Amazed at kids Over 2250 SAT Being Denied

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<p>I misspoke: the Ivies enrolled about 16,000. I got that by taking the undergraduate enrollments at all eight schools (from the CC college search web pages) and dividing by four. Clearly not an exact number, ergo my “about.”</p>

<p>I am aware that some students take only the ACT or SAT, and that therefore the 1% pool is greater that 16,000. However, if you’ll look at the title of this thread, it’s “Amazed at kids Over 2250 SAT Being Denied,” and the message I was responding to claimed that the number of kids at that level (of SAT, per the thread title) would fill the Ivies several times over. And if you assumed that the set with the top 1% of SATs and the set with the top 1% of ACTs were mutually exclusive (clearly not even close to being the case), they would only fill the Ivies twice.</p>

<p>As for the rest of your message, you are of course free to redefine the “Ivies” any way you want.</p>

<p>^^^ Wow, bovertine (post #59),</p>

<p>That’s really interesting historical data for H and Y. In 1975, Yale got only 9,331 applications and had a 27.3% admit rate, with middle 50% SAT scores of 609-722 “Verbal” (now CR) and 623-735 Math. </p>

<p>As recently as 1997, Yale had only 12,046 applications and had a 17.8% admit rate. </p>

<p>In 2011 (for the Class of 2015), Yale had 27,283 applications and an admit rate somewhere around 7%. All for essentially the same-sized entering class (1,346 matriculants in 1975, 1,307 in 1997, 1,351 in 2011).</p>

<p>No wonder it’s so much harder to get in now. And no wonder so many highly qualified applicants are rejected.</p>

<p>Posters are highlighting the superelite schools. Even the top 50 schools, including public flagships, are rejecting some students with great stats. Again, too many students for too few places. Not many more college places and a lot more students than decades ago.</p>

<p>Any comparison of current SAT scores to those pre-dating 1995 should consider the “re-centering” that was done [SAT</a> I Individual Score Equivalents](<a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/equivalence-tables/sat-score]SAT”>http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/equivalence-tables/sat-score) Not quite apples to apples…</p>

<p>^ True that, on the re-centering. It’s apparent in Yale’s historical data tables which show CR scores jumped by about 50 points immediately after the 1995 re-centering, but very little change in M. But even taking that into account, middle 50% SAT scores at Yale are definitely higher now than in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. The biggest change, though, is just the sheer number of apps, and with it the shrinking admit rate.</p>

<p>Some other changes at Yale: legacies down from 19.3% in 1979 to 13.5% in 2011. URMs up from 10.9% in 1975 to 24.1% in 2011.</p>

<p>Yes, recentering matters. But at some high score levels I don’t think recentering effects the math score much. More for cr. But even with recentering I think the sat scores at elite schools are higher today.
Of course there’s superscoring these days, and more prep.</p>

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<p>Also, let us not forget the kids who prefer Standford, MIT, Duke, Chicago, Northwestern, Rice, Berkeley and the top LACs etc over the Ivies. Many end up enrolling at Alabama, Arizona, A&M etc on full ride scholarship as NMFs. So, the pool might be big, but not that big. I was looking at SAT averages at the pharmacy school at Rutgers, it blew my mind.</p>

<p>I am confused about that 16,000 number people are using. I think the number of freshman “slots” in the Ivy League is about 13,500, and that counts everyone at Cornell (notwithstanding bclintonk’s specious analysis).</p>

<p>Harvard 1,650
Yale 1,350
Princeton 1,300
Columbia 1,300
Brown 1,650
Dartmouth 1,000
Penn 2,250
Cornell 3,000</p>

<p>If you want to add Stanford and MIT, that gets you around 16,000. But then you start thinking about Caltech, and Duke, and Chicago, and all of a sudden the number doesn’t look so small anymore.</p>

<p>You could also choose the top 10 schools in the US News rankings, a group that does not include Cornell, Dartmouth, or Brown but does include Stanford, Caltech, and MIT.</p>

<p>in 2010 there were 14049 kids that got a 2250 or better; in 2008 it was 11972</p>

<p>Schools look for many other things than just the SAT . . . and the Ivies get 10 times as many applicants as they have spaces . . . so they can pick and choose based on other criteria . . . for parents, back in the old days - when the Ivies were admitting 25-30% of applicants - that hight SAT might have done the trick . . but for now, it’s NOT a ticket to Ivyville.</p>

<p>Example: Brown

  • denied 80% of applicants with an 800 SAT Critical Reading
  • denied 83% of applicants with an 800 SAT Math</p>

<p>A high SAT score - in the top 1% - will get you considered at those schools but is NOT determinative.</p>

<p>Aren’t we all kind of just saying the obvious, though?</p>

<p>I think the common app makes it so much easier to apply and the 2250+ SAT kids are all applying to the same 15 schools, which means many get left out.</p>

<p>pugmadkate our sons are on the same path. He had a 2290 SAT, 4.0. leadership, community service, great recs, great writer-everything he needed to be serious candidate for top schools. My son was rejected at Harvard and Cornell and WL at Brown-which he chose not to pursue.</p>

<p>He is also attending NEU as a freshman in the Honors Program. He is going on the full NM Scholarship and he is also very happy there. He had a number of great choices at some other excellent schools that also offered great merit aid packages.</p>

<p>There are some incredible opportunities out there for these kids.</p>

<p>Lets not forget that if each smart kid is applying to 5 ivies +Stanford, MIT etc, then 20 thousand kids applying to 5 ivies each would result in a 20 percent acceptance rate, but they all get in.</p>

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Do you mean that they might all get into one of them?</p>

<p>While I don’t advocate going to a match system, the system we have now is chaotic enough that there can be anomalous results–occasionally a kid who has great stats might get rejected from a bunch of top schools, while another kid who isn’t as stellar might get admitted to all of them–just because of (apparent) randomness in the system. This is why it’s so important for each kid to build a good list with enough schools on it–including more than just one or two reaches if he really wants a reach school.</p>

<p>^ I think, some kids with stellar stats may fail to demonstrate independence and/ or emotional maturity. These type of kids can always make it back for graduate school, later in life.</p>

<p>"Aren’t we all kind of just saying the obvious, though? "</p>

<p>Yes, and hopefully by saying it again it WILL become obvious to the parents who believe that just because they went to an Ivy and their kid got a 2250 that their kid will get into an Ivy, too.</p>

<p>Like Colorado Mom said earlier . . . taking these facts to heart allows a family to plan realistically for college applications.</p>

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<p>I don’t understand this. There’s no guarantee that if 20,000 “smart” kids apply to 5 schools apiece, all of them Ivies + Stanford + MIT, then each one will get into one of those schools. Some will get into all 5 of their schools. Some will get completely shut out. Or are you just saying this is a mathematically possible relationship? But what’s the point? It doesn’t tell us anything about how college admissions actually works.</p>

<p>Here’s the way that it works: suppose you could identify the 20,000 “most desirable” seats at selective colleges and universities. (In fact, I don’t believe it works that way, but just for the sake of argument . . . .) Those seats won’t all be filled by the 20,000 kids with the highest stats. Not even close. The colleges themselves tell us that, and they practice what they preach. A full 25% of Harvard’s entering freshman class consists of kids who had SAT M scores below 700. A 700 on SAT M is the 93rd percentile, which is not bad—actually very good, in the larger scheme of things. But a quarter of Harvard’s class is drawn from below that level. Which means at least 115,500 SAT-takers had SAT M scores higher than the bottom quartile of Harvard’s class. Similarly for SAT CR: 25% of Harvard’s class had SAT CR scores below 690, which is the 94th percentile, which means at least 99,000 kids had higher SAT CR scores than the bottom quartile of Harvard’s class. (Of course, Harvard’s bottom quartile in CR and its bottom quartile in math are not necessarily the same people; many in either group could be “lopsided” with stronger scores in the other category; but that doesn’t undercut my analysis, it just means that potentially as much has half the freshman could be below the 94th percentile in math or below the 93th percentile in math). </p>

<p>The point is, Harvard is not just drawing from the top 20,000 test-scorers. And every seat that’s taken up by someone who is not in the top 20,000 test-scorers is one less seat that’s available for someone who* is *among the top 20,000 test-scorers. Repeat that same analysis across the rest of the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke, etc., and you’ll quickly see that not all of the kids with stats in the top 20,000 are going to get spots among the 20,000 “most desirable” seats at the most selective colleges. Many will be shut out. Many, many. Because bottom line, the colleges just don’t think those stats are as important as many people on CC seem to think they are. They’re important, more so for the unhooked than for the hooked, but many other factors are important, too.</p>

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<p>Obviously, since less tangible qualities such as maturity and independence cannot be measured by test scores.</p>

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<p>My point was that even if they all got in, the schools get to say they only admitted 20% of the applicants. So admit rates can be misleading. One has to wonder whether there are actually that many more high scoring applicants applying now or are the same number of kids applying to more and more schools out of fear of being rejected? Personally, I am not convinced there are so many kids with 2250 and perfect GPAs left over that the schools could fill all the Ivy league classes several times over.</p>