Admissions directors look to find a balanced class of kids, who will use all the school facilities and create a vibrant campus life.
They need to find the tuba player, a capella singer, majorette, dancer, athlete, actor, newspaper editor, dj etc in each class.
A kid with test scores & grades, but not showing much outside interest or social skill often gets rejected.
Nonsense.
The daughter of a friend if mine (she is currently a MD) was top five in her class at a suburb of Boston, 1600 SATs, school record holder in the HJ and hurdles, great painter, self taught musician who can hear something on piano and immediately play it. Parents are white working class. Rejected at Harvard and Bowdoin. Had she none of those non academic talents but gone on Birthright, all schools would have been fighting over her
I volunteer in this process mostly helping poor and minority kids make the most of the "unfair" opportunity they are offered to get into top schools. I was a 4:15 mile/1270 kid, who got into an Ivy in the good 'ol days on sports/financial aid. I chose the Ivy over state only on the advice of a mentor, who followed local hs track. My school changed my life, and I am thrilled to give back. If you are interested, check out the Questbridge website. This is a national program that matches aid with top low income students. It is an amazing resource, and one of the 'best ever' non profits.
I also work with some wealthy kids, on referrals/friends&family, on how to tailor their applications to get into the best schools.
Your applicant above, especially if white working class means less than $150,000 per year income, would normally get into 8 out of 10 top schools, if their app was decent.
Even though it's amazingly difficult, a 1600, top 5 in class, wealthy Asian can basically get into 1 out of 10 of the top schools with good apps.
Sometimes rejections are puzzling, but as long as the 1 success happens, it usually works out.
A friend's daughter with 1550 sat was rejected in early process by both Tufts and Yale. Her app basically said "I did sports and extra curriculars in hs to strengthen my college app, but in college I will only focus on academics, as this is important to my family."
We tailored a better app for regular decision and she got into Brown, Swarthmore, Chicago and Pomona. Ended up choosing CMU, who surprisingly offered her a nice merit scholarship. Now in Phd program in a California school.
The system is not necessarily fair, but if an applicant does their homework you can still 'play the system' to achieve your goals.
The daughter of a friend if mine (she is currently a MD) was top five in her class at a suburb of Boston, 1600 SATs, school record holder in the HJ and hurdles, great painter, self taught musician who can hear something on piano and immediately play it. Parents are white working class. Rejected at Harvard and Bowdoin. Had she none of those non academic talents but gone on Birthright, all schools would have been fighting over her
I volunteer in this process mostly helping poor and minority kids make the most of the "unfair" opportunity they are offered to get into top schools. I was a 4:15 mile/1270 kid, who got into an Ivy in the good 'ol days on sports/financial aid. I chose the Ivy over state only on the advice of a mentor, who followed local hs track. My school changed my life, and I am thrilled to give back. If you are interested, check out the Questbridge website. This is a national program that matches aid with top low income students. It is an amazing resource, and one of the 'best ever' non profits.
I also work with some wealthy kids, on referrals/friends&family, on how to tailor their applications to get into the best schools.
Your applicant above, especially if white working class means less than $150,000 per year income, would normally get into 8 out of 10 top schools, if their app was decent.
Even though it's amazingly difficult, a 1600, top 5 in class, wealthy Asian can basically get into 1 out of 10 of the top schools with good apps.
Sometimes rejections are puzzling, but as long as the 1 success happens, it usually works out.
A friend's daughter with 1550 sat was rejected in early process by both Tufts and Yale. Her app basically said "I did sports and extra curriculars in hs to strengthen my college app, but in college I will only focus on academics, as this is important to my family."
We tailored a better app for regular decision and she got into Brown, Swarthmore, Chicago and Pomona. Ended up choosing CMU, who surprisingly offered her a nice merit scholarship. Now in Phd program in a California school.
The system is not necessarily fair, but if an applicant does their homework you can still 'play the system' to achieve your goals.
The system is deeply unfair. In this case, the question is only, would this candidate have gained admission to any of these schools if he were a different race? The answer is almost definitely yes. I hope he can prove it.
Generally, white people get in not because they are white, but because they are wealthy. (Being white alone is better than being Asian but worse than being Black, Hispanic, etc.) There are four ways to get into a school like Harvard:
1.) Attend a top-50 prep school. This is the easiest way for wealthy kids and the way most wealthy kids get it. Legacy admissions SHOULD be banned, but the golden key is attending the right prep school. How do I know? My husband got into Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Brown. (He attended Harvard.) He attended an exclusive NYC prep school. By contrast, only one person in my entire 400-person graduating class got into an Ivy, and that was Cornell.
2.) Be Black or Hispanic (preferably Black) and have good SAT and grades and do something mildly impressive academically.
3.) Excel at an obscure Ivy League sport like fencing. To have the opportunity to excel in this obscure sport, you likely need to be rich and from a major metro area, just like (1). This is another way the rich dominate Ivy League admissions.
4.) Be a huge overachiever and win the lottery. By the time seats have been allocated for (1), (2) and (3), 5-10% of "qualified" applicants have been allocated 80% of the seats. That leaves 20% of seats for the remaining non-wealthy connected kids who are white and Asian. Some of those will in fact get in, but it requires a lot of luck. Some of them are truly extraordinary and gain admittance on that basis. Even here, the upper middle class kids from major metro areas will have a big advantage of truly middle class kids from smaller cities and rural areas. Admissions will toss a bone to a few poor kids of the wrong race in this category.
There are 26k high schools in the US. If you accept the top 5 from all of them, Harvard needs to have a huge freshman class.
would your friend have score in the Ivy League HJ? Is she good enough to play piano at a professional level? How many people attended her art exhibition?
Harvard is for the top of the top not the very good. And nepo babies…
They all apply to Harvard and only Harvard?
Sheesh. Harvard is overflowing with mediocre students from certain segments of society. Asians sued them a few years back. Court ruled that Harvard is discriminating against Asians....but rules it's okay.
Don't give me this Harvard takes only the elite of the elite. They don't
As I said they also take a lot of nepo babies. Bush and Trump sure didn’t get into ivies because of intellect…
I volunteer in this process mostly helping poor and minority kids make the most of the "unfair" opportunity they are offered to get into top schools. I was a 4:15 mile/1270 kid, who got into an Ivy in the good 'ol days on sports/financial aid. I chose the Ivy over state only on the advice of a mentor, who followed local hs track. My school changed my life, and I am thrilled to give back. If you are interested, check out the Questbridge website. This is a national program that matches aid with top low income students. It is an amazing resource, and one of the 'best ever' non profits.
I also work with some wealthy kids, on referrals/friends&family, on how to tailor their applications to get into the best schools.
Your applicant above, especially if white working class means less than $150,000 per year income, would normally get into 8 out of 10 top schools, if their app was decent.
Even though it's amazingly difficult, a 1600, top 5 in class, wealthy Asian can basically get into 1 out of 10 of the top schools with good apps.
Sometimes rejections are puzzling, but as long as the 1 success happens, it usually works out.
A friend's daughter with 1550 sat was rejected in early process by both Tufts and Yale. Her app basically said "I did sports and extra curriculars in hs to strengthen my college app, but in college I will only focus on academics, as this is important to my family."
We tailored a better app for regular decision and she got into Brown, Swarthmore, Chicago and Pomona. Ended up choosing CMU, who surprisingly offered her a nice merit scholarship. Now in Phd program in a California school.
The system is not necessarily fair, but if an applicant does their homework you can still 'play the system' to achieve your goals.
Nice post.
The reality is these colleges do have an impossible job to make everyone happy.
And as someone else pointed out, they don't want all 1600 SAT computer science majors. The problem this Asian guy may have done it he applied presumably for computer science. Cornell admits by major.
Gemini tells me there are 1400 computer science majors at Cornell so that mean 350 per year. Considering something like 3000 people score 1590+ on the SAT each year, Cornell doesn't have room for all of them in computer science. Was this guy one of the top 500 computer science applicants (yield rate of 68%)? Maybe - maybe not.
And if he got a bad rec or didn't tailor his application at all to Cornell, they may have not thought he'd want to come and just rejected him to keep their percentages up for rankings.
There are 26k high schools in the US. If you accept the top 5 from all of them, Harvard needs to have a huge freshman class.
would your friend have score in the Ivy League HJ? Is she good enough to play piano at a professional level? How many people attended her art exhibition?
Harvard is for the top of the top not the very good. And nepo babies…
They all apply to Harvard and only Harvard?
so add in the top 10 schools. Still not enough room. Make it the top 20. Still not enough room. Start looking at schools I. That 20-50 range and admissions will start to happen.
This is like a dude running a 4:20 mile and complaining he isn’t getting recruited by a power 5 team. It is a nice time but when you are competing against 4:10 kids, you aren’t going to b at picked very often.
I'm sorry but the simple, blindingly obvious fact is that nobody wants to go to college with a bunch of miserable Chinese nerds with zero personalities or social skills who've been forced by their parents to be academic drones their entire lives.
It doesn't sound very good, does it? Another thing is, these people rarely end up achieving anything extraordinary or being big donors to the school. They get a big tech job and then they're done achieving. And how much does that contribute to society?
My kid got a 1500 on the SAT and had an unweighted 4.0 (weighted 4.2) and got rejected by every UC school except dumba$$ Merced (where he didn't even apply). Even some of the state schools (Cal Poly and SLO) turned him away. This was a few years ago. Meanwhile, several out of state schools offered him academic scholarships ranging from 50 to 90%.
Any guesses on 1) his race and 2) how he's doing at the college smart enough to admit him as a biology major?
Yawn. Asian Duke grad here, and have been on an admissions committee (albeit for graduate programs).
1) Getting turned down from over a dozen schools with solid metrics and accomplishments indicates there was a red flag on his application.
2) If you dig into the news articles, he is a software development engineer at Google, which doesn't require any degree let alone a PhD. He's a liar. Red flag.
3) If he's so thrilled and proud of his career sans college degree, why is he wasting time on a dozen lawsuits instead of developing that career? Sounds like a loser tbh
The system is deeply unfair. In this case, the question is only, would this candidate have gained admission to any of these schools if he were a different race? The answer is almost definitely yes. I hope he can prove it.
Generally, white people get in not because they are white, but because they are wealthy. (Being white alone is better than being Asian but worse than being Black, Hispanic, etc.) There are four ways to get into a school like Harvard:
1.) Attend a top-50 prep school. This is the easiest way for wealthy kids and the way most wealthy kids get it. Legacy admissions SHOULD be banned, but the golden key is attending the right prep school. How do I know? My husband got into Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Brown. (He attended Harvard.) He attended an exclusive NYC prep school. By contrast, only one person in my entire 400-person graduating class got into an Ivy, and that was Cornell.
2.) Be Black or Hispanic (preferably Black) and have good SAT and grades and do something mildly impressive academically.
3.) Excel at an obscure Ivy League sport like fencing. To have the opportunity to excel in this obscure sport, you likely need to be rich and from a major metro area, just like (1). This is another way the rich dominate Ivy League admissions.
4.) Be a huge overachiever and win the lottery. By the time seats have been allocated for (1), (2) and (3), 5-10% of "qualified" applicants have been allocated 80% of the seats. That leaves 20% of seats for the remaining non-wealthy connected kids who are white and Asian. Some of those will in fact get in, but it requires a lot of luck. Some of them are truly extraordinary and gain admittance on that basis. Even here, the upper middle class kids from major metro areas will have a big advantage of truly middle class kids from smaller cities and rural areas. Admissions will toss a bone to a few poor kids of the wrong race in this category.
This is gorgeous you nail the system. My public high school in the rust belt has sent 2 kids to Ivies (a concert pianist and me) and never had an sat higher than 1470 in 50 years! My son's public school in met NYC sends about 20 each year to Ivies from class of 200 and always has at least 1 x 1600 SAT.
Prep schools are amazing. A school like Choate sends 100% of their kids to top 50 schools. Those kids actually know how to use college when they get there, rather than wasting 2 years to figure it out and torching their gpa. Those schools also do clever things like actually prepare for the PSAT, knowing it's how you qualify for National Merit Scholarship.
You missed good preppy sports too like crew, golf, sailing, equestrian, skiing and squash.
So you are right; wealthy family sends B student son to Choate and he pops out the other end as a 1500 SAT, crew recruit.
Still I'm not sure what a new system would look like. I'm meanwhile a big NESCAC fan. At Williams 40% of student body does a varsity sport. The art, music, theatre and language/culture program is vibrant. Sure you can find the 50 kids in physics, math and computer science, who are geniuses, we even recruit some of these. Still the majority of students are bright, balanced, hard working, and go on to successful careers and leadership roles.
If it was all off some straight academic merit formula, it becomes a very different place.
Obviously, the kid should have been faster. Screw 1590 if you can run 4 minutes for the mile.
Ha. Did not take to running but was Captain of football team and got a few looks from D2/D3 schools. Was not interested in playing past HS because of demanding major. Zero red flags on his app other than things he could not control like the color of his skin and his gender. We joke that if he would've transitioned to a female pole vaulter and soared 15', the UCs would've welcomed him with open arms.
Obviously, the kid should have been faster. Screw 1590 if you can run 4 minutes for the mile.
Ha. Did not take to running but was Captain of football team and got a few looks from D2/D3 schools. Was not interested in playing past HS because of demanding major. Zero red flags on his app other than things he could not control like the color of his skin and his gender. We joke that if he would've transitioned to a female pole vaulter and soared 15', the UCs would've welcomed him with open arms.
Something was wrong with his app.
Biology not really considered a demanding major. It is an 'in demand' major as the typical pre-med gateway.
Do you even have to apply by major at Cal schools?
Assuming male, it's now harder to get in as a female, so no gender bias.
No reason he could not have said he planned to walk on for football in college. Changing his mind upon arriving on campus is his choice. The "I won't do activities, so I can concentrate on my demanding major", sounds great but hurts chance to be admitted.
Sounds like it worked out though. Academic money at out of state school not an awful option.
Zero red flags on his app other than things he could not control like the color of his skin and his gender. We joke that if he would've transitioned to a female pole vaulter and soared 15', the UCs would've welcomed him with open arms.
Someone with this mentality raising him is definitely a red flag that would’ve shown out in some part of the application.
I can relate; I'm unlikable, too. At least unlikable when I'm having to appeal to clean-browed liberal academics/ snobs, conservative gogo-Chads.
At least this kid has a high IQ, though. He should be able to easily forge a way into any field of his choosing. Why is he having to resort to a lame internet press team and attorneys? Kid should be making Baki shorts or something
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