Reply to College admissions

Forum Index » Tweens and Teens

Reply to "College admissions"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't understand that College forum.  Parents act like the Ivy acceptance rate is 0.00001% and that DC needs a Nobel Prize to be competitive.  In fact, the Harvard acceptance rate is 5% (1 in 20 is getting in).  Difficult, but hardly impossible.[/quote]

You’re a newbie with young kids.  It is really hard to get into certain colleges today.  I attended a T20 school and was accepted to a few others as well.  No way would that happen to me today with the stats I had. [/quote]

It's so hard to get in that 1 out of 20 applicants are doing it.  (It's only hard for mediocre students.)[/quote]

Mediocre students don’t apply to Harvard - I know, I’m the parent of one. It’s essentially 5% of the tippy top, 4.0 students get in. That can be pretty jarring to a family who thinks that a 4.0 high stats kid has a good shot at Harvard. They still don’t, because 5% is still a long shot.[/quote]

Yup. 5% of the super high GPA, great SAT score, amazing extracurriculars, started a non-profit, etc kids. Take those kids, then pick 1 in 20. It’s essentially like a lottery at that point (not to mention the cost). Good news is that people can have great, successful lives without attending an Ivy. [/quote]

This.  And it's not just Harvard that is at this level.  What is very different from when we (the parents) applied is that places like Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Cornell, Rice, and the top 10 liberal arts colleges are now Harvard's level in terms of difficulty:  5-7% of the pool of kids with perfect grades/scores/extracurriculars and highest rigor in classes get in.  [/quote]

Agree.

Hardly any seats have been added to T20 colleges and slacs. Yet the population has gone up, applicant numbers up, and average tests scores/ accomplishments all up.

These universities would rather spend their budget on fancy dorms, protest centers, new age studies majors, and hiring big wigs, than build more student capacity. Yet their real mission is educating college students…. Maybe…[/quote]

To me, the biggest problem is international competition. The world is a big place and applying to top US schools from abroad has become much more common. I mean, when my teen was 10 yo we went to my home country for vacation and one 10 yo there told them they wanted to "study at Harvard".

There is also the problem of everybody applying to 20 different schools. That doesn't make the process more competitive, by itself, but it makes it extremely exhausting as there are many school-specific requirements, essays etc to worry about.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics