Getting into College

Just a little note on getting into college:  It's hard to believe how competitive it is.  Lucas has about a 3.7 GPA, but that includes Running Start courses at the local college.  His grade average in his actual high school courses is over 3.9, with his worst grade an A-.  He has taken very rigorous courses, including honors Algebra 2 as a freshman, four quarters of college calculus and three quarters of Physics.  His SAT scores average over 700, with the lowest being 690.  He has good extracurricular activities, including the Boy Scouts, a top 25 national ranking in archery, and several volunteer activities.

Lucas applied to six schools:  MIT, Stanford, Olin College, Cornell, Berkeley, and University of Washington.  We knew that MIT and Stanford were a stretch (but not impossible), but I thought he would get into maybe three or all four of the others.  Instead he was rejected by MIT, Stanford, Olin, and Cornell, and Berkeley, and accepted by UW.

I'm not complaining -- UW is a good school, and it's the easiest for us financially.  Let's be clear:  it is similar to getting just one good job offer when you were expecting a few; you only need one, and one is good.  It's just that, by contrast, when I applied to college, I had a 2.7 GPA, average 670 on my SATs, and two AP classes, and my only significant extra activities were a couple of jobs I had in high school.  I got into Berkeley.  If there are really that many kids with better qualifications than Lucas, something has changed drastically.

We have speculated about what happened -- maybe the essays weren't the best (but he's an engineer; what do you expect?), or he didn't volunteer enough, or maybe it was because his junior and senior grades in college courses were a little lower than his first two years of high school.  It all seems a little crazy to me, that even at 17 years old we are telling kids that if they are having a good time being a kid, they are not good enough.  Let them know early that it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, that we're going to keep raising the bar a little higher every year for what we expect from a teenager, and the reward for hopping over the bar won't get any better.  Sounds like work.  Yuck.

Like I said, not really a complaint, because Lucas did fine -- really well actually.  It's just an observation.