I was looking at the link that srparent15 posted. So many kids from Cornell landed their jobs in the West coast. They say if you want to work in the tech industry, go to the college nearby. But Cornell kids can go everywhere.
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My son was rejected and waitlisted to many colleges. Even some safety schools denied him. Is it because of this year being unusual, or because of Computer Science being super competitive. I don’t know. I feel your pain.
I think already crapshoot college admission got way worse this year. Safeties are yield protecting and top ones are having many more applications. Nothing wrong with the applicant, just the situation is bad. But it will resolve once waitlisted students are accepted after accepted students decline some of their offer. So don’t worry.
Me too. I have gotten rejected/waitlisted at safety schools. I am so nervous for Cornell. Cornell is the last school that I am waiting to hear back from and all of my previous schools weren’t good news.
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I think some people underestimate what safety school means. Safety schools should be schools that you are 100% sure you will get into. I’ve seen some people on the UT Austin cc board say “I’m OOS and have a 3.9 GPA, and a 1500 SAT. I thought UT was a ‘safety’ school, but I guess not.” Well, UT is required by law to accept 90% from in-state, so ANYONE applying from OOS should know it’s not a safety school even if you are valedictorian with a 1600 SAT. OOS admission acceptance this year for UT was 7%! That’s not a safety school! Safety school is when you are guaranteed admission if you are in top 10% and you are in top 10%, or schools with a 90%+ acceptance rate. At the very least, a safety school should admit more people than it rejects (so, 51%+ acceptance rate) and you should have GPA and scores that fall into their mean acceptance. Pretty much any competitive flagship state school should not be considered a safety school for any OOS applicant ( or even competitive in-state applicants).
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same here, all rejection until now, but I applied to target and reaches, I didn’t applied safety as I’m international and require aid (EFC is $6k per annum, and on top of that all I can do is work-study)
Safety school did waitlist while 50 others from high school got accepted. On an average 80-90 get into PSU.
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I’m an international applicant, so spare me if I get confused here. In a previous email, cornell said the time of decision release would be 7pm EST. But due to daylight savings, the clock for you guys has shifted back by 1 hour, right?? So will the time of decision release be 8pm EDT now or is it 7pm EDT??
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7pm EDT
you’ll have to adjust that 1hr. in your own time zone. Else, online time converters take into account the EDT and will give you the right conversion.
Hope that helps ~
yeah I got it, thanks! the time for everyone stays the same in their own perspective, but it changes relatively, if I’m not wrong
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7:00 p.m. EST will be 4:30 a.m. in India
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Exactly! I have never understood this. My son’s safety school was Miami (OH) where we knew that they gave merit scholarships at all levels that he qualified for even at the lowest level since it’s right on their page. Turns out he was offered a full merit scholarship. That was his only safety because you only need 1. 1 school that you will go to if you get into no others and you are 100% ok going to and 100% sure you will get in. Once he was accepted to Purdue, he then declined Miami, OH. As he receives better options he also declines other schools.
Of his original 7 he’s been accepted to 5, w/l 1 and deferred his ED which is here. We did our research didn’t apply to 20 reach schools, or 20 schools period. I don’t quite understand what people’s processes were with that. When he was deferred Cornell however, because no other schools decisions had come out yet, he did add 6 schools (2 of which he was always planning to apply if he had been rejected from Cornell), and then 3 others. Of those 5, he’s been waitlisted to 3 which is actually kind of funny and then 4 more to hear from with the expectation of rejections, but he does now have some great options. I think this year people reached too high without taking into account safeties. The other issue for people will be financial and the waitlists as many schools will not offer financial aid because they’ll have given it out already if they offer someone a spot off the waitlist, so that too will wind up causing a lot of changes.
I’ve seen on many threads people saying they haven’t gotten into any schools and when they list their schools, they are all reaches! Someone in the Northwestern group actually said their counselor told them that’s a safety. Heck no! Terrible advice. There are other Northwesterns in the country so maybe the person got confused.
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I think with Covid, many students didn’t have in person classes and therefore weren’t in the building to meet with counselors. That was the case with our school district and we are fortunate that our family planned for this scenario. But many students had little guidance through this year’s application process and that combined with the surge in applications with TO policies has made it an unpredictable year for many.
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Yeah, I don’t know. My son had his virtual meet with his counselor last April, but he had already starting visiting and researching colleges way before that. We didn’t rely on the counselor to tell us what a safety would be. Talking to people in our school, knowing where other people attend, general word of mouth, facebook college groups, etc. is just the best way and there are many schools that offer merit and you know off the bat what the requirements are to get in. There are also a lot of state schools that just have a set index for admission that are not bad schools.
Totally agree. But as one of the people who had no idea going in that TX capped OOS at 10%, or that the default SAT range and acceptance rate for a school might be way off if you’re applying to engineering, this mistake is way easier to make than you might think. My son was halfway through an intense amount of college application work before we fully understood this, and then frantically tried to change course in Dec. Maybe this is why people hire college counselors, because I feel like I’ve done almost nothing for the past 6 months except learn all of this stuff, and I learned it too late. I feel like I let my son down by not understanding earlier that we were letting him set his sights too high, and the result now is a shocking number of rejections which at this point are expected, but each feels like a blow nonetheless.
His SAT is 150 points higher than mine was, he has taken 4 times as many AP classes as I did, and I went to an ivy. The landscape changed and I didn’t figure it out in time. At least I’ll know all of this for my next kid. And I’ve been telling everyone around me with younger kids so that they don’t go through what we did.
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Things are completely different now than when we went to college, including that the SAT is a completely different test, so you can’t really compare yours to his and that you went to an Ivy. Many people who went to Ivies 20 years ago acknowledge they would have no chance in getting in today.
UT is pretty transparent about that and most school counselors know that as well. They only take 8% OOS and 2% are international. Engineering there can be as hard to get in as an Ivy if not harder. The essays there also really matter. Engineering though is not ideal for all as it’s very hard to change majors within engineering. We knew someone who wanted to change out of Aerospace into CS which is in CNS there and he couldn’t. So he finished, taught himself and is working at Google or FB I can’t remember which as a software engineer anyway.
Other than my oldest who had some issues, we have never used a college counselor outside of what school provides and they’re pretty useless. The key is to start researching and planning in sophomore year including visits and narrowing down lists, etc. But usually after a first kid, people do much better the second time. But that still doesn’t absolve people from knowing what a safety is vs not. Texas is definitely not one because anyone looking at Naviance or whatever their school has, would see that too.
It is not too late to find a safety. The Nacac list doesn’t come out for a while, but check into your state colleges.
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To select safeties / target / reach, we used Parchment. This website is supposed to have the database from past users to compare your stats, your race and other profiles to predict the likelyhood of your acceptance of each school. This is just the data science. Of course it is not perfect, but just the guideline. My son was rejected from schools with 72%, 87%, and 89% chance of acceptances.
Also he was rejected from the school that invited him for the fly-in program, and he attended the virtual fly-in.
The problem with something like parchment is that all schools are not created equal per se, so we ignore what that says and just look at the stats from our own school because we know what the rigor is and what the GPA means etc. Some schools don’t have APs and scale things differently like a Scarsdale for instance, but a 3.8 GPA is actually really high there. So it’s not comparing apples to apples if that makes sense. That’s why I never really pay attention to the chance me stuff on here. It’s so hard to find the right measure but having a variety of schools to apply to across the spectrum is the best thing to do.
@tnspls21 @nw2this is correct. There are a lot of schools you can still apply to as my son is receiving emails daily hitting him up to apply to still. He’s not, but clearly there are still schools out there looking for students.