<p>I haven’t read this entire thread, but, based on what I did read, a few basic facts weren’t stated.</p>
<p>First, if you apply in the regular decision round, you can’t use LACs as safeties. A LOT of LACs offer early decision and many also offer early decision round 2. By the time the regular decision round comes along, a lot of places in the class have been filled. A disproportionate # of the spots in the regular round will go to URM kids and/or kids who differ from the typical applicant in other ways, e.g, being geographically diverse. If you are an unhooked white or Asian kid with 2 college educated parents who is interested in a particular school because of its strength,e.g., foreign languages at Middlebury or music at St. Olaf, my hunch is your odds of admission in the regular round are FAR worse than you’d suspect looking at the overall admissions stats. </p>
<p>Indeed, I suspect, though I cannot prove, that LACs that are need blind are particularly harsh with full pay candidates in the regular round. LACs do understand that some families have to look at aid packages before making the enrollment decision. But if you aren’t applying for financial aid, and you’re applying to LACs in the regular round, I REALLY don’t think you can use the school as a safety no matter how good your stats. There are probably a lot of kids like you who applied in the early rounds. </p>
<p>And, if the college isn’t need blind, then it’s going to be even more of an uphill battle in the regular round for kids who require fin aid, as the college uses its fin aid budget to attract URMs and other kids who will add diversity to the class. </p>
<p>So, my advice is that in choosing safeties, you don’t include any LACs. I’m not saying you shouldn’t apply to LACs in the regular round; I’m just saying that you shouldn’t count on them as safeties.</p>
<p>It depresses me deeply to think of kids giving up their passions and working like dogs with the only goal to get into a top college. For one thing, those years of middle school and high school aren’t just a ramp up to college. They’re that child’s LIFE. And for another, like someone above said, it’s not just the getting in. Once you’re in, you have to work in college. What if you find you can’t? What if you find you don’t want to? What if you find you have a passion different than your parents want you to have (eg, med school)? </p>
<p>I find some of these stories ineffably sad.</p>
<p>GTalum I completely agree with you. My son always took the most challenging classes because he enjoyed the challenge of them. In 6th grade he asked to be tested so he could skip a grade in math. This year (his senior year) he took 7 AP classes. I begged him to reconsider and his response was that he didn’t want to be bored with school. He has always felt compelled to to be the best. He’s valedictorian because he enjoyed pushing himself. My daughter on the other hand, a junior in college, took some challenging classes but never had the desire to be in all AP classes. The difference is that my son is going to an Ivy League school next year and my daughter is deliriously happy at our State flagship. They will both end up where they are supposed to be.</p>
<p>I would not start in 8 th grade as a previous post discusses. Kids need to be kids, and need to go through some self discovery. Some kids get there sooner than others. My D loved horses since she was 2 and that is where she focused all of her EC energy. Son was a “serial trier” not really finding his thing till sophomore year, but once found he really dove in.</p>
<p>I also think there is way too much box checking when it comes to ECs where students are doing things that will look good to ad coms as opposed to following their interests. I wonder if part of what was appealing about my son, is that you could clearly see all the things that he tried and abandoned, then see him dive into his passion.</p>
<p>I also think this same box checking approach still finds it’s way not essays so that they all sound similar. By going to “insert name of 3 rd world country” to build houses for impoverished people, i discovered “x about myself” which made me appreciate my opportunites and realize how fortunate I am". Service is great and useful, but that is not the way to write about it. Kids really need to spend time thinking about what they want to say that puts their voice out there and highlights their self discovery in a personal way that is not so cliched</p>
<p>It seems to me that it is getting increasingly more difficult to attain admissions to selective colleges each year. The statistics bear me out as the accept rates are lower. A reason for this is that there are more applications being filed per student each year which does create a smoke screen of sorts for the whole process. When the average kid used to apply to 3 schools of a particular category, such schools knew that, and could use that stat. Now with such kids often applying to 8-10 schools, it causes a quandry for the schools as well as the kids. I think the wait list season is going to be an interesting game of musical chairs. Last year’s was. My son’s close friend cleared 4 waitlists over a 2 month period as those school realized they had accepted phantom applicants. </p>
<p>The common app has made it so that kids can apply to more colleges and that has meant that some kids are applying to schools they may not have bothered to try. So the more selective schools have become more selective as there are more candidates for their spots, with a trickle down effect for less selective schools. The trail ends at some point and we’ll see schools with spots left in May, I’m sure.</p>
<p>As to figuring out who gets accepted where, the Naviance and such other tools are helpful if there are enough applications from your school in recent times. It was right on the money last year for my son’s school. Very few outliers and those that were, had some specialty issue. </p>
<p>The difficulty of curriculum, test scores, class rank/grades are the most important things for most students. A recruited athlete, celebrity, development might be an exception but for most others, even with some hook, those three things, though maybe tempered somewhat, still play a major role. </p>
<p>The Occidental swimmer may not be a recruited athlete which means that sport is just another EC and I saw no mention of grades in that post. One never knows the full picture. I’ve heard parents speak of their kids who seem to walk on water, until you get a more directed view of the situation. Not to say that there are not cases where everyone is surprised, but most of the time, that is not the case. At my son’s school, it appears that a certain group of kids, again, got a lion’s share of acceptances to the most selective school and really to nearly all of the schools to which they applied. No big surprises, though some kids accepted at, say Gettysburg were WLed at Dickinson, and vice versa.</p>
<p>I am a parent that had to force my child to do more than his “passion”. Why? As a teenage boy, he would have stayed holed up in his room on the computer or video games as his passion. I did force him to do some “community service”, in the hopes that he would find another topic of interest. He humored me, but did not really find anything outside of academics and computers that he was excited about. </p>
<p>He is not a person that wants to be in a position of leadership, and for that reason, seems to be a little invisible. However, he is the first person that his friends call when they need help with school or something else. He is supportive and helpful. He will stop to help someone with car trouble on the side of the road, or a hurt animal. He likes to learn…scratch that, he likes to know. The difference is that he feels learning to be slow and unproductive in many classes. So like another mom posted, he took many AP and honors classes to be in with his peers as much as to learn. The most disliked classes he had to take were those that were repetitive basics as pre-req’s for classes he should have been fast tracked into. Or classes like Health and PE, that did not offer honors or AP classes, but had to warm a seat for a semester or more to be able to graduate. </p>
<p>HS should be to get ready for the next phase of life. Whatever that is. A HS diploma should mean that a student has a certian knowledge base, it should not be about attendance.</p>
<p>This is so true. You can’t just look at avg SAT. You may be over 75% overall but you may not even be 50% in your own subgroup. The admit rate for your own subgroup may also be much lower. Unfortunately, schools do not publish the data for each group. Kids apply without much to go on and get rejected. Isn’t it understandable if they are angry? Colleges should be far more transparent. We should go after colleges and make them more transparent instead of telling angry kids to suck it up or that that’s the way it is in life. If proper data were given, they may have known better and apply accordingly.</p>
<p>ahnelk-
Did your D submit a Performing Arts CD or video, or try out at the Stanford on-site auditions?
(In order to do that, applicants must send n their ENTIRE RD apps by Dec 1)
Did she apply to Stanford SCEA?
Just curious.</p>
<p>At any rate, good luck to her and congrats on all the other acceptances and attending Oxy!</p>
<p>The rule about EA/ED vs RD applies to most schools. Chicago shows an overall rate of 13% but the EA was 18% or so while RD was less than 9% when a lot more candidates were under consideration. </p>
<p>So if schools have EA/ED and they fill a large portion of their slots, applying RD automatically reduces your chances.</p>
<p>We have discussed this before, texas.
For an unhooked applicant, you would need to compare the unhooked acceptance rate for EA to the RD rate, and it will certainly be quite a bit lower than the reported overall RD rate. I don’t know how hooked vs unhooked applicants do in RD…</p>
<p>Notwithstanding the above, what I am really sensing is that the Early Apps give two advantages: you get to the front of the line for consideration for spots in the FA pool and also for typing slots (oboe, MT, STEM- whatever they use to build an interesting class)- these are FILLED for the RD round; and there are fewer apps for the AdComm to deal with so they have more time read each app and make more carefully thought-out decisions.</p>
<p>To me the real problem is ED for those who NEED FA- it is too much of a commitment, unless by now so many are “legally” by-passing it for FA reasons…</p>
<p>At any rate, my bet is that one key reason for distorted results this year is a preference for full or most pay applicants in the lottery stage (between/among ties), yes, even with need-blind schools, sorry. For need-aware schools, not needing FA is probably now a certifiable hook.</p>
<p>I’m ONLY saying that I SUSPECT it’s true at the small group of NEED BLIND LACs.</p>
<p>If you are full pay and pass on Middlebury ED and ED 2, for example, Middlebury knows it’s unlikely it’s your first choice. It doesn’t know that for the kid who needs a substantial fin aid package to attend–it really may be his first choice.</p>
<p>Most LACs and most universities are need sensitive in admissions. I don’t think they do things the same way–but again it’s just my hunch.</p>
<p>The point I’m really trying to make is that in choosing safeties and matches when you are applying in the regular round you have to take into account how much of the class has already been filled. From what I’ve seen, a lot of people don’t.</p>
<p>Do you think there is a quota for full-pay kids??? I would bet it is the other way around, that there is a maximum number of slots available for FA kids.
Do you think that the colleges really do avoid accepting FA kids ED now??</p>
Sounds OK in the abstract … but I can’t imagine how this actually could be implemented for numerous reasons. I doubt there are hard quotas for most of the sub-groups; things evolve as they see how the class is shaking out. More importantly many (most?) applicants fit into many sub-groups. The oboe player may be … from an over-represented geography or an under-represented geography … an URM or a ORM … have killer academic stats or be on the lower end for this school. I’d like to see someone’s proposal of what schools should/could provide that would be meaningful and not have HUGE issues with confounding of the data.</p>
<p>I filed all the FA forms and every school came back with a zero, but some admitted and some rejected.</p>
<p>I am a bit lost on this whole unhooked vs hooked candidates admit rates. who is publishing those numbers for you to be even aware of them? There is a legacy rate but it totally depends on the number of slots each school holds for legacy.</p>
<p>A kid could have a very fulfilling childhood even if he/she have “worked like a dog” while in school. This idea of if a kid had 4.0 with many meaningful ECs then he/she had no life is a very strange concept to me. Yes, my kids felt pressured from time to time, when they had major paper due and few tests at the same time, and junior year was a killer for them, but they always had time for movies and FB time. They never got tutored or took any summer courses. What is stressful is when a kid is not an A student material and parents still keep on pushing, or when a kid has no interest of volunteering/writing for school newspaper/competing at some math contests/, and parents still continue pushing. </p>
<p>Our kids’ lives were pretty well planned out even before middle school, but only as much of been in the right track for math/science. D2 had a passion for science for a while because she thought she wanted to be a doctor, then it was to be a writer, and now a lawyer. But her courses in high school didn’t change because she changed her interests, and no one stood in her way of trying out different things.</p>
<p>*It depresses me deeply to think of kids giving up their passions and working like dogs with the only goal to get into a top college. *
The very best kids keep their passions and still produce at top levels. AND, come across in their CA and supps as interesting, balanced, mature people with some compassion as well as drive. That’s the competition for slots at the best colleges. </p>
<p>I also think there is way too much box checking when it comes to ECs where students are doing things that will look good to ad coms as opposed to following their interests.
Big problem here. Many of our kids don’t know what looks good to adcoms. They only know their own context, what made them BMOC at their hs. </p>
<p>*Colleges should be far more transparent. We should go after colleges and make them more transparent instead of telling angry kids to suck it up or that that’s the way it is in life. * </p>
<p>Another view is that kids should work a little harder on getting to know what that college wants, what it’s about, the real opportunities there, not just USNWR. And, they should be able to articulate why they want that major or when answering the Why Us? questions.</p>
<p>3togo - I have no idea how to do that. I am quite sure tho the numbers are not as fluid as you make it out. Vassar publishes admit rates for male and female applicants. They may also publish ave scores for each group. I found it useful when we were considering it.</p>
<p>lookingforawrd - Are you saying kids get rejected because they can’t answer that? Where have you been? There are loads of kis who did everything right and still get rejected. Don’t the adcoms themselves say that they could fill the class five times over with rejected kids?</p>