<p>The girl I knew who went to Middlebury was smart, artistic, wonderful. I knew little about colleges those days, and this was my intro to Middlebury and I will always associate Middlebury with her!</p>
<p>Mini, is it truly so that fewer financial aid kids are now going to the selective colleges? I know that when I went to college, my father felt that the floodgates had been opened to the "middle class". It was unheard of for anyone to even consider applying to the more selective schools unless "you knew someone" back in his day. I know that he was full of wonder that I was just picking colleges as I pleased and applying for aid. And in my hall in the dorms, more than half of us were on some form of financial aid. It seems these days, it is about the same proportion but I do not have the figures and you seem to know them pretty well. It would be sad if we are going backwards in this area.</p>
<p>From the little data I have seen (it is hard to come by) the floodgates opened in the late 60s and early 70s, but have generally tightened since then - not by much, but somewhat, and when you add in the internationals not receiving any aid it begins to look signfiicant. Mortenson data shows a general decline in Pell Grants at the major private institutions over the past decade - not huge, but significant. There are some major outliers to that trend (Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Macalester, Amherst, Oberlin, Occidental).</p>
<p>Floodgates to the middle class? Hardly! Take my alma mater. 60% receive no aid whatsoever - minimum family income to fall in that category is about $155,000/yr, and many, many have much more. Pell grants, those with incomes in the bottom 35% of the population (around $40k or below), makes up 9% or so. This leaves 31% of the student body coming from the vast 35-95%tile, many from the upper reaches of it (remember; median family income in the U.S. for a family is a little under $50k.) This is also where the vast bulk of applications come from - substantially more than 60% of them (remember, there really are not that many low-income candidates to begin with, and there are limits to the number of wealthy ones.)</p>
<p>I have a fondness for Middlbebury too - too cold for me, though. Brrrrrrhhh. ;)</p>
<p>Crash, I agree with you that there is little incentive at the very top to change the system -- I don't think its any accident that Harvard was one of the first colleges to adopt the common app -- they don't have to worry about their yield, and the more $$ they can collect from applicants the better. I'll bet 60% of the apps to Harvard end up in the reject pile without so much as a glance by the ad coms.</p>
<p>But unpredictability of yield hurts the colleges down the list - and with the multiple-Ivy submissions, it may start hurting the Ivies, too. Keep in mind that Yale & Brown have only recently abandoned binding ED in favor of EA. If ED isn't available as a tool to lock some applicants in, then April is going to be a tough time when it comes to kids who have been accepted at multiple-Ivies. </p>
<p>I do also like SBMom's idea of limiting the number of colleges where test scores could be sent, though mostly because I think this might decrease reliance on test scores. Or another option would be to allow multiple schools to receive scores, but for each score report to also include the names of every other school that has been designated to receive the scores -- that would be another way to disseminate the data without actually needing to create a different system to record it. It would be less accurate - students sometimes send scores to colleges they don't end up applying to - and of course many colleges that would be safeties don't require the tests -- but it certainly would reveal those who are applying to a dozen or more elite colleges.</p>
<p>You're kidding right? I thought there was just one. Isn't the name of the school "The Ivies"? That's the school all the CC kids say they are applying to....</p>
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Ouch, Mini! Thirty years ago, Middlebury turned me down (5/1000, 1490 etc.). I'd like to think they were a little selective at the time.
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<p>Were you applying for financial aid? Maybe religious or ethnic considerations that would not have put you in their most "desirable" pool? Those stats were strong enough for any LAC at the time and way above Middlebury's range.</p>
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Mini, is it truly so that fewer financial aid kids are now going to the selective colleges?
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<p>No, that's not it. The percentage of kids qualifying for financial aid has steadily increased. </p>
<p>What Mini is referring to has more to do with shifting distributions of the income quartiles such that fewer students from the lowest income quartiles are attending elite colleges. I believe that is probably accurate. Remember, the median family income is somewhere in the $60,000 range and there are students qualfying for financial aid well above that figure.</p>
<p>It probably has a lot to do with the collapse of the educational system in low-income neighborhoods.</p>
<p>I'm having a little trouble with the lottery ticket analogy when a kid gets accepted to all 8 plus another couple top schools. That does not appear random to me.</p>
<p>And please note, the April at the beginning of this thread is last April, 2005, one year ago.</p>
<p>Up until this year I think that the general rule to limit oneself to 7/8 colleges was a good rule. The evidence this year seems to destroy that concept and encourage a student to cast a wider net to average 10/11. The concept used by the adcom to create a freshman society--social engineering--forces the smart kid to not only be smart, talented, but unique and a kid isn't going to be unique at many schools. The results at the HS bear this out. Northwestern which was incredibly accepting last year granting admission to almost ten out of 60 kids, accepted none this year. NE LACs accepting 1/2. Vanderbilt has become almost crazy to gain admission unless you play the bagpipes for Russian funerals. Schools that no one even considered 2 years ago are now hot.<br>
Reluctantly I had a convo last night with junior S and said he needs to up the schools he is seriously considering. And again to love the safety.
The whole process is insane and will get worse as the schools have decided its a business and the kids respond in kind.</p>
<p>Crash said, "Certainly if I were an admissions officer and received an application from a student who'd also applied to 15 or 20 other schools, it would be a clear indication to me that this student was not at all heavily invested in attending my school . . ."</p>
<p>I disagree with this. It's not the kids who have made the system this way; it's the population bubble and the college themselves that have created this madness. To tip off admissions offices about who has applied where will only result in fewer acceptances at target and safety schools when those schools are now often the only choices kids are getting.</p>
<p>Kids who are qualified to attend top LACs, Ivies, and top nationals must apply to a lot of schools. The odds are simply against them every step of the way. My D applied to 11 schools; she got into 6, which seems like an excellent yield - except when you compare to two of her friends. One, who had better stats, got into only two out of ten - and none of her top choices. Another, who had comparable stats, got into three, and none of her reaches. This number of choices are comparable to what we had as kids when we applied to four or five colleges. Before you get those acceptances letters, you just can't predict whether you've applied to too many colleges or too few.</p>
<p>Back to my D: she would have attended any one of the colleges she applied to, even the safeties, although obviously she wouldn't have been as happy. She was rejected/waitlisted at all of her reaches and waitlisted at one of her two safeties. You see? Even a safety is no longer a safety anymore. If my daughter had been like some of the other posters here who didn't get into any of the reaches and target schools, then she would have gotten into a single school. Yeah, four out of those six acceptances she barely considered when making her final choice, but if she had not gotten into the two she is now considering, then everything would have been different. Those four would be receiving serious consideration right now.</p>
<p>Son applied to twelve colleges this year with five rejections, six acceptances, and one waitlist. This for stellar stats and achievements...</p>
<p>9th grade D and I were talking about 20 schools this morning. Her stats are not so stellar (so far) and she can see a trend in the making. Plus she is a girl, and that hurts the odds of success more often than not.</p>
<p>I don't expect to see change until a process takes hold in which the kids have "accepted" some huge number (like 20) apps as normal, and our society then has a collapse in absolute numbers of applicants (class of 2015?). When yield falls at the top Ivys (as it must in this scenario), then we will have change; not before.</p>
<p>To answer your question, I-Dad, yes, I was applying for serious financial aid. Plus, my father died when I was 14 and I worked throughout hs to help out at home. Which meant my "ECs" were thin. Less tolerance for that kind of reason back then. And, I was applying as an English major--really dumb. Should have said Russian (took 4 years of it in hs), they love language majors. Oh well.</p>
<p>I agree that at this point that it makes sense to apply to many colleges - my daughter applied to 12 -- but I don't think that it is quite as random or unpredictable as some make it out to be. My d. was admitted to 9 colleges, including at least 4 reaches, and including her top two choices. We were talking tonight and she told me that she couldn't believe how little effort some of her classmates had put into applying to very selective colleges -- it seemed to her that they had thrown together apps at the last minute, whereas my d. spent a lot of energy & effort trying to really personalize her apps and convey a good picture of her qualities. I think that the 3 colleges that rejected/waitlisted her are also those which seemed to afford the least opportunity for individualization of the apps. </p>
<p>I do think that the more applications that are done, the less opportunity for individualization - because part of the customization process is to think about what each school represents and what it might want to see in a student, and to tailor the application to emphasize what is most likely to appeal to that college. The common app process tends to make it too easy - the student submits a bunch of cookie cutter applications, essentially maximizing the chances that the application will fail to make the cut multiple times. The student who essentially does separate apps one at a time, using different formats as appropriate, will tend to improve upon each app in the series (until exhaustion sets in) -- which at least increases the likelihood that some of the apps will be good enough to impress, even if the first couple were duds.</p>
<p>And in hindsight, I'm realizing that it is a good thing that my daughter did not have "stellar" stats & achievements. It put her in the position of knowing she had to work hard to get her message across -- she didn't assume that anything was automatic.</p>
<p>Yes, but we don't know what "hooks" those students might have had - gone to a prep school, had professional help putting their app together, won an elite competition, wrote about their experience fighting a rare disease, etc. A kid from the west coast applying to the east coast elite schools likely has a better shot getting in than an east coast student. In addition, the number of students from your community applying to a school will have an impact. My son applied to two small top LAC's. Probably 50-70 kids from our town also applied to those same schools. With only 300 openings, they are not going to take more than 1 or 2 from this community, regardless of how bright, talented the kid is. So, in actuality, there was a 2% acceptance rate in our town - not the 15-20% as advertised.</p>
<p>I seem to recall that when U Michigan was forced to drop its "point system" a few years back and went to a more complex application, their applications for the following year dropped substantially. U Michigan's app was known as an "easy" app to prepare and many applicants filled it out and filed it because it was a excellent school with an "easy" app.</p>
<p>On the other hand, don't give up on the lottery - someone will win and you have to be in to win. Think of it as buying a ticket to a movie - for a few days you can escape to a fantasy world of wealth and how you would deal with it.</p>
<p>Yes Palermo, but those are some of the factors that play into targeting the apps. I would not encourage my kid to apply to private colleges that are deluged with applicants from the local schools - for example, I've always known that its hard for us SF bay area students to get our kids into Stanford, so I told both my kids that I thought it would be a waste of time/energy to focus on Stanford. That's the whole point of a targeted approach: maximizing your selling points. Geographic diversity is one that all our kids have potentially, but obviously a kid sacrifices that advantage if he/she is dead set on staying within a limited geographical region.</p>
<p>Yes, but why have a child apply to a school in an area they don't wish to go to? I am well aware my son would have had a much better chance of getting into a school down south or on the west coast and likely would have been a hot commodity. But, my son really wanted to stay in New England. People need to be aware that when they see results on the message board, they may see very different results with their child. Too many people get on and say their child got into a top school with average to below average stats. Obviously something in that kid's profile attracted the admissions people. Even with above average stats and ECs, a New England kid who wants to get into a New England elite school will have a much harder time than someone from Nebraska. That is what makes this process a lottery.</p>