Even a teacher who truly likes the student may not necessarily write the kind of recommendation that helps the student stand out in competition with others at super-selective colleges, compared to teachers at top-end high schools with plenty of experience writing the needed kind of recommendation. Recommendations can be one of the biggest unknowns (that seem like “random” influences to the applicant) in one’s application.
It’s what happens when kids get too exotic with their college selections. They either get a long list of rejections or a list of acceptances to colleges they can’t afford. When you’re trying to choose between Michigan and Vanderbilt, one is private and the other is out of state, and your parents make $65k a year, then something got messed up. Both are unacceptable options. For a school to be a true safety school it has to be affordable, it has to be a school with a high acceptance rate for your stats, and it has to be a school you could see yourself going to. If you have your heart set on Harvard, and you apply to UNC just in case, chances are you’re going to get rejected by both schools and end up at community college for your first semester.
@CU123 Not an outright rejected (no updated post by user) and not a 1,600 SAT, so this example isn’t perfect, but I found it very quickly. I’m sure if you searched the hundreds of pages of the UM RD and EA threads, “I can almost guarantee you” that students with very high GPA and very high SAT/ACT scores were rejected by UM and other top public universities.
@CU123 I still you’re still implying public schools are in “crisis.” Keep grinding your axe. :-@
You’re a “one trick pony.” :-?
@sushiritto Rumor alert: This is unsubstantiated, but my son who applied to UMich two years ago was put on the waitlist after EA. He was a 1470 SAT, 4.0 UW GPA. He was on the waiting list maybe two weeks before he was accepted. He told me that it was an “understood phenom” with UMich that they put a ton on the waitlist because they can’t go through the stack of apps fast enough. So, they waitlist the majority and remove from the waitlist as they go through the stack. I’m not saying it’s true, but to be waitlisted and then removed before the next round seems to be one scenario that fits.
“When you’re trying to choose between Michigan and Vanderbilt, one is private and the other is out of state, and your parents make $65k a year, then something got messed up. Both are unacceptable options.”
If your parents make 65K a year Vanderbilt is likely to be a great option!
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@BrianBoiler In my example, the prospective student’s parent posted on 4/03/18 and not 12/24/17.
But that’s a rumor, but from what I read, the rumor was started several years ago, maybe when UM switched to the common app. @billcsho and/or @Alexandre are UM experts and better informed.
My main point is that @CU123 seems to think that the top public schools are “in crisis”, like Cal, UCLA, UVA, UM, etc., and don’t reject high stat students. They do. I know some high stat students that were rejected at top public schools. It was a difficult admission year for the Class of 2022.
@sushiritto good points, I didn’t look at the dates. I don’t think Cal, UCLA, UM, UVA are in crisis yet (I don’t believe CU123 believes that either), but I do believe that some of the lower level publics are/will be in trouble soon.
I also believe that there is some problem with the application of kids who are 36/1600/4.0 kids that are rejected from the top tier publics. Many are mentioned above in this thread. Bad recommendations, bad essays, maybe just not completely filling out the application. I know quite a few entitled kids who justify why they don’t need to spend a ton of time on the application or they write essays like “how dare you make me write an essay on this, can’t you see I’m very smart.”
I do not buy the “it’s random, it’s luck, if you are not hooked…” line of reasoning. There are two many threads that state things like “Harvard/UChicago/Stanford or Yale?” Most people aren’t accepted to just one of the elites they are accepted to multiple and then have to choose (or they apply ED/SCEA and get accepted outright). If it were random, you wouldn’t see so many people accepted to multiple and another group that was accepted by most/all. Statistics just don’t back up that theory.
This isn’t correct. Michigan had 59,886 applications in the 2017 admissions cycle. They offered admission to 15,871 (27% admit rate), of which 6,847 enrolled (43% yield). They offered a place on the waitlist to 11,127, of whom 4,124 accepted a place on the waitlist. Of those, only 470 were ultimately offered admission. And that was an unusually large number. In 2015 only 90 applicants were admitted off the waitlist, and in 2016 only 36 were. So it’s just not the case that they “waitlist the majority” and admit large numbers off the waitlist.
I think your son may be conflating their handling of (non-binding) early action (EA) with the waitlist. Under their EA plan, applicants who submit completed applications by Nov. 1 are promised a decision by Dec. 24. There are four possible outcomes: acceptance, deferral to the RD round, waitlist, or denial. Many of those not offered admission in the EA round are deferred to the RD round—in effect getting a second chance when matched up against the entire applicant pool—and of those who are deferred at the EA stage, a significant number are ultimately admitted in the RD round. Far fewer (if any) are waitlisted at the EA stage, though some are probablly deferred at the EA stage and then waitlisting in the RD round. It sounds like your son, an EA applicant, wasn’t waitlisted, but instead was deferred to the RD round. That may sound like a kind of “waitlist” but it’s really not. The waitlist gives them a pool of qualified applicants to choose from if they haven’t met their enrollment targets by the end of the RD round, i.e., by the final date to submit a deposit to secure a place in the entering class, and to compensate for “summer melt,” admitted students who do place a deposit but ultimately make a late decision not to enroll (e.g., because they accept admission off the waitlist for another school, health reasons, a late decision to take a gap year, or whatever). They’d have no reason to accept anyone of the waitlist while they’re still processing RD applications.
@BrianBoiler First, @CU123 has mentioned on several threads that public schools are “in crisis.” He/she believes it. In fact, he/she started a thread here on CC titled “public schools are in crisis.” What he/she does is “infect” other threads with his/her “thesis.” Private schools have issues too. And, in his/her thread, I posted that UM has the 8th largest endowment in the US, with $11.000,000,000 dollars, so whether you divide by student or look at the totallity of $11 Billion, UM is not worried and has no crisis. The same for other public schools, including the Texas schools, Cal, UCLA, UVA, UNC, etc.
Second, I choose to believe that there is an element of chance or randomness in admissions. Whether there’s a human or machine involved in the process.
There’s an old movie called “I, Robot” with Will Smith and I always remember the quote from the character Dr. Alfred Lanning, who said “there has always been ghosts in the machine, random segments of code that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols.” And yes, I’m conspiracy theorist from WAY BACK. =))
@sushiritto I am familiar with @cu123 and the posts on the public school in crisis. While I’m not going to go back and read it again, I don’t remember an implication that the best public schools are in crisis. We’ll let CU123 set me straight, but suspect the statement is aimed at schools like Ball State, Bowling Green State, Bloomsberg level publics. Maybe I’m wrong.
I’m not saying there is absolutely no chance or randomness, but the major factors tend to be applicant and not randomness that decides who gets in and who doesn’t.
Any movie with Will Smith in it isn’t old.
@bclintonk is there only two weeks between EA and RD at UofM? That was the suspect part. I believe you are right, he was differed and not waitlisted. However, I know that it was two weeks or less. In fact he found out he was accepted after being deffered faster then he was accepted at two other EA schools outright (UMD and UICU).
@BrianBoiler If you consider the UC’s, like Cal and UCLA, some of the best public schools, then @CU123 thinks they’re “in crisis.” He may have dialed back his/her rhetoric recently to “funding issues” rather than “crisis” at least in terms of the UC system.
Although at present, it doesn’t look like the UC or CSU system will raise fees/tuition this year and they didn’t raise fees/tuition last year either. Why? CA is receiving unexpected tax revenue flow(s). That doesn’t sound like a public school system with “issues” or a “crisis.”
@sushiritto I think all of California is in crisis. But this isn’t a political thread.
@BrianBoiler Well, I love it here. :D/
@BrianBoiler, Michigan does RD applications on a rolling basis—instead of holding all RD decisions until March as many schools do, they send out decisions in batches as those decisions are made. Any complete application received by Nov 1 is processed in the EA round, with a decision (admit, defer, waitlist, deny) by Dec. 24. They then start making decisions on applications received after Nov. 1 together with deferrals from the EA round. It’s not unusual for the first batch of RD decisions to go out two weeks after the Dec. 24 EA decision date, but they’ll continue sending them out in batches until they’ve gotten through the entire pile sometime in March.
Now I have heard that in some recent admissions cycles they’ve been so overwhelmed with EA applications that they’ve had to defer some before completing their painstaking 3 reads of the application. So while they’re technically in compliance with their promise to give an EA “decision” by Dec. 24, if that decision is deferral you don’t know whether it means they fully processed the application and decided to defer for a second look in the RD round, or instead they deferred because they never completed the first look. Sounds like the latter may be what happened to your son, because they decided to admit an applicant with clearly excellent stats so quickly after deferring in the EA round. And it would make sense that the very first applications they’d take up in the RD round would be those they were unable to fully consider before the EA decision date, and deferred on that basis.
@BrianBoiler , my high stats kid was deferred from EA and then waitlisted at UMichigan. I don’t believe there were any problems with the common application or references, since he got Stamps somewhere else, and also got into one of those schools with single digits admission rates and a corresponding place in the USNWR ranking. As far as the UMichigan specific application, I don’t think what hurt him was mentioning that he’s attended their summer camp (competitive admissions), that UMichigan offers one of the uncommon majors that he was interested in, and that his two main ECs also have a tie in with UMichigan.
How do you know that kids who post about multiple acceptances are not hooked?
@2more2go could he have left the name of another school in his application to UofM by mistake? Could one of the references? I assume he didn’t read the references. I really believe the top tier publics look for ways to accept perfect stats kids, not to reject. But if they have rules like, must submit one math, one english teacher recommendation and one of these kids knows better and gives them a theater and a math teacher or send me a 500 word essay on a “challenge you overcame and how that made you a better person,” and a 5,000 word document is sent; you could see where one school is rigid on their rules (especially one that gets 50,000+ applications) might reject a great student. Other institutions might not view that as a big deal and give you a great scholarship for it.
The only hook that makes sense for highly selective D3 schools is URM. And since most of these kids post what ethnicity they are, it is pretty easy to figure out. For D3 athletes, to benefit from the hook, they have to apply ED, to get that hook. So for the UChicago, Caltech, MIT, JHU, CMU threads I don’t think they are all hooked for recruited athlete. Same for the Williams/Amherst/Tufts/Bowdoin threads. It is tough to be a legacy to more than 2 schools, so that hook is gone. Maybe they are huge donors to multiple schools or children of famous people, but I suspect not.
For the Harvard/Princeton/Stanford/ schools, maybe they are all athletes, but again most of those kids will apply SCEA to their first choice.
At the large publics like UofM, where you apply EA and RD, maybe but I think the hooks are less important when you have 30,000+ undergrads on campus.
Again, this is based on some very suspect evidence. Are the posts on CC correct? Did they really get accepted to all these schools? Are their scores accurate or inflated? I see who is accepted to where in one very well to do suburban 500+ students/class public school and the top students are going to the schools they expected to. Princeton, UChicago, UPenn, USNAx2, Cornell, etc. All of them had choices too to equally prestigious schools. I have the experience of my two sons and one who couldn’t believe he wasn’t accepted outright to UofM and GTech (but later accepted, but chose to go to UMD for merit money) and the other who played the game a little better and was accepted to the two schools he applied (UCHicago ED and the USNA).
@BrianBoiler You seem to be pushing an agenda as well. UM uses the Common App just like a lot of both private and public schools.
Some folks just can’t accept the fact that high stat students do get rejected at public universities. There are a lot of high stat students applying to top public universities and they simply can’t accept them all.
Vanderbilt would be a great option for a high-scoring student with household income of $65K. That school on average would cost that student about $8K per year. Vanderbilt gives great FA.
@sushiritto I don’t think I’m pushing an agenda. I know UofM uses the common app, but they also have a supplement, which is another essay. Could that essay have had the name of another school? It is not an unheard of mistake?
My point is that I do believe that this process is much less random then people believe. I agree that great schools are rejecting perfect stat kids. But, I look at the cause of the rejection as holistic application problem (spelling mistake, wrong type of recommendation, less then stellar recommendations, not meeting the essay prompt requirements, assuming the ACT score on your transcript is adequate without sending the official report…) more than the roll of the dice. When you are down to the last candidates, maybe randomness plays a bigger role, but I don’t believe so for the earlier acceptances in any cycle and if I had time to prove it I would.
I literally had an argument with my son on the ACT thing above. He believed that because one college said the test scores on your transcript were good enough, that all of the schools would take them that way. Kids rationalize the strangest things.
If I do have an agenda, it would be to get that message out to the next class of applicants. You do control a large portion of the probability of acceptance. Own it and don’t knuckle under to the X University only has a 9% acceptance rate, therefore your probability of acceptance is only 9%. That is not a true statement at all. If you are a high stat kid, your probability is much greater than 9%, control the things you can control to maximize your chance of acceptance.