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Thanks LongPrime. The student with the unique ‘must have’ of a nuclear reactor is olderwisermom’s son. Sorry for the confusion. In all the things our kids look for, that one really makes me smile. I thought my son was tough insisting on wind tunnels. We did find the only Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility (NBRF) on a college campus at UMDCP which is unbelievably cool. He gave the tank a thumbs up…the school a thumbs down. Jeeze…</p>
<p>My younger daughter lucked out and barely got any college marketing mailings. I think she got just one, Harvard. This is likely due to the fact that she never took the PSATs. Other D got a lot of brochures but she took the PSATs in tenth and eleventh grades.</p>
<p>LongPrime and BlueIguana: Yes, our son looked into Oregon State. We have friends whose son is a freshman there. The boys have been friends since preschool. If things don’t go as we hope in Dec. (EA at reach and/or Honor College at safety), he may apply there. Deadline is Feb. 1. I’ve never been to Oregon so it would at least be a fun trip to visit!</p>
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Which to my mind is why it’s far more important to raise kids to pick colleges, as opposed to kids certain colleges will pick. IOW, DDs and DSs, buyers choose products & services, not the other way around. The notion that some buyers are less worthy of the product is largely part of the marketing & sales pitch that creates greater demand than supply.</p>
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not sure that paragraph is logically consistant … maybe part of the goal of the mailings is to find URMs and people from North Dakota and the flutist they need … or maybe it is totally a cynical plot to drive up their applications.</p>
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I don’t know that I’d call it a “cynical plot,” but I think it’s the case that # of applications received divided by # applicants admitted = “selectivity rating,” so it’s not irrelevant, although it’s also true that those levels of selectivity are capped. </p>
<p>I do think URMs and overall student diversity plays a big part. Not so sure about the flutist, though. :)</p>
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<p>Hmmm. Maybe this has been in some of the unopened snail mail. Maybe all of these schools know that D1 isn’t going to open any of this? Ah-hah, I just realized that’s why schools send postcards–because students just aren’t interested enough to open plain white envelopes, or even big viewbooks. Full-color postcards with witty quotes and clever visual jokes might actually be looked at.</p>
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<p>44,000 will (sooner or later) become the average number of applications at the Ivy League.</p>
<p>Last year, the Ivy League plus Stanford and MIT received about 270,000 applications --a twenty increase in two years. The number of admitted students is about 28,000. </p>
<p>Comparing the 28,000 admitted students to the 44,000 students scoring above 1270 might offer a different perspective.</p>
<p>Xiggi -
Cross applicants and cross admits in those #'s? (270,000 unique applicants? 28,000 unique admissions?)</p>
<p>Is the 44,000 unique test takers…or just 44,000 tests?</p>
<p>Just curious…</p>
<p>Even an institution like CUNY is currently playing this game. </p>
<p>I was recently rejected admission to one of CUNY’s CCNY; a few weeks after I received the “rejection” email, I received a glossy brochure and a letter from CCNY’s director of admissions congratulating me for my choosing CCNY and how “they hoped to see me on campus next spring!” Nevermind that my GPA is .6 higher than the avg. GPA of students that have transferred to CCNY.</p>
<p>Oh well, at least I know why I was rejected. Before 2008, I would have been admitted as soon as I clicked the “apply” button. But since nowadays more people are applying to CUNY for financial reasons (tuition is dirt cheap), CUNY has the luxury of rejecting transfer applications from one CUNY school to another in order to admit more OOS students. They even have a waitlist now.</p>
<p>Even a school like Brooklyn College is now claiming they are becoming more selective. Brooklyn College, a public institution mostly surrounded by poor NYC neighborhoods, is claiming more selectivity. What a joke.</p>
<p>19,000 applicants, 43,000 applications, 32, 000 applicants…each counsellor reading 1200 to 1500 files per cycle…</p>
<p>Any yet many still actually believe the myth that schools engage in ‘holistic’ assessment, whereby each student’s file and multiple essays is carefully read and studied, that each transcript is read and judged on its own unique merits (since they intimately know the profiles of the 24,000 potentially highschools), and that eventually students are hand picked in concert with the others, to create a special balance of attributes in a class?</p>
<p>Every year I have to read a relatively tiny number of the best applications to our graduate program in our particular department. I devote days to that assignment and you would not believe how we have to make quick and fast judgments, sorting into piles based on some heuristics, and gloss over many details to get it accomplished. </p>
<p>I don’t believe for a minute that colleges actually spend much time with each application at all. Not when we are talking tens of thousands. They want you to believe the myth but in reality there is no incentive for them to do so. They can very quickly pick out the cream of the crop using some fast heuristics and create a high calibre and diverse class (without even reading essays or bothering to balance and weigh all the kinds of pros and cons with each application).</p>
<p>Will this trend end up waitlisting more kids? It seems that with more kids applying to more colleges, there will be a lower yield of students attending any particular school.</p>
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<p>Spot on point, Xiggi.</p>
<p>I posted on this topic in March 2010 after being rejected by Upenn, Cornell and Duke. I got into BC and other fine schools but had no busy applying to these “stretch” schools. I realized that I was just application fodder being used to lower their acceptance rates. The colleges won’t stop until they are under 5%.</p>
<p>Well we know that someone at U of Chicago read the essays of the kids they accepted EA last year because they sent every one of them a holiday card with a comment about one of their essays. :)</p>
<p>Back in the dark ages when I read applications for Columbia’s architecture school every application got read by three people. (Two professors, one student.) We went through them fairly quickly, but certainly every word got read of anyone who had grades and scores in the ballpark and generally even if they weren’t. I remember one difficult application from a kid with dyslexia, terrible scores, mediocre grades, and fantastic recommendations. It came down to the portfolio for him.</p>
<p>^ I’m sure they read those essays :). And yeah, you are talking about a tiny number (compared to these giant ones).</p>
<p>And while all three are supposed to do a read- in our department everyone is supposed to read every one- does not mean it actually happens. Moreover, the focus is on those that make the cut, nowhere near <em>everyone</em> (let alone the majority). It is not remotely ‘holistic’ in the sense they lead you to believe. </p>
<p>Heuristics rule, and it will always be the case with these huge numbers.</p>
<p>If you’re curious about whether adcoms read those essays, I’d say it’s a resounding YES!</p>
<p>Last February, my son got an email from one of the readers at a T20 school, telling him how much he enjoyed reading his essay. He also suggested a book that went along with the particular topic son had discussed. The email started with, “I don’t normally write to applicants, but…”</p>
<p>Um, are some essays read? Yes. Does that mean they are reading all of them? No and certainly not with 20,000-30,000 applications. Does anyone even have a sense of the sheer size that number? Do you know what a set of fifty applications is like on a desk, let alone tried to read and process and remember them together? </p>
<p>As but one example: I was just watching an admissions video for Berkeley. They were dispelling the ‘myths’. One myth the claimed was that no one read their application, that it was all test score based. They highlighted that yes they do holistic reviews and a scene shows a group sitting around with files in their hands discussion them. They poit out that they have “100 plus” admissions officers reading the applications. </p>
<p>They left out the little detail about 50,000 applications. That would be 500 applications and essays per adcom. I don’t think so.</p>
<p>I wonder if you could randomly mix all the applications (or assign them random numbers), then use statistical sampling to decide what the class’s mean SAT etc should be… just a thought :D</p>
<p>But to think about it, you can’t blame the schools for wanting a higher reputation, nor can you blame the student who applies to 100 schools (unless some of them are non-researched. then that would be their ‘fault’ kind of), just to make sure he gets in somewhere… vicious cycle, really. I wonder what the University Application Season in 2050, say, will look like!</p>
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I have no idea how they reivew these apps, my feeling is that the review is more complete than you seem to think, but not this fine-tooth-comb type review that they claim.</p>
<p>But why does this 500 application number strike you as so implausible? How long do they have to review these documents? 3 months?</p>
<p>In my job I review documentation far more complicated, varied and extensive than 500 college applications over the period of 3 months.</p>
<p>If I had the luxury of dealing with the same basic document covering the same basic issues for most of it, I could do it a lot faster. </p>
<p>And I don’t think anyone claims they remember all 500. I don’t remember everything I’ve read over the past 3 months, but I was certainly able to read and process it as it came across my desk.</p>