*** Case Western Reserve Class of 2022 Applicants***

Can anyone guess the acceptance rate for RD and the overall admissions cycle for 2018 ?

@Mickey2Dad From the student’s point of view, I agree with you 100%.
However, from the university’s point of view, it is totally waste of resource to admit more students in the RA roound. Case’s yield is so low (in 2017-2018 it admitted about 8000 applicants only to yield about 700 enrollment, was force to get 588 enrollment from the waiting list), it is a great waste of resource and effort even if they bump uo the acceptance rate. so the univeristy has to do something about it. what case did is just on par with any college:

  1. Admit as many as they can to ED student, basically if the ED application’s status is on the average of previous student, offer the admission with a decent financial package.
  2. May provide ED2 option as other colleges in the near future.
  3. May eliminate the EA all together as it is a nighmare of prediction game and its high turnover.
  4. Using RA as the place holder for the enrollment left over.
  5. May play the scholarship game as USC to attract the high status student.

The goal should be produce about 20% admission rate and 4% waiting list enrollment.

So basically I think this trend will continue in the near future for every private college.

I can imagine that part of the issue is that say, last year, 8405 students were admitted, but only 1308 enrolled. So they need to see after acceptances how many students actually enroll…and since they guarantee housing, they use the WL to figure out how to round out the class. Last year there were >500 WL admitted. So that is actually a large amount of the class.
https://case.edu/ir/media/caseedu/institutional-research/documents/pdfs/2017-2018-CDS.pdf

@bopper Totally agree with your take. There is always another side of this story. I wonder, why is the yield rate so low… is it because of the location? I always see Case at par with schools like U of Rochester - and Rochester is not exactly attractive - and yet UoR has decent yield and pulled very few students off from the WL. I saw the stats on how many kids from WL were pulled to compose the class of 2021 and made me wonder, what happened? Why didn’t the kiddos got in come? Case is quite generous with aid, even in the non-needed category, that should attract many students and yet. I think taking more kids in during ED round (admit kiddos w/at least average school stats and will provide 100% aid), and cut the RD rate significantly (and place those into WL) is a way to go. It was just so depressing to hear the disappointing stories from the many good kiddos I know.

@Mickey2dad and @bopper , Thus perpetuating ED for admissions and stats, thus favoring those families with higher means than the avg. families.

@Mickey2Dad there are obvious few factors for low yield rate in general for schools. Most significant one is that school is out of reach financially even though you are keen to get into that school. Current generation is more savvy then 10 years back since last recession. they have seen what their parents gone through and in last 10 years and become more debt conscious and rightfully so reluctant to carry that burden for UG. That is one of reason nowadays kids prefer to go to school with big endowment. Personally feel low yield rate is failure of admission process that school admitted kids who decided not to join for various reasons.

@Mickey2Dad There are a few issues that are not being considered. First is that with the Common App it is easy to apply to 20 or more schools with very little effort. Case without a supplemental essay or an application fee is especially easy because you have no additional work or cost. Second, (and I work at a different though comparably ranked University) is that foreign students make up a larger percentage of the student body. Why are schools accepting more foreign students? - because they are typically full pay! I have a student at Case. He has many friends who thought they would land at a higher ranked school but ended up at Case. Some of them have amazing financial aid and/or scholarships. There are many high performing kids that have found themselves without a place to go because they took a school like Case a decided it was their safety. You have a small number of people comment on this forum and there are just too many factors that go into the decision process to make an informed decision about acceptance. The majority of applicants who apply are highly qualified for Case. It is true they need to make a class that is balanced between engineers, pre-med, business, nursing, etc. When we went to meet with accepted students in our area the summer before he started, we were blown away by how accomplished each of the accepted students we met were. They were not just academic stars. One fenced, another danced, my son is a musician, etc. And these additional activities were not just interests, these kids performed or competed at the highest levels. At the time my sons guidance counselor told him he was a “perfect match” for the Ivy he applied to - except he wasn’t. That year they accepted 2 recruited athletes. It is a grueling and difficult process. You may be the perfect match but so are many of the other students that applied. I’ve had three kids go through the process. To the students - you will end up in a good place, might even be Case off the wait list.

@Mickey2Dad Bottom line is that there are just far more high-stat students than available places in highly-selective colleges. Some of them have to end up to less-selective institutions. Unfortunately, one way of allocating the available places is lack of financial need. That’s just the reality of it.

At the end of the day, most students find a good match for them, at a price they & their parents can afford.

Interesting conversation. I cant help thinking the situation is exacerbated by kids being able to apply to as many schools as possible in an ever increasing arms race for college. Limit applications to 10 per kid.

My D was a PPSP applicant but got rejected and now waitlisted for the undergrad. We are full pay. She had a1540 SAT, 4.67 wGPA with straight As in 7th semester, 4 of them APs. Total 10 APs . She spent at least 3 weeks writing essays. We paid the admission fees and spent sending all the scores. We could not do campus visit because of distance but requested interviews three times with no response. If we are not interested why would we do all these? If the college don’t want to give an honest consideration and evaluation , why should they emails to apply every week? Why can’t they be honest and come back to tell the kids with whatever criteria that they are not interested, not to apply? How do they decide if a student will enroll or not, because the students themselves won’t know until April 1st. Blaming students for applying to many schools and across the spectrum is lame because no college is guaranteeing any admission for any criteria and they can’t afford to take chance.

@elguapo1 , I agree with you. Limiting the application to 10 or fewer colleges will help everyone, provided the colleges are ready to evaluate the kids honestly without worrying about the yield

^ I am not blaming the students I am calling out the current system of unlimited applications. Reducing the amount of applications and the number of foreign students means colleges have less ability to game the system, consequently the application process will have much less opacity. Moreover, students will choose more wisely with their ‘10’ bullets rather than shotgun it… The current system has all the cards in the hands of the universities and colleges to the detriment of the kids, limit the common app to 10 choices, less work for the kids more judicious decisions from the universities and colleges.

@bsms2018 sounds familiar. ’ need aware’ is like synergy word in corporate world.

@elguapo1 , I apologize if I gave you that impression. I was not referring to your comment.

I agree with you completely

@almostdonemom did we meet in Hillsborough? lol

My daughter did not visit until after she was admitted, had stats no where near the ones posted here. We are Asian, so it wasn’t a diversity thing either. Bob’s “personal” note at the end of her acceptance letter, gives some insight to why she was accepted - but still no reason to overlook some of the great students that were wait listed or denied.

My daughter applied to Penn and was denied - it didn’t bother her too much because the local alum she was paired with for nursing, pretty much didn’t paint the Penn atmosphere very well. Even though, Penn was a draw for my daughter because she had spent the summer before volunteering in Camden, going to Case was not a “downgrade” for her. While a minority, they (the students who are feel they “ended up” at Case) are vocal enough to be sort of a downer. My daughter feels like they perpetuate the idea that Case is not a “fun” school. I can’t figure out why Case isn’t a draw either - besides people not getting past “Cleveland” and for some, it’s not a “name” school.

Let me tell you, I think Cleveland is awesome. I think those who don’t think so, simply don’t know enough about it and what it’s got going for it. Kind of like people who still think of Pittsburgh as a “smoggy city.” They obviously don’t know anything about Pittsburgh and the high tech, cutting edge medicine there. Same with Cleveland. It’s a great city and Case is a great school. Wish my girl had been accepted. She will go on the waitlist.

I agree with elguapo1 on some sort of limit to applications being a way for schools to get a hold on yield. At the rate we are going by the time my younger son is applying in a few years kids will be averaging 25- 50 applications each. I thought about this the other day and I came up with 10 as a fair number too. Then I started thinking about how it would be implemented and problem is that there will always be schools that need more applications then they are getting and will operate outside of the system. Plus I don’t know what the motivation would be for the high yield schools to join that type of system. Right now I see a lot of anger coming from (mostly)parents because schools like Case, Tulane, Northeastern, U Miami, etc that were traditionally safety schools for high stat students are now waitlisting them instead of accepting as a way to manage yield. Angry parents think this is being done to protect the schools ranking but really they need to do it in order to produce a class that is not too big or too small. The only other thing I wanted to say was about ED and that is ED is actually more of an advantage for the poor who know they will get tons of grants than it is for the rich. There are way more poor kids in America then there are 1 percenters. And even a lot of the 1 percenters that I know will not let their kids apply ED. They are 1 percenters because they are smart with their money, not because they throw it away.

With the high cost of college for some students casting an extremely wide net is necessary for merit aid. Especially for donut families. Eliminate merit aid, drop the tuition then limit the number of applications. Get rid of ED.

@EDHDAD and others who are advocate of limiting number of applications, it won’t work for kids who are interested in medical route. Those kids apply to mix bag programs, some direct/med scholar program as well as traditional route as direct programs are very limited.
For other academic branches it may work, know for a fact my elder son last year applied to <=10 schools, engineering focused. This year younger one wants to take medical route and applied to 14~15 schools and still its not decisive enough where to go, at least we know direct med route is closed for us and have to go through traditional route. Should we have opted to apply <=10 schools this year, probably we are already in limbo.
Also what we noticed from last year to this year applications, there is a drastic 5~10% increase in number of applications, at the same time number of spots in schools remains more or less same. Effectively, that pushes the selection criteria to go up for same school and hence lots of wait listed and denials. It also results in 2~3% lower acceptance rate then last year.