[csa]

There is something missing from your story, but I can’t exactly figure out what it is.

Some things that may have gone wrong:

- Maybe your GPA was too low for your high school. If it put you outside of the top 10% or so of your class, then that hampers your chances substantially.

- Maybe your references did not know how to write good reference letters for elite schools. I think this limits a lot of people, since tepid reference letters from people who don’t know better can kill an application.

- Conversely, maybe you went to an elite university feeder high school. If so, maybe you didn’t compare well against other folks who did get into elite schools other than test scores.

- You applied based on academic prowess, and maybe your academic prowess was not enough for elite schools. Elite schools typically want national or international levels of success in something (especially academics, which is hyper-competitive), so maybe your state competition results combined with a relatively low GPA (for elite schools) didn’t really match up to the other 100-200 or so people at each school who got in on the back of academics.

- Maybe you didn’t have much/any significant community involvement and/or leadership experience. This may seem soft, but it makes applicants stand out, imho.

Fwiw, I don’t think your ethnicity played as much of a role as you think it did. Those killer test scores you have are basically table stakes at elite schools (i.e., you need a lot of something else to get in), but they are a meal ticket at large state schools. Many/most people think that test scores and above average grades alone should be enough for elite school admission, but this hasn’t been true for many, many decades.

For reference, “top 50 state school” is something like University of Georgia or Ohio State University, both the type of school that will not slow down someone who would have fit in at Harvard or Stanford, imho.

> But I probably could have saved years in high school exploring things that mattered rather than optimizing for a college application process that didn’t ultimately end up feeling very fair.

I guessing that you optimized incorrectly.

I’m curious about where you got your information on how to optimize for elite school admissions. Most people will say something like “have great test scores and great grades”, and they would be wrong for elite schools but very accurate for most state schools.

I don’t want to say that elite school admissions are perfect (or even good), but people who have never been able to see the processes from the inside (e.g., actual applicant pools) usually make very unreasonable criticisms of the processes.

Fwiw, every elite school tells applicants exactly what they want in their recruiting materials. It’s just that different people interpret those materials in different (usually inaccurate) ways.

All that said, I’m glad it worked out for you.

[jklm]

Yeah, in hindsight fair to say a little bit of all of the above. I agree with a lot of what you mentioned.

At the same time - if I'd gotten 300-400 points less on the SAT, I likely still would have ended up at the same school. So in that vein my gut says the test scores were close to irrelevant. Or maybe not, I guess I wouldn't know.

Separately I think it's valuable to evaluate this through another lens. It sounds like you have some experience with the admissions process, and something I've been curious about for the longest time is this: if I had been in a slightly different segment, e.g. first-generation immigrant of non-East-Asian ethnicity, how would that have affected my chances?

Is it that test scores mattered less for me in this particular case, or is it that there's generally a higher bar because of competition from peers with similar East Asian backgrounds? In both cases it feels like test scores matter less overall (even if paradoxically the bar is generally higher!).

---

> For reference, “top 50 state school” is something like University of Georgia or Ohio State University, both the type of school that will not slow down someone who would have fit in at Harvard or Stanford, imho.

This was the only piece I felt differently on. There's a significant advantage to attending a top school - the alumni network and a generally stronger and more well-connected student body for starters. Going to a state school didn't necessarily prevent me from finding success later in life, but I definitely took the long way around.

[adamsmith143]

Let's be real, Stanford could fill it's entire freshman class with kids who got perfect GPAs and perfect SAT scores. That's not the deciding factor. You mentioned doing well in State level competitions but the elite schools of the US, Ivy+ etc, are the best schools on the planet. It's not surprising that you didn't get in given that fact. Their freshman classes are full of State Champions, National Champions, Olympiad Winners, Intel Science Fair winners, Published Authors, kids that have given concerts at Carnegie Hall, etc. I think you may have misjudged the level of competition. It's not 1940 when a perfect SAT got you into any school you wanted.

>This was the only piece I felt differently on. There's a significant advantage to attending a top school - the alumni network and a generally stronger and more well-connected student body for starters. Going to a state school didn't necessarily prevent me from finding success later in life, but I definitely took the long way around.

People have studied this and found that students that were accepted into elite colleges but ended up going to lower ranked schools had equivalent levels of achievement after graduation. So it turns out graduating from Harvard isn't as important as you think. Unless you want to go into IB or Big4 Consulting.

[jklm]

I halfheartedly agree.

Getting into a top 5 school would have definitely been a surprise, but I also doubt the top 20 or even top 50 schools have equal levels of talent.

> People have studied this and found that students that were accepted into elite colleges but ended up going to lower ranked schools had equivalent levels of achievement after graduation. So it turns out graduating from Harvard isn't as important as you think. Unless you want to go into IB or Big4 Consulting.

This tracks but as mentioned elsewhere it's probably a longer journey all around. There very much is an in-crowd of connection pooling when you're an alumni of an elite school, from my experience of going to some meetups with heavy membership from them.

[adamsmith143]

>Getting into a top 5 school would have definitely been a surprise, but I also doubt the top 20 or even top 50 schools have equal levels of talent.

I tend to think that that outside of like the top tiers of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and MIT/Caltech that the top 20 have student bodies that are basically interchangeable and it's a coin flip whether someone gets into UPenn but not Columbia or UChicago but not Vanderbilt.

>This tracks but as mentioned elsewhere it's probably a longer journey all around. There very much is an in-crowd of connection pooling when you're an alumni of an elite school, from my experience of going to some meetups with heavy membership from them.

You can short circuit this by doing a graduate degree. MBA from HBS is at least as good if not better than an AB from the College. But like I said outside of a few industries those connections aren't as valuable as you may think. Is getting a job in a VC firm easier as a Harvard/Stanford Alum? Sure, but least in theory though getting startup funding from a VC as a Harvard vs Michigan alum should be roughly equivalent in difficulty(lest we break the illusion of meritocracy in the tech world).

[csa]

I concur with all points, and I envy your brevity.

[csa]

> It sounds like you have some experience with the admissions process

I do. Not as an admissions officer, but in a variety of advisory capacities to admissions offices over the decades.

> if I'd gotten 300-400 points less on the SAT, I likely still would have ended up at the same school

Maybe. It depends on the state school. I certainly hope that your scores and (maybe) grades got you access to some sort of honors or scholarship program that a significantly lower score would not have. If you were not in one of these types of programs, I am curious about why that is the case.

> if I had been in a slightly different segment, e.g. first-generation immigrant of non-East-Asian ethnicity, how would that have affected my chances?

My default answer is that it would not have affected your chances at all unless someone in your application process was racist. This would most likely have happened with someone who wrote a reference letter rather than someone affiliated with the universities.

The exception would be if your different ethnicity put you into an affirmative action category (specifically Black, Latine, or indigenous people). You might get in based purely on academics, but it seems like you would still be relatively average or weak in other areas. There would be a lot of other factors to consider (e.g., socioeconomic status, school/school district, geographic area, etc.).

While a few of the affirmative action admits are merely "standard strong" (i.e., not admit and not close because so many people are similarly strong while not standing out) who get in due to their race, many/most tend to be shine in other areas (esp. community leadership activities). Affirmative action basically gives some of these folks a slightly lower curve on academic rating, but their academics are (usually) good enough, and the other parts of their application made them shine. There is plenty to debate about whether that is a good policy or not, but I think that this is a reasonable policy if a specific kind of racial diversity is an institutional goal (as it seems to be). Almost all of the folks who get into elite schools are extremely impressive in some factor that the school values.

> Is it that test scores mattered less for me in this particular case, or is it that there's generally a higher bar because of competition from peers with similar East Asian backgrounds?

Without knowing more about your specific situation, my guess is that you focused on the wrong things -- specifically SAT scores over almost everything else.

As I have said elsewhere, no "strong admit" East Asian candidates are being denied admissions to elite schools because of a quota. Zero. None.

The folks who don't get admitted who feel jilted are typically "standard strong" (good grades, great SATs, nothing exceptional, will never get in) and the threshold applicants who just miss an offer because the whole package doesn't quite add up to enough (rare, but it happens). That said, lots of White people fall into these categories as well, so I don't think that it is specifically an East Asian phenomenon.

The issue of discrimination comes up because the average SAT scores of Asians is higher than that of other races. Some people think that is a sign of racial discrimination. This can be seen in articles that claim that Asian students need ### more SAT points to get into $ELITESCHOOL (prime example of misuse of statistics around the theme of correlation does not indicate causation). Personally, I think that this just points to a focus on test prep in the East Asian community that is consistently greater than other racial communities (by a lot).

> There's a significant advantage to attending a top school - the alumni network and a generally stronger and more well-connected student body

This is true... if the students avail themselves of this network. Most folks who are not already part of that network rarely do. I have found that there are relatively few people who effectively utilize this network during school or after school who would not have had similar access via another school and/or their already-existing family connections.

I call this the dirty little secret of the Ivies -- the Ivies largely don't make people successful, they just accept a large chunk of people who are already going to be successful and let them go to school there. There are a very small percentage of people of modest background who go to elite schools and then becoming someone exceptional via the school network, but that is extremely rare (for a number of interesting reasons, imho).

Note that state schools have similarly strong alumni networks, but the scope of these networks is usually state or regional rather than national or international.

The real exception in my eyes is if someone has relatively narrow ambitions to be an investment banker, a consultant, a supreme court justice, etc. (i.e., some line of work that almost exclusively consists of elite school grads). Yes, elite schools help with this tremendously. That said, I imagine that the elite folks in GA and OH society (which I listed as top 50 state school examples) are more likely than not graduates of UGA and OSU, and certain roles like state-level politicians, judges, business magnates, etc. are disproportionately from these schools.

Feel free to ask more questions. I feel like the misinformation on this topic is abundant, and I like to dispel as many of the myths as I can (at least based on my experiences).

I made very detailed reply to a concerned Asian parent who replied to you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33341897

Please add to that line of the thread as well if you find it interesting.

[flymonkey]

> There are a very small percentage of people of modest background who go to elite schools and then becoming someone exceptional via the school network, but that is extremely rare (for a number of interesting reasons, imho).

Would you mind expounding on these interesting reasons? I've heard a theory that it's because the truly powerful networks are established at prep schools such as Andover and Exeter, so the vaunted power of the elite university network is really an extension of the prep school network.

[barry-cotter]

> My default answer is that it would not have affected your chances at all unless someone in your application process was racist. This would most likely have happened with someone who wrote a reference letter rather than someone affiliated with the universities.

Of course there was. An admissions officer saw it and they have to stop the school getting too Asian.

[csa]

> An admissions officer saw it and they have to stop the school getting too Asian.

Where do you believe that this specific situation has actually happened this century?

I am fairly certain that this has not happened at any elite school in the recent past.

The worst actual evidence I’ve seen is of an admissions officer referring to a “standard strong” applicant as something slightly less flattering like “a familiar profile” Asian applicant.

Note that “standard strong” basically means great grades and scores and little else of significant note. This title defaults to non-admit.

Below is a link to a click-bait article that discusses the topic. Note how almost all of these “inappropriate” statements fall into the category of least charitable possible interpretations of the rater’s comments rather than the explicit malice that you seem to suggest is happening in admissions offices.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/asia...

[barry-cotter]

These are people who know that anything written down will eventually be used in a lawsuit. They’re not going to use slurs. I bet they wouldn’t even have any problem with their children marrying an Asian. But it’s their job to keep the Asian percentage down below what it would be if the student was White, and very far below what it would be if they were Black, among students with otherwise similar credentials. If that doesn’t qualify as anti-Asian racism what is it?

The reason the holistic admissions system was made up was to avoid having too many Jews. Now it’s used to prevent too many Asians.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose