Reply to Are TJ college admissions a mess this year?

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[quote=Anonymous]Hear me out for a second... being obsessed with getting into "HYPSM" is one of the best ways to ensure that you don't get into them.

The reason is because you're focusing on prestige rather than fit. Those are five completely different schools with completely different strengths and weaknesses. The only thing that the five of them all share in common is the prestige element and that they're among the most highly rejective schools in America. It's a thing that you want because it's a status symbol, not because it's the best thing for you/your kid - and CERTAINLY not because it's the best thing for the school to admit your kid.

The grades, the academic rigor, and the board scores are all relative necessities to get into those schools, but they are FAR from sufficient. They all reject literally thousands of kids every single year who have flawless applications on paper. So what's a family to do?

You have to make the case that the school will be better off with you attending. You have to convince them that you are going to add value to the university's environment that they won't get from admitting someone else. And, yes - this is one of the reasons that people from underrepresented groups get favorable treatment in admissions processes: BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT AND WERE NEVER DESIGNED TO BE MERITOCRACIES.

Harvard is not in the business of choosing "the best" 2,000 applicants on paper - they are in the business of constructing a class of 2,000 or so students that will be the best for Harvard's present and future. Harvard likes having a $50 billion endowment, so they need kids who are likely to either make or to generate major gifts. Sometimes that comes from their football team, sometimes that comes from an alum making a huge discovery, and sometimes that comes from a really rich family writing a check to get their name on a building because four generations went to Harvard. And those major gifts are used to enhance the student experience and make it more likely that the next major gift will come along.

Fair? No, but neither is anything else in this world. So, post-SCOTUS, Harvard will figure out another way to admit the class of kids that they want to admit. And it will continue to be a top-ranked institution even while Indian families in Northern Virginia mutter about how it's not as prestigious as it used to be. And the exact same thing will happen with TJ.

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