<p>Snow dog, I’m not suggesting the OP should “move on” from USC. I’m suggesting the OP should “move on” with regards to comparing their kiddo’s situation to ANYONE else.</p>
<p>As noted by others, this student could very well get one of the other USC scholarships, as well as an acceptance. </p>
<p>The parent seems disgruntled, and I hope this doesn’t interfere with the decision at the end of the process. </p>
<p>NO applicant has received a “deferred” admission decision.
–ALL applicants who got their apps in time for the unofficial early notification and did not get the fat package, like the OP’s DD are “deferred” as compared to those who did.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>USC does not defer to an RD pool, because it does not have ED and EA.
–USC does not have official ED or EA, but clearly it accepts some students early, as a lot of students do, and there seems to be a scheduled period for those notifications, so though the terms are not what are used, those kids who did not get those packages, are deferred to the RD pool, which is the vast majority of kids.</p></li>
<li><p>Interviews conducted during the admission cycle have no bearing on admission decisions. --Though they may not have bearing on admissions if they do for the scholarship, then since getting consideration for the big award does mean an early admissions decision…well, you see where I’m going here.</p></li>
<li><p>The merit scholarship process has no bearing on whether students who were not invited to interview for scholarships will be admitted.
– Again, the same. Those invited to interview are definitely in, right? Those not invited are in limbo still. Their chances of admissions are lower than the 100% for thoe who got the invite right?</p></li>
<li><p>The merit scholarship process has no bearing on whether admitted students will receive university (need-based) grants.
– Yes it does. If the merit scholarship process does result in an award, it will be offset from need directly and that can affect need based grants. Yes, the net number may be the same, but it does have bearing.</p></li>
<li><p>State of residence has no bearing on USC admission decisions. The highest represented state is CA.
– Yes, it does have some bearing, as USC does love diversity in geographics and since it has enough CA kids to probably fill a class, some Wyoming or West VA blood would be a slight plus in consideration for admissions. Most every school takes that into consideration. Brown and BC admit it outright. Of course the highest represented state is CA since the school is in CA and the average college kid doesn’t go an hour from home. It’s like 90% go within 4 hours of home. So it’s no surprise that USC has mostly Californeans.</p></li>
<li><p>If your child is one of the ~35,000 applicants who was not invited to interview for a scholarship (as was mine in 2012), it means NOTHING about whether to “move on” because he or she is not being admitted to USC.<br>
–IF your child is NOT invited to interview for that scholarship, it means that the chances of a big merit award from there is very small, and if that is what it’s going to take to go there, it’s probably time to move on. Our budget is such that if any of my kids wanted to go there, the only way possible is to get merit money as the sticker price is out of range for us, and we don’t qualify for fin aid. My son just took all the privates that cost $60K+ and did not offer sufficient merit, off the table because they were not affordable. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>@cptofthehouse - you really are giving out a lot of misinformation about a college with which you have no personal experience. Of course that is what people do here. But still, you aren’t helping the OP.</p>
<p>^I would actually say that his post is spot on. </p>
<p>"- State of residence has no bearing on USC admission decisions. The highest represented state is CA.</p>
<p>-- Yes, it does have some bearing, as USC does love diversity in geographics and since it has enough CA kids to probably fill a class, some Wyoming or West VA blood would be a slight plus in consideration for admissions. Most every school takes that into consideration. Brown and BC admit it outright. Of course the highest represented state is CA since the school is in CA and the average college kid doesn’t go an hour from home. It’s like 90% go within 4 hours of home. So it’s no surprise that USC has mostly Californeans."</p>
<p>I agree with Cpn’s response. Just because a school (any private) doesn’t state that “state of residence” is a consideration that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t come into play. Privates love to say that they have kids from X number of states. the fact that USC is loaded with Calif kids is just because the school gets a gazillion apps from Calif and - as Cpt states - most kids don’t go to far from home. In Calif, if you have strong stats you apply to the UCs, USC, Stanford and some other schools. </p>
<p>The same can be said for eng’g. Many schools will be more lenient towards female applicants who will be in eng’g. Yet, I’ve never seen “gender” written on any school’s list of “considerations for admittance.” </p>
<p>I am not responding to anything about USC but just to what you stated in your post. I just refuted every single thing you said simply because the statements in themselves are not true. It doesn’t matter what the school involved is.</p>
<p>If a school has nothing that they call EA, ED, rolling, RD, but they do send out a batch of acceptances along with merit award invitations on a systematic basis, those students who did not get accepted at that time, are “deferred” no matter how you want to spin it. They are not officially deferred because that’s not what the school calls it, but, yes, they are deferred as compared to those who got the golden ticket of acceptance. You don’t get that letter and packet on that day or that week, and you are deferred, baby. You are deferred to the date when everyone else gets told or if there are some special pickings in between there, maybe sooner than the masses, but you are deferred as compared to those who got the package. OP’s DD was deferred compared to her friend who was accepted. I don’t see any issue with that. Them’s the facts. </p>
<p>I wasn’t trying to help the OP on my post. I think she’s been well helped and is just fine. I think she was just fine from the get go. Just a disappointed, surprised and puzzled that her DD was DEFERRED as compared to her friend who was ACCEPTED EARLY IN THE PROCESS. And we all gave the reasons why these things happen, and she gets it. </p>
<p>So I just responded to your post, point by point. </p>
<p>I personally think that cpt is spot on.</p>
<p>My daughter was very fortunate and lucky that she was accepted and invited for an scholarship interview at USC. We’re full pay, so we’re grateful for the opportunity. We’re also from SoCal and she also attends a very big typical suburban public HS. She thinks that she’s the only one who got the packet from her school.</p>
<p>I’m surprised there isn’t more of any uproar over the OP’s friend who it sounds like was accepted ED at Cal Poly, but kept her app in at USC. The ED accept date was Jan 15, so maybe that ‘big packet’ would have had time to go to the next person on the list.</p>
<p>^^
Maybe the family is still negotiating the aid pkg from Cal Poly? If so, that can delay an ED acceptance. I’ve seen people being able to delay their ED acceptances for a LONG time because of “reviews” for their FA pkgs. </p>
<p>It can almost be a game where the delays run into RD results. </p>
<p>I didn’t read all of the posts, but just came upon this thread and thought that I’d chime in with my .02 worth.
I’m not surprised at all about the OP’s daughter’s friend getting in. When we visited USC last summer, I naively asked if my son would be an automatic admit because he was a National Merit SemiFinalist (I only thought that NMSFs were auto admits because they gave such a generous scholarship to them that I thought that USC was trying to recruit NMSFs). The admissions officer exclaimed absolutely not! Nobody’s an auto admit. (Okay, I got that.) But then she went on to exude about one candidate who only got 1800 on the SAT but who was just incredibly amazing and she won their full ride scholarship. It was at this point that I realized that USC has quite different criteria for their top scholarships than I was expecting. I assumed that “holistic” would probably mean high stats (grades and test scores) PLUS a bunch of other amazing ECs, leadership, letters of rec, interview, etc… But apparently the high stats part is not even necessary. Or maybe this person was hooked – URM, athlete, dying of cancer, etc. But the adcom officer definitely went out of her way to stress the 1800 SAT score from this “amazing” full ride winner.</p>
<p>I did not get a merit-based scholarship offer from USC. These are my credentials:</p>
<p>SAT: 2070
ACT: 29
GPA: 4.0 unweighted, 4.07 weighted
Got A’s in two college course I took, but only one was reported at the time of application deadline.
Class Rank: 1/45</p>
<p>School Activities (the following I participated in one year each):
Tap Dance
Drama
Kuk Sool
Piano
Video Production
Photography</p>
<p>Most Important School Activities and Leadership:
Student-Body President this year
Editor of school newspaper this year, assistant editor last year, writer last three years
Creator of three yearbook pages this year
Bass Singer in choir in 10th grade</p>
<p>Our school does not offer sports</p>
<p>Extra-curricular activities:
Over 1,200 hours of community service through my participation in various organizations
Eagle Scout (Boy Scouts)
Past Master Councilor and currently the Senior Councilor of Superior Division Northern California DeMolay Association (Demolay)
Special Olympics Athlete
Sports Broadcasting Camp
Broadcasting of JV Basketball games at another high school
Volunteer play-by-play announcer for youth football league</p>
<p>Awards:
Marysville Exchange Club Student of the Quarter
American Legion Good Citizen Award
Representative Demolay Award
Lamp of Knowledge Award
Seven straight semesters of Principal’s List Honor Roll
Member of NSHSS
Demolay Jurisdiction Ritual Champion
Choir won a state competition the year I was a singer
Two silver and three bronze medals in special olympics
School Activity Points Award
Member of GATE
Member of California Scholarship Federation</p>
<p>Jobs:
Produced weekend event commercials for local radio station (1 month)
Worked for Marysville Gold Sox, doing play-by-play updates of game through the team’s Twitter account (3 months)
Sports reporter at Gridley Herald newspaper, covering local high school sports (last two years, currently working)</p>
<p>Recs: Great</p>
<p>Essay: Really personal. Talk about overcoming autism and Crohns Disease.</p>
<p>Degree I’m seeking: Broadcast Journalism, emphasis in sports</p>
<p>Location I’m from: Northern California</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s simply laughable. I don’t have time to get into long pi#$ing matches here on cc, but every single thing I wrote <em>is</em> true. You see, I’ve actually been through the admission process at USC with a child. Unlike any of the experts spouting their conventional wisdom on this thread. USC’s admission and scholarship process is has some differences to most colleges - not better, and the merit interview process and what seems to be some sort of early decision angle (it isn’t) causes students who aren’t invited to interview for massive scholarships a great deal of stress. But in fact - sorry caption but you just don’t know (if you’re so confident, post your theories on the USC forum), some students will still receive merit awards even if not half tuition or more. Have a nice day.</p>
<p>I believe it WAS stated upstream that this student could still very well be accepted, and receive a decent merit scholarship from USC. </p>
<p>And that is why I think the OP should let THIS part of the application/admissions part go. At the end of this process, she could very well find that her kid receives a generous merit award for USC.</p>
<p>“You see, I’ve actually been through the admission process at USC with a child. Unlike any of the experts spouting their conventional wisdom on this thread.”</p>
<p>What makes you think that you’re the only one here who’s been thru the USC admissions process. I can tell you for a fact, you aren’t.</p>
<p>“Holistic” means they take into consideration all kinds of non-academic factors: socioeconomic, geographic, personal struggles, etc. </p>
<p>Okay, I’ll admit I read just the first and last page of this thread, but the OP noted that the friend is a first-generation college student. At schools that use holistic measures for evaluating candidates, that factor counts for a lot and most likely is the primary reason why the friend was awarded merit aid.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, over at UCLA forum, the first 3 kids that mentioned they were invited for the UCLA Regents scholarship (Only 1.5% of 86,472 applicants were invited) were also finalists for USC merit scholarship. So could it be that USC merit candidate selection process is not random after all? The sampling is small, but still . . .</p>
<p>I think the issue between SnowDog and CPT is semantics. The early notification for a small percentage of students can seem like EA with merit money, and not getting the packet early can seem like deferral, but using those terms when USC doesn’t actually follow those practices (or at least call the decisions EA and deferral) can be very confusing for applicants who look for information on these forums. (Btw, I had one USC student graduate from Cinematic Arts in May – his professor helped him get his dream job – and another who is third year of a five-year architecture degree, minoring in cinematic arts. I can’t tell you how much our family loves this school.)</p>
<p>It’s also possible that the OP doesn’t know the BFF’s most recent or accurate test scores. the BFF may have taken the SAT again, or may have a better ACT score. </p>
<p>even BFF’s don’t always know such details, or they get retold incorrectly. I knew that one of my sibling’s sons had gotten an ACT 29. It wasn’t until much, much later did I learn that he retested and got a 33. So, we don’t always know the exact details. </p>
<p>Like somebody said, unless you read the application, you just never know what’s in it. Last year, in my daughter’s school, there was a girl that was accepted (and eventually attended) to Harvard that nobody knows about. My daughter (who was a junior back then) also said that the girl was originally in her AP Calc AB but she dropped out after a week or so. So it was a big surprise when they learned about her acceptance. It turned out that the girl is a very accomplished ballet dancer. I think she event went to Russia every summer to attend one of the most prestigious ballet school. But not a lot of people knew this. So, if they’re just basing her acceptance on grades and scores, they will say the same thing as OP said on this thread.</p>
<p>I stand by my post, every word. It has nothing to do with the school but the statements themselves are inherently wrong. USC does not EA as an official thing, but it does admit group of kids early, which means those who did not get accepted at that time are deferred, but not with a capital “D”. </p>
<p>As for trying to figure out why one kid is accepted and/or get merit and another isn’t at the same schools, it’s not a useful exercise. I have two close friends with twins and each set graduated from the same high school and applied to some of the same schools as the twin. The results were eye brow raising at times. </p>
<p>Things like an essay hitting a admissions officer the right way, and the order in which your app is read can even make a difference. If you are lucky enough to be a cross country runner who loves doing benefit races, and the person reading your app and essay on the subject has the same passion, it can be a great advantage. If that reader just broke up with a jerk that happened to be a runner and seem to fit the same mold, you are out of luck. Of course, it’s not the only factor, but if your on the fence, it can put you on either side. Also if you are the first Classics major in after reading STEM and premed apps, you are going to look like a breath of fresh air, whereas if your twins app is read after several very similar and better written essays, and kids with the same major which is rapidly becoming oversubscribed at the school, it’s going to be viewed differently. On the whole, it seems to be a fair process, but absolutely, sometimes luck of that sort enters the process. </p>