07-06-2026, 12:30 PM
(06-20-2026, 10:15 PM)qwerty49 Wrote: College admissions is indeed a weird deal, or at least it was back in 65-66 when I was applying.
For some reason I applied for early admission to UC Berkeley (Dad was an alum but that didn't really skew things too badly) and found myself in the position of having to accept or decline by January of my senior year -- 3 months before Stanford sent out its decision letters. So that caused some angst when I had to turn Berkeley down before having heard from any other schools. (I did seek some input from the high school teachers who wrote my Stanford recs, and they seemed pretty confident I would get in.)
Northwestern was my "safety school" (I'd attended a summer course there and liked the campus) and Harvard waitlisted me.
Yale accepted me and invited me to a recruitment "party" hosted by a local alum. Me being a typical 1960's California boy, the deal-breaker was when the alum revealed their tradition of wearing coat and tie for dinner every night in the frosh dorm. Ouch.
That left Stanford, and man, I was so overjoyed to get the thick envelope in the mail on April 16th.
Our high school class sent 4 (out of about 630 students) to Stanford, which was some kind of record for a local public school at the time. We didn't have AP classes to pad GPAs in those days, so SATs were considered a pretty valid triangulator, along with recs and extracurriculars. The 4 of us compared notes and agreed that our extracurriculars must have made the difference.
Looking back, I would have to agree that SATs were less than perfect, but I'm not sure what could have taken their place.
More on the topic…
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/opini...-ios-share