<p>How</a> to Get Into Harvard - WSJ.com</p>
<p>Just thought I'd post that.</p>
<p>"Richard Bischoff...recently received a letter from a parent of a toddler wanting to know where the child needs to go in order to get accepted at Caltech."</p>
<p>I lol'd heartily at that.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Samantha Broussard-Wilson promised to attend Georgetown if the school accepted her early application. It did. But later that spring, the student from Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, Calif., got into Yale. When she decided to go to New Haven, she says some teachers at her high school turned hostile. "I actually did get a lot of negative comments," says Ms. Broussard-Wilson, 18, now a freshman at Yale. "Teachers told me, 'You may have taken one of the spots from someone else at our school."
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Geez. The girl just changed her mind, nothing to freak out about. =/ This is her life! She can make the choice to not go or not if she wants.</p>
<p>A student knows the risks they take when they apply early decision. The girl was just stoked that she got into a prestigious university and decided to go back on her promise. It was immature, and she was wrong. If it wasn't a case of early decision, it would be different.</p>
<p>Well, was it binding? If it wasn't binding, she didn't have to do even if she promised everyone she would.</p>
<p>Gtown only has Early Action. Who cares if she promised some people she would go there? Why do those other people even care?</p>
<p>how can someone promise to get into a university if it is not documented (as in ED)? That's just dumb. You cannot expect a 17/18 year old to make up their mind and prevent themselves from exploring other options if they are not contractually obligated to do so.</p>
<p>i agree with the above posts.</p>
<p>Well, I hear the school had early action, so it was binding, but even so, I think it's a horrible idea to make a seventeen year old make that kind of choice so early. What if she had gotten better financial aid later? What if something came up and she had to go to school nearby? Or what if, like what happened, she got into a school she ended up liking more? I think it's rude to assume everyone that gets into an ivy only goes for prestige. I'm sure that's not true. She just liked Yale more in the end. So what? Nothing to be hostile about.</p>
<p>Sorry to be contrary, but the issue is one of integrity. Even though Georgetown is EA, in this case, the school's guidance dept. asked the girl for the commitment so that they could go to bat for her, by using the school's good will and reputation to assist her in getting in. It was not some benign promise, but one that was made to ensure that te guidance dept. would give that extra push. Who knows if she would have gotten in w/o that extra push.</p>
<p>17 year olds know what a commitment is and she should have thought harder before she agreed that she would attend. And, where are her parents/guardians in all this?</p>
<p>GT is EA, which is nonbinding. It was wrong of the guidance office to expect her to make a binding commitment to a college that was EA.</p>
<p>I want to second DuckPondParent's comment. When these guidance counselors talk with colleges, they are placing their and their school's reputation on the line when communicating with the colleges. Colleges trust this information...until they shouldn't. The loser in this situation isn't the student who backed out of the commitment, but the high school and the students who are now juniors or sophomores and will be applying to Georgetown or some other school in the future and who would benefit from the extra "push" provided by the GC. If a student can't stand behind her/his commitment to a school, then they should not make it in the first place or at least make clear that it is a qualified commitment, ie, one that could be overturned when a better offer comes along. But too often this does not happen because the student worries that such a qualification may lead to a deny/defer decision at the initial college. In the student's case, flip-flopping (or in some cases, outright dishonesty) pays but there is a price to pay for this behaviour. Unfortunately, that price is not paid by the right person.</p>
<p>If she made the promise to attend in one of her essays, and then it was backed up by her GC, I think it reflects very poorly on her, her age notwithstanding. Particularly in that case, she has made a written agreement. In one sense, making this kind of promise was a ploy to boost her chances of being admitted and if the GC went to bat for her over another student, it probably did affect the chances for that student and possibly future year's applicants. In our school, the GCs really value the relationships they have with college admissions offices - something like this would be a really big deal because it does have repercussions down the road. The adcoms want to know that the info they get from the school is correct, and the GCs like to know that they have a little pull with the adcoms. Obviously, not every high school has this kind of relationship with the adcoms at top schools, but these kind of relationships are why some schools get so many kids into top schools.</p>
<p>I agree with DuckPondParent, Vango and Hawkette that it was wrong morally and ethically for the student to turn down Georgetown under these circumstances; especially since Georgetown University "reads" applications first by high school from which students are applying, thereby eliminating the "weakest" applicants from her high school before progressing to the general early action pool of applicants from all high schools.</p>
<p>The WSJ rankings are interesting, but incomplete in that it considered matriculations to just 8 colleges and universities (only 2 Ivies) which resulted in only recognizing and evaluating, at most, 26% of a graduating class and, at the least, only slightly more than 3% of a particular school's graduating class. A few months ago I completed my study of 22 U.S. boarding schoools and 3 U.S. day schools which rated and ranked 100% of the schools' college matriculations to U.S. based colleges and universities; examing college matriculations of an entire graduating class resulted in sometimes drastically different results in ratings and subsequent rankings. Exeter, the WSJ's second ranked boarding school, finished at #15 when examining their entire college and university matriculations for the three graduating classes of 2006,2005 & 2004, and was #11 when limited to a ranking of northeastern U.S. boarding schools.</p>
<p>I would like to propose that, instead of casting all blame on the high-school senior who tricked the guidance office into "going to bat for her", we also consider how much culpability the college admissions office has, by demanding to know information they cannot legitimately have: prior commitment to accept an not-yet-made offer. That is, the EA deal that Georgetown places on the table is: you apply early and we will consider your application by a certain deadline; then you have until May 1 to respond to our offer. Of course, as accomplished gamesmen, they want to do their best to maximize their return, which is to make an offer to the best possible student who will accept their offer. But nothing gives them the RIGHT to have that info. I think there is a market inefficiency here, which I am having some trouble articulating, but basically, the ad. office wants to have all the cards (info) without giving something up in return.</p>
<p>So, colleges that offer ED usually give the applicant something tangible: a better chance at admission in return for the up-front promise to accept an offer. Colleges that offer EA usually DON'T give nearly as large of a bump to an applicant's chances, AND they really shouldn't expect to get the same up-front promise (or it's under-the-table equivalent, the nosy-parker spying out of motive by the h.s. guidance office) in exchange.</p>
<p>So I blame the college admissions office most, the ego-tripping enablers of bad college behavior at the high-school guidance office second, and the mendaciously self-interested high-school senior least.</p>
<p>Early results of my much more comprehensive study, which rated and ranked most boarding schools' college and university matriculations based 3, 4 or 5 most recently available years of college placement from 2007-- 2002 had the following results in order of college placement success: St. Paul's School, Andover, Deerfield Academy and Groton were the top four schools in a class by themselves. Next were Milton Academy and Hotchkiss. #7 was Lawrenceville, #8 Middlesex, #9 St. George's School, #10 United World College-USA, #11 Choate Rosemary Hall, #12 Cate School, #13 St. Andrew's, #14 Cranbrook, #15 Phillips Exeter Academy. A more recent version of my study, stuck temporarily in a malfunctioning computer, included several additioal boarding schools that did not affect the top 6 places in the ranking. My #1 school, an all male day school located outside of Boston, was the Roxbury Latin School, which was excluded from the WSJ rankings since it only graduated 48-- and not 50-- students. Just the bottom half of St. Paul's School graduating class of 2007 (Those 76 0f 151 graduating seniors who did not graduate "cum laude" sent 18% to 7 of the 8 Ivies, 30% to Ivy equivalents, and over 70% of the non-cum laude grads went to "most selective" colleges and universities. Exeter 's college placement outside of the top third of the graduating class is its downfall). Two private day schools, The Westminster Schools in Atlanta and Albuquerqie Academy, ranked after Choate and Exeter, respectively.( These day schools have the top two endowments among the nation's private day schools).</p>
<p>^^^^where did you get that information?</p>
<p>Not sure how these things work internally, but there is no indication that the school actually wanted or "required" the so-called commitment, but I would suspect that the gc uses the commitment (if there is one) to convince the school that the kid is worth taking (the bird in the hand argument). </p>
<p>I know it is popular to absolve today's 17 year olds of all responsibility in every context, but most 17 year olds applying to elite universities are pretty astute and know how to game the system, especially, I might dare to hunch, those who attend private expensive prep schools.</p>
<p>Just my 2 cents.</p>
<p>cecil15: From my study which was furnished to all 25 rated schools. The college and university matriculation info. came from the schools' own material and went through a verification process and comment period. All college and university placements were rated using the 2007 edition of USNews Peer Assessment (PA) ratings to minimize disputes regarding whether Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT or Stanford was #1, as they all are ranked #1 in the PA as 4.9s out of 5.0 rating system. In my study, the bottom 25% of each graduating class' college placement was as important as the top 25% of each graduating class' college placement. Year off, PG year and foreign based matriculations were not included in the study and did not help or harm these U.S. based ratings. USNews' PA rating allows for an evaluation of over 1400 U.S. based colleges and universities. To exclude schools such as Stanford, Yale, Cornell, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, Northwestern, Wellesley, Duke, Vanderbilt, Emory, UCLA, USC, Michigan, Virginia, Washington Univ. St. Louis, Rice, West Point,Notre Dame, Georgetown, Berkeley, NYU, Boston College, Georgia Tech, Amherst, Middlebury, Bowdoin, Davidson, Colgate,Carleton College and large state universities honors colleges makes the WSJ study much less than it purports to be.</p>
<p>What the girl did was disrespectful to her guidance consoler. She had put her credibility on the line for the girls benefit, and when the girl completely disregarded that it was incredibly rude and shows a lack of maturity and selfishness.</p>