Any high school teachers here who can give some frank talk about which types of students get into the top colleges?

[Anonymous]

For some reason there are endless college counselors doing marketiing podcasts, for admissions officers giving interviews, parents stating this is what worked for their child, etc. We get this information and try to use it to see what our own child should be doing.

However, missing from all this talk is the actual teachers who teach these kids, see what kind of grades they get, the impact on their high school community, what the letters of recommendations say, etc.

Out of all these stakeholders you would think that a teacher who sees year after year particular kids getting into college would be in the best position to see what works.

For some reason, we never seem to get their wisdom.

[Anonymous]

Rich
Well liked
Took a million APs

[Anonymous]

The first bit of advice is to not worry about “top colleges”.

[Anonymous]

Parents who work as admissions coaches. Specifically, essay coaches seem to fare the best.

[Anonymous]

Feeder school aka mostly private

[Anonymous]

I had an intelligent but not unusual, otherwise unremarkable student get into Harvard, and I'm sure ROTC was her hook. She talked with them a few times, and was told that they had spoken to Admissions and that Admissions assured them they were looking "very favorably" at her file. Then she was admitted. She also got into Yale and Cornell.

So, ROTC. Not sure if I'd advise anyone to take that route unless they were already so inclined, though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For some reason there are endless college counselors doing marketiing podcasts, for admissions officers giving interviews, parents stating this is what worked for their child, etc. We get this information and try to use it to see what our own child should be doing.

However, missing from all this talk is the actual teachers who teach these kids, see what kind of grades they get, the impact on their high school community, what the letters of recommendations say, etc.

Out of all these stakeholders you would think that a teacher who sees year after year particular kids getting into college would be in the best position to see what works.

For some reason, we never seem to get their wisdom.

teachers often don't know where their star students end up.

[Anonymous]

Football players

[Anonymous]

Editors of the school newspaper. Legacies. Athletes. Especially weird ones like Crew. Or URM that has an amazing story and stats to back it up.

[Anonymous]

Being sociable, friendly and engaging with classmates/teachers, a contributor in the classroom, is much more important than people realize.

Teachers talk amongst each other, "Oh you have Jimmy next year? He's a great kid."

The more community-oriented and outgoing the kid is, the likelier their reputation will smooth the way for great recommendations and other soft support.

[Anonymous]

I don’t think individual teachers necessarily have the broad, big-picture view of a student that OP seems to think they do - at least not very often. They know how a kid performed in their class and what they wrote in a rec letter, but may have minimal insight into other areas of the student’s academic or extracurricular performance and interests.

Not always, of course - there are certainly cases where a teacher and student really click and the teacher becomes more of a mentor and confidante and therefore does have a lot if insight into the student beyond that teacher’s own class, but I doubt that’s the majority experience.

[Anonymous]

Authenticity and smarts.

Nothing else. We are all looking for that recipe. Sounds like a task for a large language model - driven well-trained data set to elicit the holy grail of pattern (phenotype and genotype) top colleges seek in their admits.

[Anonymous]

The immense majority of teachers do not have any insight into college admissions, OP. They're just like the rest of the population. US colleges are that opaque. It's not like this in any other country.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Parents who work as admissions coaches. Specifically, essay coaches seem to fare the best.

Agree.

Great essays and strong LOR (coached with detailed brag sheets relating why & how teachers class impacted kid, led to passion about academic area, created intellectual curiosity) are the main differentiators at private HS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Feeder school aka mostly private

lol facts say otherwise
Public’s do better overall