Reply to Why is it so hard to accept that the students at better colleges are simply better students?

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[quote=Anonymous]It is hard because just like times in swimming races which can vary by 1/100 of a second, the difference between students getting into the top 10 or top 60 are trivial at this point. Being a serious candidate is something to celebrate, but it doesn't mean you get in. Getting in is a lottery for top students - and sometimes only 2% win. I have sent 4 kids to college in 5 years and visited many top ones when COVID allowed and listened to more info sessions than I can remember. I have been told at schools like Tufts that they could fill their whole class with students with unweighted 4.0's and 1550 SATs and above if they wanted to, so it's not all about the grades. We were told at schools that as scores become optional, only kids with the best scores submit, making the school's averages seems off the charts. With the common app, kids apply to more schools than ever, look at Northeastern with over 90,000 applications last year. They didn't hire more reviewers, so each application gets maybe 2.5 minutes of review, and that is generous.

There are lots of smart kids, and some get into T10 and some don't, and no one knows why. So in my book T75 means something. And a kid in the top 15% of their class at any T75 school is probably pretty even. Kids get Cs at T10 schools (well not at Brown where P/F options are incredibly liberal- I have a kid there too) and that means something too. A C at Harvard is a C. Equal to a C at Michigan, or GA Tech.

Sports matter, legacies matter, DEI matters, gender matters, and balancing a class matters, and who else applies from your HS matters. I had a child get into Harvard with 8 APs (not submitting their scores cause they weren't all 5s), playing a sport, 1490 SAT and a child with 1590 SAT, 12 "5"s on APs, 2 college credits, classical violin, and work experience get rejected from Yale, Harvard and MIT.

You can believe only those who go to Harvard will rule the world, but only if Harvard is used as an adjective to describe a large group of elite schools, and not a noun to describe 1.
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