Look, I can understand if someone doesn’t get the right job with their first five to eight applications. But if you can’t find a suitable college match given five to eight shots at the target, then you are probably doing it wrong.
This isn’t just my personal opinion, or just the College Board’s opinion – the colleges responsible for the Common App also clearly agree that limits are appropriate, because the Common App currently caps applications at a maximum of 20. A number like 100 (which is the suggestion that I responded to) is “patently ridiculous”.
I accept that 5 to 8 is in the right range for a “suitable institution”, but there are valid reasons for many more. D only applied five places because she was accepted early into her first choice school, UChicago.
But she had valid reasons for doing 15 applications in all, mostly because she was seriously considering med school. Five of the 15 weren’t very highly ranked undergrad but had highly respected BS/MD programs. Three more were on the list because they offered generous merit scholarships ranging from full tuition to nearly full ride, allowing saving money for medical school.
The remaining 8 schools were all in the top 30, so with the addition of a safety she would been at 9 schools.
So college board says it, and therefore it is a fact for all 2.2M freshmen applicants? And also, why do you discount the part where they say “There is no magic number”?
I appreciate that you believe passionately in your knowledge and authority on the subject. My own opinion is I do not believe there is an absolute “wrong” or “right” that applies to all students. Guidance counselors and many college admissions professionals commonly advise twice that for high-reaching students. Most importantly, it is up to the student to decide, since they have to live with the results. Any arbitrary, context-less application of a number then used to compare that decision to “spamming” (your words) is, in fact, patently ridiculous.
When I said “inevitable, perpetual population growth” I was talking about the United States, not college populations. That’s part of the point: the population of eligible applicants keeps increasing, while seats at colleges do not.
Our national population does continue to increase, and has since… well have we ever had a year-over-year population decline? If so, was it recent? (i’m guessing if we have, the most recent occurrence was not recent)
I don’t think 5 to 8 is satisfiable to many because there are many people who are still not sure what they want in a school, where they want to go geographically, and what they want to major in. Then they also have to factor in safeties, reaches, and likelies. To add onto this some may need financial or merit aid and apply to many different schools trying to seek out the best price.
I am pretty sure you meant “more people = more applicants” and my point was that was not so. It’s a logical conclusion and I did not mean to imply any deficiency in your reasoning by disputing it with the data. In fact, quite the opposite - it is a reasonable thing for intelligent people to conclude, yet it is not so – and when one knows that we can better focus on the things that are genuinely responsible for the continually declining rates.
Back when I applied to Stanford the admit rate was 11% although I wasn’t even aware of the exact percentage at the time. As a Stanford alum I am somewhat perplexed where the rate has gotten down to now. At some point kids are going to stop applying because the odds are so extreme against acceptance it isn’t worth it.
I understand Stanford, the Ivy League, and some other private colleges are very appealing to low income students because the cost is actually less for them than a community college and the application fee can be waived. However at some point the percentage for all these schools will bottom out because the odds don’t make any sense for applying.
@prezbucky, the population keeps increasing because people live longer, but the number of HS grads, though it fluctuates, actually has not increased that much over time. In fact, the peak may still be during one of the baby boom cohorts.
There’s a feedback loop affecting the top schools, and it works like this:
Students say in the fall: "Wow, acceptance rates are falling. I better apply to more schools than my friends did last year".
Then colleges say in the spring: "Wow, we got more applications than we did last year. We better lower the acceptance rate, so we aren't overenrolled."
Go back to Step 1.
We haven’t reached that point yet. It’s true that the odds are increasingly extreme, but the flip side is that the average cost of applying is increasingly low. More schools are using the Common App, reducing (or even eliminating) application fees, and reducing (or even eliminating) the requirement for supplemental essays. Why not buy lottery tickets, if the cost is low?
We are getting a bit off-track so I will answer succinctly. There are two major ways to determine math talent among kids: Contests and Research. Contests at the middle school level include competing for National MathCounts, while at the HS level it is American Math Competitions (AMC), which starts with 100K plus students and eventually determines the 6 kids selected for the US Math Olympiad team. You can estimate rough ranking based upon how far you go in the selection process. Research means getting selected for working with professors on math research problems. There are only a few programs for this for high school students and they are highly selective.
The point of all this is that neither of these tracks require calculus. It is entirely possible to qualify for USAMO without knowing calculus, and there is plenty of math research that doesn’t require calculus either. All of the kids that can qualify for USAMO are easily capable of learning calculus at a young age, but it’s not particularly useful.
Right, that brings up another pet peeve of mine: math education in the US seems to follow the historical chronology rather than what makes sense.
Thus, because Leibnitz and Newton invented calculus centuries ago, American kids learn that first rather than numerical methods which were invented in the 19th/20th century but have a lot more practical uses. Likewise, analysis pretty much isn’t touched upon unless you take some math course that typically is only required for math majors. Yet analysis is the theory on which calculus stands (and thus why it is taught before or alongside calculus in Germany and Russia).
I hope parents are not framing 500th place ribbons from estimated rough rankings in a competition.
The value of the experience is preparing and competing. Many will try few will win.
Let’s hold that up as a parallel for colleges. There are no ribbons for being accepted to a school with an acceptance rate below 10%.
Colleges now can market heavily to encourage many more applications. Plus leverage Early Decision with a yield around 100% so for that portion of the class instead of having to accept four to fill one seat, it is almost 1:1. For half the class. That is a game changer.
For a case study look at University of Chicago and its huge drop in acceptance rate.
The sub 10% schools are still a small fraction of the colleges out there. One way to avoid the arms race Corbett describes is to set minimum stats. To even apply to Harvard, you would need at least some minimum ACT/SAT score and GPA, although that might horrify the pro-holistic crowd.
@roethlisburger Harvard isn’t accepting any non-athletes/students of HUGE donators kids without a 1300+ SAT anyways so I don’t see why not. Then again, how are they going to work their way around the minimum SAT barrier to accept that huge donors kid and athletes?
Fair enough. I was mistakenly under the impression that increasing population would necessarily mean an increase in high school students. (A lazy assumption. I had a second assumption in mind: that an increase in hs students would equal an increase in apps. Not necessarily…)
About 3.5 million students graduate from HS per year.
So ~175K rank in their HS top 5%.
If 50 very selective colleges had an average of 1200 freshmen places and an average admission yield of 34%, that would be slightly more than enough to accommodate all 175K.
Some top colleges have yields much higher than 34%, but ~T50 colleges with lower yields include Boston College, Brandeis, NYU, Rochester, USC, W&M, WUSTL, and Wake Forest. For 2015-16, Wake Forest made about 3900 admission offers for about 1300 seats. So, 50 Wake Forests could make enough offers to cover every top 5% HS senior in America with about 20K offers left over. Wake is a pretty small school, too.
At many very selective colleges, no more than 80% of entering students even ranked in their HS T10%. For the last year I checked, less than 75% of students ranked in their HS T10% before entering Claremont McKenna, Middlebury, Wesleyan, Hamilton, or Vassar. Ditto for Michigan, Case Western, Rensselaer, Northeastern, Brandeis, NYU, and UIUC. Are that many high-ranking students being displaced by lower-ranking, hooked applicants? Or is it the case that many high-ranking students just aren’t interested in top colleges (or don’t have scores and ECs to qualify, or else can’t afford one), and therefore many top ~50 colleges need to reach deeper than the admission rates alone might suggest?
What affects yield at private colleges and top state schools for OOS students is affordability. Many top students who do not get into the sub 10% schools are not able to afford schools like BU, BC, CWRU etc.