Why your kid didn't get into the college of their dreams
Hint: It's almost certainly not for the reasons you assume.
Since the summer of 2022, my attention has primarily been focused on supporting my oldest daughter in choosing the college that’s the best fit for her long-term goals. Everything else has been a (very) distant second. This is a journey that began, honestly, shortly after she was born and has only intensified as she got older and I became more obsessed with higher ed, in large part because there is so much confusion and misinformation on the topic. By parents and the media.
Some of the steps I took to prepare for my daughters’ future as a college student involved the following:
Emailed notes to myself
Slack messages to myself
Google Docs with links and notes of pertinent information
Texts to myself of things I’ve learned
Facebook saves of important articles
Twitter bookmarks of posts from educators and researchers whose words I trust
Pocket app saves and tagging of articles
Bear app notes of videos and social media posts
News articles bookmarked
Feature stories emailed to myself
Interviews of prominent researchers who study college selection and success
Read a dozens books and research papers
Created Excel documents of possible schools, test scores required, application dates, acceptance rates, tuition costs, room and board costs, etc.
“I was more prepared for this than I have ever been for anything in my life,” I said to a friend last fall.
The planning paid off
By the time my daughter had narrowed down her choice of major, what she wanted in an institution, and the parts of the country she was most interested in, I had documents for her to peruse to better inform her, and my wife, so that we were all on the same page. The herculean effort paid off big time, as it allayed many of the concerns my wife had while laying out a reasonable course of action for my daughter, who understood that the final decision was hers to make.
The research nerd (biopsych major) in me loved the information gathering. An added benefit was becoming a resource for a few dozen parents and friends who were also making decisions about college and who knew I was just the over-analytical resource they could bounce ideas off of and ask questions. (Thanks to some of the many great contacts I’ve made, I’m in the early stages of co-authoring a book with a UC professor and software engineer who’s done eye-opening research on what leads to success in college and beyond.)
Many parents and students are in the dark about college
The most glaring lesson I learned along the way is how uninformed most parents are when it comes to preparing for, applying to, and selecting colleges for their children.
Many are blinded by big names,
Most are in the dark about what the selection process inside colleges looks like,
Still more are unaware of how to pick the best program—not necessarily school—for their kids, and
Nearly everyone is oblivious to how stiff the competition is inside top programs (e.g., computer science, engineering, business, health sciences, fine arts, etc.)
Aside from the dozens of informative conversations I had with researchers, educators, administrators, and informed parents, the book Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions, by Jeffrey Selingo—which I read three years ago—was the biggest help to me. It provides a never-before-seen look inside the admissions process at top schools. It contains a lot of glaring takeaways, some of which are a cold comfort for parents whose kids have worked super hard in the classroom.
One of the biggest takeaways I’ve gleaned from my research overall: Grades are but table stakes.
What do I mean:
Roughly half the graduates in any given year are A students.
~16,000 spots at ivies but 26,000 valedictorians or more each year
There are far more near-perfect GPA, near-perfect SAT/ACT, award-winning at state level for math and science, organization-creating, CEO of student-created small startup students than parents are aware of.
Given these facts, admissions personnel have their pick of top students and could—as I read many times in numerous articles by admissions folks—pick blindly and select an amazing class. They get around the deluge of qualified applicants the only way they can:
Lots of skimming
Looking for unique elements beyond grades and extracurricular achievement
Searching for diverse elements from among the current crop of students
That last bullet point is important, in large part because, as selections are made for each individual program, each would-be student is being judged against other would-be students for the program, not against applicants for the entire school. (Thus the hue and cry among parents that another kid got into the school with lower grades.)
A recent New York Times piece provides clarity in this area when talking of Selingo’s book. Jessica Grose, in a NYT newsletter titled Why Those Super Low College Admissions Rates Can Be Misleading, said:
“Selingo’s book made me realize the extent to which colleges can game their applicants. It also made me realize how deliberately opaque their decision making is. Selingo…shows you that the choices schools make about whom they admit are often about a school’s desire to round out a class in a particular year — a point guard, a cellist, more prospective chemistry majors, more students from Wyoming — than about any individual kid or her achievements.
“More and more parents’ eyes have been opened to the absurdity of a system that convinces us it’s worth going into significant debt for top-tier college degrees that can wind up having a questionable return on investment. In his book, first published in 2020, Selingo compared the University of Virginia to Virginia Tech: The University of Virginia, he wrote, admits just ‘27 percent of applicants and spends about 6 percent of its own aid dollars on merit scholarships.’ Virginia Tech, on the other hand, ‘accepts around 70 percent of students who apply and spends 75 percent of its aid without regard to financial need.’ Ten years after graduation, ‘graduates earn nearly identical average salaries.’”
Parents learning a hard lesson
In one of the several online parent groups I belong to, a parent openly wondered how her future engineer son, who had top grades and stellar extracurriculars, could get rejected by every Ivy and most top state schools, including UT Austin, Georgia Tech, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
When she said “It’s obviously Asian bias,” I showed her comments from an academic forum I’m a part of where students share their stats, including race/ethnicity, grades, and extracurriculars, in addition to which schools they were accepted to, denied or waitlisted. There were many, many kids—including Asian kids—who had identical stats. Her mouth was agape at seeing that her son’s resume was, as one kid said of a near-facsimile application, “just mid”—slang for average given the school and program they were applying to.
Context and perspective matter—a lot.
My favorite observations are of parents sharing their kids’ stats in private forums for the tacit purpose of gaining support for their belief that their child is a shoe-in for a top school. Cold dashes of reality are delivered daily, including the example below, which took place recently.
Wrote one parent:
“My son has top grades (4.0) and SAT (1550); is it wrong to assume that he will get into one of the so-called top 10 schools.”
Wrote another parent
My son has the exact same stats (4.0 UW/4.6 W and 1550 SAT), and was…
Waitlisted: MIT, Cornell, Brown, UCLA, Notre Dame and Harvey Mudd
Denied: all other Ivies, UChicago, Duke, Georgetown and Pomona
Accepted: Johns Hopkins, UC Berkeley, USC, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine
“I don’t think that by virtue of grades and test scores alone that your son (or my son) stands out in this competitive college admissions process. There are thousands out there like them in that regard.”
“A student needs to be well-rounded, get perfect grades but have time to also captain a varsity team, create a startup, win national academic championships, be humble and caring, have strong leadership skills and be charitable—all as a teenager coming off a global pandemic.”