Washington & Lee
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
NP. I'm a bit confused when you say local grads wouldn't "grant an interview". Can you explain? W & L like a lot of other schools have dropped the on campus interview due to sheer numbers of students coming through for tours. My college gave my DS one when we toured but that was unusual and done just because we had flown 3,000 miles for the tour and I gave money. When we toured W & L there were no on-campus interviews that day. To the best of my knowledge, W & L local alumni don't interview like Yale, Harvard and Princeton do. And certainly, the local alums who do this do not have the option to "grant" or "not grant" an interview. They do it as a courtesy to the school and take the list and run with it. Many say in all the years they've done it, the universities have never been swayed by their notes or suggestions. |
Anonymous
|
This was our impression as well from our tour. I read on the website an interview was required. DC took their time researching this requirement because they were under the same impression you were. We convened a family meeting after the local interviewer blew off DC. We concluded the stars were not aligning so, no calls or further effort would be made.
Definitely don't take our advice: we blew it! |
Anonymous
|
.23 back. I don't even think W & L was taking down names the day we toured. There were definitely no on-campus interviews. DC was very turned off by the Greek scene and drinking culture (we toured right after that horrendous accident where eleven drunk students were packed into a car and a woman was thrown through the front window and died), so we didn't apply. I don't know about the local interviews. My own SLAC doesn't do them here in D.C. DC did go through the local Harvard, Yale and Princeton interviews. Cornell also interviews locally. I'm not aware of any SLACs that are doing it. How did the local interviewer (W&L personnel or alumni) blow you off? My impression from the hYP ones is that the local alum gets a list of students, file and phone numbers and they set up shop at the local Starbucks and see student after student.
|
Anonymous
|
Well, it sounds like when the local rep. blew you off that you should have called W & Lee according to its instructions:
"Should you have any difficulty in connecting with a member of your local chapter, please contact our Admissions Office at admissions@wlu.edu or (540) 458-8710. Remember, our AAP members are volunteers, so please be patient with your interview requests. For more details on interviews, see our Interview page.I'm having trouble connecting with an AAP representative." Should you have any difficulty in connecting with a member of your local chapter, please contact our Admissions Office at admissions@wlu.edu or (540) 458-8710. Remember, our AAP members are volunteers, so please be patient with your interview requests. For more details on interviews, see our Interview page. |
Anonymous
Well, I am a bit confused. During the interview we were told interviews were not required: I have my written notes and can tell you exactly who said what and what they each were wearing. Then, I read info posted in this link. DC was late to contact the local interviewer and thought they didn't need the interview because that was what we were told. DC did contact the admissions office themselves and was so stressed out when no one could be bothered to deal politely with DC's oversight. Local alumni couldn't accomodate DC's request and we live in an area with many alums and DC even babysits for alumni. DC e-mailed admissions, per the instructions, and got an "oh well" response perhaps because the interview wasn't important. What do I know?! It was only then that we had a family meeting to discuss this. All is not lost: the best thing to come out of the dinner meeting was being able to try highly recommended fish tacos at an adorable restaurant in the neighborhood. The worst was having to gently tell alumni, DC tried all avenues and hit dead-ends. W&L told Legacy repeatedly offspring were welcomed as long as their grades were acceptable. Maybe DC's grades were not acceptable. Maybe they didn't like Legacy, DC's essay, stats, their ecs, their social media, their school, their name or there was a computer error. DC handled the entire college process on their own. Don't throw this back on us when we don't care for the school for any siblings after this ridiculous decades long lie. Period. The Honor Code stops at the adorable admissions' building's door. Legacy DC wasn't good enough for W&L, we demonstrated interest, they demonstrated interest and they misled multtiple alumni for decades. They are well within their rights to accept and reject anyone they want and we are free to write off the school after 17 years of DC's free marketing as well. |
Anonymous
|
8:26 here. I meant to say, "during the tour we were told interviews were not required." The online policy and information given on the tour didn't match up.
|
Anonymous
| There is a new president now, who I understand is highly accomplished and a good person - perhaps he would want to hear about your experience ... You may still be bitter about DC, but I personally believe ending things on a more positive note after your DH has devoted so much time, energy and money to the school might be a net good thing for your family ... ? |
Anonymous
Thank you for this comment. Bitter implies we care. We were told one thing since DC was born and received another. We only come across as slighted revisiting this. I'm moving on but, sharing with alumni our experience so they do not get their hopes shattered. |
Anonymous
I understand your frustration, OP. Legacy doesn't mean what is used to. My own SLAC takes only about 30% of the legacies now. My DC was legacy at Harvard and triple legacy at Yale. She had the scores, the SAT II scores and the 4.0+ GPA but still didn't get in. White females are a dime a dozen. The slots went to URMs, athletes, first generations, and international students. Every LAC now wants to pattern itself after HYP and say it is a "global" institution, which means something has to give and it is usually the legacies. Note the statistics that even LACs boast about after each class is formed - they list the number of international students and no. of countries they hail from, they talk about all the first generation students, the URMs, the diversity, the disadvantaged they admitted. Even if you have a faculty member in your family it doesn't mean squat to the admissions office. It's all about stats reported to U.S News & World report. Legacies just don't count in those statistics. |
Anonymous
Thank you for commenting. The entire situation is a powder-keg waiting for a spark. I have typed and deleted so many comments in this post. I think I'll leave you with: "Best of luck to you and your daughter. She's very lucky to have you." |
Anonymous
Care to explain why it's a powder keg ? |
Anonymous
| What kind of stats needed if you are from the DMV? |
Anonymous
I don't think most people are opposed to greater diversity but there's an element of today's current college model that doesn't seem quite fair. It's not one or two specific things but many things that come together. One part of it would be international students. Why are the schools taking in more and more international students at the expense of highly qualified American students? After all, our tax dollars are used to subsidize these colleges, whether directly or indirectly. And while it's great that schools are looking at taking in more 1st generation (read: poor, usually immigrant background) students, they usually come in at lower grades/scores than more qualified rejected candidates who don't tick enough diversity boxes. So your blameless child, who's worked very hard in school because all the top colleges are saying we need X grades and Y scores and Z accomplishments, and then gets rejection after rejection over technically lesser qualified candidates, or candidates who got in because they're "hispanic" despite that mom and dad are doctors and from rich families in Mexico and so forth. A lot of virtue signalling in today's college admissions. Harvard is a great example, if you add up all the "minority" students plus the international students, you're left with around 40% of the undergrads who are "white" but half of that will certainly be Jewish. So the percentage of Harvard's student body that is from your typical white American background is much smaller than the actual share of the national population, and that's because Harvard has to play the admissions game to try to be as fair as possible to the other groups (Asian Americans and Jews are heavily overrepresented and for good reasons), and to accommodate their desire for more international presence at Harvard, the group that gets most affected in enrollment numbers are, you got it, non-Jewish white American kids from normal backgrounds. (note, do NOT dare claim I'm anti-semitic or anti-Asian, I'm just pointing out the facts). Then, on top of it, are the shockingly high tuition. |
Anonymous
|
It sounds like a slave trading firm. They need to change the name of the school.
|