Can a normal smart kid get into an ivy these days?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Speaking for yourself. Plenty of us were burning the candle at both ends 30+ years ago, with much inferior technology and resources than what's available today.

Backwards, uphill, and in snow!

[Anonymous]

Yes, absolutely. Have your kid get off Minecraft and Instagram and start cultivating a talent--debate, orchestra instrument, singing, theater, art, math or science olympics, creative writing, coding, etc--that will be excellent enough to add something of value to an Ivy campus. Otherwise, why should they pick her application out of the pile for admission when so many other kids have high stats too?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes, absolutely. Have your kid get off Minecraft and Instagram and start cultivating a talent--debate, orchestra instrument, singing, theater, art, math or science olympics, creative writing, coding, etc--that will be excellent enough to add something of value to an Ivy campus. Otherwise, why should they pick her application out of the pile for admission when so many other kids have high stats too?

Lots of the high stats kids these days are already doing "debate, orchestra instrument, singing, theater, art, math or science olympics, creative writing, coding, etc."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, absolutely. Have your kid get off Minecraft and Instagram and start cultivating a talent--debate, orchestra instrument, singing, theater, art, math or science olympics, creative writing, coding, etc--that will be excellent enough to add something of value to an Ivy campus. Otherwise, why should they pick her application out of the pile for admission when so many other kids have high stats too?

Lots of the high stats kids these days are already doing "debate, orchestra instrument, singing, theater, art, math or science olympics, creative writing, coding, etc."

Get ideas on Reddit. Random obscure things and lots of detail.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes, absolutely. Have your kid get off Minecraft and Instagram and start cultivating a talent--debate, orchestra instrument, singing, theater, art, math or science olympics, creative writing, coding, etc--that will be excellent enough to add something of value to an Ivy campus. Otherwise, why should they pick her application out of the pile for admission when so many other kids have high stats too?

Lots of the high stats kids these days are already doing "debate, orchestra instrument, singing, theater, art, math or science olympics, creative writing, coding, etc."

You are not just "doing" these things; rather, you are excelling to the extent that the schools will recruit you for one of them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I keep hearing about these high stat kids getting rejected. On social media, I have seen posts about ridiculous students with extremely long crazy impressive extracurriculars.

Can a normal smart kid get into an ivy?

My kid has the scores and grades. He plays 3 sports and is on several academic teams. He is not nationally ranked in anything but good at everything. DH and I both attended T25 colleges and ivy grad schools. Our kid is better than DH and me in every single category.

So, keeping things at the Ivy League, Cornell is doable for a smart unhooked kid with the grades and the stats and the ECs and the recs and the essays and all that.

And of course there's always going to be the random that gets into Brown or Dartmouth or wherever.

But by and large, no. Your smart, hardworking kid is not getting into Harvard.

That's reserved for certain names, wealth, wall street, some athletes (hockey is very good), the DEI stuff, some legacy, the "Z" list, first generation.

Straight A white girl Lucy with college educated parents from Hyatsville is not going to Yale.

But there are some very good non-Ivy League schools that prioritize talent and will make it happen financially - MIT, CalTech, Rice, Williams, Chicago, Notre Dame, Bowdoin, Northwestern, Vanderbilt. And the instate public school honors programs are becoming better and better every single year.

And of course you can shoot your shot with merit scholarships,

But generally, the Ivy League today is a club. It's not a meritocracy.

[Anonymous]

My DC’s boarding school sends a large number of extremely smart, unhooked white and Asian kids to the Ivies every year.

[Anonymous]

You can get into HYP unhooked (as a white or Asian) if you're roughly top 3 in the class at STA, NCS or Sidwell. It happened the last two years and it's happened again this year. It's not a guarantee but the odds are surprisingly good. However graduating with those stats is really difficult.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My DC’s boarding school sends a large number of extremely smart, unhooked white and Asian kids to the Ivies every year.

Yes, coming from a school that costs $85,000 will definitely increase your odds of acceptance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You can get into HYP unhooked (as a white or Asian) if you're roughly top 3 in the class at STA, NCS or Sidwell. It happened the last two years and it's happened again this year. It's not a guarantee but the odds are surprisingly good. However graduating with those stats is really difficult.

Right. Those aren’t “normal smart kids.”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes. DC attends a top Ivy, and only about half the kids are hooked. You do need to excel at something, though, in order to be admitted unhooked.

Where did you get the data on this? One time I added up all the numbers of hooked kids at Harvard in each category (numbers from The Crimson), and it came to like 120% of the entering class. There is obviously some overlap in categories, but even considering a great deal of overlap, it would be hard to get that number down to 50%.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My DC’s boarding school sends a large number of extremely smart, unhooked white and Asian kids to the Ivies every year.

Yes, coming from a school that costs $85,000 will definitely increase your odds of acceptance.

Right?

The top feeders to Harvard are Andover, Dalton, Spence, Collegiate, Horace Mann, Trinity, Exeter, Choate, Boston Latin, Deerfield.

Just average American families.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes. DC attends a top Ivy, and only about half the kids are hooked. You do need to excel at something, though, in order to be admitted unhooked.

How does he/she really know?

[Anonymous]

As someone who went to an ivy undergrad and the top law school, trust me, it's far more important in the long run to get into a good graduate/professional school. As long as your DC truly excels in whatever undergrad they attend, that's all that matters.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think so. I was a normal smart kid admitted to an Ivy regular decision in 1998. Even then, I got to campus and realized I was out of my league and my straight-A gpa, varsity sport, 1510 SAT put me in maybe the bottom 25% of students at the time.

The world is so much more competitive now and that bottom quartile of normal smart American kids has long been bumped for smart international kids and actual smart kids who would never have been able attend 25 years ago because they weren’t offering zero-cost attendance at the time. With cost of attendance off the table for poor brilliant kids and the international student population more than doubling, anyone who is truly normal getting an accept is powerball territory.

This but more so. I think you are misremembering if you think 1510 was bottom quartile in 1998. I remember from my Princeton Review guide perusing days that even the best schools had 25th percentile at high 1300s to low 1400s. (Fellow 1998 HS grad here).

Okay, googled it and check this out https://pr.princeton.edu/profile/06/08.htm

My SATs were fine but the rest of what I brought to the table was definitely bottom 25%, especially when it came to the sophistication of my academic preparation. My graduating class in college was over 50% private school grads and included people who have since won Oscars and Emmys, people basically running the government in more than one country, professional athletes, and wildly rich kids who were also brilliant and have had careers like something out of a Wes Anderson movie. I actually don’t mind how things have gone with college admissions, because I don’t know that a place like that has a lot of space for smart, normal kids. I didn’t have the resources or connections to fully take advantage of what my school offered and often felt I was on the outside looking in.

My DH and I share the same alma mater. Even though we sometimes fantasize about our child getting in and starting the family tradition that so many of our friends benefited from, we’re hopeful that she seeks out something that would be a more welcoming fit.