Link to a blog I created last year for my teacher-exchange trip to Peru ...
http://peruvian-adventure.tumblr.com/
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Ivy admissions: If the game is rigged, why play?
Update: I wrote this two and a half years ago when my son Connor was a high school senior. Since then, he accepted an offer from Cal Berkeley, had a terrific freshman year, joined a campus Christian fraternity, interned for a California state senator two summers ago, and moved into the frat house for his sophomore year. Last summer, he interned for Capitol Weekly, an online publication that covers everything related to California state government. This fall, he started his junior year, he's just started a series of seminar presentations for the Berkeley Institute, he's headed to Scotland for a semester study-abroad program in January, and he's starting to think seriously about graduate school. And ... he has no regrets whatsoever about ending up at Berkeley – he knows it's absolutely the right place for him.
What clinched it for him was a visit to Cal Day in the spring of his senior year of high school. He went to a couple of guest lectures (including one by Prof. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Pres. Bill Clinton and professor of public policy at Cal), talked with students, soaked up the Cal vibe ... and decided a couple of days later that Cal was the place for him.
His college admissions story, which I've shared via this blog and in lots of face-to-face discussions with students and parents over the last 30 months, might still be helpful to students in the middle of the whole college admissions game this fall. The bottom line, at least for me, is this: Ivy League schools are overrated. In fact, two-plus years ago, I sent an email to Prof. Reich, thanking him for his lecture and how it helped galvanize Connor's decision to attend Cal – Reich told me, in a reply, that he'd attended and/or taught at three different Ivy League institutions, and none of them could hold a candle to the education students get at UC Berkeley.
Connor's decision is behind him, but perhaps there is something others can still learn from his experience -- and from mine.
This is a kid with a GPA approaching 4.4 (never a B in high school), almost 2,300 on his SATs, and he's ranked No. 3 in his graduating class. He's been a two-sport athlete his entire high school career, and he's taken on all kinds of leadership and community service roles in the youth group at our church, with the local food bank and even internationally.
He's certainly gotten his share of "yes" responses, too – from UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Davis, among others, with the Regents' scholarship at Davis thrown into the mix. And those are giving him some fantastic choices. But still, he dreamed of going to school on the East Coast at an Ivy League campus, and he thought he at least had a shot. So he's more than a little bummed, and he'd like to know what it takes to actually get a yes from one of these places.
And frankly, so would I.
If I'd known they were coming, I probably would have been inclined to attribute his rejections to him being one of tens of thousands of very good students who apply to the Ivies, Stanford and their ilk ... but he just didn't have that little something extra they're looking for. But now, I'm not so sure. I've been doing some poking around the admissions process in the last year as I've tried to help him maneuver through this nutty game, and here's a little of what I've learned:
1. Money counts. If your father is a titan of industry and he's made big donations to a fancy private college, there is plenty of evidence things can be easier for you in the admissions office. If you're a middle-class kid from the 'burbs whose parents can barely afford to send their children to a struggling-to-stay-afloat University of California campus, not so much ...
2. Family matters. Legacies – that is, students who have parents who went to a particular school – often get in, and not always with the same qualifications as other students. Especially if those legacy parents are donors. See No. 1.
3. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that athletics matters more than you'd think. This has always been true at Stanford, but my previous assumptions about the relative purity of Ivy League sports were wrong, especially since the Ivies sweetened their financial aid formulas for all students in the last decade or so. These are schools with relatively small student populations – Dartmouth has something like 4,000 undergrads, for example – and a boatload of Div. I varsity athletic programs with roster spots to fill. In the past, the Ivies couldn't compete with athletic scholarship offers from public universities, because the Ivies officially don't offer athletic scholarships, and their need-based academic scholarships were less generous. Now, though, they can offer reasonably bright middle-class kids who are terrific athletes much better scholarship support and still get away with the fiction that they're not giving out athletic scholarships.
I'm a high school teacher, and I have had a handful of very nice kids over the years who were also very talented athletes ... and that's why they got in to Stanford and Yale, to name just two examples. Last year, a boy at the school where I teach was a strong Ivy candidate – 4.3 gpa, nearly 2,300 on the SAT, ranked No. 2 in his class – but he went 0-for-8 on Ivy admissions. After he was rejected by the lot of them, however, he went 46 seconds and change in the 100-yard freestyle. When my colleague, his high school coach, asked Harvard's swim coaches about why he didn't get in, they told him it was because he wasn't on their radar screen – otherwise, they said, he would have definitely been admitted under what they called "special action."
4. Geographic diversity might not be all it's cracked up to be. I had always thought California kids would have a better shot at the Ivies than at, say, Stanford, but it turns out I'm probably wrong. According to a school counselor friend who knows something about how the game is played, once the Ivies have cherry-picked the cream of the crop, they resort most often to their networks of schools that have regularly sent them students. That means the East Coast prep schools, and upper-class public schools in places like Chicago's northshore, or Palo Alto, or the Lake Washington area in Seattle, end up with a disproportionate share of Ivy students, and Ivy admissions for run-of-the-mill suburban and rural high school campuses remain a very rare commodity. So how does a school become a funnel to the Ivies? Get kids admitted. How do you get kids admitted? Be a funnel.
5. Most disturbingly, the whole thing could truly be random. A quick anecdote, which might or might not be apocryphal: A doctor in my community has a daughter who attended my son's high school, and she was also a very good student (and she also failed to get into any Ivies). (Update: She got into and went to Cal.) According to the doctor, information about the admissions process at a prestigious Ivy League school recently leaked, and here's the story: First, the admissions office eliminates about half the applicant pool by setting a minimum floor for SAT scores, grade-point averages as determined by the university (which takes into account the rigor of different high schools) and class rankings. Then they hand-pick the students they specifically want -- the point guard, the Olympic swimmer, the violin virtuoso. That leaves 9,000 or so students vying for about 1,500 spots.
And then, they just draw names out of a hat.
The school? Harvard.
Again, it might be apocryphal, but Harvard is the same school that exercised such great care in its admissions process that, in 2010, it admitted transfer student Adam Wheeler, who completely fabricated all the supporting documents he needed to gain admission – school transcripts, letters of recommendations, everything. Harvard's failure to recognize his entire application was fake meant Wheeler also scored more than $45,000 in financial aid before the gig was up. So you'll pardon me if I give some credence to the names-drawn-from-a-hat admissions story ...
I've probably written more than 750 student letters of recommendation in my career. Most have been for students applying to public universities, with many others for students seeking scholarships. A few have been for kids applying to Ivy League and Ivy League-caliber schools. A small handful of my students have gotten in to those schools over the years, but the overwhelming majority – like my son – hav been rejected.
Back in the fall, I told Connor he should go for it, that he would only get the opportunity if he was willing to put his hat in the ring. Now, as I see how disappointed he is, as I watch him bemoan his "failures," as I see him questioning whether all of his tremendous academic efforts over the last four years were worth it, I think I might have been wrong.
If I could do it all differently, I think I might tell him not to bother, that the whole exercise – hours spent completing applications, weeks agonizing over essays, hundreds of dollars shelled out in fees – might not be worth it, that the opportunity cost is too great. And from now on, I think that's what I'll be telling my students, too. All of which makes me more than a little sad, honestly.
But if the game is rigged, why play?
What clinched it for him was a visit to Cal Day in the spring of his senior year of high school. He went to a couple of guest lectures (including one by Prof. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Pres. Bill Clinton and professor of public policy at Cal), talked with students, soaked up the Cal vibe ... and decided a couple of days later that Cal was the place for him.
His college admissions story, which I've shared via this blog and in lots of face-to-face discussions with students and parents over the last 30 months, might still be helpful to students in the middle of the whole college admissions game this fall. The bottom line, at least for me, is this: Ivy League schools are overrated. In fact, two-plus years ago, I sent an email to Prof. Reich, thanking him for his lecture and how it helped galvanize Connor's decision to attend Cal – Reich told me, in a reply, that he'd attended and/or taught at three different Ivy League institutions, and none of them could hold a candle to the education students get at UC Berkeley.
Connor's decision is behind him, but perhaps there is something others can still learn from his experience -- and from mine.
***
April 2012 (edited for clarity) – So my incredibly talented and dedicated oldest son went 0-for-Ivies this week when most of the private college admissions decisions were announced -- no from Yale, Princeton and Columbia. Then yesterday, Stanford said no. Then today, Claremont waitlisted him.This is a kid with a GPA approaching 4.4 (never a B in high school), almost 2,300 on his SATs, and he's ranked No. 3 in his graduating class. He's been a two-sport athlete his entire high school career, and he's taken on all kinds of leadership and community service roles in the youth group at our church, with the local food bank and even internationally.
He's certainly gotten his share of "yes" responses, too – from UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Davis, among others, with the Regents' scholarship at Davis thrown into the mix. And those are giving him some fantastic choices. But still, he dreamed of going to school on the East Coast at an Ivy League campus, and he thought he at least had a shot. So he's more than a little bummed, and he'd like to know what it takes to actually get a yes from one of these places.
And frankly, so would I.
If I'd known they were coming, I probably would have been inclined to attribute his rejections to him being one of tens of thousands of very good students who apply to the Ivies, Stanford and their ilk ... but he just didn't have that little something extra they're looking for. But now, I'm not so sure. I've been doing some poking around the admissions process in the last year as I've tried to help him maneuver through this nutty game, and here's a little of what I've learned:
1. Money counts. If your father is a titan of industry and he's made big donations to a fancy private college, there is plenty of evidence things can be easier for you in the admissions office. If you're a middle-class kid from the 'burbs whose parents can barely afford to send their children to a struggling-to-stay-afloat University of California campus, not so much ...
2. Family matters. Legacies – that is, students who have parents who went to a particular school – often get in, and not always with the same qualifications as other students. Especially if those legacy parents are donors. See No. 1.
3. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that athletics matters more than you'd think. This has always been true at Stanford, but my previous assumptions about the relative purity of Ivy League sports were wrong, especially since the Ivies sweetened their financial aid formulas for all students in the last decade or so. These are schools with relatively small student populations – Dartmouth has something like 4,000 undergrads, for example – and a boatload of Div. I varsity athletic programs with roster spots to fill. In the past, the Ivies couldn't compete with athletic scholarship offers from public universities, because the Ivies officially don't offer athletic scholarships, and their need-based academic scholarships were less generous. Now, though, they can offer reasonably bright middle-class kids who are terrific athletes much better scholarship support and still get away with the fiction that they're not giving out athletic scholarships.
I'm a high school teacher, and I have had a handful of very nice kids over the years who were also very talented athletes ... and that's why they got in to Stanford and Yale, to name just two examples. Last year, a boy at the school where I teach was a strong Ivy candidate – 4.3 gpa, nearly 2,300 on the SAT, ranked No. 2 in his class – but he went 0-for-8 on Ivy admissions. After he was rejected by the lot of them, however, he went 46 seconds and change in the 100-yard freestyle. When my colleague, his high school coach, asked Harvard's swim coaches about why he didn't get in, they told him it was because he wasn't on their radar screen – otherwise, they said, he would have definitely been admitted under what they called "special action."
4. Geographic diversity might not be all it's cracked up to be. I had always thought California kids would have a better shot at the Ivies than at, say, Stanford, but it turns out I'm probably wrong. According to a school counselor friend who knows something about how the game is played, once the Ivies have cherry-picked the cream of the crop, they resort most often to their networks of schools that have regularly sent them students. That means the East Coast prep schools, and upper-class public schools in places like Chicago's northshore, or Palo Alto, or the Lake Washington area in Seattle, end up with a disproportionate share of Ivy students, and Ivy admissions for run-of-the-mill suburban and rural high school campuses remain a very rare commodity. So how does a school become a funnel to the Ivies? Get kids admitted. How do you get kids admitted? Be a funnel.
5. Most disturbingly, the whole thing could truly be random. A quick anecdote, which might or might not be apocryphal: A doctor in my community has a daughter who attended my son's high school, and she was also a very good student (and she also failed to get into any Ivies). (Update: She got into and went to Cal.) According to the doctor, information about the admissions process at a prestigious Ivy League school recently leaked, and here's the story: First, the admissions office eliminates about half the applicant pool by setting a minimum floor for SAT scores, grade-point averages as determined by the university (which takes into account the rigor of different high schools) and class rankings. Then they hand-pick the students they specifically want -- the point guard, the Olympic swimmer, the violin virtuoso. That leaves 9,000 or so students vying for about 1,500 spots.
And then, they just draw names out of a hat.
The school? Harvard.
Again, it might be apocryphal, but Harvard is the same school that exercised such great care in its admissions process that, in 2010, it admitted transfer student Adam Wheeler, who completely fabricated all the supporting documents he needed to gain admission – school transcripts, letters of recommendations, everything. Harvard's failure to recognize his entire application was fake meant Wheeler also scored more than $45,000 in financial aid before the gig was up. So you'll pardon me if I give some credence to the names-drawn-from-a-hat admissions story ...
I've probably written more than 750 student letters of recommendation in my career. Most have been for students applying to public universities, with many others for students seeking scholarships. A few have been for kids applying to Ivy League and Ivy League-caliber schools. A small handful of my students have gotten in to those schools over the years, but the overwhelming majority – like my son – hav been rejected.
Back in the fall, I told Connor he should go for it, that he would only get the opportunity if he was willing to put his hat in the ring. Now, as I see how disappointed he is, as I watch him bemoan his "failures," as I see him questioning whether all of his tremendous academic efforts over the last four years were worth it, I think I might have been wrong.
If I could do it all differently, I think I might tell him not to bother, that the whole exercise – hours spent completing applications, weeks agonizing over essays, hundreds of dollars shelled out in fees – might not be worth it, that the opportunity cost is too great. And from now on, I think that's what I'll be telling my students, too. All of which makes me more than a little sad, honestly.
But if the game is rigged, why play?
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