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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Welcome to the application process for highly qualified daughters.  If your daughter is white or Asian, it's even worse.  The stats don't lie - your daughter is competing with far more applicants exactly like her than boys.  Check the Common Data Set stats and you will see it - applicants are mostly girls.  Are you middle class - specifically in the not so sweet spot of a family earned income between 200K and 400K a year?  It's even worse than just having a daughter!

A boy with those stats would have a bigger advantage than a girl in gaining admission simply because there aren't enough boys applying.  Add to that the middle class earned income no fly zone where you earn just enough to pay for school but not enough to pay full tuition, and it becomes a tougher road.  The stats and the achievements are only part of the equation.

You should feel upset - your kid busted their behind and others who may be less deserving but fulfilled some unknown need of the colleges on the list got their admit.  It sucks, but it's where we are.

My DD was in the exact same boat but we applied to places where she had clear opportunities at a full ride (in addition to the standard T20 applications) and she got more than one full ride offer at what would be considered by most here as lower tier schools. That helped her get over the sting of not being accepted to the T20s in her list.

My attitude would be as follows - those other schools didn't want my kid?  F them - they're missing out, and we are going to focus on the ones that showed my kid some love and love them right back.[/quote]

Yes, we're in that income bracket. DD is half-Asian, and according to this thread I'm guessing her "stereotypical" ECs showed AOs that she was Asian.[/quote]

I wouldn't jump straight to race.

I am thinking this is more of a:

-Intra-high school competitiveness
-Gender competitiveness 
Possible recommendations issue bc often they say or have boxes for...this kid is the best I've ever seen or best in their class year.  At a hard high school, it's tough to get those top box check marks.

I am the Pitt grad who posted a few pages back. Your DD is the first Chancellor's Scholar interviewee that has surfaced on this site in the last few years.

I'd like to make an observation about that program.

Pitt has only been strengthening its appeal to top students since I went to school.

My husband and I were not Chancellor's Scholars but were toward the top of our graduating classes at Pitt.  We ended up getting free-ride merit scholarships to Michigan and Georgetown for graduate school.  My close friend who did not get a Chancellor's Scholarship but a substantial merit scholarship ended up going to Harvard Law and getting prestigious law jobs.  I think your daughter would find a good peer group in the Honors Program.

It's been a long time since I was in college so I can only remember one of the Chancellor's Scholars from our era.  But her's her bio now.

https://www.dhs.gov/archive/person/mary-ellen-callahan

Here's the resume of the student body president from my years at Pitt.  He was an international student.

https://www.colliers.com/en/experts/gil-borok

If the urban setting of Pitt suits your daughter, I think she'd be happy and challenged there.  And it would be pretty painless to transfer to CMU if you felt it necessary and she could get in (low acceptance rate but going to Pitt OOS would demonstrate credible interest in Pittsburgh).

My read of your situation ties back to the competitiveness of the high school and gender for the major.  It's hard to get recos as "best student I've ever seen" or "one of the best in the class" when the class is full of achievers.  If you look at TJ stats (if she's there), there are only low digit matriculations to almost all selective schools.  I think it's a lot about competing against classmates.  If your kid is really at TJ, you have a correlation, not causation, situation with race.

I do think Cornell and CMU are the waitlists to watch.  However, as a Pittsburgh native, I've never liked CMU's vibe.  I respect the rigor but I'd only send my kid there if they wanted to maximize salary and work somewhere where school reputation was critical.  Like moving to Silicon Valley to be a tech bro.

Here's somebody who dropped out of CMU to go to Pitt.  This kind of person is more my kind of person. Very liberal artsy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chabon

Good luck with everything.[/quote]

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