Brown’s website is very clear that they don’t track demonstrated interest. They won’t give you brownie points for visiting or contacting the AO. They believe you are interested because you send in an application. However, at least on the page for the BS/MD program, they state that they want to know why Brown is the right college for you. So, they won’t track your visit, but you had better find some way to get to know the school well enough to satisfy them.
@ucbalumnus —if an applicant can’t be bothered to let the college know that he/she is seriously interested in attending – and the college has plenty of others to choose from … why should the college take a risk on the student who hasn’t communicated their intent?
Or put it another way: one of the most important “qualifications” needed to succeed in a competitive environment is the ability to take initiative and advocate for oneself. So by definition – the students who fail to do that during the application process, have fallen short – they may have great stats, but they have poor communication skills — so if they end up waitlisted or rejected, then it’s a function of them being less qualified than students with better communication skills.
It’s not as if the student is being turned away and the spot is left unfilled. The student is being turned away precisely because all the available spots have been offered to more appealing candidates.
Applying to the college is supposed to indicate serious interest in attending.
Wouldn’t that and showing communication skills be done in the essays (especially if there is a “why [this college]?” essay), rather than concocting ways to add “interest” contacts (e.g. asking admissions for something even when nothing is needed)?
Not in a universe where students are applying to colleges by the dozens. A student can only attend one college.
To the extent that this discussion has been focused on WUSTL - there isn’t a “why this college” essay - as WUSTL simply takes the common or coalition app, without any supplemental essays.
But the point is in a competitive environment, there are winners and losers. Merely adding a few more colleges to the list and clicking submit on a generic, shared application is not a winning strategy.
I don’t know why it seems to you to be so disconcerting that college admissions staff is going to favor students who they think are more likely to attend. They aren’t in the business of giving out trophies – they are trying to build a class.
This was certainly true back when I applied to college, when each application was different and had to be typed up separately. Colleges could be pretty sure that you weren’t just applying for the heck of it. But now, when you can apply to 20 schools with the push of a button, I don’t think schools can make that assumption any more.
" But now, when you can apply to 20 schools with the push of a button, I don’t think schools can make that assumption any more"
I disagree. YES, you can add a college and submit with a click of the button, but MOST ALL highly selective schools have additional essays (besides WUSTL). I know my D applied to many schools - all she was very interested in - but it took alot of work with the extra supplemental essays. YES, some essays could be somewhat recycled, but I saw alot of work go into each and every school supplemental. I do agree with @ucbalumnus on his/her statement about interest by applying (unless it is really just a click of the button for some schools).
“If the arrival of the common app also coincides with first entry of that student’s name in the college database, it’s a pretty clear sign that the student has spent their previous summer and fall looking at other, different colleges.”
The reason many of the selective colleges don’t track interest is that they don’t want to penalize lower income families who cannot afford the travel. This has been made clear by the adcoms, and I actually believe them on this. Your essays, applying early and/or interview is where the interest comes in and can be shown (or not shown).
Seems like it would be easier for a college to just have its own application (instead of the Common, Coalition, or Universal Application) with lots of essays to make sure that the applicant is definitely interested, rather than use hidden “level of interest” indicators that become a game for those who know, and an unknown barrier for those who do not.
But then perhaps that is the intent, so that the college gets more applications that to reject to drive down admission rate to move up the rankings, as well as tip the admit pool higher on the family income scale (since lower SES students are less likely to have high school counselors or others to inform them about the “level of interest” game).
“and it’s quite possible that the student who can’t visit but has been sending the admissions rep a steady stream of emails and questions is perceived as far more likely to attend than the student who simply showed up with their parents to a college tour and info session the previous summer.)”
There’s no way an adcom differentiates interest on that, what about the people that call the adcoms and don’t give their name? You’d think calling would indicate higher interest than emails, but adcoms don’t sit around taking names on who called. Stream of emails is not good, esp if the questions can be answered by going oinline.
“If, as many here appear to advocate, colleges all decide to play the level of interest game, then there is no way for any college to be a safety for anyone, except possibly with ED.”
I think that @ucbalumnus has a good point here, or at least this would be a very worrisome point if all universities were to care about yield protection.
For us our “safeties” were our in-state public flagship, and universities out of the country (specifically in Canada). If our in-state public universities were to start trying to ensure yield protection, along with the public universities in nearby states, then we would not have had a true safety in the country.
I suppose that if only the “top 50” universities practice yield protection in this manner, then for a top student the 51st university would be a safety. However, I suspect that the 51st university might possibly want to become a top 50 school. If yield continues to be a ranking factor then they need to do yield protection also.
To me this interest in yield protection just adds another level of unpredictability to admissions in US schools. This in turn seems to add another level of stress on our high school students.
Yield isn’t a factor in the US News ranking, and I don’t know of any other ranking that uses it. But yield affects acceptance rate, and US News does use acceptance rate in its rankings, albeit to only a small degree—2.5% of the overall ranking, I believe.
But I think this isn’t really about rankings. It’s about managing freshman enrollment… Very high-yield schools don’t need to worry about that so much because most of those they admit will enroll, and it’s probably fairly predictable from year to year. Second-tier and lower private colleges and universities typically manage yield through selective discounting (“merit scholarships”) and if they know their business, they probably have a pretty good idea of how deep those discounts need to be for an applicant with a given set of stats and a given SES to optimize yield. Most second- and lower-tier public universities don’t really have the resources to play the financial incentives game the private colleges are playing, but they know they’re mostly getting in-state kids who probably have a limited and familiar set of options. I think it’s the schools in maybe the #12 to #100 range in the rankings that need to worry about yield because for them it’s more unpredictable and their yield varies widely with various buckets of students. The example I used before was Michigan which gets about a 70% yield from in-state admits (extremely high) and according to some reports 80% from legacies (off the charts), but probably somewhere in the 30s for OOS non-legacy admits, but undoubtedly wide variation within that group as well based on factors that they’ve almost certainly recognized but are not transparent to us.
@ucbalumnus: “If, as many here appear to advocate, colleges all decide to play the level of interest game, then there is no way for any college to be a safety for anyone, except possibly with ED. Would that be desirable?”
Great question, but why criticize “level of interest” as a “game”?
All competitive schools have ED. In terms of filling freshman seats, it would be truly courageous for any competitive school to discontinue ED and rely solely on RD for admissions. (This, despite the often heard Adcom statement, “above a certain level of ‘high stats’ test scores and GPAs, our school has qualified applicants to fill our freshman class many times over.”) Isn’t ED, in reality, the ultimate way applicants express “level of interest”?
When all competitive schools say they use a holistic admission process – which many CC posters have repeatedly defended, however opaque – why wouldn’t Adcoms use all available information, including level of interest, to discern how to best fill their freshman seats? Don’t all competitive schools claim to have their own secret sauce for admissions review?
I suppose what is “desirable” is in the eye of the beholder, but to be fair, let’s all agree that the holistic admissions process is far from a level playing field – where “overqualified” applicants are routinely denied admission in favor of other applicants (with “lesser stats”) who hold the hooks deemed desirable by each school’s secret sauce. On that playing field, most anything is fair game.
“All competitive schools have ED. In terms of filling freshman seats, it would be truly courageous for any competitive school to discontinue ED and rely solely on RD for admissions.”
I suppose Berkeley and UCLA aren’t competitive? Oh wait, the UCs (and UCLA in particular) have more applications than any other college, but rely solely on RD and don’t consider level of interest :-?
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT do not have ED. The first four have restricted EA, while Caltech and MIT have unrestricted EA.
UCB, UCLA, and USC have neither ED nor EA, although USC has an earlier deadline for merit scholarship consideration.
“All competitive schools have ED.”
Not true. Stanford does not, nor does Yale, Harvard, Georgetown, Notre Dame, and BC, to name a few.
Restricted EA = ED, yeah, yeah, yeah I know there are easier ways to get out of it, but for the purposes of showing interest they are exactly the same for those schools that use it.
I still am amazed at the amount of people who think the college admission process should be fair/transparent to prospective students. It is not their purpose to admit and educate students. The education of students is one tactic in how they meet their purpose (especially true for Private/Research Universities (IVYs, Stanford, UChicago, CMU, MIT, etc.)).
The Private Research University has only one purpose, to further the “Body of Knowledge for the benefit of society.” The incoming class is a raw material that they use to help them accomplish that purpose. While it is a beneficial arrangement for the University and the student, do not fool yourselves into thinking that the University is looking to be fair to all those who apply.
One of those things that helps them is to get named near the top of all the rankings that matter. That helps them fund-raise, that helps them win grants, that helps them get their name in the public eye, which spirals up the first two things in this list.
If you want to go to one of these great universities, you need to find out what they are looking for and give it to them. If you don’t, you will find yourself on the outside. If you do, you have a much better chance of getting to play in their process. One of those things is showing interest. I know some schools say they don’t factor it in, but if Brown is hosting an event at your high school, you should go. If there is an information session at a local library, you should go. If you have a legitimate question during the application process that you can’t find the answer on their website, you should reach out to them. Even if they say they don’t factor it in, you could be down to “I’ve one more slot from my region to fill, I’m down to two students. Student A visited with me when I was at their school, attended our information session at the library, and sent me a very smart question. I only know student B through the application.” Who do you think the AO is going to favor?
“Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT do not have ED. The first four have restricted EA, while Caltech and MIT have unrestricted EA.”
I stand corrected. Would you agree that EA at these schools (and Notre Dame + BC) is a way to convey a level of interest ?
UCB, UCLA, and USC have neither ED nor EA, although USC has an earlier deadline for merit scholarship consideration.
I stand corrected. UCB and UCLA are indeed competitive schools that rely solely on RD. Would you agree that an earlier application at USC is one way to express a level of interest ?
I agree! This is exactly why MIT does not participate in the common app. I think more schools don’t do this because they want to keep their applicant numbers up for the prestige of having a low admit rate. Why else would WUSTL drop its supplemental essay? To entice more kids to apply.
MIT explicitly says that EA there does not give and admission advantage.
http://mitadmissions.org/apply/freshman/cycles
Princeton and Notre Dame consider level of applicant’s interest. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, UCB, UCLA, USC, and BC do not, according to collegedata.com or common data sets.
“Princeton and Notre Dame consider level of applicant’s interest. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, UCB, UCLA, USC, and BC do not, according to collegedata.com or common data sets.”
I would be careful about this blanket statement. I have had multiple counselors tell me that USC does indeed care about “demonstrated interest” whether or not they state it on the CDS.