Anyone else thinks the whole college admission process is a total farse?

[Anonymous]

so my good/not perfect kid got into every school ranked 60-150 that she applied to. and they are all great, and she will get a good education and job from any of them.

maybe you need to chill out and accept the reality.

the system is nuts- maybe they should allow just 2 total applications per kid to top 50 schools, instead of letting all the high performers in the county blast off 12+ applications to the same top 50 schools. Recipe for heartbreak for those who don't recognize the craziness of it.

[Anonymous]

Some people need to improve their coping skills. College admissions at the most competitive schools isn't fair, but no one ever told you it was. If you were convinced that every qualified kid got into HPYSM, that's 100% on you. If you decided a brochure in the mail was a promise of admission, that's 100% on you, too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yep. 100%

The amount of lying and marketing oneself and trying to show you have some trauma or special adversity or belong to some outlier group so you can curry favor to Admin officers. It's gross.

And the fake non-profits and the no standards at times with overinflated gpas and no test results.

It's really gotten so out of hand given the sheer volume of applicants universities now face.

I swear it should be changed to this:

Everyone that meets certain requirements all get put in the hat and then they pull out admits like a lottery. At some point it's just too much.

All of these actions are based on heresy, mostly from parents who are just as clueless as the next person. I've never heard an AO say they want trauma or non-profits. Stop believing random strangers for something this important.

Not true. The heart-string stories. A friend was an AO at a top state university and the discussions were often said of very qualified kids from MC/UMC/!% that they never had to experience adversity. They were essentially penalized for coming from functional, normal backgrounds and being neurotypical 'normal' , but exceptional kids.

Yeah WTF a major goal of mind as a parent is to ensure my kids DO NOT experience adversity and now I’m hearing I shouldn’t have done that.

So you would trade places with my kid who has experienced adversity, right? You would totally want your kid to have dyslexia and ADHD, have invested $25,000 and countless hours (and tears) over the years to be sure they can learn to read and do math. You'd take the therapy for anxiety, because being a smart kid who still fails is really hard. But my kid is totally lucky because he's getting extra time on his SAT! He can write an essay about overcoming adversity!

You know you don't want your kid to have my kid's circumstances. And the reason you didn't let your kid grow up poor or traumatized is because you love them and want them to be well and happy, not because you thought being well was going to get them into college. Be sad that your kid can't get into the tippy top schools if you want to, but don't gaslight those of us with kids who has suffered by saying we have it lucky.

+1000

[Anonymous]

"Yeah WTF a major goal of mind as a parent is to ensure my kids DO NOT experience adversity and now I’m hearing I shouldn’t have done that."

It's not that your kid is disadvantaged in admissions for not experiencing diversity. It's that any kid who has parents with college degrees who can live in a great neighborhood, send them to strong high schools, and provide them with expensive enrichment programs from the time they're babies, should be able to do really well in high school academically. They should be able to demonstrate mastery and eventually leadership in multiple activities. The UMC kids in the DMV have more resources thrown at them than any group of humans throughout history, for goodness sake. So, they should be the brightest stars imaginable.

When a kid is first-gen college, URM, low-income, and maybe English as a second language, and that kid can score in range with your kid, that means that that kid has every bit as much innate and nurtured talent as your kid and then some. You probably have no idea how much inner drive and hours of work it takes for those kids to be on par with your kid, especially when the whole world has been telling them since birth that they aren't good enough because of their race.

If your kid has never gone without anything, what's their excuse for not being beyond amazing? Because those schools want amazing. Not just par for the course bright kids.

[Anonymous]

I'm still waiting for someone who is willing for their white son to live the rest of his life as a Black man just so that he can get that amazing bump in admissions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Why don't parents understand that? The first kid will get into just about all of the places the second kid got into to, plus has a shot at the highest tier schools. The issue is the parents/high achieving kids want the same acceptance rates as the second kid, but at the most selective schools in the country. THAT's what they are complaining about!

Except that's not true. I know plenty of kids like the first kid who have NOT been accepted to the schools that the second group of kids have, because the first kids run into yield protection.

That's partly on the kid. When you have high stats, you must demonstrate interest in a school so you don't get yield protected. You have to do it more so than the kid at 50% stats for that school. If there are supplementals you need to use those to show why it's the top school for you. Attend online sessions. But you wont get yield protected everywhere if you do it right.

[Anonymous]

Do people read "holistic admissions" and that think this means their scores and GPA don't matter as much? That's not what it means. They will still run your application through a computer for the first screening, which is based on scores.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm still waiting for someone who is willing for their white son to live the rest of his life as a Black man just so that he can get that amazing bump in admissions.

It's a good point, but it hardly seems fair that the only racial group underrepresented at Harvard is whites. That just seems like deliberate racial discrimination, and I'm sure you're not in favor of that or are you?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Bottom line: The system is fine tuned for the colleges to build exactly the class they want. If you want to change the system you'll have to start by convincing them to not do that. Unlikely to ever happen, and with good reason.

The mistaken assumption is that elite colleges simply take the X best candidates and offer admission to them. Completely untrue and it has never been that way. They build a class to accommodate a long list which makes up their institutional mission. And in the current system they do it extremely well, test scores or no test scores.

And remembering that most elite universities could build 5+ equally qualified freshman classes from their applications, so yes, many qualified candidates will get turned away. Don't set your snowflakes up to expect they will get in just because they have high scores, because there are way too many qualified candidates for spots, and that is only worse with TO. It was a lottery system 10 years ago and isn't going to get better as people continue applying to 10+ colleges each year

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do people read "holistic admissions" and that think this means their scores and GPA don't matter as much? That's not what it means. They will still run your application through a computer for the first screening, which is based on scores.

Who is "they" and how do you know what "they" do?
And yes, "holistic" does, in fact, mean that test scores and GPA don't matter as much as in a process that doesn't use it.

[Anonymous]

We are likely in the minority but DD had a good experience applying for colleges. The only strategies we used were choosing schools she could actually get in to and setting the expectations. Oh we also never demanded she do any activities “because they would be good for a college application.” I think colleges could see who she was, what she wanted to do/study, and they liked it. I’m sure it helped her desired major is not super popular overall although at some schools (like the one she enrolled at) it was competitive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yep. 100%

The amount of lying and marketing oneself and trying to show you have some trauma or special adversity or belong to some outlier group so you can curry favor to Admin officers. It's gross.

And the fake non-profits and the no standards at times with overinflated gpas and no test results.

It's really gotten so out of hand given the sheer volume of applicants universities now face.

I swear it should be changed to this:

Everyone that meets certain requirements all get put in the hat and then they pull out admits like a lottery. At some point it's just too much.

All of these actions are based on heresy, mostly from parents who are just as clueless as the next person. I've never heard an AO say they want trauma or non-profits. Stop believing random strangers for something this important.

Not true. The heart-string stories. A friend was an AO at a top state university and the discussions were often said of very qualified kids from MC/UMC/!% that they never had to experience adversity. They were essentially penalized for coming from functional, normal backgrounds and being neurotypical 'normal' , but exceptional kids.

Yeah WTF a major goal of mind as a parent is to ensure my kids DO NOT experience adversity and now I’m hearing I shouldn’t have done that.

Adversity can be many things, as long as the kid deals with it and mom and dad don’t swoop in. My kid got a C and wrote about it in an essay. She wrote about how she struggled and had never struggled and was embarrassed to ask for help. How the following semester she met with her teacher weekly and did extra work, etc. she got in virtually everywhere she applied. The key was that she had to take action and figure it out, not her parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do people read "holistic admissions" and that think this means their scores and GPA don't matter as much? That's not what it means. They will still run your application through a computer for the first screening, which is based on scores.

That might be true at some places, but I just read applications for a large university this winter (yes, I was a dreaded temp reader). There was a minimum GPA for normal consideration but we nevertheless did receive applications with lower GPAs to read. So clearly if they had a computer looking at applications first, it wasn't doing this job.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:UChicago has sent a LOT, LOT, LOT of mailers.

Same with my kid who has a B+ average. I know the marketing and drumming up applications to deny helped them rise in the rankings back in the 90s (I worked for a research firm involved in that) but you'd think now that they are up there they could be a bit more focused in their direct mail efforts!

+1. I throw out a few a week, and pass one or two along to DD periodically when it's been awhile. She's not their target student. (I think she's quirky-enough that she'd fit right in there, but she's not getting in with her stats.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Why don't parents understand that? The first kid will get into just about all of the places the second kid got into to, plus has a shot at the highest tier schools. The issue is the parents/high achieving kids want the same acceptance rates as the second kid, but at the most selective schools in the country. THAT's what they are complaining about!

Except that's not true. I know plenty of kids like the first kid who have NOT been accepted to the schools that the second group of kids have, because the first kids run into yield protection.

That's partly on the kid. When you have high stats, you must demonstrate interest in a school so you don't get yield protected. You have to do it more so than the kid at 50% stats for that school. If there are supplementals you need to use those to show why it's the top school for you. Attend online sessions. But you wont get yield protected everywhere if you do it right.

Agree. Demonstrated interest is really important at many of these schools