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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is OP. You are misreading the post. I am not freaking out. DS is. I am just trying to figure out how to explain things to him in a way that is as accurate as possible. I don’t know if connections help the way the used to. I know this is the way of the world.

Yes it is mainly that his best friend spilled this after the process. They’d talked about how fun it would be to go to the same school, etc. all along and then my DA felt sort of blindsided. I explained he was under no obligation to say anything and he said he wished he didn’t know.

Keep in mind as others have said he is a teenager and their brains fire up in different ways.

My first response was to be proud for working hard and getting good grades and SAT score and focus only on himself. That he in the end will have greater confidence in himself.

But he is still upset and feels like he was “played.” He said he wouldn’t have applied to so many of the same schools if he’d known. We talked about how he needs to focus on the future.

[b]My question was about how much those connections really work these days and if I can honestly tell my kids, “things have changed and those connections don’t help as much as they did pre-Varsity Blues” vs “sorry, kiddo.” [/b][/quote]

OP, you are right to ignore the crazy responses and yes, he is a teenager.

As to the bolded question, here is what I can tell you based on very close relationships I have with senior development officers at a couple elite colleges and conversations I have had with them: The bottom line is that it is now much more difficult to buy or influence your way in to a school where the family does not already have a relationship and where the family has not been making large donations for a long time. Connections and influence like that don't help as much as they did pre-Varsity Blues.

Are there exceptions for a small handful of prominent extremely wealthy families and their kids? Sure. But post-Varsity Blues (and the Harvard admissions trial), the barrier between development and admissions has gone up a lot. Today, at pretty much every elite college, development officers are not allowed to communicate with admissions about particular applicants, which was not always the case. They can identify a file as a development case, and that's pretty much it (and it's going to be a rare case that that will happen where the family is not already giving). And all of them are also terrified of a hypothetical lawsuit and discovery (see Harvard trial) that would make them look bad or be embarrassing individually and for the institution, so they do adhere to this pretty carefully. Now, does it ever still happen that there might be a specific applicant where the VP for Development, or even the President, talks to the admissions director? Sure. But that's going to be a very small number of instances, especially when the family hasn't already been giving to the college.[/quote]

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