Excited to have mithawk in this thread. This has been something I've been struggling to figure out. I guess both your kids and both of mine are DYS. I had terrible admissions outcome with my daughter, and would like to avoid it with my son.

I'm supposed to be smart too, but I made a ton of blunders, and maybe if I get some of this off my chest other gifted can avoid my mistakes. To begin with, I started with what I now feel was an incredibly naive view that schools want smart kids, that intelligence is rewarded. That you just start with the US News rankings, and work your way down from 1 onward, that college is about learning, that all colleges want this.

US universities are in some ways homogenous. Demographics of Ivy admits are suspiciously similar. There are a few differences though. Princeton and Columbia have larger engineering schools. Barnard students get a sheepskin that says Columbia on it. Not every Ivy has the full complement of professional schools. In the UC, arguably UCLA and UCB (and possibly UCD) behave slightly differently, for example they are not in the TAG program for guaranteed admission from CC. UCLA is unique in offering 4 years of guaranteed housing.

I would just advise people to review this article. https://sites.gatech.edu/admission-...-important-letters-in-college-admission/ In other words, Insitutional Priories across Ivies is likely in lockstep, ditto the UCs.

These IPs are for internal use only. I feel they differ from my naive view that colleges prioritize intelligence. See https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/2001/03/cultural-bias-and-the-sat/

Ever since racial quotas in college admissions were banned by Proposition 209 in California and by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas, academics and politicians have been racking their brains to come up with something that would allow quotas to continue under new names. The latest attempt to get away from admitting students by their own individual qualifications is a proposal from the president of the University of California that the standard Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT I) no longer be required of students applying for college admissions.

The DYS reading this should be alarmed by this. Your high IQ score will correlate with a high SAT score. Which the UC (and many many other colleges) will willfully ignore. In the UC's case, in service of their social engineering agenda.

Here's a related analysis "The University of California Is Lying to Us" https://archive.ph/2021.11.23-001604/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/why-university-california-dropping-sat/619522/

In the discovery documents from the Harvard lawsuit, the UC's high-handed experiment in social engineering has cost $500 million and running. With scant results to show for it. As Yogi Berra said, If people don't want to come out to the ballpark nobody's going to stop them.

The UC and others will tell you "Oh we wanted to use SAT scores, but we lost that darn lawsuit". These are crocodile tears. I can't claim they arranged the lawsuit, but the UC didn't appeal it, and based on the above, its quite convenient for them to hide behind it.

This video puts paid to the fantasy that the UC wants IQ. Science Goes To DIE at UC-Berkeley https://odysee.com/@StudioBruleArchive:e/science-goes-to-die-at-uc-berkeley-tff:e

Here, the U of O actually arranged legislation to hide behind. https://tinyurl.com/3jpv35yz


The upshot of this is simple advice for the gifted. With colleges willfully ignoring your 1600 SAT score, they're left with grades. Do not let your kid get a B in 9th grade, when they are most at risk. In The Golden Ticket, the author says that when she worked in Stanford admissions for 4 years, they simply started by taking any applicant with more than 2 B's and rejecting them (2/3 of the applicants). And this was 10 years ago. Its probably any B at all now.

The UC has a 13 point list of what they say they are looking for. 9 of the 13 are related to GPA. (of course, segregated by zip code...) And they deliberately threw away test scores. Its all about GPA. I don't care if you have to do all their homework for them in 9th grade, don't let any B go on their transcript.

And the other advice is hire an essay coach. Or really, a full admissions counselor.

Last edited by thx1138; 06/07/23 05:45 AM.