What Admissions Officers "Secretly" Want
Last night I was a little more more, ahem, "candid" than usual when Pearl and I did a short seminar in our Glen Head office.
The good news is that the attending families seemed to have liked it and found it helpful.
The "other" news is that a reporter and photographer from Newsday were also in attendance, hopefully not to write a hit piece slamming me for my non-politically correct, offensive ways.
We're still in business, for now, so I might as well share one of the more controversial segments that poured out of my pie hole last night.
Here's the deal with college admissions at most competitive colleges:
It's rigged.
Anywhere from 50-80% of spots at these colleges are reserved for non-academic "tags" or "selects."
These "special categories" are no secret - you probably caught wind two years ago of a highly publicized lawsuit against oft-sued Hahhhhhhvahhd, brought by an Asian American student?
The Supremes ruled that the admissions committee's policy of admitting on the basis of race, etc. violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and the Civll Rights Act.
Nonetheless, special category applicants still get a thumb on the scale, boosting -- not rubber stamping -- their admissions chances.
What special categories?
Underrepresented minorities. Recruited athletes. Legacies. Children of faculty and staff. "Development" families (know what that means?). Student from an elite "feeder" high school (private or public).
To be clear, just because you fit one of these buckets does not mean you automatically get in.
Here's a completely hypothetical, totally fictional example of a college applicant to an Ivy League college from a few years ago:
*Attended an elite high school
*Father teaches at the Ivy League college in question
*Checked off "African American" on the Common App (even though he's not)
*Democratic Socialist running for mayor of New York City (lying on his Common App shows he's qualified to be a politician. But I digress...)
Even this completely hypothetical, totally fictional example of a college applicant with multiple tags failed to get into that elite college. Special categories get a boost, but not the red carpet treatment.
Still with me? There's more, and it's also not politically correct.
If you're NOT a special category...or as I described it in an ill-advised way in front of the 4th Estate last night...a Plain Old White Boy (or Plain Old Asian, Plain Old Indian Girl, Plain Old Irish Guy, etc.) you need to pay heed of a harsh truth:
Those special categories DRAG DOWN the academic statistical averages reported by each college.
So if you're looking at Naviance with your high school guidance counselor, or whatever they use to guess at your admissions chances, you must be ABOVE the median GPA and SATs/ACTs reported by that college to have a decent chance of getting in.
Failure to understand the truth about admissions is a one way ticket to Admissions Armageddon.
If you can stand it, and want to help your kiddo(s) learn The Rules so that they can get into their Dream College, I have much more to say on this topic, tonight, on a free "Admissions Edge" webinar.
Don't come if you're easily offended.
For everyone else, here are the details:
Please feel easy and breezy about sharing this invitation with any of your friendsies who need to learn this info!
- Andy "Not Hypothetical" Lockwood
P.S. I'll be running through at least five or six actual client case studies tonight, instead of blabbing about vague or theoretical bits of "advice" that doesn't work in the real world.