Are you seeing kids not getting in ANYWHERE this year?

Parent Cafe
161

I agree, but I’d add a couple of things. First, admissions committees do care about SAT/ACT scores and GPAs for purposes of assessing whether the applicant is capable of doing the work and likely to succeed at the school. Research shows the tests have some validity when used for making that threshold determination, and that’s all the College Board and ACT claim for their tests. . Higher test scores do correlate somewhat with higher success rates, but marginal differences in scores at the top end are pretty meaningless for that purpose, especially at highly selective schools where typically upwards of 90% of enrolled freshmen graduate.

Second, I agree that many schools (though not all) care about test scores for prestige and ranking purposes, but here, too, marginal differences at the top end are far less important than many on CC seem to think. What’s typically published is the 25th and 75th percentile medians, and US News uses test score medians for ranking purposes… But any score above the school’s 75th percentile will have exactly the same effect on those medians as any other score above that level—it will, in combination with others, pull the medians marginally higher. So if you’re the University of Michigan and your ACT 25th and 75th percentiles are 30-33, a 34 will help you just as much in the rankings and published data as a 35 or a 36. And if you’re the University of Detroit Mercy with ACT medians of 22-27, any score above 27 will help you just as much as a 36. So once an applicant is in that range, other admissions factors are likely to take precedence over marginal differences in test scores.

In either context, the notion of an applicant being “overqualified” seems rather meaningless, because it’s based on a misunderstanding about how test scores and GPAs are actually used in the admissions process… But I think calmom has it exactly right: schools do care about yield management because it’s an institutional imperative to get the size of the entering class right. An applicant’s numerical credentials may figure into that, but so do many other factors. For example, I’ve read that something like 80% of University of Michigan legacies who are offered admission enroll, while their overall yield is in the mid-40% range, and OOS yield even lower. In-state yield is right around 70%… So an in-state legacy legacy with a 36 ACT and 4.0 UW GPA will look a lot more attractive to Michigan’s admissions committee than an OOS non-legacy with identical scores and GPA, especially one coming from a school where they’ve historically gotten a low yield. And for that matter, an OOS legacy with a 34 or 35 probably looks more attractive to them than the low-yield 36/4.0. It’s not that the low-yield 36/4.0 is “overqualified.” Some 36/4.0’s are being admitted; it’s just that some are more likely to enroll, and that makes them more attractive candidates for admission…

162

Colleges factor in yield prediction at all levels.

It just happens that it is only those who are externally perceived as “top” applicants who seem to attribute their waitlist status to yield protection --but that doesn’t mean that yield wasn’t considered as a factor for other students as well. The point is that it is important across the board … but students who have less impressive stats may be less likely to turn down a spot because of better offers from higher ranked colleges. But that doesn’t mean that other factors impacting yield aren’t being considered, including lack of demonstrated interest.

But bottom line it is a waste of a spot for a college to offer admission to any student who is less likely to enroll than average. For highly desirable students, that can be offset somewhat by offers of generous merit awards – but for the bulk of the admitted class, yield prediction remains very important.

163

When I originally noted that WUSTL’s graph looks like yield protection, I didn’t mean it in a pejorative way. I don’t think there is anything wrong with a school taking necessary steps to acurately predict its incoming class. We have seen how problematic it is when schools miscalculate yield in either direction. I can also see the benefit in filling the class with people eager to attend, rather then people who are reluctantly coming because they didn’t get into an Ivy.

All I meant was that the graph was an interesting glimpse into the process and that the highest stat kids should not get their hearts set on WUSTL, unless they are willing and able to apply ED. On the other hand, the students with slightly lower stats within a certain range had a pretty decent chance of getting in. It does look like the school is acurately predicting student interest because in the last three years, all of the admitted students attended.

Also interesting, with regard to slight differences in ACT scores, I could find no school where a 35 had a better shot then a 34. There are not enough 36s to make any determination about them. And yes, I have spent way too much time peering at naviance graphs.

164

Notice also that small differences in yield rates matter more for enrollment management purposes at the low end of the yield curve. If your expected yield on a certain category of applicants is 5%, you’d need to admit 2,000 such applicants for every 100 you expect to enroll. But if this year there’s an unexpected slight uptick to 6%, those 2,000 admits turn into 120 enrolled students, overshooting your enrollment target by 20.

But for another category for which your expected yield is 80%, you’d need to admit just 125 for every 100 you expect to enroll. If there’s an uptick to 81%, your 125 admits become 101 enrolled students, overshooting the enrollment target by only 1. That’s a much more manageable problem. It’s just easier to manage enrollment if you’re admitting applicants who are more likely to attend.

165

@gallentjill – does your Naviance chart for your school distinguish between ED/RD applications? Because you drew a certain conclusion based on a chart with numbers — but it’s also possible that you are just seeing an artifact of the application strategy of kids at your school, possibly influenced by advising practices a the school. So if a kid perceives WUSTL as a desirable school where they have the best shot of admission — then they may be highly likely to apply ED. But maybe the very highest stat students at your school are targeting Ivies … and so by definition are only applying to WUSTL RD.

166

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? Seems like that situation would lead to more shutouts and more emergency gap years.

167

What’s preventing any student from demonstrating interest in their safeties?

168

Kids from low income families may not know they need to express interest. If their parents aren’t that knowledgeable about the college process or their guidance counselor isn’t aware or involved, those kids may miss out on some great opportunities.

169

My son has two college educated, high middle income parents (at least on paper) and expressing interest wasn’t something we ever considered. We did go out to 2 East Coast schools during special events, so we registered, but that was only because I wanted my West Coast kid to get a feel for how he’d fare in the cold. He got into 8 of the 10 (6 of which he was strongly considering) and the other 2 were reaches. I don’t think interest plays a part for a strong candidate, but might tip the scales for someone on the bubble.

170

If college admin reps come to your HS or community, attending one of those presentations can be a good way to show interest without spending lots of $$. We did the college tour thing as part of family vacations. We also looked at several local/local-ish schools to get a sense of whether my sons liked small/medium/large/LAC/research univ/rural/urban. That was a good way to discover preferences to target a good list. We are lucky to live in an area with many colleges, so that was also an affordable way to consider options.

In our family’s experience, the best way to express interest in a particular school is through the essays. That doesn’t mean fawning all over the school, but concretely demonstrating with specific examples how the student and school are a good pairing. Yes, it meant separate essays in some cases. Yes, it was a LOT of work. However, my sons got into every school they REALLY wanted. I think some of the other schools on their lists recognized that my sons were a better fit at X instead. They were right. Those waitlists and rejections had a definite pattern, and it was all about the fit.

That said – I think it’s also helpful to apply to a variety of schools (large, small, LAC, research university, etc.). S2 thought that he would love being at an LAC – he was rejected/waitlisted at every one of them. Something in his app made them feel he wasn’t a good fit. They were right – a midsize was better for him and he did very well with those schools. S1 was one of those applicants who certain schools looked at and recognized that the yield rate for students with X, Y or Z is extremely low. He was sincerely interested, but they were right.

I know of another situation where someone applied to nine highly selective LACs and Harvard (double legacy). Seven rejections, three waitlists. If you are an intelligent young woman looking at selective East Coast LACs, the odds are not with you. It’s an overrepresented demographic. We knew of someone else who applied to 20+ schools and got one acceptance. To me, that’s a clear sign that there was a big red warning flag. Poor choice of rec letters? Arrogance in the essays? Grades and scores were fine. This is where a rolling admit or EA application makes lots of sense to me – if you don’t get the results you’re expecting in early apps, you have time to retool/add other schools/make sure things were sent out/get another letter/rework an essay.

Show respect to your “safety” schools. Don’t blow off the essays or the deadlines. UMD has early deadlines for scholarships and other goodies, and while it is the “likely” school on the list for top students, they don’t like being treated poorly. We know of someone who thought they could throw an app at UMD in February and get all the goodies. They rejected that person.

Austinmshauri is right – every year, there are low-income/underrepresented students who come here looking for advice on schools and FA, and someone here helpfully mentions Questbridge or similar programs. I get goosebumps when those students come back later and have earned admits to great schools with enough financial support to make it happen. Not every GC or parent knows about Questbridge (or Gates, CocaCola, etc…). To me, this kind of support is one of the greatest parts of CC.

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@calmom

Our Naviance indicates which of the dots are ED/EA/RD. So, for example, you can tell that no one has gotten in to Brown from our school without applying ED. However, none of the applicants in the naviance history for WUSTL are ED. So all the accepted and rejected candidates are RD. Of course, its possible that its an inaccuracy in the data. I do find it strange that there are no ED apps to that school.

172

In addition to what @austinmshauri mentioned in reply #167, even those who know that they need to express interest may not know what the college values as an expression of interest, and may not be willing to apply ED due to a need to compare net prices.

173

My hope is that the colleges don’t expect the impossible. I would hope that they would not expect a family to fly all over the country to visit campus. But they might expect a family who lived 3 hours away to make the trip. Above all, I would hope that colleges rely most on the “why us” essay to make sure that the student really values what the school values about itself. The school wants to know that a student is serious in considering it AND that the student will be a good fit for the college. In any case, all of our N=1 anecdotal experiences don’t really mean anything. Its fine to say, “I never visited anywhere and my child got into all of his colleges.” But that says nothing about how best to make the process work for a different family, with different needs, and issues.

174

“Above all, I would hope that colleges rely most on the “why us” essay to make sure that the student really values what the school values about itself.”

Wash U’s acceptance patterns over the years, as well as your schools Navience data, show that they rely on ED as the best way to show a student really values the college. All the " I REALLY want to go to Wash U" essays in the world will not sway the admissions committee the way applying ED will.

“Hoping” that a college will change the way it handles admissions decisions is probably not a smart tactic.
Better to face reality than to hope something will change, when all available evidence shows that it probably wont. As far as Wash U is concerned, its admission policy is not broken, so there is no reason to change it.

175

There are a lot of colleges that don’t care about interest at all. You don’t sign in, no one even knows if you were there or not.

176

I’m not sure that follows. Many people really like their safeties and do show interest, even apart from ED.

And I’m not sure “many” people here are advocating that “all” colleges “play the level of interest game”—I certainly don’t see it, but maybe I missed something. In any event, there’s not much danger of that happening. HYPSM don’t much care about level of interest because they don’t need to—they’re going to get a very high yield anyway. And at the other end of the selectivity scale, most colleges, public and private, can’t afford to use level of interest because they’re just desperate to get warm bodies with minimally acceptable academic credentials in the door, and tuition checks in the till. Between those two poles it’s a mixed bag. Many private colleges and universities are more focused on providing financial incentives in the form of “merit scholarships” (i.e., tuition discounting) to bring in the class they want. And many public universities don’t consider level of interest because they can’t (or don’t want to) handle all the additional paperwork. Many use a strict by-the-numbers approach, or maybe require a recommendation or two to have some assurance the applicant isn’t a public safety threat, and maybe an essay to be sure the applicant’s writing is minimally acceptable. Even at the level of the Big Ten, which is pretty selective as public universities go, only Michigan, Michigan State, Wisconsin, and Purdue consider level of interest, and only Michigan State lists it as “important.” The other Big Ten publics–Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio State, Penn State, Rutgers, and Maryland—all say they don’t consider level of interest, and I don’t think anyone’s advocacy on CC is going to change their mind.

177

@ucbalumnus – you seem to be playing something of a game with the use of the word “safety”. The example brought up was WUSTL, which is a highly selective private university (16% admit rate) which is need-aware in admissions and could not possibly be a “safety” for any student. It is a reach school for all, at that step down from reachiness from the Ivies - so akin to Tufts, Rice, Georgetown. These are colleges that students who are aiming for Ivies use as “backups” (not safeties, not even matches – just schools that are somewhat let reachy) — and they are also schools that are targeted as top choices by high stat students who happen to be more realistic in their goals.

That is not to say that there aren’t some schools with higher admit rates that are also somewhat discerning about fit and yield factors — but those schools would still not be “safeties” – they would be “likelies” perhaps, and part of the application process is to demonstrate sincerity. Which really isn’t hard to do.

When colleges say that they are looking for “demonstrated interest” they don’t mean that they have some obscure set of hoops for the student to jump through - they just are wary when the first and only contact they have from a student is the application they receive. 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.

@gallentjill - I don’t think your Naviance data is inaccurate, but it is incomplete. You are looking at little dots on a chart that are probably too small in overall number to be statistically significant, and it tells you absolutely nothing about the qualitative factors that accompany those dots (EC’s, essays, recs, intended major, etc.) In some cases, the information higher stats you see on the chart might also be correlated with missing pieces in other areas. In post #136 you wrote,

I don’t know about your school, but there are a lot of schools where students who are participating in some EC’s have scheduling constraints that limit the number of APs & weighted grades they can have. A common example is kids who take band. At a certain level, an A in an unweighted course is bringing down the GPA ---- but that very well could be part of an EC that is highly valued by a college.

I do think that when WUSTL sees a 1450-1550 SAT range they are looking at a student clearly within their midrange – and that says something to them about fit. WUSTL also does not require supplemental essays, so in most cases they aren’t looking at a “why this college” essay, but drawing conclusions based on the same set of essays and recs that have gone to the other schools. And it may be that they are getting a different message from that upper-end waitlisted group than from the “tight circle” group.

178

@bclintonk Our high school sends many kids to Penn State. I know their Common Data Set states that level of interest is not considered. But the last two years a PSU admission counselor advised a large group of parents and students (including me and D) that “showing interest” was important. In fact, the rep discussed it at length - get on mailing list, reach out to rep, attend local college fairs, campus visits, etc.

I’m not advocated that “interest” is good or bad, but it does make me nervous when I see conflicting info from a school.

@OHMomof2 I agree not every college cares about interest, but do you think if they ask for sign in, they care?

179

Whatever a college says – all colleges who have more applicants than they have space for need to be concerned about yield. They simply can’t do business without being able to reasonably project how many students they need to admit in order to fill the spots they have available. And that is a hard task to manage in an environment where students routinely are applying to a dozen schools or more, so almost all by definition will have other options.

“Interest” is not the only way for the college to ascertain likelihood of attendance – but it is something that is within the control of the student. (Many ways for the student to engage with the school beyond visiting - 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.)

Other factors that the college may be considering in its yield projections could be far less transparent and harder for the student to influence. For example – the college may very well be looking at historical trends in enrollment from certain regions; or the college might correlate information related to specific student interests or activities to the factors that tend to attract students to that campus. Some colleges tend to attract kids who are outdoorsy types – some colleges are known for their marching bands or a capella groups. So maybe something in the student’s profile gives a better sense of why they are likely to attend – or not. That’s an element of “fit” that the college ad coms will see and understand— but may not be so obvious to the student.

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Why is it that necessarily the assumption? Seems like the following scenario is possible and common:

  • Applicant researches college X using college X's web site.
  • Applicant finds all needed academic information (majors, general education, etc.) on college X's web site.
  • Applicant uses the net price calculator on college X's web site.
  • Applicant either does not need to visit, cannot afford a pre-application visit to a distant college, or is local to the college and has already visited without being recorded at the admission office.
  • Applicant does not have additional questions to ask the admissions office, so s/he does not make any such contact.
  • Applicant's previous standardized tests were taken before s/he put college X on his/her application list, so s/he did not have any previous score reports sent to college X.
  • Applicant does not want to apply ED because s/he wants to compare financial aid and scholarship offers.
  • Therefore, the first official contact that college X sees from the applicant is the application.

None of the above actions hit the “level of applicant’s interest” buttons usually used by colleges that consider that, even if college X really is a top choice for the applicant.