I haven’t found its a given anywhere. Great research and expertise doesn’t always equate to great teaching.
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I don"t believe that there is an official or generally accepted defintion of the tiers.
Your son sounds like the kind of student that any college would want. The sharp rise in applications and changes to test requirements has made application cycles such a crapshoot. I’m sorry your son got WL and I really hope he lands someplace that appreciates the remarkable student that he is.
Seriously?
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One rejection provided some insight into an aspect of this process.
A certain ambitious and ascendant second tier school kept plying my son and us for months with emails which made it seem as though he had already been accepted.
Come decision day: WL.
The odd thing was the letter basically said most people on the waitlist do eventually get admitted.
Then another email arrived from a music teacher at that school reaching out to him to talk personally over the phone about the school.
Well, if they wanted him so badly, why did they not just straight offer him admission?
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My D22 received similar signals from her first choice school last year who then put her in their WL. Then they kept sending marketing emails touting all the great reasons to go to that school. They asked her if she would accept a place off their waitlist if they offered her a $23k scholarship … but they were just trying to gauge her interest IF a WL spot opened up. They were clearly trying to keep their WL engaged but it was like a constant stab in the heart to my D who kept saying “I already know this school is great, and I wanted to go there but they didn’t want me. Why do they keep sending me these emails?”
For her sanity, we had to unsubscribe. Lucky for her, after being deferred EA she got accepted RD to a place that is perfect for her.
DS23 waitlisted, College of Arts & Sciences, Environmental Analysis and Policy
OOS, 4.0uw/4.75w, 11 APs (5’s on all 5 taken to date), 1570 SAT
ECs: environmental clubs/activities, speech & debate (nationally ranked, many awards), varsity athlete (for fun, not ranked or recruited), all ECs included leadership roles
Volunteer/Community service: 200+ hours
Summer Activities: environmental research, community service
Accepted UCLA, USC, UCSD, Wesleyan, so plenty of good options so far
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Wow, that’s incredibly cruel and utterly thoughtless! It’s beyond me how anyone could send out such an (not really) offer without thinking how it might impact the recipient. I’m so glad to hear it all worked out in the end.
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Can’t say for sure, but yield protection can be the reason he was waitlisted. Given the average number of apps per student rising and universities wanting to protect their yield (impacts their ability to finance loans, their rankings etc…), more schools are looking to accept students they are pretty sure will attend. If their stats suggest that they are likely to get accepted to a higher tier school, they waitlist…
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Omg, that’s horrible. I hope you’ll share the name of the school.
We received an email that made it sound like kiddo had been accepted. Other people thought the same of their kid due to the poor wording. I can’t recall what school it was (maybe Richmond?) and was put off by it.
My son got rejected.
After having spent my entire career focused on achievement (and now being pretty burnt out as a doc in the ER) I did not push my kids to do anything they did my want to do in high school for the sake of a college application. He had a solid app and strong essays. From reading these posts, I’m glad he didn’t waste his time pursuing things for the sake of a better application that could have just as easily been rejected!!
It’s just a crazy brutal process.
Rejected from: Villanova, UVA, B.U.
Accepted by: U Conn (with $50k scholarship), James Madison
Waitlisted: Wake Forest
Waiting to hear from: University of Michigan
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It’s incredible to me that bu would waitlist kids like yours who are above their current numbers. If their game is to protect yield, bu should not be in any top applicant’s list unless they can seriously demonstrate interest. I think yield protection is a dishonest practice.
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I can see not offering a high-stats kid a spot in CGS (which my lower-stats, almost full-pay kid got into and is considering!) because they think he wouldn’t ever take it. But I have trouble believing BU would yield protect their regular programs. It seems more likely to me these situations are cases of “institutional priorities” where they have too many qualified applicants for a particular program, and they have to make decisions based on other factors. Once you meet the “well-qualified” bar, they don’t necessarily pick the highest stat person but search for other characteristics they need for the class.
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It was horrible! No consideration whatsoever for the emotional rollercoaster that these kids go through for months. Luckily she was accepted RD at Northeastern for their NUin Dublin fall semester so she was able to let it go and focus on an exciting freshman year!
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It was CWRU. I am in marketing so I understand the concept of “lead nurturing” to keep your potential customer list “hot” in case you have something to sell (an offer off the waitlist) … but it totally ignores the emotional time these kids have gone through. It’s one thing for a car dealership to send out emails that say “the car you wanted might be coming into inventory this week! Can we agree on a deal if it is still available” and it is a totally other thing to dangle a scholarship offer in front of a kid who desperately wants to go to that school.
In the end it all worked out, as she now goes to Northeastern and in retrospect cannot imagine herself at CWRU.
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If it was a case of yield protection, they might have made a mistake. Even though it isn’t ranked as a top program for his particular major, he really liked the program they had put together as well as the location. We visited (but did a self-led tour as the student led ones were booked up). However, he was able to later secure a lengthy one-on-one session with a current student via zoom that cemented his interest. But he wasn’t willing to apply ED (to any school). And he wasn’t interested in the honors college (his major is very interdisciplinary & he was worried the required honors college courses would reduce the number of classes he could take that were more directly related to his major). So perhaps that made it look like this was a backup for him. But with so many applying these days, there is really no way to tell if it’s yield protection or simply a matter of so many qualified applicants.
In any case, he’s one of the lucky ones who has great options already. So if him being waitlisted got someone else in for whom BU is their dream school, it all turned out for the best.
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“I do think TO and definitely test blind are a disaster.”
Sorry, but I have to question if you would have this same energy if you/your kid(s) didn’t have high test scores.
Test-optional/Test-blind policies aren’t a disaster and it has certainly given high-achieving applicants a fairer shot.
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“fairer” is in the eye of the beholder. I would contest that an objective test uniformally applied throughout the country is more “fair” than GPA which is subjective to indvidual schools and teachers.
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The SAT/ACT are far from objective. It’s effectively a glorified game of RNG + there are so many random factors that come into play with the SAT like any other metric (how much you slept the night before, the version of the test, etc.) which get brushed aside unlike GPA where students/counselors/school profile can bridge a lot of nuances present
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I would agree with you but you can take the test multiple times and most schools will super score. You also have 2 types of tests, ACT and SAT so you can pick and choose.
I wouldnt say test optional is “more fair” when you have wide discrepencies in how high schools grade (especially grade inflation), teacher recommendations, favoritisim, etc.
Are AP tests unfair?
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