Rejected by Stanford? You'll live
THIS AFTERNOON, my office will send out nearly 18,000 e-mail messages to high school seniors who are waiting with anticipation to learn whether they will be invited to spend the next four years at Stanford.
While I have been in the admissions field for more than 25 years, I expect to be feeling quite a bit of pain at the end of this week (as I do each year) about the many exceptional youths who did not get offered one of the roughly 1,650 slots in the Class of 2011. I also expect that, in the following weeks, I will hear from parents who are understandably distraught that their sons and daughters with top high school class rankings, perfect 800 SAT scores and some truly impressive extracurricular accomplishments were denied entry.
Clearly, I believe that a Stanford education is wonderful, but my experience suggests it's often parents who are more upset about our admission decisions than the kids. I can relate to their concerns: I find myself getting jittery as my daughter waits to hear from the colleges she's applied to this year. But given that today's teens already have enough pressure in their lives, I wish to impart three credos to these parents.
First, it's all relative. While the number admitted into the undergraduate class has remained unchanged for years, Stanford, like many of its peer schools, has had a record number of applicants -- nearly 24,000. Regardless of arguments over whether too much preference is given to one category over another, thousands of students are going to be turned away, and there is no doubt that the vast majority of them could have met the demands of a Stanford education. We could, for instance, have filled the incoming class four times over with applicants who achieved grade point averages of 4.0 or greater.
I wish there were a formula to explain who is accepted and who isn't, but the decision-making is as much art as it is science. Each class is a symphony with its own distinct composition and sound; the final roster is an effort to create harmony, and that means that some extraordinary bass players don't get a chair. What's more, even among my staff there are legitimate differences about applicants. The bottom line: The world is not going to judge anyone negatively because they didn't get into Stanford or one of our peer institutions.
