A successful application minimizes risk and information asymmetry
Admission is a de-risking effort. Colleges are taking a gamble when they let a kid in. They have needs they hope each kid will fill, but maybe that won’t work out as expected.
If we let her in, will she attend, or will she hurt our yield stats?
Will he graduate on time?
Will his family pay full tuition all four years?
Will she really major in geology, like she claims she wants to?
Will the star soprano join the choir?
Will the kid with high test scores but middling grades wash out?
Will the swimmer injure her shoulder again?
Will the football player decide he’s tired of getting concussions?
Will the family who looks likely to donate a new wing of the library suffer in some crypto meltdown?
Will the oboe kid continue to like the oboe, or did he just start playing it because his parents read some blog and harangued him into it?
I think one of the reasons feeder schools give kids a bit of a leg up is because they reduce information asymmetries. Harvard understands how Stuyvesant works: how hard the classes are, how hyperbolic the letters of recommendation are, how accomplished the robotics team or choir or whatever is. So, Harvard has a better understanding of applicants from Stuyvesant.
One school formalizes this process, according to an anonymous source who spoke to Freddie de Boer:
“I spoke to a former college admissions officer once who told me that his school created mathematical profiles of all the students who had previously applied to his college from a given high school. As this was an elite college, they had a large dataset for many of the more elite high schools. And apparently they used the GPA data of students from the same high school who had applied in the past to help weight the GPA of new applicants. That is to say, if most of the applicants from a given high school had higher GPAs, this would likely result in a downward adjustment of the GPAs of future applicants.”
An aside: I don’t think this is Harvard, because this process didn’t show up in the documents it had to produce in the Students for Fair Admissions litigation. But I don’t understand why Harvard wouldn’t do this. I have no evidence to support this claim, but I’d bet this is a fairly common practice.
One of the econ-textbook ways to handle information asymmetry is the law of repeat dealings. If you keep buying sandwiches from the shop on the corner, the proprietor is less likely to make your sandwich with expired lunchmeat, because he wants to keep you as a customer. This phenomenon also looks a lot like the symbiosis between feeder schools and colleges.
What if your kid doesn’t go to a brand-name high school? Fortunately, there are brand-name classes that can also reduce information asymmetry. Colleges don’t really know how hard Honors Chemistry is at Central High School, but they have a decent idea of how hard AP Chemistry is, because there is a standard curriculum. This is another reason to aim to take a lot of AP classes. How many, exactly? You can find out in the online course.
Standardized tests, I’d warrant, punch the largest holes through the information asymmetry between college and applicant. Everyone takes the same test, so the material is consistent for all applicants, and the test is scaled, so grade inflation is impossible. One of the many reasons why your child should take a standardized test is because that score provides un-fiddle-able information to schools and so makes him a less risky bet for admission. What’s the most effective and least painful way to prepare for standardized tests? Find out in the online course.
Harvard’s internal documents, produced in the Students for Fair Admissions litigation, also show us how your child can de-risk the extracurricular part of his or her application. In the admissions office casebook, a compilation of anonymized past applications it uses to train new admission officers, a comment on extracurriculars crops up often:
“extracurricular niche at Harvard is not clear”
“extracurricular niche is unclear”
“what, exactly, will she do at Harvard?”
“Do we get the sense that he would fall in love with his concentration—or more academic extracurricular activities (such as robotics)—enough for him to contribute meaningfully here?”
We can sidestep this problem easily. Your child can explain in the “why us?” essay that she loved visiting campus and had a wonderful time sitting in on a tutoring session, soup-kitchen dinner, choir rehearsal, religious service, club soccer practice, etc. This interest will of course be consistent with her high school extracurriculars, which she chose according to the checklist I describe in the extracurriculars seminar to appeal to admissions officers.
In the same essay, she can describe the fascinating conversation she had with Professor Bauxite-Orr while on campus, which confirmed for her that wants to formalize her childhood enthusiasm for rocks by studying geology. Of course, writing that essay requires planning visits to colleges while school is in session. The best time to plan and conduct those visits is in my free timeline.
Would you like to explore more ways we can make your kid look like a sure bet, not a risky one, to colleges? You can book a one-on-one consultation here. I look forward to working with your family!
