Advice to 2019 Parents from a 2018 Parent survivor

Parent Cafe
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I would actually say that the flair at an admissions event shouldn’t really count for much.

Some colleges are really decentralized, and every department or office operates more or less independently - so some offices can run very smoothly and others can be a disaster. Even at schools that are more cohesive, though, the Admissions Office is - as someone already pointed out - the one office that your son or daughter will never have to deal with again once they are admitted. So I’m skeptical of the idea that the small details that admissions gets “right” or “wrong” during the process indicates anything about the larger school.

I think this is especially true with Admitted Students’ Day. Let’s be frank - the admissions office is tasked with marketing the college to students and parents, especially at elite schools with high tuition but that don’t necessarily have the name recognition of the Ivies et al. So they’re going to do a lot of little gimmicky things that impress 17-year-olds or jazz it up a little bit, but in the long run don’t matter. Some schools spring for free T-shirts, sunglasses, and large banners. I used to be a student ambassador at my alma mater; there’s always a huge come-to-Jesus meeting before admitted students’ day where they hype us up and make sure that we’re ready to be cheerful and enthusiastic and fresh-faced (and honestly, they select student ambassadors for those qualities anyway). Everyone’s on their best behavior. They plant new flowers and mow all the lawns. I worked in residential life at a different university and I remember the process of selecting which students would be allowed to show their rooms on admitted students’ day - the high-level res life staff would go into each room and take a tour first and assess whether the room was decorated nicely.

It’s a production. It’s a show! And it’s nice and heady, everyone’s excited, it’s a great time. Go for sure, because it’s fun and you meet a lot of your future classmates that way, but I wouldn’t make a decision one way or another solely focused on admitted students’ day. It’s more or less a farce.

I suggest going to visit on a normal day. Just pick a random Tuesday in October or April when there’s nothing in particular going on, and show up. Visit a class, talk to some students, eat in the cafeteria, meet with an advising dean, walk around and sit down on campus with a book, go the library, etc. That’s when you really get the feel of what it’s like to be a student there when they’re not trying to get you to sign on the dotted line.

I also disagree that admissions is a crap shoot. For a very small handful of colleges in the country, admissions is very competitive and even the most qualified students might not be admitted. For the remaining 95-98%, students can pretty accurately predict their chances of being admitted. Some students may need to cast a wider net than others, but there’s not necessarily a need to apply to more than 10 schools. That’s where we are talking about a student who is really teetering on the borderline and/or just really, really wants to go to a college for which she’s not really competitive. If you have a 3.1 and a 1700 on the SATs (and no hooks), it doesn’t really matter how many Ivy et al. type schools you apply to…you simply aren’t competitive for them.

I think that adults - parents and advisers and others who help with the process - should have frank, open communications with applicants, including the honest advice about whether or not they could or would be competitive for certain schools. There’s no sense in letting someone waste money applying to 19 schools that they have little to no chance of getting into. Helping students fall in love with their match schools is important, too.

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The low chance of admissions at the couple of dozen highly selective schools does not make the entire realm of college applications an unpredictable affair. And it is surely NOT a crapshoot as the term indicates a reliance on brute luck. Inasmuch as this is claimed year after year, such a statement is belied by the evidence of patterns in admissions. Further, while much publicity is given to the 5 percent admissions at Stanford or Harvard, the reality is that MOST students in the nation attend one of their first 2 or 3 top choices. This might not work out for the students who prepare an application list directly borrowed from the latest ranking of USNews and consider being above the 50th percentile a reasonable odd. You can blame the utter non-sense of :“you’re a shoo-in at Harvard” suggested to many of the 30,000 vals in the nation for the erroneous belief that admissions are a crapshoot.

The bottom line is that what appears to be unpredictable and a crapshoot in the eyes of the applicants is quite different in the eyes of the people who are tasked to make the selection. They know the students they want and find them … year after year without much difficulty. The fact that there isn’t a secret mechanism nor a “paint-by-the-number” template available for download does not mean that there is a HIGH predictability in terms of who gets admitted.

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I roll my eyes every time I hear of a student applying to all the Ivies. They are very different schools. What this says about a student is that prestige is the most important factor in choosing a college, and prestige is a stupid reason to apply anywhere.

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“I also disagree that admissions is a crap shoot. For a very small handful of colleges in the country, admissions is very competitive and even the most qualified students might not be admitted. For the remaining 95-98%, students can pretty accurately predict their chances of being admitted. Some students may need to cast a wider net than others, but there’s not necessarily a need to apply to more than 10 schools.”

I should have clarified my point a bit better. Yes, my point assumes we are talking about very selective schools. At least that’s what I had in mind when I wrote it.

But really when you think about it, one should ask, “competitive for whom?” So if you’re not clearly admissible to Central Washington University, and you want to go there, then I’d suggest you apply to a bunch just like it because you don’t know which one, if any, of “those” schools is going to like your application.

I’ve seen this from the inside. It’s is often a crap shoot. It’s not that they are careless. This isn’t a negative comment. It’s just that if you’re in the mix, and there is still much more demand than there is supply, you don’t know if you’re going to read well for this or that committee. All the advice in the world at that point can’t help you. In law school admissions, there is the story of the successful Yale Law applicant whose personally essay somehow drew an analogy between each major event in her life and jello molds. Somebody at Yale thought it was brilliant. Somebody at Stanford may not have. Of course you need to be qualified for either school, but Stanford has more than enough qualified people to choose from such that they can easily reject the person with the essay they didn’t like or whatever else it they want that you don’t have.

But of course, if you’re not in the mix, it’s not a crap shoot. You’re not going to get in.

I would never advocate wasting $$ on schools that are out of a kid’s league. No, I wouldn’t advise the 3.1 / 1700 kid to take a flyer on University of Chicago. That would be absurd.

I would advise the kid applying to Chicago with a legitimate chance to apply to all the Ivies, Stanford, the top publics, Rice, Duke, etc. etc. etc.

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Again, that is an unfortunate statement. A game of crapshoot assumes that all players have an equal shot and the outcome is determined by pure luck and nothing else. That is simply NOT the case when it comes to the decisions of an admission committee. Perhaps having had a seat on the sidelines --without a decision input-- of a law school admission process might have clouded your view, but the conclusion remains erroneous. Applicants are all singular and present a different set of qualifications, and said qualifications are measured against the demands placed on the officers to form the best freshman class.

Again that seems to intimate that the more rolls of the dice the better your odds are. That is simply a skewed view and an approach that is none too sensible. When the only criterion is one established by the selectivity and prestige of a school, you end up with a poor selection of schools. In these shores, many have stressed the impact of that elusive best fit and reject the idea that applicants can be equally competitive at schools that are vastly different in terms of offerings, settings, and general educational objectives.

But then, perhaps “we” ought to concede that a poorly designed application process has all the makings of a … crapshoot.

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First, this is a great thread.

Second, the number of applications seems to be the main bone of contention. To me, it seems very dependent upon the individual applicant and his/her family’s situation.

Take our S. Great grades, solid, not stratospheric SAT, solid EC’s. No hooks, no URM. We are donut hole’s.

We surveyed the situation, after plenty of research, and went merit hunting. He applied to 10 schools, and he was well over the 75% range for all 10. We felt we needed to cast a pretty wide net, especially since he wanted small schools with small classes.

We eschewed the “lottery” at the very selective schools, well-knowing that the price tag would be, in our minds, ridiculously prohibitive. We made a family decision we were not spending $250K for undergraduate.

But just because that was the strategy we came up with, does not make 10 a magic number, and someone else would have equally valid reasons to apply to more or less than 10 schools. I do think at lease 1 would be a good idea, however.

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"Again, that is an unfortunate statement. A game of crapshoot assumes that all players have an equal shot and the outcome is determined by pure luck and nothing else. That is simply NOT the case when it comes to the decisions of an admission committee. Perhaps having had a seat on the sidelines --without a decision input-- of a law school admission process might have clouded your view, but the conclusion remains erroneous. Applicants are all singular and present a different set of qualifications, and said qualifications are measured against the demands placed on the officers to form the best freshman class.

I would advise the kid applying to Chicago with a legitimate chance to apply to all the Ivies, Stanford, the top publics, Rice, Duke, etc. etc. etc.

Again that seems to intimate that the more rolls of the dice the better your odds are. That is simply a skewed view and an approach that is none too sensible. When the only criterion is one established by the selectivity and prestige of a school, you end up with a poor selection of schools. In these shores, many have stressed the impact of that elusive best fit and reject the idea that applicants can be equally competitive at schools that are vastly different in terms of offerings, settings, and general educational objectives.

But then, perhaps “we” ought to concede that a poorly designed application process has all the makings of a … crapshoot."

First, forgive me for not knowing how to manage the “quote” feature. My shortcoming.

Second, you are parsing my use of the word “crapshoot” and failing to employ my intended use of the term in its colloquial sense. I never said, or meant to imply, that “all players have an equal shot and the outcome is determined by pure luck and nothing else.” You said that.

What I said, and more importantly, my general intent in using language in an otherwise relaxed and informal atmosphere and context, is that there are factors that will come into play in the admissions process for admissible students that they cannot either gauge, know or control. I can tell you with absolute authority that in law school admissions, you personal statement matters - a lot. There are plenty, and I mean plenty, of kids wanting in to good law schools such that they can turn down 90th percentile LSAT kids all day long and not ever miss them. 99th percentile is a different matter, but as you should know, I was not addressing the kids at the tail ends of the bell curve. I think I made that clear in a subsequent post. If not, here it is for you now.

It is axiomatic that what one person, let alone a given committee of admissions professionals, finds interesting will make others fall asleep. What one finds compelling will initiate another’s gag reflex. This is true of ECs and a host of other things. What is cliche to one will impress the hell out of another. Those factors can’t be known or controlled. It is that element of admissions that make it a crap shoot.

Who is to say what the institutional need is for a Cuban-American applying to XYZ college in a particular year at a particular time with particular credentials. Unless the latter are of the sort that gets the kid in almost automatically, you don’t know what will happen.

Regarding rolling the dice, I guess I’ll turn it around ask you the following question: what would have happened to me if I’d applied to Georgetown, NYU, Columbia and Boalt, and not applied to Michigan, Penn, Cornell and UCLA? I’ll tell you - I would have been rejected by every law school to which I applied instead of getting in to 1/2 of them. Interestingly, two of the schools to which I was admitted (Penn and Michigan) were a tick harder to get into than all but one of the schools (Columbia) that rejected me. I was happy to live in any of the places where the schools to which I applied are located, and I viewed each of them as good “fits” both academically and socially. What I’m trying to say is no more precise or complicated than that. Choose to complicate it if you wish.

Again, for what I believe to be the third time, I readily concede that if a kid applies to 100 schools with admissions criteria that exceed the kid’s credentials, then he/she will likely be rejected 100 times. But that is not at all relevant to my point. Focus on the former point, not the latter.

As to the prestige/selectivity comment, I don’t think I’ve said anywhere that those should be the sole criteria with which anyone does anything. You seem to be (not entirely sure) saying I said that very thing. If so, I disagree. What I DID say, or write rather, is that, if people want to focus on prestige, and it certainly was a criteria for me when choosing law schools for which I do not apologize, then that’s their prerogative, and it’s not our job to “talk them out of it.” Just my own subjective view on that point. I think that there are many good reasons why a kid might want to consider prestige. Do I advocate obsessing over it? No, of course not. But I’m not going to play the game here and suggest it’s a horrible thing on which only maladjusted kids focus. That would be absurd and, frankly, disingenuous.

Botton line: there is AN ELEMENT of subjectivity to the process within given academic parameters. As you wander closer and closer to the tail ends of the bell curve, less and less so. I still hold to that view notwithstanding your post. I neither advocate nor criticize it. I merely state that “it is.”

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Perhaps you might consider a better descriptive word than crapshoot. Or anything that relates to a game of chance.

And I will agree with you as I do not doubt that the personal statement in graduate school is of paramount importance. However, you have a different process in terms of UG admissions with applicants that are not as polished (purportedly so) as aspiring graduate students, and especially at the most selective ones. The process will also have drastically different readers than your typical UG admission officers. The expectation that a graduate student will be able to convince readers with a cogent argument that reflects a clear choice of professional or academic career is hardly the same as the “small slice” of life that works so well in UG applications.

Lastly, I hope you realize that a personal statement represents a total departure from a crapshoot as it is a highly personal opus that … leaves nothing to hazard.

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I do not wish to complicate matters further. I objected to the statement about applying to all Ivies, Chicago, Duke, and more schools as I consider such strategy a willy-nilly one that cannot possibly rely on a best fit scenario.

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Hmm, @xiggi, now I think you may be purposefully skirting the argument.

I’m perfectly ok with “crapshoot” in the context in which it was proffered. Sorry, you’ll have to live with that or ignore it. :slight_smile:

Moreover, I never said that the LS personal statement itself is as random as a roll of the dice; this I’m afraid is where you rely on formalism and hyper-technical interpretations to arrive at your desired conclusion. I DID say that THE READER whose eyes will see the PS IS a crapshoot insofar as the applicant can’t, absent extraordinary circumstances, know who that person will be or how they’ll react to the content. Given that reality, the distinctions between the grad school PS and the UG PS are meaningless. It’s about which person reads which PS and what that person does or doesn’t care about and what, if anything, they find witty or humorous or ironic or compelling or whatever. You just can’t escape that however much you may personally desire to find predictability in the universe.

Finally, you have now twice ignored my point about prestige and at least implied that I am some kind of prestige monger. You may think it’s a will nilly approach that is ill-advised for the student looking for the ever-important CC concept of “fit”. Toward that end, I obviously would agree with you entirely. My point was quite different. I assume, arguendo, that the kid wants prestige and I don’t judge or evaluate that, because, personally, I don’t think it’s my place, and I also have to acknowledge that there are some practical benefits to prestige. But again, that doesn’t matter. And really, prestige, as a concept, doesn’t matter in this particular free exchange of ideas. Substitute any other variable you wish.

What does matter is that, whatever quality a kid is looking for in a school, be it pretty buildings, location in a particular area, a hard school, a laid back school, an engineering school, a LAC, whatever it is, once that has been identified by that kid, then that kid should apply to as many of “those” schools as is practicable if they are in that broad “admissible” category (i.e., they are neither clearly in or out based on the usual criteria). I gave you my own personal example from LS admissions, which I regard as not so dissimilar from UG admissions as to render it inapposite.

Your “objection” to my advice depends entirely on your assumption that everyone should see the college admissions game as you do. In that way, I was being more open minded and letting people be who they want to be. If you want prestige and don’t care about much else, then apply to as many prestigious schools (in your GPA and SAT zip code) as you can handle. If you’re fortunate to have choices, then you can get nitpicky about “fit”. “Fit” doesn’t matter if you don’t get in.

With that, I realize I’m now being repetitive (not entirely my fault) and thus will check out of this one unless you ascribe to me again a view which I do not hold.

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Gotta love lawyers! I enjoy reading them, @HuskyLawyer‌

IMHO 24 is still too many and too stress inducing. And too expensive before even the first tuition bill arrives!

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Our success story was to go on college visits summer before and during junior year. Narrowed down the list, got a better idea on grades. Made a spreadsheet with 28 colleges. Decided to apply ED to his top choice, then grades showed him he had to apply to his very close second. Convinced himself that was his top choice all along. Applied to two safeties, deferred by one, accepted by other. Made it into the ED.

Applied to four schools total, got into ED. Was planning to apply to at least seven other schools as necessary, and possibly two more that were rolling.

Take on application options:

  • ED: right for my son who was sure he would be happy there, may not be for many who are in the dark about their first or even top few choices
  • EA: why not? Like really, WHY NOT? If your child didn’t apply EA anywhere, and the option was available, I cannot fathom why. To have an acceptance in hand, or know that a reach deferred or rejected you so you might want to regroup, that is priceless.
  • RD: If you get to January 1 without an acceptance, at least four seems a good idea. See if some have different due dates in case there are other essays.
  • Rolling. Every applicant should have at least one rolling admission school that has a due date past the RD notification date. Just in case. And on CC they will post schools that have spots still available for their incoming September freshmen as of the summer.

As for 24: wow. Especially with all those Ivy essays. I at least can tell you something about how each Ivy is different, since I attended one, but seriously how many kids can? Is it really the same attending Penn or Columbia in a large city as attending Cornell or Dartmouth in the boonies? Or is it “life giving you lemons and making lemonade” if you really wanted Cambridge but have to settle for Cayuga Lake?

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@annwank‌ I aim to please.

I don’t mind being corrected at all. I really don’t. But things have to make sense to me, and I don’t take kindly to my comments being re-characterized to better fit someone else’s conclusion, no matter how eloquent they may be in their efforts.

I have a hard enough time making sense when left alone … I surely don’t need anybody coming in and further complicating my gibberish. :smiley:

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@rhandco‌

it’s funny … after several posts in this thread advocating for more applications (within a given set of circumstances as I mentioned), our experience this go around with my daughter was like yours. recruiting was the game changer for us because it introduced ED, the NESCAC version of the LOI, and when coupled with some aggressive traveling in the NE to see schools, it really put my daughter in a position of greater clarity than a lot of kids have. The key in all this was the pre-read. Several schools recruited her and basically said “yes, apply ED and you’re likely to be admitted”. Coupled with actually seeing these places, it really put her in a position to a really good sense about her choices.

So with the pre-read, the admissions risk is greatly mitigated as a factor, so then she could focus on what she liked among a group of schools w/o having to create another level of priority based on where she’d more likely get in. That is so fundamentally different from the no-pre-read situation, where you have to factor in admissions risk to at least some degree. When you do, the only real way to mitigate that risk is to increase your applications to the right schools. In her case, her numbers made her very clearly admissible, but her SAT score, while very strong, was not in that super elite 2250+ category that almost guarantees you admission most places.

So in the end, with Wesleyan ED, our applications were greatly reduced as well, which was nice. We still did some and have pulled them, but we didn’t do very many. Had she not had the recruiting pre-read, it would have been a much different story.

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After reading some of these posts I see why the selection rate at these big name schools is so low; everyone is applying. Not sure a strategy of applying to “all of the ivies” does anything but pad their stats.

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You catch on fast, @IowaParent15. Good for you!

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Regarding the comment that college is affordable only for the very wealthy or the very poor, I’ll offer an exception that is likely not applicable to most on this thread, but I share it anyway as an example of the many benefits of military service and why our D applied to a dozen schools vice just a handful. My spouse and I each retired recently and transferred our post 9/11 GI Bill to our two teens. D is a senior who applied RD to 12 schools. (She didn’t apply EA bc she needed first semester to show upward trend from a tough Jr year.) She applied to two ivies, because they were great fits for her interests and personality and because both schools cover the delta between full tuition and what GI Bill covers (~$20,500/yr and also cost of living for room and bd). Quite a few other schools are also extremely generous participants in the Yellow Program such as Dickinson, Northwestern, Amherst, and Wash and Lee. Most others offer just $5,000-$13,000 which the GI Bill will then match on top of the original $20,500. So bottom line is all of the schools she applied to would range from being zero out of pocket to max of $16,000 per year. We ruled out any schools that weren’t Yellow Ribbon participants.
ROTC and the service academies are also excellent options to pay for college with the added benefit of free medical/dental and a guaranteed job upon graduation.

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As a high school senior, I feel like that the number of schools one applies to doesn’t matter. Whether it be 1, 10, or 89 schools, as long as the student wants to apply, he/she should. The cost of all the apps could be a constraint and the amount of work put into sending all the documents can be huge, but the student should already know what he’s getting himself into when he chooses to apply and is probably smart enough to make a solid decision. Yes there can often be more logical approaches for some students to only apply to a few schools, but the students should be well aware of this. If they decide to apply to more schools for whatever reason, they should be willing to put extra work into submitting the applications (especially if they really want to go to the schools).
With adequate resources, it has to be the student’s decision in the end- he should be the one leading the process that will determine where he will be for the next few years. Plus, an opportunity like this to apply wherever won’t really appear again (except for transfer and graduate admissions), so why not take advantage of it and see where the apps get him? It could very well lead to surprising acceptances (Ivy admissions are so subjective today no one can be sure if they’re in or not).