Reply to interesting article about college admissions

Forum Index » Private & Independent Schools

Reply to "interesting article about college admissions"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I am not sure that despairing in a way that is tinged with envy that some sort of superhumanly over-programmed kids are the only ones getting into these really top schools.  One can be more upset perhaps that achievement in certain areas (sports at a level that gets one recruited to d1 schools like Stanford or Ivies) and incredible wealth or connections (and I mean incredible, not the top 1% but top 0.001% or true celebrity families) clearly make a difference and gets kids in that academically likely would not have been competitive, but at the Ivys at least these are not a huge percentage (considering that many of the recruited athletes and billionaire's kids were fully qualified).

But our experiences in the past fours years with two DD's and close friends/relatives working in one admissions office for a top Ivy indicate that the schools see straight through kids spending summers on $15,000 "missions" to Africa or "working" in internships with famous people due to family connections.  Beyond the groups listed above, it really seems like academics are the absolute top priority, very high test scores (but don't need to be perfect, no school cares about 2300 versus 2400 it seems), really great grades particularly junior and senior year that MUST be in the most challenging courses the school offers in at least most areas of study (ie don't need to take BC calc instead of AB if really not a math/engineering type), and must be a kid that teachers and peers really respect academically. It seemed in our DD's cases that kids from their classes who had great scores and grades but were kids that did not really seem to have an intellectual spark did not do as well as kids that teachers really loved having in their classes because they said and wrote creative and interesting things.  In terms of extracurriculars, for sure kids HAD to be pretty involved in something, but not everything,  and it did seem that some evidence of leadership and stick-to-it-ness was important (ie if had done a club or team or activity for 4 years but never became editor or president or team captain perhaps not so good). And it did seem that some kids in their school who did work lots of hours at jobs necessary for making money (at health clubs, at stores) and who were truly middle-class kids with single parents or parents without super high paying jobs also did quite well in admissions, and the fact that they worked over the summer didn't seem to hurt them really at all.

But people really need to realize that with no ability to actually bring applicants to campus and have them spend 24-48 hours interacting with faculty and students (which actually they do for final admission decisions at Oxford and Cambridge for some colleges and some departments) that the admission decisions are really going to be almost random in the end. Probably 30% of applicants to these top schools are just as qualified as each other academically and have great character and talents or interests, so then comes down to how an admissions reader reacts to the essay or even what time of day the applicant's folder is presented to the committee.  So one just has to be resigned to that. Both my DDs got into many great schools and were rejected or waitlisted at others, in some cases much "lower" ranked schools even, so one has to conclude there were some intangibles there.

But there are loads of great schools now full of highly qualified and well-educated kids, so compared to our generation, there are many more I think good choices, and in both DD's classes from DC high schools, just about all their friends seem to be happy in college and finding they were well-prepared academically, so I would stress everyone to relax, it will probably work out fine in the end, but the financial costs is a huge issue and whether any of them will have jobs at the end is more of a worry than the admissions experience now and their experiences while they are there.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics