[81alum]

A few reactions:

1) My children did not apply to Stanford, even with a double-legacy working on their behalf.  Partly a desire to go further away, but mainly they felt excluded and began to resent the place long before applications were due.  One year recently, Gunn (one of the two main high schools in Palo Alto--where my children attended) sent 19 kids to Stanford, 18 of whom were the children of faculty.  Counselors there advised that non faculty kids  had a much better chance applying to Ivies and other elites since Stanford generally fills its Gunn "quota" with children of faculty.  So it was a unique kind of discrimination since we happened to live in the same part of town as Stanford's faculty enclave. 

2) If you read through the links I provided, you will see that the average number of applications overall is about the same as it always has been--between 2 and 3.  But the average number of applications among elite students has skyrocketed.  This feeds a culture at certain college-prep oriented high schools where 10-20 apps is "normal."  This puts enormous stress on the already stressed out super-students.

3) The idea that Stanford has different admission standards for athletes than for non athletes is complicated.  Since Stanford admissions has always placed a lot more weight on "extracurriculars" than other elite schools, the question is how athletic achievement gets factored as an extracurricular.  Stanford admissions says it is looking for students who have shown they have perfected at least one skill to a high level of excellence, and I imagine any scholarship athlete has done that.  It would be interesting to compare with all the other extracurriculars for non athletes to see if there really is a double standard, or whether non athletes are compensating for weaker extracurriculars with higher academics.  Leaving aside that two-part weighting scheme, it is nonetheless true that some athletes--especially football players--seem to be admitted with lower academic standards than nearly anyone else on campus.  But this does not seem to apply to other athletes.  You never find WBB players who had B+ averages in high school the way Christian McCaffrey did, for example.  If B+ were good enough for WBB players the way it seems to be good enough for football players, we might well have had Kelsey Plum on the roster, among many others.

[81alum]

A few reactions:

1) My children did not apply to Stanford, even with a double-legacy working on their behalf.  Partly a desire to go further away, but mainly they felt excluded and began to resent the place long before applications were due.  One year recently, Gunn (one of the two main high schools in Palo Alto--where my children attended) sent 19 kids to Stanford, 18 of whom were the children of faculty.  Counselors there advised that non faculty kids  had a much better chance applying to Ivies and other elites since Stanford generally fills its Gunn "quota" with children of faculty.  So it was a unique kind of discrimination since we happened to live in the same part of town as Stanford's faculty enclave. 

2) If you read through the links I provided, you will see that the average number of applications overall is about the same as it always has been--between 2 and 3.  But the average number of applications among elite students has skyrocketed.  This feeds a culture at certain college-prep oriented high schools where 10-20 apps is "normal."  This puts enormous stress on the already stressed out super-students.

3) The idea that Stanford has different admission standards for athletes than for non athletes is complicated.  Since Stanford admissions has always placed a lot more weight on "extracurriculars" than other elite schools, the question is how athletic achievement gets factored as an extracurricular.  Stanford admissions says it is looking for students who have shown they have perfected at least one skill to a high level of excellence, and I imagine any scholarship athlete has done that.  It would be interesting to compare with all the other extracurriculars for non athletes to see if there really is a double standard, or whether non athletes are compensating for weaker extracurriculars with higher academics.  Leaving aside that two-part weighting scheme, it is nonetheless true that some athletes--especially football players--seem to be admitted with lower academic standards than nearly anyone else on campus.  But this does not seem to apply to other athletes.  You never find WBB players who had B+ averages in high school the way Christian McCaffrey did, for example.  If B+ were good enough for WBB players the way it seems to be good enough for football players, we might well have had Kelsey Plum on the roster, among many others.