Since there are more than 3000 four-year colleges in the US, the “Top Thirty” are only one percent. Why presume, then, that someone in the top two percent of high school students will get into a top one percent college?
@GAGM11, you have a lot of good pieces, but the question from an adcomms pov is how those pieces come together in you.
Put some serious thought into what motivates you, where you think you are going, who you think you are going to be, why you want to go to college / study what you want to study. Why do you want to go to a top tier college in the first place? that is not a facetious question: the more you know about you and who you are and what you want the better the chances are that you will be able to get it.
Do things such as taking a pair of top tier colleges that you think you might like to go to and thinking about how you would fit into each, what you would add to each, what would be the best/worst thing for you about each. Keep testing pairs of colleges and see how if you start to discern patterns in the ones you seem to prefer.
A couple of general comments that will probably get me some grief.
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I have a couple of problems with the NYT article posted up above. One, the source of the research is a firm that seems to have a potential conflict of interest - not necessarily damning evidence, but certainly something to consider. Second, Top 50 schools covers a pretty damned wide range of schools, in terms of the relevant criteria (acceptance rates, test scores of admits, etc.) I’m not sure the study really supports some of the claims in the article.
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No one ever really knows what their odds are at a given school - at the very best you’ve done all the research you can, and you can put a number on it, but there are always pretty big error bars around it, even if you don’t realize it.
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Shotgunning is overrated as a strategy, because admissions aren’t a series of unrelated independent trials. Applying to 4 nearly identical schools with an estimated 25% chance is more likely to result in zero or three admits than the predicted 1. Sure, each school applies somewhat different criteria, but if something in the application triggers a denial at one school, it will likely do the same at any other closely matched school.
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Applying to a large number of schools definitely has some impact on the overall quality of the individual applications. This is of course more of a factor with elite schools that don’t use the Common App or require supplemental writing assignments.
Your point about the quality of essay is valid but top students can write good essays if they are so motivated. Over 500 schools use the Common App now and some do not have a writing supplement. Colby College dropped the requirement this year and applications doubled.
What you said is perfectly logical but I have seen real evidence in my son’s friends that proves the process has nuances that cannot be anticipated or explained. How can applying to different schools not be an unrelated trial? Even if the outcome were the same it does not make the trial related. This position is based on students that are more or less equal in qualifications, not all students.
What is indisputable is that applications per student have increased dramatically. So, the change in the selection process involving more chance that has been suggested has to be real.
98th percentile means the top 2% of all students. The top 20 schools are around the top 0.5% in the country. Am I missing something?
@BatesParent2019 I have a feeling we are probably going to have “agree to disagree” about the merits of shotgunning, but I will concede that the strategy is not without merit or proper application. I just happen to think it often is a substitute for proper objective analysis. However, that is a long and involved topic and could spawn a huge thread all by itself.
I would like to address one thing you mentioned and explain what I meant. You said “How can applying to different schools not be an unrelated trial? Even if the outcome were the same it does not make the trial related.”
It is not an unrelated trial (in the statistical sense) because the vast majority of the input variables are exactly the same - the student’s credentials are the same, the quality of the application is the same, the same type of people are making the decision using the same types of criteria, etc. There are some differences of course, not every school evaluates applicants in exactly the same way, nor has exactly the same goals. However, to the extent a set of institutions are well matched, the outcome in a particular case is not remotely an independent trial in the way that flipping coins or rolling dice is. Does that make sense to you?
If I flip a coin 3 times, I will get all heads or all tails on 1/4 of my attempts. If you apply to three similar colleges where you have a good reason to believe you have a 50% chance of admission, my prediction would be (given enough experimental trials) you will get into all three or none more than 25% of the time. That’s because they aren’t truly independent trials.
Probably not going to convince you, but I hope what I am trying to say is clearer than what I wrote above.
If this were last year and we were having the discussion we would agree on most points. However, after going through a pre-read process at 15 schools from Maine to Virginia and a mix of liberal arts colleges and mid-sized universities, I have concluded that despite the same exact input and conclusion, the reasoning varied dramatically as did the process and the physical output. I had the opportunity to see the report at each school and it varied from handwritten and qualitative to a spread sheet with nothing but numbers and a legend. One in particular that was not technically test optional showed how small the weight was on test scores. On one it said “we have great luck with kids from this high school, so safe to recruit, we have never rejected a kid from this school during ED” and that was all. On another it had detailed recommendations regarding which AP classes to pick to maximize acceptance chances even though the conclusion was “safe to recruit”.
We have a girl in the family that went to a 50k a year prep school that only got accepted to the schools she wanted after the school pressured the colleges. She was not qualified for any of them.
In larger schools the chance you are right is much greater than smaller schools because the smaller schools painstakingly try to match the school’s needs with the talent in the application pool. I was told point blank at one school that an applicant’s ability to get along with a diverse group of kids was a cornerstone of the process. This is if course purely subjective and how would anyone know this.
So after close to 6 months of being in the thick of things, I have concluded that unless the process is reduced to a scannable application, acceptance to a similar group of colleges for a group of similar students now comes down to spreading risk in order to maximize the chance of a match. If the average kid applies to 20 schools the only way you preserve your chances is to do the same.
Students must be more flexible when applying to the top schools if they want to go to one.
@BatesParent2019 Interesting to hear your experiences and perspectives on this for sure.
I have a feeling that one thing that explains my perspective is that my “holistic amateur admission adviser” gig has tended towards a fairly conservative strategy - I focus a lot on finding schools that really fit the kids I am working with, more so than stretching for the highest ranked or most prestigious school they can possible get into. Part of that is my own hippy perspective on what makes the best learning environment, part of it is the kids I work with. If I had a kid who was hyper-competitive and driven and wanted to be an investment banker or something, I might decide to push the envelope harder and see more of what you seem to have experienced.
You are doing the right thing with your kids and that is the way it should be. Hyper-applying in a subset of schools is more of a problem in the most selective schools, which is the topic of this thread and another specifically addressing Ivy League admissions. I don’t agree with what goes on but you are forced into it.
In any event your approach is correct but based on actual cases every parent has seen, you will see that admissions decisions are becoming increasingly flaky with the only explanation being chance not qualifications.
How far this phenomenon goes down the chain is anyone’s guess.