<p>Je ne sais quoi and I are talking about the same u, fwiw. </p>
<p>I do understand the feelings. I’d be hurt, disappointed and sad. But angry implies that they owed me and I don’t think they do. I doubt I’d donate again either.</p>
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I think that one reason rejections infuriate donating alumni is that it is clearly a matter of degree. Sure, the kids of contributing alumni get a boost, but only if it is a large enough donation. And the problem with that is that the colleges don’t care what is “large” for you. Heck, you could leave your entire estate to your alma mater, but if it isn’t big enough, you name is not going to appear on any buildings. </p>
<p>There is the saying that “it is the thought that counts.” We all appreciate a heart-felt gift from a friend or family member. Well, maybe that just doesn’t apply to college contributions. </p>
<p>I agree with Bay and vinceh. I would be offended that schools solicit my donations via phone calls and glossy brochures, but can’t be bothered with me afterwards. If they could find my contact info to ask for money, they can find it for other reasons too.</p>
<p>My understanding (at least for my top tier university, and I think this applies to other top tier universities as well) is there are two levels of legacies. A normal legacy gets a small boost in admissions: if the admissions office thinks they are choosing between otherwise equal students, they give weight to the legacy status. Notice this has a paradoxical effect: accepted legacies would be slightly less qualified, but the class as a whole would be just as qualified as it would have been if the college had ignored legacy status because no normal legacy was chosen in favor of a more qualified non-legacy.</p>
<p>But a “developmental” admit, the child of wealthy parents who are likely to give a seven figure donation or more, is in a different category. Developmental admits, like recruited athletes, get a substantial boost. Colleges, to put it simply, want the money. I doubt if even the top universities have more than a handful of developmental admits. There aren’t that many applicants whose family can write million dollar checks.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why ‘we’ have to justify why a family member gets in or doesn’t. If you have a qualified kid and I mean qualified 100% and they are not accepted and you are solicited for money and are an active alum, and the schools embraces legacies, then the school needs to justify…not the parent…and they should be able to do that in a comphrehensive manner that makes sense. Somebody puts notes in that folder and they made a decision not to admit, it was based on something, so tell me what the decision was based on. Oh well, we had lots of qualified kids wouldn’t work for me. You’ve already rejected the kid, so telling me my kid had a crapy essay isn’t going to be salt in the wound.</p>
<p>^ Right on, momofthreeboys! For all I know, they may have a check list of ratings for portions of the applications right in the folders. Essay only a 7 out of 10? EC’s only got a 4 out of 10? There is probably some algorithm for the decision. It is not a mystery in most cases, so why not just share the reasoning?</p>
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If the legacy is chosen over an otherwise equal student, then how is the accepted legacy slightly less qualified?</p>
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<p>Oh, I still donate. It’s a cheap thrill to see the ** next to my name in the Annual Report, with the words, “xx years of continuous giving.” But I don’t give much. It’s a very cheap thrill. :)</p>
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Dh and I donated our time to meet with between 80-100 (between the two of us) applicants to our alma mater over the past four years. We drove miles and spent hours. We have no intention (at least I don’t!) of ever doing this again. And it doesn’t matter that our S is in a better-fit college for him, anyway. If our S wasn’t good enough for our alma mater’s freshman class, then we aren’t good enough to meet with applicants of future freshman classes.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t be angry at all. My alma mater would be a reach for my kid (not that he’s interested anyway). Also, I’ve never given them a dime, not because I have a grudge against them or anything, but because they have a ginormous endowment, and I have always felt there were more useful things to do with the limited amount of money I can afford to donate to anybody. So they don’t owe me or my family anything.</p>
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<p>There is OBVIOUSLY a big problem with this statement. One heck of a lot of parents think their kids are “qualified” when an admissions officer might not. “Qualified” is in the eye of the beholder. </p>
<p>If we define “qualified” to mean “qualified in the eye of his/her parents,” at least 10% of my college classmates have continued to give $ despite the fact their kids were rejected. I think this is in part due to the fact that the “helping Johnny and Jane get into colleges where they fit” program was begun just about the time my class’s kids hit the pipeline. But I think there’s another reason. “Back in the day” a fair # of my classmates got into my alma mater because they went to the right prep school or were the children of alums. One of my classmates was definitely a developmental admit and pretty much everyone in our class agreed he won the “dumbest classmate” award hands down. </p>
<p>Most of my friends in college were either top 10% or in difficult majors and still in the top quarter. If we could have made one change to our college at the time, it would have been to throw the dead wood out. We railed against “privilege” back in the day.
So, while some of my college friends were REALLY upset when their kids were rejected, almost all started giving again within a couple of years. Some do sort of say “Be careful what you wish for.” They loved it as our alma mater became more selective and prestigious than it was “back in the day,” until it was too selective for their kids. </p>
<p>Re: 104: Most of the time the reason why any kid with the “stats” to get in isn’t admitted due to one factor–it’s a combination of factors. It’s not that the essay is “crappy”; it’s that it was mediocre, and the teacher recs were mediocre and the ECs were mediocre, etc. </p>
<p>When admissions officers do identify one factor, parents STILL go beserk. There is a well-regarded past poster here who was told that her kid didn’t get into X top college because his essay was weak…Well, she posted, another college admissions officer where the kid was admitted said it was terrific, so that just proves the first school has incompetent admissions officers. </p>
<p>I’m not saying I’m any different than anyone else; I’d be hurt too. But, again, my modest donations and modest amounts of volunteer time are given to honor what my college did for me. Lets not forget that even “back in the day” the REAL cost of tuition, room and board at most top private colleges was one heck of a lot more than we paid.</p>
<p>OK. My DS is a URM (dad’s side) and great test scores. Every Ivy school plus t-20 EXCEPT alma mater has sent him a brochure and a letter encouraging him to apply. I know…probably they don’t connect me to him yet, but I can’t figure out if school brilliantly has realized that sending brochures to encourage applications is generally a waste of money or hates the kids of hispanic immigrants. We can pay full ride for our kid (thanks, in large part, to that full ride that I had as a poor student 25 years ago). As my income increased so have donations to scholarship funds at the University since I really feel that Univ contributed mightily to my success, but they are not huge amounts of money. </p>
<p>If he were to apply and be rejected (and he is MUCH better qualified than I was–but school is MUCH more selective now) would I be angry? Only if I thought that the URM was actually a negative and I would never know. I certainly would be sad for him if he wanted to go there. However, I was rejected from my first choice and second choice was wonderful and generous to me. I do think a special rejection letter to a loyal alumna would go a long way to keeping my loyalty. A little personal touch would keep the warm fuzzies for me but regardless of outcome I will continue to give to this school and my brother’s little college too for their support when we were young and poor and trying to get a start in life.</p>
<p>I thought my son had a better than even chance to get into my alma mater, but there were plenty of obvious reasons to reject him if they wanted to. (As MIT, Caltech and Stanford all did.) He was an excellent candidate, but he had flaws.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what difference it would make to know that “the essay was weak” or “the EC’s were weak” – too late to do anything about it at that point, and then you start to play the comparative game – “look at Billy down the road who got accepted, his EC’s were no better than my kid’s,” “look at Julie down the road, she can’t possibly be a better writer” … and then it just leads to nowhere, IMO. </p>
<p>Which raises a bigger philosophical question. Assuming indeed that students are indeed rated on X number of factors (GPA, scores, EC’s, essays, etc.), in general, are colleges obligated to tell students why they were rejected? Would it be better if rejecting-colleges sent the “scorecard” and the kid could see where he fell down? And how much transparency can there really be? Because honestly I could (theoretically) have perfectly qualified kids with a double legacy – but they get turned down because white upper-middle-class Chicago-area legacies at NU are a dime a dozen and they’d rather take the Hispanic kid from Nebraska with lower stats? I mean, do I <em>really</em> want to know that?</p>
<p>I know two top 20 legacies (one a single-legacy at an Ivy, one a double-legacy at a non-Ivy) who were not accepted in regular decision, but were waitlisted … and both came off the waitlist and are attending those schools. I have no idea whether legacy informed the waitlist decision, but it’s a possibility.</p>
<p>Which makes me wonder. Would it make alum feel better if qualified legacies were automatically put at the top of a waitlist, under the perspective of “we can’t guarantee room for your kid, but he’ll at least be waitlisted”?</p>
<p>I would take it easy, you do not know who lost and who gained, and your child might be in place that fit him better. Nobody knows until they actually start attending. Nobody owes nothing to anybody. Just chill, there are sooo many challenges ahead, in couple months you will laugh at this little bump on a road.</p>
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S never contacted our alma mater, except to say he’d stay on waitlist (upon our urging; he couldn’t have cared less). He got a letter in June informing him that he was a guaranteed transfer for Fall 2010. </p>
<p>Did it make us feel better? No.</p>
<p>I doubt colleges would ever give a scorecard to rejected applicants. They really don’t want a lot of transparency about admissions, anyway. If they did, they would more readily publish stats for different racial and ethnic groups.</p>
<p>One thing that I think is missing here is that the colleges can’t accept everyone who is qualified and wants to go there. The admissions committee has to make tough choices but those choices aren’t personal. This year my daughter was accepted at my alma mater but chose not to go. I certainly hope their feelings weren’t hurt because she wasn’t trying to make them feel bad.</p>
<p>Agreed; so I’m not sure why a rejected-legacy is any more “entitled” to such a scorecard than a rejected non-legacy. Either way, you didn’t get in. It doesn’t mean you weren’t qualified; it just means there weren’t enough spots. Look, all these schools have said this over and over again - they aren’t looking for reasons to reject, they are looking for reasons to accept. For bright, statistically-qualified kids, if they didn’t get in, it’s because they didn’t capture that adcom’s imagination enough. That’s all the reason there is. It ISN’T the 0.2 in the GPA or the 20 points in the SAT or only winning second in state in debate vs first in state.</p>
<p>BTW, to the legacy issue - many schools, including my own, give the legacy bump more in the ED process than the RD process, in the spirit of … if you go ED and you’re a legacy, I know you really care, versus in RD how do I know I’m not just one of many colleges you’re looking at and you tossed in this app on a why-the-heck-not-dad-went-there whim. It seems to me that if a college gives a legacy bump in ED, they are already setting the conditions for what they “owe” you. Pledge to me you’ll come – I’ll give you a bump.</p>
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<p>Good question, Deja. It’s not that the legacy is slightly less qualified than the otherwise equal student he’s chosen over; rather, legacies on average will be slightly less qualified than non-legacies. I said this was paradoxical and it is, but let me give an analogy.</p>
<p>Suppose you have a bag of red and green balls. This represents the applicant pool, and let’s say red represents legacy. Suppose the balls come in three sizes: big, medium and small. This represents qualifications: big is a superqualified applicant, medium is the broad mass of qualified applicants, small is underqualified.</p>
<p>Now, you need to pick X balls from the bag, and you want to pick the biggest set you can. So, first, you pick all the big balls, no matter what color. Then you start picking medium balls, but since they’re all the same size and you like red, you preferentially pick red ones. There are enough medium balls that you don’t have to pick any small ones. Now you have your X balls: all of the big balls, a good bunch of medium red balls, and some medium green balls. </p>
<p>Let’s look at the average size of the balls you picked. It’s as big as possible. There’s no way to pick a set of balls that are bigger (= no way to pick a class that is more qualified). Now, consider the size of the average red ball-- it’s dragged down by all those medium red balls you picked. So the average red ball (legacy) you picked is smaller (less qualified) than the average green ball (non-legacy) you picked.</p>