OP has great insight.
He will likely be successful anywhere
he goes.
How kind of him to share his story with us all.
@Postmodern, itās not game theory, itās statistics. When events are not independent but correlated, you canāt just use that simple math.
One problem is that some of those 70% that donāt get in miss out because of something that is a flaw in the application. It might be tone of an essay, recommendations that donāt really shine, ECs that are solid but not outside the mainstream, or that the entire pool of applicants (many apply to more than one Ivy) is heavily weighted in some way that year that makes the schools much pickier about applications that look like the given applicant. The top schools are not identical in what they look for, but they often have similarities ā so something that gets an applicant knocked out in one pool (and it doesnāt take much, a feather touch at those schools can move you out of the accept pile) might come to play at the other schools as well.
@PurpleTitan , I would like you to explain why to me ā and please show your work!!!
From mathgoodies: Definition: Two events, A and B, are independent if the fact that A occurs does not affect the probability of B occurring.
My current belief is that these events are in fact independent, since the outcome of one decision will not affect the probability of outcome of another.
(ps I am just kidding about the show your work part)
@Postmodern, I believe you are on the right track. In my opinion, the problem with applying this type of calculation here is not that the events are dependent, but that each event is not random, therefore each possible outcome does not have an equal probability of occurrence.
As far as I know, colleges do not share information during the admissions process, so College Aās admission decisions will not affect College Bās decisions. Therefore, these are indeed independent events. (Events are dependent if the outcome of one event affects the outcome of subsequent events.)
The fallacy lies here: A college having a 5% acceptance rate does NOT imply that each applicant has a 5% chance of admission. That would be true if applicants were drawn randomly, but of course we know this is not true.
Given the nature of holistic admissions, I believe it is impossible to come up with a correct probability of admission for a particular candidate at a particular school.
There will be some who are highly likely to be admitted to multiple schools. There will be some who are extremely unlikely to be admitted into any very highly selective school. There will also be those who could possibly fit into multiple schools, and whether or not they are accepted will depend on what each particular school is looking for to ābuild a classā. This last group are the ones who may benefit from applying to multiple top schools, but IMO it is impossible to quantify their likelihood of admission.
Your ONLY mistake was in applying only to reach schools. Everything else was just speculation. But you will thrive at your school, and you will meet like-minded people, so you will find peers there!
Please take a statistics course so you can better understand statistic for independent vs dependent things.
Yes, thanks, was trying to make that point!
I agree with this also, overall. In fact it only takes your first few Naviance scattergrams of the elites to see that is so.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I do think, as overall acceptance %s increase and holistic admission effects decrease, it is possible to predict better, and it is why the āreach-match-safetyā approach that most experienced people here promote seems like the best.
Someone said it, and itās worth repeating: the only thing you need to regret is the schools on that list.
It saddens me, really, that there is a significant % of the population who donāt understand that while attending Harvard would be nice, attending UNC Chapel Hill would also be REALLY DAMN NICE!
Itās like buying a Ford Focus because you canāt afford a Ferrari. Ok, but can you afford a nice entry-level BMW? They are a lot cheaper than a Ferrari and drive a heck of a lot better than a Focus.
Iām not going to candy coat it: with your stats and obvious intelligence, you screwed up. You do not belong at Arkansas. Sorry, you will get a fine education there if you chase after it, but you could be at any one of a number of stellar schools my good man. STELLAR schools.
Whereās Emory? Cornell? Michigan? Northwestern? Williams? Tufts? Bowdoin? Rice? UVa? UT Austin? Berkeley? UCLA? UC San Diego? Vanderbilt? USC? A group of these schools, and more, should have formed the meat or middle part of your list. Theyāre not safeties, but Iām willing to bet youād have been admitted to half or more of them.
My goodness. Iāve been at it in the work world for some time, and in environments in which where you went to school kind of matters. SOOO many schools beyond that short list are very highly regarded, even among school snobs.
@Postmodern, college admissions to elites are neither random nor independent (in the statistical sense). Take a stats class.
Just because judgements are rendered independently does not mean admissions is independent if they all look at mostly the same things and render judgement mostly the same way.
As an extreme, say that 10 different schools all look at the same variables and use the exact same formula or judgement. Then for any particular applicant, he/she would get 10 admits or 10 denials.
Wellā¦this student is NOT actually going to college in Arkansas. He said that upstream. Itās some other flagship in the same sort of geographic areaā¦a S supposedly the school is ranked bout 110 with a great honors program.
I am not criticizing Arkansas! Just sayingā¦that is NOT where this student is heading.
The mistake? Wellā¦there are a LOT of excellent colleges that are between the Ivies, Stanford, MIT and Caltechā¦and the state flagship university. The mistake was having an extremely top heavy application listā¦almost like an all or nothing list. Elite or bust.
Too bad, because there are many great schools out there that would have welcomed this studentā¦if he had applied. But he seemed to get caught up in the top school or nothing thing.
College admissions at various super-selective schools are not independent events, since any two schools tend to consider many of the same criteria among courses/grades, test scores, essays, recommendations, extracurriculars, etcā¦
Actually, a Ford Focus is a very nice driving car that has been praised for suspension design and tuning that gives good handling and good ride ā much like many BMWs.
Honestly I am in awe. Your application is by far one of the strongest Iāve ever seen. But then again there are aspects that are hidden to the naked eyeā¦essays, recs, bias of the admissions officer that read your application, etcā¦
But your answer may be in this articleā¦to be honest I was somewhat surprised, and somewhat not.
https://www.teenlife.com/blogs/secrets-college-admissions-officers
Ok Berkeley, pick two other cars to make the point. How about an entry level 911 vs. a Honda Civic?
and Iām willing to bet a Focus doesnāt feel like a 3 series on the road. maybe itās just in my head.
LOL Iām amused by the in-depth analysis of what was just a back-of-the-envelope calculation by my dad. Sorry Iām a huge math pedant - no, the events are not independent even if the schools donāt share information; technically two events A and B are independent if their joint distribution p(A,B) is the same as the product of the marginal distributions p(A).p(B) (where A might be āadmitted at Harvardā and B might be āadmitted at Columbiaā). This is equivalent to saying p(A) = p(A|B) and p(B) = p(B|A). However, the chance that a student gets admitted to Columbia given that s/he is admitted to Harvard, p(B|A=admitted) is of course larger than the a priori chance of getting admitted to Columbia, since if Harvard saw something promising in the student itās more likely Columbia will as well - even though the conditional probability is far from 100%.
Of course this wasnāt intended as a rigorous calculation - of course the outcomes are dependent: if I thought my application is good, I could (and did wrongly) conclude I had a better chance at all of these schools than their product, but if my application was bad I would conclude that I had a worse chance than the product. However I think this is useful as a āno-informationā model since it doesnāt require me assessing the quality of my application.
@PurpleTitan @MYOS1634 With regards to graduate work, I donāt think I want to go into math and based on what Iāve been doing in the lab and papers Iāve been reading I think Iād get more out of taking some ordinary and partial differential equations classes as well as applied math classes (even if undergrad level) than taking a whole bunch of grad-level algebra and geometry classes.
Iām truly in awe of this. I admire your optimism and determination for the next four years, even if things didnāt turn out the way they should have. I hope everyone sees this post and knows that college admissions is a game and every school is amazing and brilliant in its own right. Congrats on UArk (or whatever school it is) and I wish you well!!
OK, Iām going to say this and then drop the subject: The mathematical definition of independence is that the outcome of one event does not affect the outcome of another event. In the case of college admissions, I believe this is generally true. HOWEVER, many factors affecting probability of acceptance are the same at most/all schools. That is why some applicants will have a 100% chance of acceptance at multiple schools and others will have a 0% chance of acceptance at multiple schools.
@MiddleburyDad2 Thanks for your input but, respectfully, I disagree. I made this decision after a month of soul-searching and am confident it is the right decision for me. Iām not buying a car, Iām choosing a university and I donāt think theyāre comparable. My flagship state school isnāt to an Ivy League school what a used Ford Focus is to a Ferrari.
If last year I knew what I know now, would some of those schools be on my list? Absolutely. Would it make a difference? Iām not convinced; Vanderbilt for instance has an admit rate of just 11%, and all of those schools get extraordinary applicants, most of whom Iām sure are as qualified or more qualified than I am to attend and do well. If I got into a ābetterā school, would I go? Maybe; but knowing what I know now, I might still opt for UArk.
But thatās not the question here. The question is rather, am I willing to give up a year of my life and education for a āwhat if?ā No, I donāt think itās worth it. I accept that for whatever reason, other applications those schools received were stronger and a better fit than mine, and I wish them well. I do believe UArk is where I belong.
@cmfl11 Actually, thatās not the mathematical definition of independence; itās a common (albeit sometimes confusing) lay explanation of the definition. The mathematical definition only has to do with joint and marginal distributions and doesnāt impose any notion of causality. Take a different example: are the events āI am drinking hot chocolateā and āI am wearing a winter coatā independent? No, because even though wearing a winter coat didnāt cause me to drink hot chocolate (or vice versa), the fact that I am drinking hot chocolate means itās likely that itās winter, which means thereās a higher chance that Iām wearing a winter coat.