<p>@mittentiger,
“I think it is an excellent rule of thumb for middle class parents who won’t get much FA but don’t have deep pockets…”
– if more people thought like this, there would be a lot fewer kids/parents struggling with college loans. I do think that part of the school loans problem is due to upper-middle-class tastes on middle-class incomes. At some point, rational people should just say no to privates…</p>
<p>@giterdone Believe it or not the odds do increase for both of the cases you cite. For instance, if you buy 1 lottery ticket in 100 separate lotteries, each with a 1 in 100 chance (100 tickets sold in each), your chances of winning at least one lottery are 63%. Of course, you’d be better off buying all the tickets from one lottery to guarantee a win, but where’s the fun in that!</p>
<p>For school admissions, I subscribe to an “adjusted randomness” theory. The school has an overall acceptance rate, and each student varies +/- from that based on their ECs, recs, tests, etc. But even the best students probably don’t get above 50/50 at the most selective schools. </p>
<p>In the case you present of 10% admission likelihood, applying to ten schools does increase one’s odds of acceptance to at least one of them. Yes, the odds of getting into any one school are 10%. But the probability that you get into at least one of them is 65%. </p>
<p>Probabilities are a funny thing. For example, run the calculation to see how large a group you need to have a better than 50% chance of two people in the group having the same birthday. It’s surprising. </p>
<p>@mobius911 - you are right that if admissions were truly random – and if the student’s odds of acceptance were identical at each school then odds of being accepted to at least one college would increase with multiple applications, by an amount derived by a formula that is not additive. That is, you can’t add up 10 times 10% to get 100%. </p>
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<p>For anyone looking for how to do the math --here is the way I did it –
If there is a 1 in 10 chance of admission – that means that there is a 9 in 10 (.9) probability that the applicant won’t get in.
So the probability that the applicant will “lose” over 10 attempts in a random situation is 0.9 multiplied 10 times – that is, .9^10 – and the solution to that problem is 0.348 (which can be rounded to 35%)</p>
<p>Cheap trick: Google is more than a search engine. It’s calculator . You can verify my math by doing simply running the equation I bolded above as a Google search.</p>
<p>So now that we have figured that the probability of losing over 10 trials in in a random contest where the participant has a 10% chance of winning works out to 35%, we simply subtract that number from 100 (there is a 100% chance that in all trials, the result will be either a win or a loss)— and then we are left with 65%.</p>
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<p>The problem is that the process is not random and the chances are not equal from one school to the next, because each school has its own set of priorities and may value different qualities differently. So a quality that could be an asset at one school could be a detriment at another, depending on its institutional priorities. For a simple example, consider geographic diversity – Stanford and Brown may weight applications from students in Rhode Island very differently. </p>
<p>^I agree that an applicant’s chances move up/down from institution to institution. For fun I ran the probability for the kid that “ran the table” at the Ivies, assuming a 50% likelihood of admission at each school. He certainly had better-than-average odds of admission, so maybe his chance ranged from 25% to 75% at each school. So using 50% to make the calculation easy, the chance of hitting all 8 comes in at… 1 in 250. </p>
<p>Well the table runner probably started with much better odds -probably in the range of 80-95%.</p>
<p>Every year there seem to be a handful of stories like that – and generally the applicant has these factors:
- URM or child of immigrants
- First in family to attend college
- Distinguished in multiple areas (star athlete; exceptional community service record; leader in community, etc.)
- The whole package on stats (top ranked student at high school, strong test scores, etc.)</p>
<p>And you can add to that a fair assumption that the LOR’s from guidance counselor and teachers all say that the applicant is the best and most amazing student they have ever seen. </p>
<p>Or to put it another way – if you are calculating the probability if dice coming up a certain way, the math is different if the die is weighted. </p>
<p>There are some students at any school that are essentially automatic admits.</p>
<p>Every Ivy and elite probably has quite a few slots for hooked applicants who are pretty much sure-things to get in – which is why the odds of the ordinary unhooked applicant are actually much less than the reported stats.</p>
<p>However, in most cases the hooked applicants are aware of their status and they probably don’t apply to multiple schools. They decide early on where they are going to go, and they either go through the early decision process or get an early write through other means. For example -recruited athletes don’t simply submit applications to a dozen schools --they spend a lot of time talking to a handful of coaches from different schools doing the recruiting, make a decision, and submit an early application. </p>
<p>If we assume a 90% chance of admission, it turns the probability equation on its head – then you are assuming admission and trying to calculate the chances of that student NOT being admitted to a given school </p>
<p>No real restrictions - just look at really good schools - which to me encompasses a range of generally the top 40 or so schools. (Don’t hang me on 40, this wasn’t an absolute cut-off.) No geographic restrictions, though neither kid really sparked to the south or California. Things I cared about were diverse national student body of high caliber, living on campus all 4 years if possible and strength of alumni network. My kids’ schools are very different but both fit that criteria. </p>
<p>I’m in the minority here - I had to insist S1 look at two other schools besides his safety. I had no problems with his safety (an in-state regional university exceptionally strong in his major) but I wanted him to see other places and make an informed choice. We looked at a flagship in a neighboring state and a regional in another neighboring state. He liked the flagship and was OK with the OOS regional. As it turned out, his first choice, the flagship, didn’t like him financial-aid wise. He got enough merit aid at the OOS regional that we could have made it happen, but he preferred his safety. He just graduated from there and had a wonderful college experience. S2 is slated to go there too, but he really needs more structure than it would provide. He was accepted at a Jesuit LAC where he would have small classes and be able to play lacrosse as a walk-on, but he still prefers the other school. I really think it would be better for him, but, as someone mentioned upthread, I’m one of those people complaining to my analyst that my parents wouldn’t let me pick my college. I refuse to do the same to my kids, so it looks like it’s going the be the regional in-state U for him. </p>
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<p>Did any of those schools qualify as safeties? If not, what did your kids do for safeties?</p>
<p>@janesmith my D had the no Ohio school rule for herself. Not sure where that came from considereing there are some very good theatre schools there</p>
<p>We didn’t put restrictions or requirements - considering her major we new chances were she would be far away. However we did discuss cost and what it meant being so far away regarding travel home and us being able to see her perform. </p>
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Depending on the students ED/EA strategy they may never need to apply to safeties.</p>
<p>My only restriction was that they each had to apply to one in-state, financial/admission safety. Both of my kids chose majors that require auditions so I did limit the number of out-of-state audition trips because of the travel time/costs. </p>
<p>My son is a music major and most schools only offered 2 or 3 audition dates for his instrument with many of the schools overlapping so that was a limitation in and of itself. He ended up applying to 5 schools and only auditioning for 4. He left his safety for last, so by the time it got close, he already had two acceptances from other schools and cancelled the safety auditon. </p>
<p>Back to the criterion that really matters: college football. </p>
<p>No Michigan schools. No Aggies.</p>
<p>We had no geographical restrictions, but my D did-no Southern or Midwest schools. Then she eliminated CA and asked to go to the northeast, 3000 miles away. This has been a bit of a burden, but the school is a top academic school with small class sizes, so we decided to let her go there, bypassing some schools that offered significant money for her athletic skills, but are significantly less academic. She is doing well so far. I think the child has to be fully invested in the school. Meanwhile, we are enforcing our budget and driving old cars. Also, I cannot see her play. Tradeoffs.</p>
<p>I tried to encourage S to add schools to his list. He had fairly narrow geographic restrictions, for relatively good reasons, which restricted the number of schools offering a reasonable program in his major to less than 15. I did encourage him to visit some schools that he wasn’t considering, and tried to encourage him to apply to a few others as well. It was a process between the two of us - he agreed to apply to our state flagship, even though he REALLY didn’t want to go there, because of something that happened to a cousin (NMF and good SATs but not so good GPA, low income/resources, didn’t get accepted to any school that she wanted to attend and could afford, so ended up at our state uni, but locked out of merit awards because she applied late), but if he hadn’t agreed I probably would have tried to “make him” do it. As it was, he is reasonable and agreed without any ‘arm twisting’.</p>
<p>A question did arise, though, because one of the schools he wanted to apply to, and one of his top choices after research and a visit, was a for-profit school with a very narrow program, highly regarded in the field but not outside of it (video game design/production, the school is DigiPen). I allowed him to visit and to apply, but by the time decision time came, I was having pretty severe misgivings about him attending there. Fortunately, the aid was not good (no surprise, though he did get a merit scholarship - but not the highest level, which would have made it more feasible), and he came around on his own to deciding NOT to limit his options by attending a school with such a narrow range of majors and no possibility of transferring credits out if he changed his focus. I really don’t know whether I would have said “no” if he had decided on DigiPen, but fortunately we didn’t have to cross that bridge. I did make it very clear from the beginning that no matter what schools he was accepted to, liked, etc., we had a veto on financial grounds. He knew we would do what we could but he also knows about our overall financial situation, and that some things just might not be possible. I think he might have ended up at UCSC, but when the aid package came in, I just said point blank, we cannot do this. Not a big surprise to him, though, since I’d been saying all along, “we probably won’t be able to afford a UC, even with merit aid, so just be ready for that possibility.” I think it’s important to set reasonable expectations in the $$ department, from the ‘git go.’</p>
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<p>A student who gets an early admission to an affordable school gets a safety in that school and can therefore drop applications to other less preferred schools (or all other schools in the case of ED or if an EA/rolling school is the first choice), but if none of the ED/EA/rolling schools yields an early admission, the student still needs to have other safeties in mind planned out (applications complete except for the final submission to avoid having to rush applications to them in that case).</p>
<p>^ agreed!</p>
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<p>Some applicants will have a 100% chance of admission, e.g., Obama’s kids. Do u think Bill Gates’s kids are going to get any thin envelopes?</p>
<p>I made a rule that they had to apply to at least one public in-state school, and any other school they applied to they had to explain to me how they would pay for it above what I agreed to pay (which was basically in-state tuition and costs). DD1 applied to one OOS flagship that was auto admit and financially fine for me, and that was it. DD2 applied to one private in-state school.</p>
<p>So much for my rules.</p>
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It depends how you define “best students.” If by “best students” you mean students with near perfect stats without consideration of anything else, then the <50% rule is true for several selective colleges (selective colleges that sponsor NMSs such as Vanderbilt, Rice, and USCs are exceptions for which the chance of acceptance would be close to >90% for near perfect stats), but if you define best students to mean excelling on the non-stat portions of the application as well, then the acceptance rate for particular groups of students can get quite high at nearly all colleges. This relates to why we often hear about students who have something amazing in non-stat portions being accepted to all or nearly all of the selective colleges to which they applied. An example that has been discussed on the forum is the student at <a href=“http://www.modbee.com/2013/05/30/2738606/elk-grove-teen-goes-9-for-9-in.html”>http://www.modbee.com/2013/05/30/2738606/elk-grove-teen-goes-9-for-9-in.html</a> who was accepted to HYPSM and all other schools he applied to and received the Gates Millennium Scholarship. He seemed to most excel in personal qualities, rather than traditional hooks. The description also makes it sound like he had very impressive ECs, essays, LORs, etc. A similar statement could be made for many applicants whose ECs/awards include something impressive on the national/international level or traditional hooks.</p>
<p>We limited to those with significant merit scholarships. D will be going to grad school so we had to be careful in selecting a school that would open all doors but not kill our savings.</p>