Here’s a broader statistic about legacy:

across the top 30 schools in the U.S., one review from 2011 discussed in the Washington Post found that children of alumni "had a 45 percent greater chance of admission" than other applicants.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/09/06/harvards-incoming-class-is-one-third-legacy.html

Other than being a recruited athlete, I can think of nothing that increases your chances of admissions that dramatically.

Anonymous wrote:The families I know with multiple ivy kids are mostly legacies. Legacies aren’t a guarantee of course but these smart parents have tended to produce very smart kids. One had/has 3 at Dartmouth. Double legacy, plus one recruited athlete and one superstar academic. One had 2 at Harvard. Big donor and both kids were recruited athletes. One had 1 at Stanford and one at Yale (also accepted at Stanford and some ivies). Legacy at Stanford and super smart kids with perfect SATs.

This. Legacies made up fully one third of Harvard’s freshman class last year. If you see families with multiple kids at an Ivy, they’re likely legacy.

The families I know with multiple ivy kids are mostly legacies. Legacies aren’t a guarantee of course but these smart parents have tended to produce very smart kids. One had/has 3 at Dartmouth. Double legacy, plus one recruited athlete and one superstar academic. One had 2 at Harvard. Big donor and both kids were recruited athletes. One had 1 at Stanford and one at Yale (also accepted at Stanford and some ivies). Legacy at Stanford and super smart kids with perfect SATs.

Anonymous wrote:So first off, we don't really care if our kids go to Ivy league, SLAC, or good public universities, but we are hoping they would have the capability to exceed or be accepted there.

We come from a LMC background, and went to good colleges, and through hard work are now solidly DC middle class. We want our kids to have a little easier time, and we all these neighborhood families where sibling goes to an Ivy or similar college (for reference, for my entire county, we had one student go to an Ivy league every year; they were featured in the local paper).

So is there some secret sauce on how to setup all your children for having these kind of options? We emphasize that they do well in school, they do some extracurricular activities in sports and music but NOTHING like travel soccer or piano competitions -- we are working parents and those commitments are hard. We might do some enrichment on the weekends like math work books and we encourage reading and such all the time, but nothing very structured. We volunteer with our church for like holiday events, but again not some huge accomplishment for applications.

Are we preparing them enough? Should we specialize in something like a travel sport? Obviously we try to ask our neighbors and schoolmates but they are pretty cagey and just say "lucky I guess" Which I understand, hence why an anonymous forum may work better!

There is, OP - crazy enough, it's just Thousand Island Dressing. Apply liberally 3 times a week. That's it.

This is admittedly an old article, but I think it sums up what’s happening here. The process isn’t random from the perspective of the adcom—in most cases—but it is so unpredictable from the perspective of what might happen with an individual’s application that it might as well be random, if you’re talking about trying to meaningfully improve your chances of admission.

From the article:

The process at Wesleyan, as at about four dozen other private colleges that reject far more applicants than they accept, is often so idiosyncratic, unscientific and dependent on the personal tastes (or even the mood) of the people reading a particular file as to defy most strategizing by outsiders.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2003/01/19/nyregion/memo-from-wesleyan-a-closer-look-at-the-mystery-of-college-admissions.html

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Re: Random

I think that the admissions process is random in the sense of statistics, where different cases have different probabilistic outcomes, rather than random in the sense that there is no process at all. Clearly there are important things to do to be in the range to be considered at highly selective schools (strong academics, other interest areas, etc.) but there are also factors at play that aren't under the control of anyone. The first big one is who else is applying? Perhaps one year, there is only one award winning French Horn player applying and they stand out to the admissions committee, but in a different year there are 100, so no one stands out. The second big factor is the order the admissions committee fills their spaces. Some students may be clear admits for various reasons, but then others are chosen to "round out" the class. I found it interesting that an MIT admissions officer said that they had admitted a fantastic class, but that they could set aside all of those students and admit a completely different, but equally fantastic class.

When you can take a given set of candidates and run it through the admissions process 1000 times and come up with different answers every time (although individual students have different probabilities from 0%-100% admission), I'd call that random.

Exactly. This is what I was trying to articulate; thank you!

This. Someone with experience, thank you! It certainly is random. Meanwhile so many families are scrambling to sign up for water polo. Guess what? The top schools are not recruiting for that.

Unfortunately it seems like you have a reading comprehension problem confounded by a lack of understanding about the concept of random. The admissions officer example above is NOT random. What the admissions officer is saying is that there are so many well-qualified applicants that they could choose any of them and have a fantastic class. Even the fact that there is an application process nulls the argument that it is a random process. You should go ask your parents about this because hopefully they can help you with the concept of random and not random. I don't know what grade you are in but hopefully as you mature and take more difficult classes (hint: statistics would be good) then you will develop stronger logic skills.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you don’t think it’s random to some extent you’re naive.

When there are well more qualified applicants than spots, there is a significant element of randomness.

I say this as someone who has been admitted to multiple programs with less than 10% acceptance rates. I’m not so arrogant as to say I wasn’t the beneficiary of a random choice between another qualified applicant and myself.

Nothing that has such a detailed selection process is random. At all. They are antithetical.

I understand they may appear to be random to you. But they are not. People read, select, and teams debate, and vote. That's the opposite of random.

Element of randomness in elite college admission is exactly 0%.

You’re just wrong. There are multiple times per admissions cycle where admissions officers have to pick between two almost identical applicants. That’s where the randomness comes in.

Trust me — I know enough about admissions to be right about this.

DP. Uh, I don't think you understand the definition of random. To be random means to choose without method or conscious decision. In the situation you describe above, the person choosing made a conscious decision. The deciding point may be minute and you may disagree with it but it is still there. Random would be drawing a name out of a hat.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Re: Random

I think that the admissions process is random in the sense of statistics, where different cases have different probabilistic outcomes, rather than random in the sense that there is no process at all. Clearly there are important things to do to be in the range to be considered at highly selective schools (strong academics, other interest areas, etc.) but there are also factors at play that aren't under the control of anyone. The first big one is who else is applying? Perhaps one year, there is only one award winning French Horn player applying and they stand out to the admissions committee, but in a different year there are 100, so no one stands out. The second big factor is the order the admissions committee fills their spaces. Some students may be clear admits for various reasons, but then others are chosen to "round out" the class. I found it interesting that an MIT admissions officer said that they had admitted a fantastic class, but that they could set aside all of those students and admit a completely different, but equally fantastic class.

When you can take a given set of candidates and run it through the admissions process 1000 times and come up with different answers every time (although individual students have different probabilities from 0%-100% admission), I'd call that random.

Exactly. This is what I was trying to articulate; thank you!

You can call it Random, or Felix, or Pastrami Sandwich, but that doesn't make it any one of those. And you have no evidence that the "1000 times different answer every time" thing is true.

Also your french horn example supports the opposite position, because in case A it is one person standing out from the rest, making it not random, and the other case of 100 out of 30,000, making it also not random... and guess how they choose the one french horn player out of 100? I'll give you a hint: not at random.

You can have all your theories and thought experiments you want -- every book, every adcom, every person who has ever been involved in elite college admissions will tell you the selection process is deliberate and highly considered. You do a disservice to applicants and their families when you tell them it is random. It can do real damage and you should reconsider saying it.

Tell you what -- find me one elite adcom who says it is random and I will make a $100 donation to the charity of your choice.

No adcom would ever say it’s random in a public comment. Come on now.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Re: Random

I think that the admissions process is random in the sense of statistics, where different cases have different probabilistic outcomes, rather than random in the sense that there is no process at all. Clearly there are important things to do to be in the range to be considered at highly selective schools (strong academics, other interest areas, etc.) but there are also factors at play that aren't under the control of anyone. The first big one is who else is applying? Perhaps one year, there is only one award winning French Horn player applying and they stand out to the admissions committee, but in a different year there are 100, so no one stands out. The second big factor is the order the admissions committee fills their spaces. Some students may be clear admits for various reasons, but then others are chosen to "round out" the class. I found it interesting that an MIT admissions officer said that they had admitted a fantastic class, but that they could set aside all of those students and admit a completely different, but equally fantastic class.

When you can take a given set of candidates and run it through the admissions process 1000 times and come up with different answers every time (although individual students have different probabilities from 0%-100% admission), I'd call that random.

Exactly. This is what I was trying to articulate; thank you!

You can call it Random, or Felix, or Pastrami Sandwich, but that doesn't make it any one of those. And you have no evidence that the "1000 times different answer every time" thing is true.

Also your french horn example supports the opposite position, because in case A it is one person standing out from the rest, making it not random, and the other case of 100 out of 30,000, making it also not random... and guess how they choose the one french horn player out of 100? I'll give you a hint: not at random.

You can have all your theories and thought experiments you want -- every book, every adcom, every person who has ever been involved in elite college admissions will tell you the selection process is deliberate and highly considered. You do a disservice to applicants and their families when you tell them it is random. It can do real damage and you should reconsider saying it.

Tell you what -- find me one elite adcom who says it is random and I will make a $100 donation to the charity of your choice.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP- you are now "solidly DC middle class" -does that mean you can fully pay for college or will you need financial aid? It really does make a difference at some Ivy-league schools. Think about it, all things being equal they will take someone who can pay full-freight over someone who can't. There might be 3 or 4 Ivy League schools that truly are need-blind but the others really aren't.

The problem about growing up lower/lower middle class is that you don't have a sense of entitlement that people who grew up upper middle to upper class have. I grew up in a upper middle class family and my husband grew up in a lower class family. He doesn't realize you can finagle and push your way into opportunities. He would never ask anything or try to leverage any advantage to help our kids because he doesn't realize it can be done. Our youngest didn't get into a gifted program based on school testing. He accepted it even though he was puzzled because our youngest is clever. I took our youngest to get privately assessed and based on those scores he got into gifted program and is in gifted classes at school. So now he is tracked into a higher achieving cohort.

Same with sports or outside activities. You don't wait around for opportunities to fall into your lap- you go make those opportunities happen for your kid. I had my kids go to Kumon starting in preschool- I really believe it let me connect with Asian parents who value education (we are Latino) and who are knowledgeable about educational programs, who the best teachers are at our elementary school, what opportunities are put there, etc.

In sports my husband coaches at the younger ages. He wants to be completely fair, but I convince him to favor our kids with slightly more playing time, better positions, etc.

You are the worst. This is pathetic.

+100000. You are “pushing your way into opportunities “ for your kids to the detriment of other children. You should be ashamed of yourself, tiger mom.

OP, getting back to your original question:

My parents had three children. Two went to Ivy, one went to a top LAC (and turned down two Ivy schools for the LAC). This was in the 1990s.

If memory serves me correct, we kids all had SAT scores in the high 1400s, bordering 1500, several AP 5s, SATII in the 700s (and I received perfect 800s on the two history SAT II). All had excellent grades. We were upper middle class kids from good private schools in a midsize city. While admissions is much tougher today it was also tough back then (Ivies had admission rates between 15-20% and the top LACs in the high 20s (self selective pool). This is why I think we were admitted:

Sibling 1: editor of school paper, four years of continued involvement including growing leadership on the paper. Other hook was strong grades and interest in Greek/Latin and expressed interest in studying classics in college. Also played sports but not at recruitment level but this rounded out the profile. Applied early and got in.

Sibling 2: Statewide recognition for lacrosse and field hockey. Captain of her teams. Ivy coach expressed interest. On application said she was interested in STEM majors. Applied early and got in.

Sibling 3: Had the highest grades/scores of the three of us. Sang in the state boys' choir (not as impressive as it sounds but did so for years). Long demonstrated history of drama groups at school and acted in groups outside school, including two small roles in local repertory performances during high school. Expressed interest in drama groups on college applications. Played tennis/cross country but not at recruitment level. Applied to a range of colleges, accepted at two Ivies but chose to go to a top LAC instead.

The pattern was that we all had the requisite background of excellent academics and scores, but each had a niche that stood out. None were truly outstanding or special but it gave us an edge over the competition.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Re: Random

I think that the admissions process is random in the sense of statistics, where different cases have different probabilistic outcomes, rather than random in the sense that there is no process at all. Clearly there are important things to do to be in the range to be considered at highly selective schools (strong academics, other interest areas, etc.) but there are also factors at play that aren't under the control of anyone. The first big one is who else is applying? Perhaps one year, there is only one award winning French Horn player applying and they stand out to the admissions committee, but in a different year there are 100, so no one stands out. The second big factor is the order the admissions committee fills their spaces. Some students may be clear admits for various reasons, but then others are chosen to "round out" the class. I found it interesting that an MIT admissions officer said that they had admitted a fantastic class, but that they could set aside all of those students and admit a completely different, but equally fantastic class.

When you can take a given set of candidates and run it through the admissions process 1000 times and come up with different answers every time (although individual students have different probabilities from 0%-100% admission), I'd call that random.

Exactly. This is what I was trying to articulate; thank you!

This. Someone with experience, thank you! It certainly is random. Meanwhile so many families are scrambling to sign up for water polo. Guess what? The top schools are not recruiting for that.

Anonymous wrote:Re: Random

I think that the admissions process is random in the sense of statistics, where different cases have different probabilistic outcomes, rather than random in the sense that there is no process at all. Clearly there are important things to do to be in the range to be considered at highly selective schools (strong academics, other interest areas, etc.) but there are also factors at play that aren't under the control of anyone. The first big one is who else is applying? Perhaps one year, there is only one award winning French Horn player applying and they stand out to the admissions committee, but in a different year there are 100, so no one stands out. The second big factor is the order the admissions committee fills their spaces. Some students may be clear admits for various reasons, but then others are chosen to "round out" the class. I found it interesting that an MIT admissions officer said that they had admitted a fantastic class, but that they could set aside all of those students and admit a completely different, but equally fantastic class.

When you can take a given set of candidates and run it through the admissions process 1000 times and come up with different answers every time (although individual students have different probabilities from 0%-100% admission), I'd call that random.

Exactly. This is what I was trying to articulate; thank you!

Re: Random

I think that the admissions process is random in the sense of statistics, where different cases have different probabilistic outcomes, rather than random in the sense that there is no process at all. Clearly there are important things to do to be in the range to be considered at highly selective schools (strong academics, other interest areas, etc.) but there are also factors at play that aren't under the control of anyone. The first big one is who else is applying? Perhaps one year, there is only one award winning French Horn player applying and they stand out to the admissions committee, but in a different year there are 100, so no one stands out. The second big factor is the order the admissions committee fills their spaces. Some students may be clear admits for various reasons, but then others are chosen to "round out" the class. I found it interesting that an MIT admissions officer said that they had admitted a fantastic class, but that they could set aside all of those students and admit a completely different, but equally fantastic class.

When you can take a given set of candidates and run it through the admissions process 1000 times and come up with different answers every time (although individual students have different probabilities from 0%-100% admission), I'd call that random.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The acceptance rates for Ivy League universities are so low that it is irrational to try to figure out how to be accepted by one. I’m not saying this to be mean; it’s a mathematical fact.

However, two things:

1. There’s nothing special about the Ivy League. It’s a football league at the end of the day. There are dozens of schools just as good as the Ivy League.

2. I know plenty of people who went to Ivy League schools. Some of them are successful and many aren’t. It’s about the same as many other great schools. Your kids will succeed or not based on many other factors than whether they go to an Ivy League school.

I definitely agree, which is why I find it exceptional that there are families which send multiple siblings to the Ivy league, despite the low odds.

And again, i am not hung up on Ivy league per se, there are many high caliber schools that I will be happy for my kids to attend and feel they will succeed -- but the ability to get accepted to an Ivy likely means they will get accepted wherever they really want to go.

Like the PP said, unless they’re a legacy, first gen college student, significant minority (Native American, for example), it's luck. Sometimes people beat the odds and win the lottery. We congratulate them and think they’re better than applicants who didn’t get in, when really they just won a lottery.

Gosh, I hope no one reads this and believes it to be true, because it isn't.

It may seem like a lottery, because you can't figure out why one is chosen over another and they don't tell you. But the people choosing work incredibly hard to choose one over the other and there are qualitative reasons. None of it is random. Not one iota.

Op here. This is my feeling. What are we missing?

If multiple kids are attending from one family, you might be missing legacy status. Which parents might or might not advertise or brag about. Also, you have a better chance at ED. Be prepared to full pay and commit without a financial aid package.

OP— I really respect that you struggled and are trying to make your kids lives easier. It’s what all good parents want. To do right by their kids. So, please take this as coming from a place of wanting to provide perspective. DH and I went to a top 25 college. Not Ivy. We have successful lives. I don’t think we’ve struggled to much. We’ve worked hard, but not in a two jobs each and aren’t sure if we can pay the rent way.

We have a kid at TJ. So I see how the sausage is made. The time and energy and money people pour into giving a kid a shot at an Ivy is astounding to me. And that’s a chance. No guarantees at all. And my kids are not exactly slackers. And in the end, getting in is a crapshoot and the amount of stress these kids are under is awful. I don’t see a special sauce. It is work and work and work and work. And not just on school work. On becoming a national level contender in something in addition to being the very top of the class. There is a reason most FCPS Hss have had at least one, sometimes multiple, suicides a year.

Plus, if you are DC UMC, you hit a merit aid donut hole. You will get little to no financial aid, and Ivy’s do not do merit aid. And I will not let my kids take on loans for undergrad. They have grad school ahead. If your kid goes to UVA or WM or VT in STEM and does well, they will get into the same grad school as kids from an Ivy undergrad. And in many, if not most fields, the terminal degree matters. No one cares where I went to undergrad. They care where I went to law school.

Aiming for an Ivy is all fine and good. And if your kid gets in and you can afford it, great. But if they don’t, or there is a lot of debt involved, then do UVA/ WM/ VT and the best grad school possible. Take out the loans to pay for a degree that increases your earning power to pay the loan back.