kid attending a community college any time over a self entitled kid attending HYPSM.