Yale lied to us...

Colleges and Universities A-Z Yale University
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<p>Taking courses at a nearby college, getting 5s on APs your school doesn’t offer,scoring high on the SATs, and exhausting your academic opportunities (JHS was right about the 11th grade date), playing sports/instruments and volunteering in the community doesn’t necessarily guarantee you admission to any Ivy league school…I can personally testify to this.</p>

<p>Admissions isn’t a pure academic meritocracy - there aren’t the same number of beds and chairs as there are qualified students.</p>

<p>If Cornell had the same dorm/professor capacity as Harvard, and only one academic college, it’s admissions rate would be damn close.</p>

<p>(Also…to anyone applying to colleges…STOP doing chance threads, and STOP comparing admissions rates in terms of academic rigor and selectivity. It’s a misadventure in statistics and basic math, and is really, really annoying)</p>

<p>The fact of the matter is that there isn’t some percentage of the highschool population that weirdly matches the number of spaces available at the best schools year after year…</p>

<p>There are just too many students and too few spots. Which is excellent for the schools, because it allows them to select little personal qualities from an array of students whose academics are almost identical in quality. (I’m almost certain they tier applicants by school/achievement and Scores just for this purpose).</p>

<p>So, there’s really nothing unfair (unless you have opinions about Affirmative Action, which I won’t lie, I have as well) about the process OTHER than the fact that lay prestige isn’t limited to the layman.</p>

<p>There will be plenty of Yalies (I know one, actually. He’s a ***head) that consider themselves somehow more intelligent or better educated (as a result or as a cause of their Yale education) than someone else.
There will be plenty of Cornellians (ann coulter…) that consider themselves the upper crust in relation to * OTHER CORNELLIANS.</p>

<p>But where competence actually matters (the workforce/higher echelons of society), prestige isn’t really a factor, and perception no longer supplants reality.</p>

<p>So, yeah, it sucks you got rejected, and yeah, you’ll probably feel a little annoyed when you meet someone that went to Yale, and they aren’t as intelligent as you…</p>

<p>But unless you allow that to dictate your own success in life, it’s pretty much irrelevant.</p>

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<p>I really like this post, collegehopefull with two ll’s. Nicely said.</p>

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<p>Bleck, Ann Coulter! EW!</p>

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<p>1) You can’t expect to give them a specific answer WHY the person got rejected. A ton of people get rejected for low test scores (test scores being one of the first hoops you have to jump through to even be considered for admissions), so the assumption that her test scores weren’t high enough wasn’t entirely unreasonable. Each application gets read 3+ times - they’re not going to read it again just to satisfy you.</p>

<p>2) You don’t have a full look at her application/essays/recommendations/etc. nor do you have access to thousands of other applications (to which you would compare her app) Hence you cannot make an accurate judgment on her admissions.</p>

<p>In any case, the person got in somewhere good.</p>

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<p>Thanks, Lergnom.
(the double l started out as an inside joke)</p>

<p>Yeah, I hear ya. The Ann Coulters/Ted Ralls/ Rush Limbaughs/ Michael Moores of the world really annoy me.</p>

<p>But they’re nothing compared to the binLadens/Ahmadinejads/Kim Jong Ills</p>

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<p>@ jamesford:</p>

<p>But, in your mind, is that ‘somewhere good’ on par with Yale?</p>

<p>To me the real answer to this question is : If it’s an accredited 4 year college, it doesn’t really matter where this person goes, so long as they give it their all in academics, and have fun in the process.</p>

<p>^ I am more than willing to defend that assertion.</p>

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<p>

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<p>Same, although I started self studying in Junior year.</p>

<p>To comment on the idea that you can’t get in from a sub-stellar school: I got in from a really badddd public school in Hawaii. I was the first kid to get accepted to Yale ever (the first to get accepted to Stan in over 5 years). You really just need a complete package to get into HYPS.</p>

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<p>^</p>

<p>Yeah, ditto. I had absolutely no hook…ORM, and came from an OK public school. I worked my butt off, took advantage of every single opportunity I had…and by CHANCE was accepted. Does NOT mean you lose hope. The possibility is there, and it doesnt mean people w/out hooks DONT get accepted. The process is definitely not cut and dry, and it really comes down to what sticks with your admissions officer and how far they’re willing to support your application.</p>

<p>
[QUOTE=pink001]

They then start to look for something specifically unique or interesting about you, something that makes you a vibrant student who will thrive in the school’s community. Your friend, like many have said, is an amazing person who will go far. However, have you considered that maybe her essays were a little run-of-the-mill? Or that her application didn’t capture her spark?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Exactly. Trust me, out of the thousands of people that are rejected the large majority of them would/will have been extremely strong candidates, and it’s almost guaranteed that there will be at least a few that are like what the OP described. It never was a full-proof process & I doubt it ever will be–there are way to many external factors (esp “hooks”) that sway decisions one way or another…or change the context of everything.</p>

<p>And personally, if I was an admissions officer, who’d gone through application after application for months, and then was asked to specify why a certain student was rejected over and over…my mind would explode. What would you say? So much of the process is through dialogue and debating during committee about the merits of each application, and I doubt they write more than a few words as to why they ultimately rejected someone on more than 20,000 applications. It’s crazy and difficult to ever give a straightforward response…</p>

<p>Oh, and Me=pomegranate!!, where is the valedictorian going next year? And did you have a hook to get into Cornell (congrats, btw!) ?</p>

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<p>"Now, our entire school was shocked that the was not admitted so the guidance counselors called up Yale and their immediate response was the automatic, as if by rote memorization, ‘her scores probably weren’t high enough’ ". </p>

<p>I would be shocked if it could be proved that an admission officer at Yale actually made this statement.</p>

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<p>^^Yeah, it’s more likely they said “we had thousands of amazing applicants and we simply couldn’t accept them all, no matter how incredible they were.”</p>

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<p>hey everbody,</p>

<p>sorry for the delay, but i really don’t visit CC that much anymore. I’m exhausted and ready for bed, so i’ll just address two of the most frequented comments:</p>

<p>@ataraxis and others</p>

<p>1.) the Val got accepted to 2 of the three schools she applied to (SUNY Buffalo honors-full ride and University of Rochester)…According to her she will be “happily attending the U of R in the fall”. I am not too sure how sincere this happiness is however; she obviously wanted Yale, and i think she would have thrived at say Columbia or Vassar College. Unfortunately, imo she really wasnt prepared for the admissions process (as in researching colleges, etc) and i am positive that the school did not do enough to help her out. Of course, this whole ordeal takes personal initiative as well, but i am sure she was always busy w/ work and was unable to visit colleges since she is from a low-income family</p>

<p>2.) Yup, I am stoked about Cornell (CAS) in the fall especially because i got in with NO TRUE HOOK. (I mean ~2100SAT and Salutatorian of a public school is not that great!) I wholeheartedly believe that it was my personality that permeated my entire application (teacher recs, personal essays, ecs, interview, etc) that ultimately earned me my spot. Thank for all the congratulations!</p>

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<p>don’t you think she couldve/shouldve done better than UR?</p>

<p>I mean, i would understand if she got their full scholarship (Ren? something) but she didn’t… only “full tuition aid” which was all loans so its really not that much help</p>

<p>…bump</p>

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<p>are you just the super brilliant girl? haha</p>

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<p>Um, UR is a great school, and everyone I know who goes there is ridiculously happy and seems poised to live a fulfilling life. Not sure what yardstick you’re using for a school’s merit, but that sounds pretty good to me.</p>

<p>No one is entitled to the Ivy League, and people who think that they are in for a disappointing life.</p>

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<p>Not getting merit $ at UR is suprising if she is as marvelous as you say. I know people who have received UR’s highest merit award but who haven’t been admitted to HYP for what that anecdotal evidence is worth. The lack of any merit $ at UR may indicate that she wasn’t as strong a candidate as she seemed to your community. I would think anyone who truly was “sure thing” material at Yale would be offered merit $ at UR.</p>

<p>It does sound like she received poor counseling, but she also did not apparently do a lot of investigation herself. Lots of kids have lousy counseling at their high schools and take the initiative to educate themselves. UR has much to commend it and a very bright student body. I think she’ll get over her disappointment quickly when she starts freshman year.</p>

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<p>^ Totally agree with the above two posts.</p>

<p>In terms of why she “didn’t do better than UR,” you said she only applied to 3 schools, SUNY Buffalo, UR, and presumable Yale. Therefore, she really could not have done better than UR…</p>

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<p>Yale didn’t lie. They just didn’t broadcast the truth. Which is that half of the applications are dumped out immediately after perhaps a 2 minute read by one rep. And then out of a forest of unique, wonderful, brilliant trees, most are systematically chopped down. A few stand out immediately as must accepts, and then you have your athletes and your development cases and your international applicants. </p>

<p>I used to follow up the statistics, I don’t really care anymore, but look, you don’t have a 5.7 % chance of getting in, that’s not how it works. Yale never lied, they just made it seem like if you had the stats AND the personality, the vibrant, dedicated rec letters and essays, the passion, the awesome unique acheivement and art supplement, you would get in. But uniqueness has become trivial - In a blizzard of beautiful, unique snowflakes, all the snowflakes are equally indistinguishable, even if they are all one of a kind. Yale makes you think that if you are a special snowflake, you’ll get in, but the problem is, about half of their applicants are special snowflakes nowdays. </p>

<p>Everyone believes their special. You can say, “oh, blah blah I know I was rejected and I see where they are coming from”, but I can tell you are bitter both about your friends and your own, because you believe, despite your SAT or whatever, that you had some special, unique quality. And that is a good thing - understand that being one-of-a-kind is a great thing, but when 10000 people are special, no one is special. Let it go, it’s all a big game - not a gamble - but a strategy game, both for Yale and for the applicant. Part of Yale’s strategy is general obfuscation of how they are actually making decisions</p>

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<p>I don’t think this is Yale purposely confusing anyone. They make it perfectly clear that they have thousands of qualified applicants applying and they can only accept a small percent of them. They tell you what they look for, that the admissions process isn’t a science but an art, and that having the qualities that they look for won’t automatically get you in.</p>

<p>We have all come to believe that having that “perfect GPA and SAT scores” will automatically get us in. “I got a 4.0, 2400. So, I deserve, perhaps am entitled, to get into Yale.” Know that that’s not the case at all. You got the 4.0/2400 so you are now qualified to apply to Yale… qualified to apply, that is all. You are not entitled to be accepted for no reason. I think this is a larger cultural problem, not a Yale-created or -encouraged phenomenon.</p>

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<p>“We have all come to believe that having that “perfect GPA and SAT scores” will automatically get us in.”</p>

<p>Actually, Drbigboy, I think that is what everyone used to think. Now everyone knows that you have to be interesting, you have to jump off the page, etc etc. Sure, some people do believe that their stats entitle them to Yale, but most of the applicant pool has wisened up to that. They excel quantitatively and qualitatively. When I visited Yale, they did make me feel as if I had these certain qualities and arts to myself, I would be a Yale student. </p>

<p>Thats what people believe now. You get thousands of high schoolers on CC giving each other advice on chances threads like 'It’s not about the 2400, you have to be a person". But the game has progressed to a stage where being an extremely interesting person is an abundant commodity. I’d say it goes like this “We have all come to believe that with perfect GPA and SAT scores, and with our great personality, flair for writing, and amazing recomendations, and well-rounded passions, that we will stand out.” </p>

<p>And that blame cannot be put on Yale. Yale, however, does propagate that type of thinking, because they want everyone to apply. They know that everyone thinks they are special.</p>