Who doesn’t love it when a great plan comes together for success? Grace’s admissions season is complete, and she’s very happy about where she’s going next fall. Read all about it below, and read each month’s interview since September here.
Now is the part of admissions season when we really get into horse racing analogies. Grace is in the final stretch before making a college decision before May 1st. Hofstra and Fordham are neck and neck, and it’s going to go down to the wire. Or will a dark horse longshot suddenly get her attention? Read the full interview below.
Earlier this week I wrote down my thoughts about the admissions scandal as we know it right now. In that post I argue, among other things, that massive cheating and bribery are not normal. I also argue that major donations to colleges are not actually legal bribes to get sub-par kids into elite schools, despite popular perception. However, popular perception is absolutely correct that elite universities are largely populated by wealthy students. So how do wealthy kids get into elite colleges? Are they, as many people have written in the past two weeks, gaming the system and destroying meritocracy? They are…kind of. Let’s look at some of the ways that wealth plays into college admissions.
If you are currently a student at an Ivy League or other elite university, or if you’re an adult who graduated from one, I’d love to hear about any of your classmates who were clearly not up to the task but well-connected enough to get in. (Best to leave their names out of it.) Hit the Contact Button or email me directly at benjamin@applywithsanity.com.
On the other hand, if you are/were at an elite university and never came across people who were sub-par but rich, I'd also love to hear that. Thanks!
Grace has kept herself busy. She’s preparing for her last high school musical; she’s preparing for three AP exams; she’s getting lots of email, snail mail, and phone calls from colleges. However, it’s been a slow month in terms of moving her toward a decision about where she’ll be next year. Read the full interview below.
Grace has got an acceptance and an scholarship from one of her top-choice colleges. She’s also waiting to hear back from another top-choice school. She’s got a few more acceptances as well. You might think Grace is relaxing and feeling pretty accomplished, but she knows there’s a few more months to go. Read the full interview below.
Dear Harvard College Admissions,
As you’re quite aware, there have been increasing calls for you to try out an admissions lottery system. Calls like the one here, for example, and here and here and here and here. A lot of people think the most fair way to handle admissions for a program that is worth a whole lot but only has an acceptance rate under 5% is to literally leave it up to chance. No legacy admissions, no diversity goals, no athletic recruitment, no committee votes. This, they say, would guarantee true diversity by taking away all biases and loopholes.
I completely understand your reluctance to go in this direction.
Faulkner had a good Thanksgiving, and she’s got support from her family. However, she had a clerical setback in early December and didn’t get some of her applications finished in time—including a top-choice school. Read the entire December interview below, and look forward to better news in January!
Grace is feeling a little more relaxed these days. She sent out all her applications, and now she’s already got acceptances from two of them. Read about her “thick envelopes” and the rest of her month below. You can catch up on Grace’s earlier interviews here.
Faulkner had been working toward a lot of the same goals and deadlines as most other high school seniors. She’s taking the SAT one more time, finishing up her first college application, looking ahead to sending out a big batch of applications through the Common Application. On top of all that, she’s taking actual college courses at an actual college for her high school. Read all about her progress below!
For many people, there’s something special that happens when they get their first college acceptance. College gets a bit more concrete and a lot less abstract. Possibility becomes more clear. Reality feels more real. This seems to be the case for Kati, who got her acceptance to the University of Texas at Austin. She knew she had automatic acceptance coming, but making it official has still allowed her to cut down her to-do list a little bit. Read the whole interview below.
The National Association for College Admissions Counseling, or NACAC, released its annual “State of College Admissions” report. The report is based on a survey of over 2,200 high school counselors and almost 500 college admissions officers. You can read the full report here. It’s worth at least browsing and checking out the charts. Here are my top take-aways for smart, ambitious college-bound high school students.
Grace surprised me this month. I knew she planned to apply Early Action to a few of her top choice schools, but I also knew that she had a lot of extracurricular expectations with the school play. So I was not expecting to hear that she took the extra time to go ahead and just send out all 10 of her applications early. But that’s what she did, and she says it feels great. Read the full interview below, and catch up on Grace’s past interviews here.
Arguments in the Harvard trial wrapped up last week, and the judge is expected to make a ruling some time in the next few months. If you haven’t been following the case, here’s a pretty good summary of what you’d need to know.
Before I talk about the Harvard trial, I want to explain why I wasn’t going to talk about the Harvard trial.
So basically: high school students don’t know what college tuition costs in their area; they realize they don’t know; many assume it’s unaffordable; many give up on college because of their (often inaccurate) estimates of cost.
These findings make a lot of sense. The actual cost of college is complicated, because it’s different for each person at each university. It’s completely reasonable not to look into college if you’re pretty sure you can’t afford it. And really, why would we expect 9th graders to know how much a college education costs?
