Came across an article in the Amherst paper about admission for the class of 2020 if anyone is interested-
http://amherststudent.amherst.edu/?q=article/2016/04/06/admissions-accepts-137-percent-class-2020
@VTSkier – Thanks for posting the link. I’ve got some questions/comments:
– What do they mean with this: “Three admitted applicants are stateless.” Are they nomads, roaming the earth? I mean, really?
– “The incoming class has a record-breaking average SAT score of 2221.” The writer made a careless error here, but a significant one. At this point Amherst doesn’t know which admitted students are going to attend. This should read “the admitted students”. The stats of the admitted students is not the same as those who will actually matriculate. In all likelihood the scores of the ‘incoming’ students will be lower. A couple of schools botched this piece (either intentionally or unwittingly) on the data that they submitted to USNWR, Forbes, etc., which resulted in their being suspended for a couple of years from their rankings.
That all said, Wow. Those are really high average SAT scores.
– Amherst is by no means unique with this “early write” thing, so I’m not criticizing them in particular, just this whole new phenomenon. I understand the basis of it, but it’s a bit much for me. If you want to move up the decision date, then move it up. But I think doing this is silly, and I wonder what sort of difference it will actually make to those 163 ‘early writes’. Undoubtedly those kids are going to wait those couple of weeks for their Ivy, etc. decisions regardless, and I think the main effect of doing this is to create extra stress for the kids who don’t get an early write (which is about 80% of the RD admits).
@AsleepAtTheWheel “stateless” means they are refugees. Amherst published an essay from one of their refugee students in the fall: https://issuu.com/amherstmagazine/docs/web_amherst_f15/25
@michigandermom – Thanks!! Great article. In retrospect I should’ve been able to figure that out, especially because a friend of ours who’s a freelance reporter and files a lot of stories from Myanmar and Thailand refers to all the ‘stateless’ people around her when she’s in the refugee camps.
I think getting an early write made a difference to D’s decision last year. And one other school really took itself out of the running by not providing FA info until mid-April when it was too alt to visit (it was her furthest away school and we’d have gone if we’d known the FA with her acceptance).
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