<p>“They Just Weren’t That Into You.”</p>
<p>
LOL. How true. Now if they could deliver that with a Jeff Spicoli accent and add a “, dude” at the end as in “They Just Weren’t That Into You, dude.” I believe we have the Answer of Answers. Thanks.</p>
<p>^^ LOL!! Perfect way to sum up the capricious art of college admissions these days!</p>
<p>Northstarmom was right to bring up teacher recs. Ditto for alumni and on-campus interviews. I’ve interviewed a couple of candidates whose fate I’m pretty sure I sealed. One was a heavily recruited athlete. After introducing ourselves, the first thing he said to me was, “Look, the coach of sport X really wants me and the only reason I’m here is because he told me I had to do an alumni interview.” That set the tone for the rest of the interview and I reported the unbelievable arrogance on my interview report form. It would be hard to be an interviewer if you knew applicants might come back after you. In today’s litigious society, I can imagine people threatening legal action against teachers who write recs, although I don’t know what the basis for any lawsuit would be. Fraud because the person said they’d write you a good rec but it wasn’t good enough?</p>
<p>“I have learned that admissions are capricious.”</p>
<p>JMHO, but I think it would be appalling to get a detailed 100% accurate reason for why things happen the way they do. “We almost didn’t admit you due to your listless application and weak HS perfomance, but we’re short of computer nerds just now and you certainly appear to be one.” [Insert your own true-but-ridiculous reason for acceptance/rejection here.] Isn’t it a whole lot better to work toward making oneself the best person possible, recognizing that in life decisions are often capricious?</p>
<p>*Dear Admissions Committee:
Having reviewed the many rejection letters I have received in the last few weeks, it is with great regret that I must inform you I am unable to accept your rejection at this time.
This year, after applying to a great many colleges and universities, I received an especially fine crop of rejection letters. Unfortunately, the number of rejections that I can accept is limited.
Each of my rejections was reviewed carefully and on an individual basis. Many factors were taken into account - the size of the institution, student-faculty ratio, location, reputation, costs and social atmosphere.
I am certain that most colleges I applied to are more than qualified to reject me. I am also sure that some mistakes were made in turning away some of these rejections. I can only hope they were few in number.
I am aware of the keen disappointment my decison may bring. Throughout my deliberations, I have kept in mind the time and effort it may have taken for you to reach your decision to reject me.
Keep in mind that at times it was necessary for me to reject even those letters of rejection that would normally have met my traditionally high standards.
I appreciate your having enough interest in me to reject my application. Let me take the opportunity to wish you well in what I am sure will be a successful academic year.
SEE YOU IN THE FALL!
Sincerely,
Paul Devlin
Applicant at Large *</p>
<p>It’s all very well to say that they should just get over it and move on and so on and so forth. </p>
<p>The problem is that the application process is increasing painted as one in which the kids are judged, not on their grades, courses, and scores, but on some indefinable essence of their being: an essence that they are supposed to portray in the application essay and a few 300-character responses. </p>
<p>So when they are rejected, it is the very essence of WHO THEY ARE that is rejected–or so the kid is led to believe.</p>
<p>No wonder it isn’t easy to just shrug and move on.</p>
<p>Perhaps if schools openly admitted how capricious their admissions process often is, it would be easier to dismiss the results.</p>
<p>They do admit that they could select another whole class of qualified kids. Some more than one. Do you want them to use the word “capricious”? I don’t think they’ll do that. I also think “arbitrary” is out. Why? Because they have a reason for every rejection - “They Just Weren’t That Into You, dude.” It’s like asking some gal you’ve been wanting to go out with for the third time and her still saying “no”. You just didn’t ring her bell.</p>
<p>From the far end of the curve, as D is graduating in May…from college. She was originally rejected outright EA from Yale in what was characterized at the time as a “bloodbath,” though I suspect there have been other, even more stunning rejected classes since then, and has had a spectacular four years at Smith.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter. And as the Great Wheel turns, things have a funny way of working out very well for the better. As a HYPSM admissions officer said in a PM when talking about my D, (paraphrasing) “A student can often get more out of the process by being brilliant at Smith rather than being lost in the crowd at Yale.” There is no no doubt that D could have been successful at Yale…3.9uw, 1580, + recs, essays that we <em>thought</em> were good (see the great “essay” debates) at the time. But you know what? After a year at Smith, she said that Yale could come calling and she’d turn <em>them</em> down.</p>
<p>There needs to a group for parents to get over the rejections and get support. I suggest MovedOn.org.</p>
<p>
Believing this is is the first step to ceding ENTIRELY TOO MUCH POWER over how a young person sees himself to a set of nameless faceless admissions staff members.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that any college admissions person thinks of the process as rejecting the ESSENCE of who a person is. </p>
<p>Don’t allow yourself or your child to believe this. Please.</p>
<p>Agree with jmmom.</p>
<p>If a student believes that it is the very essence of who s/he is that got rejected, all the more reason not to learn the awful truth. Would it be any better for a student to learn that s/he had come across as boorish; arrogant;unimaginative; lazy; ignorant; uninteresting; unable to write (insert favorite negative trait here). Would that student be able to act on the information? Would it help the student get into another college?</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter why they were not selected.
Asking why they weren’t “chosen” is like asking why you are turned down when you ask someone to dance.
It doesn’t matter.
Move on and ask someone else.
Staying * stuck* and trying to figure out * why*, is taking time and energy away from the next step & that is looking at the choices you * do have*.</p>
<p>My daughter applied to 6 or 7 private prep schools.
She was admitted to half, but we expected her to be admitted to more.
One of the rejection letters from a school that wasn’t even high on her list but that the head of the upper school encouraged her personally to apply ( family friend), sent a letter indicating that * they couldn’t address her “special needs”* have no idea what that meant- because at the time she had excellent recs, in fact she qualified to participate in the CTY through Johns Hopkins a year later.</p>
<p>Puzzling.
Another school actually sent a very nicely worded rejection letter, that made you feel that they really did feel badly that they couldn’t accept all that applied.</p>
<p>The results were the same, but the feeling it left was certainly different.
As she needed a great deal of financial aid, we didn’t expect to have all acceptances ( K-12 schools aren’t generally need blind),and she was waitlisted at her top choice school.</p>
<p>However, she ( we ) were able to indicate that it was her first choice school, and she attended from 6th through 12th * with aid*</p>
<p>Life isn’t fair.
Its not meant to be fair.</p>
<p>Helping kids to learn that and to persevere anyway, is one of the greatest gifts we can give them, IMO.</p>
<p>Great vocabulary debate: Curm, yeah maybe capricious wasn’t the best word. Agree with you on arbitrary. How about mystifying and unpredictable, just like interpersonal chemistry. Like the “They’re just not that into you, dude” also.</p>
<p>Repeat my idea that my question is how amongst some surprising rejections did D and S get accepted to the most perfect schools for them, and probably among the most selective they applied to too. I guess, “They were just into them.” Can’t say why.</p>
<p>But as TheDad said, sometimes an all’s well that end’s well is the best we have and usually more than good enough. </p>
<p>As soon as kids put in their deposits I know that each one never gave their rejections another thought. It was full speed ahead.</p>
<p>If for no other reason, it’s just logistically not practical to send personalized rejections at many schools. Big and/or highly selective schools might well be rejecting tens of thousands of applicants each year. Is someone going to actually write a unique letter to each one detailing their deficiencies? They’d need to increase the size of the admissions staff ten fold to accommodate that.</p>
<p>mythmom, I’m not dinging you or others for using the word “capricious”. To us, those on the outside of the curtain, it sure looks that way as we look at a single acceptance or rejection. If it makes sense at all, it makes sense in the selection of the “class of 2012” or whatever year. To an individual student (or their parents) that indeed looks capricious. </p>
<p>What I was trying to get across is that there is a “reason” for the action taken with regard to each file. That reason is best given as “They Just Weren’t That Into You, dude.” But it’s sure fine and dandy with me to call it capricious from our side of the curtain.</p>
<p>Regarding the comparison of college rejections with the employment world:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>At least the colleges write back; not all employers give you that courtesy.</p></li>
<li><p>Not all professions keep to a single set of deadline dates, so you can compare offers. There’s no such animal as “April 1” and “May 1” in the working world. In some professions, an applicant must sometimes take second choice simply because the first choice destination isn’t ready to decide yet. </p></li>
<li><p>Some employers make cold calls to people outside of your own list of references, respond to industry gossip, and in other ways accept faulty information about a candidate. That is supremely unfair. Have you ever heard of a college cold-calling the teacher who gave out that C+? It just doesn’t happen. Colleges decide based on the information they request and receive, and don’t engage in espionage. </p></li>
<li><p>If an applicant could learn and grow from the feedback of understanding why the app didn’t work, such that the knowledge could be applied to the next app in the near future, there might be some value to knowing why. Employment works that way, and candidates actually improve their ability to present themselves with each rejection until they finally succeed. It can take years to find a new position. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Instead, for college, there are multiple simultaneous applications, and all institutions adhere to similar deadline dates. In this way, a person hears all at once from many places on the same timeframe, and makes the best possible choice from the available offers. At that point, it really doesn’t matter why the other places didn’t take you. I wouldn’t want to see the college app process turn into a multi-year process, as is sometimes the case when seeking an employment promotion or change. </p>
<p>If applications were sequential, not simultaneous, then a kid could “learn something” and improve his/her presentation each time. Without that, there’s no real benefit to knowing why one place said “no thank you.”</p>
<p>Just to toss another idea out there – perhaps it is not -always- best to accept that “they’re just not that into you” and move on. I agree that no young person should believe that the decision has anything to do with “the essence of who they are”. Indeed, anyone who can distill their “essence” into a college application is either very, very, shallow and lacking personal depth, or a very, very talented writer. :)</p>
<p>However, I would like to offer that occasionally mistakes are made by the very human members of the college admissions committee (or by the applicant). And sometimes they can be corrected.</p>
<p>My DS is a case in point. He was rejected by his number one school. Deeply disappointed, he contacted the admissions officer and asked him why he was rejected. He learned two things that led him to believe there were 1) errors in his transcript (very small – just .1 on his gpa – but with the intensely competetive nature of admissions, it was enough to drop him out of the pool), and 2) that he had made an error in another part of his application.</p>
<p>He worked with his school guidance counselor to correct the transcript errors, and he spent four months working on an appeal (in spite of being told by the college that appeals are almost never successful). He was ultimately successful and is now attending his number one school. At his orientation, he met a girl who also got in on appeal – so apparently it IS possible, at least at this school. </p>
<p>While he was waiting through that four month process, he bonded with his number two school, and would have been content to attend there if it worked out that way. He is happy that he pursued the issue, though. It was the right choice for him.</p>
<p>One thing he learned from the admissions officer – they had thousands of applicants that looked just like DS. Some were admitted, and some were not. Were all of those choices the right ones? Of course not. But the process has inherent flaws. Some who should be admitted will not be – some who should not make the cut will get in. This is also how life works in the “real” world. </p>
<p>If we can teach our kids that a judgement about college admissions is not a judgement about their personal worth, we will be doing a very good thing.</p>
<p>Here’s my (non-serious) suggestion: let’s start a service which, for a fee, will determine the “real” reason a student was rejected. In general, the “real” reason will be one of the following:
- The adcoms were biased against people like you.
- The college is ridiculously obsessed with stats and unfairly ignored your incredible extracurricular achievements.
- The college is ridiculously obsessed with ECs and unfairly ignored your incredible stats.
- An unknown enemy sabotaged your application.
- You would have gotten in, but your spot was given to the much less qualified child of a major donor.</p>
<p>When I was on the admissions committee at Columbia’s architecture school, three people read each application. (At least two had to be professors, one might be a student.) We gave them a score. We weren’t allowed to see what scores the others had given. Although we were in the same room we only occasionally discussed the applications. No one could tell you exactly why anyone was rejected. I can tell you I rejected one candidate who handwrote her essay, and it was illegible. I decided if she’d really wanted to attend the school she would have found a typewriter or taken the trouble to write something that could be read easily.</p>
<p>Hunt, don’t forget number 6, as suggested by previous posters:</p>
<ol>
<li>We’re just not that into you.</li>
</ol>