I was in the top 1/3rd of my public magnet and got into HYP. UMC white kid; no legacy (except parent who was a law student at one) and no hook. Scores and activities (especially accomplishments therein) matter. The difference between 1 and 9 at a big, good public HS is miniscule, especially if it didn't adequately reflect course load difficulty.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You all are seriously scrutinizing the HS record of one of the most successful business women in America, asking if she deserved to go to Harvard???

She helped build from the ground up one of the world’s most successful, influential companies with a $1 trillion valuation and someone else on here is saying that’s just “average” for someone who went to Harvard??

Yes the misogyny is unreal.

I was also a Harvard college grad and yeah it doesn't mean you just automatically become a billionaire without trying. She's clearly talented to have used her opportunities to yield incredible success.

I don't see this scrutiny of male billionaires-- "are they really anything special or just average with an ophthalmologist dad" wtf

NP. I agree, this thread reeks of misogyny. A man is successful and he's a savvy, scrappy, innovative bootstrapper with genius ideas. A woman is successful and she's a climber who got opportunities she didn't really earn. Same old double standard as ever.

And on this it's absolutely women who are leading this charge.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You all are seriously scrutinizing the HS record of one of the most successful business women in America, asking if she deserved to go to Harvard???

She helped build from the ground up one of the world’s most successful, influential companies with a $1 trillion valuation and someone else on here is saying that’s just “average” for someone who went to Harvard??

Yes the misogyny is unreal.

I was also a Harvard college grad and yeah it doesn't mean you just automatically become a billionaire without trying. She's clearly talented to have used her opportunities to yield incredible success.

I don't see this scrutiny of male billionaires-- "are they really anything special or just average with an ophthalmologist dad" wtf

NP. I agree, this thread reeks of misogyny. A man is successful and he's a savvy, scrappy, innovative bootstrapper with genius ideas. A woman is successful and she's a climber who got opportunities she didn't really earn. Same old double standard as ever.

In the early 2000, my suburban west-coast public HS sent 10/20 students to ivies or equivalent. Memory isn't perfect but 2 stanford, 2 columbia, 2 caltech/mit, 1 yale, and the rest brown/penn/etc.

How is this shocking? A smart, full pay student goes to and Ivy and is today one of america's most famous executives? Everything seems to line up

I went to a good suburban high school in NY. It was large and of the top 20+ students quite a number went to Ivies, including Harvard. Does not seem unusual to me.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe they used UW GPA to rank?

That has nothing at all to do with how colleges select students.

What if she took APs and had one A- vs 1-8 just took honors and had 4.0.

If the HS ranked with UW GPA she would be “behind” those other students. But she would still have a stronger college application than 1-8.

I’m 8:44 and again, want to reiterate, we didn’t do it this way back then. It was the 80s. One of the best high schools in the nation, and APs were only offered senior year. I didn’t take all APs offered, because we had some custom classes that were more interesting. I knew where I was going, so I only took the AP tests that would give me some benefit at the school I was headed to (to place out of intro courses). Elite colleges didn’t accept a schools weighting, and re-ranked people based on their criteria. It really is not that weird that non-valedictorians got into the top schools.

Anonymous wrote:You all are seriously scrutinizing the HS record of one of the most successful business women in America, asking if she deserved to go to Harvard???

She helped build from the ground up one of the world’s most successful, influential companies with a $1 trillion valuation and someone else on here is saying that’s just “average” for someone who went to Harvard??

Yes the misogyny is unreal.

I was also a Harvard college grad and yeah it doesn't mean you just automatically become a billionaire without trying. She's clearly talented to have used her opportunities to yield incredible success.

I don't see this scrutiny of male billionaires-- "are they really anything special or just average with an ophthalmologist dad" wtf

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Maybe they used UW GPA to rank?

That has nothing at all to do with how colleges select students.

What if she took APs and had one A- vs 1-8 just took honors and had 4.0.

If the HS ranked with UW GPA she would be “behind” those other students. But she would still have a stronger college application than 1-8.

I’m about her age, and went to a public, non-magnet high school in the metro NYC area that was in the top 20 nationally on the USNWR list. Our graduating class was around 250 people. We sent three to Yale, one to Princeton, a ton to Columbia, at least one to Duke, and several to U Michigan, U Chicago, and I don’t remember what else because it was over 35 years ago and we just weren’t that obsessed and it was not a thing to do “decision day” or publish lists. I’m sure people went to Cornell and Penn. Harvard wasn’t that popular with us - the number one and two in our class applied early to Yale and Princeton, got in, and were done.

Even more so, we weren’t obsessed with STEM degrees - we majored in English, History, Economics, American Studies, etc. Also, there was no common app, and you had to type those essays out by hand, and the elite schools were big on having very specific essays that you couldn’t really repurpose your main essays. I remember throwing my Georgetown application in the trash because it was that stupid - I vaguely remember it being something like what card were you in a card deck.

Weighted grades weren’t a thing, either, and I remember the big “scandal” was that someone was in the top ten in our class who hadn’t been in any of the hardest classes, and some of us felt that was vaguely “unfair”, but it didn’t seem to affect who went to school where.

Different time, and the colleges knew enough about schools like ours to understand who they were looking at. How young or how out of touch are some of you to think that what happens now is “normal” or was always like this?

Anonymous wrote:#9 and got into Harvard? Class rank is irrelevant. My classmate and I wee #30 and #50 in our HS class in the 80s and we both went to Yale.

Yes, at my public high school the kids who went to Ivy were obviously strong students, but also had parents who were familiar with that world and knew how to position them for admissions. I remember asking one of them what's the Ivy League? LOL. Looking back today I can see what they did to stand out and it was very intentional. They were not the top ranked students, but the had the stats.

Anonymous wrote:Maybe they used UW GPA to rank?

That has nothing at all to do with how colleges select students.

Ivy disinformation central.

#9 and got into Harvard? Class rank is irrelevant. My classmate and I wee #30 and #50 in our HS class in the 80s and we both went to Yale.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Was it really that easy back then? Sandburg was 9th in her public high school class and got accepted to Harvard. Did she do something extraordinary like ranked tennis player??

Her dad went to Hopkins and was an Ophthalmologist, so they were full pay I’m sure that helped.

Idk what she had or not but being full pay is peanuts for these wealthy schools with multibillion endowments, unless you can donate above millions, you get no bump in admissions.

Wasn’t Harvard needs blind back then?

Need blind for admission I think, but didn’t offer aid. I have a friend who graduated high school around 1982. He was valedictorian of his tiny high school in Nowhere, TX. He got into Harvard but his family had no money and he got no aid, so he couldn’t go. He went to UT Austin instead.

I think the original point is that competition for admission was lower back then, and presumably Harvard’s yield was lower as well, as a significant number of admits simply wouldn’t have been able to afford the tuition.

Huh? Harvard offered aid, then and now. They don't offer merit aid, but they offer need-based aid. I overlapped with Sandburg at Harvard and gad a mix of need-based scholarships, federal loans and work-study. And Harvard's yield rate back then was about 75%.

People forget several things when they wonder how a particular kid got into a highly selective college. For one thing, they forget that it's not just about "absolute merit," even assuming anyone knows what that means or agrees on how it should be measured. It's about social engineering a whole class: they want a certain number of squash players, a bunch of clarinetists, some people who will major in classics, some kids who grew up on farms and some kids who grew up in South America, and so on. (As they used to tell us back then: Harvard was not looking for well-rounded students. They were looking for a well-rounded class). Upshot: if Harvard has too few cellists and too few kids from Delaware and too few Folklore and Mythology majors, and a kid ranked 25th in their Delaware high school plays the cello and loves Joseph Campbell... well, that kid is probably much more likely to get in the the 24 kids ranked higher.

The other big issue is that selective colleges are more democratic now. In the late 80s my guess is that 75% of Harvard students came from a few hundred high schools: elite boarding schools, elite private days schools in major cities, elite urban magnets in major cities, and highly regarded suburban public schools in places like Westchester County, Shaker Heights, Newton and Brookline and so on. Now-- for excellent reasons-- Harvard is no longer willing to admit sixty Exeter kids and fifteen St. Albans kids each year: they want their class to be more geographically, racially, ethnically, nationally and socioeconomically diverse.

Oh, and more kids apply now. In the late 80s, Harvard had about 15,000 applicants/year and filled an entering class of 1600. Today, Harvard gets 60,000 applicants/year-- to fill a class of 1600.

As a result, being in the top five at a top school is no longer any guarantee of anything. It buys you a lottery ticket. That's it. Unless a kid cured cancer while winning an Olympic gold medal and is the child of a sitting president, there's no guarantee of anything.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:1. Number one is basically valedictorian.

2. My sibling is her age and got a 3.5 gpa and 1280 on sats and no hooks and got into hyps. Yes, it was waaaay easier in the eighties. Fewer applicants.

Meant to say - my sister went to a top private.

+1 fewer applicants (American and international), there was more regional focus to applications back then ( a woman from Florida was probably “diverse” for Harvard), and you don’t know how they dealt with weighted vs unweighted GPAs at that time. Plus she’s very articulate and outgoing so she probably had a great interview and maybe some references from local alum