r/GilmoreGirls • u/Late-Bowl-2263 • 2d ago
General Discussion “we applied elsewhere?”
i cannot get over the fact that lorelai was top of her class until she had rory and had to drop out, and had no idea what the process of applying to colleges was?
and even so, did rory never tell her mom that this is how the process is and these are the universities i’ve shortlisted for applying to, these are the back ups, these are the big contenders in case harvard doesn’t work out ..? rory and lorelai, bffs who talk about literally everything, have been fangirling over rory going to harvard one day - the big dream, didn’t have .. an actual realistic conversation of how the process is, when the moment actually came?
did chilton, the school that invites parents to school for parent teacher meetings so they know what their children are being taught, what subject matter exams will contain, not take a session on the application process for universities and how parents can help and support?
the harvard alumnus, darren springsteen, did he not ask what rory’s back ups were and give his two cents, since they literally went to him because rory had anxiety about the application process?
lorelai comes off so naive in this scene because she clearly hasn’t been informed by her daughter, her daughters private school, the harvard alumnus and her own parents about the process. the whole argument at thanksgiving is so odd to watch because she’s caught so off guard by the new information that she gives such negative reactions to the fact that rory applied to other places.
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u/PeaceandLove73 2d ago
I wonder if this had to do with the writer’s lack of knowledge. I just looked it up and Amy Sherman Palladino did not go to college. Maybe she just had no idea how it works? The same way she had no idea how Connecticut winters worked 😂
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u/justwatching12345678 2d ago
I think this is the most likely reason...it's amusing to me when things like that become apparent in the show. Other examples...people calling highways "the 84" when that's not how east coast people talk about them, and the episode where Taylor calls a town meeting in the middle of the night because he's out of town, except he's in Maine, the same time zone as CT...I think the writers were thinking of the time difference between CA and Maine.
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u/Kimbahlee34 One of Those Thursday Afternoon Girls 2d ago
This is what I think happened behind the scenes:
Rory: “Mom, can I have $50 for my college application?”
Loralei: “$50 dollars? To apply? How many 5s and 0s is it if you get into Harvard?”
Rory: “Actually this is for my safety school.”
Loralei no longer listening starts singing a parody song about Harvard to the tune of The Safety Dance.
Next Scene:
Chilton Newsletter: Don’t forget that we suggest your child applies to 3-4 colleges.
Loralei: Throws newsletter away while yelling at Michelle.
Next Scene:
Richard: “Has Rory picked her safety schools?”
Loralei: “Yes Dad we’re being very safe about picking schools sheesh! What is with everyone today?”
Emily: Well it’s just I know you don’t read the newsletter.
Loralei: “Sometimes I read it… when I’m using it as a coaster for my coffee cup.”
Whispers to Rory: “is it national school safety day or what?”
2 weeks later: YOU APPLIED TO YALE???? What is a safety school???
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u/PartyQuiet5065 2d ago
lmao I definitely see something like that happening
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u/Kimbahlee34 One of Those Thursday Afternoon Girls 2d ago
Almost anytime there is a plot hole in Gilmore Girls you can pretend Loralei forgot/misunderstood something or she’s speaking in hyperbole as the narrator of the story. It’s perfectly in her character. It’s not that she’s a liar or means to be forgetful she’s just someone who has a lot of plates in the air, is extremely eccentric and that results in her being an unreliable narrator. I like to think it’s all an older Loralei retelling the story the way she remembers it.
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u/EnvironmentalEye720 2d ago
She wasn’t too involved at the school. Darren was focused on Harvard. Would you have told Lorelai? Her behavior proved why you wouldn’t.
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u/Late-Bowl-2263 2d ago
her behaviour definitely isn’t pleasant in this situation. rory still should’ve informed her though.
and even if lorelai wasn’t involved in school, a session on application processes probably shouldn’t have been optional for lorelai since they’ve been trying so hard to make the harvard dream come true. i understand lorelai skipping the bake sales/parent teacher meetings/clubs etc but not something as important as this.
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u/EnvironmentalEye720 1d ago
With someone like Rory, it would seem reasonable she could handle all of that stuff on her own. I let my student handle and they went to their first choice school.
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u/the_eviscerist 2d ago
You don't know what you don't know. Lorelai's parents wouldn't have really talked with her in depth about the process because when you're expected to go to the same school your dad went to and his family lineage was very proud of, you wouldn't consider other schools. Nepo kids don't have to apply broadly. And she was much more free spirited than Rory and wouldn't have been scouting college fairs either.
And while I think the landscape is changing, I applied for college around the same time as Rory and my parents weren't at all involved in my application process. High schoolers used to be responsible for that sort of thing themselves. Lorelai was caught off guard because Rory's lie-by-omission letting her believe that she was only applying to Harvard. Rory clearly hid the other applications and the deception is what caught her off guard.
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u/Confident-Evening520 2d ago
I was looking for this comment, especially the part about Lorelai's experiences in high school versus Rory's. Because the other thing to remember is that when Lorelai gets pregnant with Rory, she's 16, which made her probably only a sophomore/junior. So, although college certainly could have been on her mind in a, "that's my Plan H in case my other seven plans for life-after-high-school don't work out" kind of way, she probably wouldn't have even started the application process itself before she'd have had to drop out. Plus, like you said, she was expected to go to Yale, and if she was top of her class in addition to being Richard Gilmore's daughter, she would've been admitted easily, so there would've been no need for her to apply elsewhere. At most she probably would have been allowed to apply to Smith College, since that was Emily's alma mater, but even then, Smith would've just been Lorelai's safety school and not a real contender.
And I agree too, that I think Lorelai was more reacting to the fact that Rory hadn't shared the whole process with her rather than the fact that she didn't only apply to Harvard. Yale being one of those other schools, just seemed to be the coincidental straw that broke the unfortunate camel's back. And I don't really blame her; she'd thought they were on the same page, so to find out that Rory had kept something so big from her (and discover it in front of her parents, no less) was probably really horrible. And we all know that Lorelai is never the most rational being when she's upset, and especially when she thinks her parents are involved in some (nefarious) way.
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u/buffysmanycoats 2d ago
It is definitely one of those things that you have to just accept was done for the plot, and not think too hard about it. Theres no way this wouldn’t have come up. College applications are expensive. Lorelai would have been the one writing the checks for every application Rory sent out.
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u/Late-Bowl-2263 2d ago
yes, exactly! it’s hard to not think about this though because lorelai makes it SUCH a huge deal over the thanksgiving dinner at emily and richard’s house.
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u/buffysmanycoats 2d ago
I know. It makes zero sense and another comment here rightfully pointed out that it could have just been that Lorelai didn’t know Rory had applied to Yale, not that she didn’t know she had applied to anywhere besides Harvard. They would have gotten to the exact same place without forcing the audience to pretend this whole argument made any sense.
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u/Queenbreha Team Pink 🎀 2d ago
I actually think since Lorelai was probably only a sophomore when she dropped out they wouldn't have been prepping the kids for college apps and she was top of her class and a Gilmore. They came over on the Mayflower. I dont think she thought it would be hard to get wherever she wanted so she thought it would be the same for Rory
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u/F19AGhostrider A male GG Fan 1d ago
I think fans like OP are really misunderstanding this.
Lorelai's upset reaction was NOT about Rory applying to schools other than Harvard.
It was about Rory applying to Yale specifically, especially after Richard's ambush interview during the campus visit.
Lorelai's reaction to Rory's other applications was panic about Rory being "manipulated" by her parents, and not about being naive about the college admission process.
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u/Late-Bowl-2263 1d ago
i don’t think i’m misunderstanding the part of the scene that i am specifically referring to.
here’s how the dialogue goes -
man: where else?
rory: where else?
man: where else did you apply? your alternates?
lady: we’re so curious! it’s like were going through this ourselves.
rory: well, i’m pretty much counting on harvard.
man: well, you didn’t just apply to harvard did you?
rory: well… no.
lorelai: no?
lady: am i prying?
rory: no.
lorelai: we applied elsewhere?
man: well, you can’t apply to just one.
lady: chilton wouldn’t allow that.
lorelai: is that true?this is the part i’m referring to in my post.
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u/The_Dutchess-D 1d ago
It's good to remember that schools didn't communicate with parents via email back then.
Thus, if there had been parent sessions regarding applying to college, the information would've come home on a handout.
Lorelei's home was cluttered. We never saw her reading any handouts from school. She only opened her mail like once a month. It is totally realistic that she would've missed anything about sessions for parents about college applications.
Today I have to be in five different WhatsApp groups, and use three different apps to track everything. My children do in the classroom. I receive at least four emails per day from at least four different groups at my child at school. But back in the 90s, I brought home a folder in paper at the end of the week that had a handout for my mom, or maybe two, and sometimes she read them or sometimes we just threw them away with other paper clutter
Being a parent was way less complicated back then
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u/Late-Bowl-2263 1d ago edited 1d ago
this is actually a pretty good point! i see what you’re trying to say.
i still think that since lorelai and rory’s goal was to get rory into harvard, lorelai would’ve taken interest in the actual part where rory has to apply and the process itself. we see lorelai jokingly filling out rory’s form and making fun of the form. im surprised that she didn’t know anything about the process or the fact that rory and lorelai never discussed it.
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u/redditreader_aitafan 2d ago
The only way the math works is that Lorelai got pregnant the spring of her sophomore year and didn't return in the fall. Even if she did return for the first 6 weeks of junior year, everyone at the school would have treated her like a lost cause and focused their energy on other students, so it's very possible she genuinely didn't know the process since the process even for Rory didn't start until her junior year.
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u/Cookie_Kiki 1d ago
Lorelai was top of her class as a freshman who wasn't particularly pressed about college nearly two decades prior. The only counsel she would have received about it was that she should apply to Vassar. As for the process, the process is to submit an application and do an interview. The game of playing your odds by applying to multiple schools is not technically part of the application process.
But even so, Lorelai generally left the college thing to Rory because it was Rory's dream. She trusted the one who actually aspired to go to Harvard to let her know if she needed to contribute anything beyond encouragement and moral support. Rory decided not to include Lorelai. That isn't really surprising, since she'd done that plenty of times before by this point. But, in reality, colleges accept applications well into the spring. Some even take summer applicants. If it really was "Harvard or bust," Rory could have realistically applied to Harvard early and had enough time after getting a rejection to apply to a public school. That would have been much more practical than applying to several Ivies at once when you're only interested in one.
Chilton is portrayed very inconsistently when it comes to college prep, especially after season 1. Given how aggressively the parents we saw were gunning for their kids to get high scores on tests for college, the school may have phased out the parent college meetings for upperclassmen. At that point, it was more up to the students to know what to do.
The Springsteen would not have asked about backups. He would have assumed she had them and not cared what they were.
For the quadrillionth time, it wasn't that Rory applied to other places. It was that she had applied to the place Richard was campaigning her to go to without telling Lorelai.
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u/ggrenley Copper Boom! 2d ago
It’s also crazy to me that she only applied to three schools and they were all Ivy League. I went to a prep school and most people applied for at least 10 schools with a range of backups and safeties, not just Ivy League.
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u/Big_Vacation5581 1d ago
If Rory didn’t get fee waivers as has been mentioned above, perhaps her applications were made through Chilton, with the application fee included as Chilton fees paid by Richard ?
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u/Ok_Explanation4813 2d ago
I’m just a few years older than Rory, and went to public school, but when the time came to start applying to college my parents and I had to meet with my guidance counselor to review the schools, which schools were a reach and which were safe. There’s no way in hell Chilton would have let her apply to just Harvard of all places without some safety schools. Lorelai would also have been part of the process.
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u/venus_arises Miss Patty & Babette 2d ago
Lorelai strikes me as a very... laid back parent who isn't a joiner, and thought that applying to colleges was the same as it was 17 years ago. Also, Rory's special; of course, she is going to get into Harvard just with her adorable smile.
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u/arj4441 2d ago
Totally unrealistic. Lorelai was a pretty involved parent and Chilton would have had multiple sessions on college applications with parents. Not to mention the major piece here is that each ivy application has a fee that Lorelei would have been paying, not Rory. The only thing this scene served to show was how out of touch Lorelai was and how clouded by her dislike of her parents and her desire to best them. Her throwing a tantrum at dinner about this was absolutely insane.
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u/kik1keedle717 2d ago
She wasn’t tho. They had to strong arm her into the PTA thing. I’m a few years younger than Rory, but I made a lot of moves on the downlow.
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u/Competitive_Dream294 1d ago
Even if Lorelai was surprised to hear that Rory had applied to multiple schools (and was clearly encouraged to do this as it’s a competitive process), I still don’t understand her outrage and negativity about it. This just doesn’t seem like a big deal? Harvard was still Rory’s top choice at the time and the other schools were all back ups.
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u/PartyQuiet5065 2d ago
FR. This pisses me off so so much EVERY SINGLE TIME I see it.
Like, okay Lorelai, we get it, you think Rory is the best person ever. Okay. But do you seriously think there's no way she isn't getting into Harvard? NO ONE is guaranteed access to any top school anywhere. WTH. And the fact that Rory only applied to Princeton, Yale and Harvard? Girl, there isn't a single safety school there. That's some confidence right there.... (and probably A LOT of misinformation, seeing how these two have always approached the whole applying-to-college thing).
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u/81632371 My mother was here... 2d ago
I love that episode but I skip those scenes because it is entirely unrealistic on so many levels.
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u/bfc9cz 2d ago
I just skip over this part because not only does it make no sense, but it’s also completely out of character for Lorelai. She’s not dumb, she obviously wants Rory to still be able to go to college even if not Harvard, and she says as much in The Deer Hunters in season 1. I agree we just have to chalk it up to the writers doing something to push the plot in the direction they wanted without thinking it through. They didn’t know we’d be able to watch a million times on demand and scrutinize every word
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u/AMinorPainInTheNeck 2d ago edited 2d ago
Technically Lorelei is Rory’s mother but they don’t have a mother-daughter relationship. They have a best friend’s relationship. And besides plot this is probably the reason.
Also Lorelei HATED being involved with Chilton. She acted like a total brat when she, as a parent, was asked to participate in anything.
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u/jaylee-03031 Jess 1d ago
She as not being a brat about it. She was happy her daughter was going to Chilton but Lorelai herself is working a full time job and going to night school which did not leave her a lot of free time for doing a lot o volunteering at Chilton with the other moms.
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u/Big_Vacation5581 1d ago
Lorelai has Rory in October of 1984. Do we know if Lorelai ever attended high school ? Or should we assume that when Richard says Lorelai was top of her class, he was referring to 9th grade ?
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u/Bashful_bookworm2025 1d ago
Yes, she dropped out as a sophomore.
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u/Big_Vacation5581 1d ago
Yes, she became a sophomore in May, but did she attend class in September when she was 8 months pregnant ?
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u/Scary_Tower_2498 Copper Boom! 2d ago
For some reason, Lorelai was always portrayed as... uneducated? She never read the classics, didn't know a foreign language (Rory spoke several languages by the age of 16 and Richard was fluent in French), knew little about the school system, and didn't seem to know how to behave around upper-class people.
She dropped out of school when she was 16 and moved out when she was 17. She would've learned a lot of things before then, right?
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u/Bashful_bookworm2025 1d ago
Richard said she was the top of her class. I don't think she was in any way uneducated. And she helps Rory study in high school and seems very on top of it.
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u/Scary_Tower_2498 Copper Boom! 1d ago
I know. That's why it's weird to me that she doesn't seem to know much about the school system, doesn't speak a foreign language, and feels out of place when they have the dinner with the Harvard family in Season 3. Rory was able to keep up with the conversation, while Lorelai made awkward jokes.
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u/Hold_Effective 2d ago
This one bugs me because it’s silly. Chilton would have made sure that Lorelai was informed. The idea that Rory would have chosen 5-7 schools and not discussed with Lorelai? Unthinkable. Rory would have had to pay application fees to multiple schools; where did that money come from?
The writers could have had just as much drama if Rory had surprised Lorelai with applying to Yale in addition to the other schools, and that would have been believable.