Reply to Any Parents Privately Disappointed with College Placement?

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[quote=SAM2][quote=Anonymous]And, yes,  Sam, schools will turn down the 4th (or xth -- maybe it's 6th, I don't know) fully-qualified GDS students.  The schools with the most selective admissions routinely turn down hundreds of highly-qualified students.  They want student bodies that are diverse/balanced in so many ways (regionally, economically, public vs. private) and wrt athletes, at a certain point (earlier in Ivies than in football-oriented school), each coach has met his/her quota.  Basically, with a nationwide pool there's an overabundance of well-qualified kids and highly-coveted schools have to say "no" not just to some of them but to MOST of them who apply.  Which is why you have various sorts of quotas -- admission is a scarce commodity which needs to be rationed in order to serve a variety of different goals.  [/quote]
My apologies -- I was not clear. I completely agree with you that very many highly-qualified applicants will be rejected. But my point is that the applicant from a top private school who is not legacy/athlete/diversity is not really directly competing for slots with the legacy/athlete/diversity applicants at her school. She's definitely competing, but that competition is far broader than just her private school.

It's not as if a college sets a quota of 4 slots from a particular high school, and then assigns those 4 slots to legacy/athlete/diversity applicants first, with leftover slots going to other applicants without such characteristics. Each applicant is competing on a nationwide (or at least city/region-wide) level. Indeed, if an applicant is relying on an athletic scholarship to get admitted, I suspect her [u]real[/u] competition is with all the other athletes across the country playing that same sport, since I imagine each coach will only have a limited number of recruiting slots to award. (In other words, the womens crew coach cannot designate 300 women as priority admits because they happened to row in high school.)

Yes, an applicant who lacks any legacy/athlete/diversity factor must be incredibly highly-qualified (and very lucky) to be admitted to a top college. But she doesn't have to be [u]more[/u] qualified to get admitted when she's coming from a local private school rather than from a local public school.

The one exception I can see relates to class rank -- I've definitely read articles about how students from top high schools (private and public magnets) are disadvantaged in college admissions because they have relatively lower class ranks than they might get at standard public schools (since the academic competition is more fierce at many privates and public magnets). This is the reason many such schools refuse to report class ranks.[/quote]

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