So does that mean, 1NJParent in your post 238 that you are agreeing with my post 237, in that the parents of a student now that made poor choices back in the day, are responsible for being unfair by causing the “disadvantaged background” to their offspring? If their choices put him/her in a disadvantaged position, as you have described in post 238, then they were unfair. Then now the question would be should the student remain disadvantaged? If not, who bears the responsibility of [essentially] doing less for someone else to give extra help to the disadvantaged? What should that help be?
The student, many of whom are legally adults (age 18) are the ones going through the college application process. The LUCKY ones are those who have knowledgeable, helpful parents whose interests are aligned with their students, and go through this gauntlet for them. Kids without parents, or without a knowledgeable adult helping in the process are at considerable disadvantage. Yes, there are students who are savvy, organized, mature enough to commandeer the entire process themselves–I was one of them in my day. They may even be able to get the parental financial statements to fill out the financial aid applications. They may be the go getters to get scholarships. However, that is not typical.
I work at tax office where we get a lot of low income clients We assist with the FAFSA and PROFILE apps. A lot of these folks have kids at college on financial aid. They get the forms out because they have their taxes done (albeit, mostly to get refunds). Easy enough to file financial aid forms when the tax forms are done early.
I also know a number of high middle to high income families who refuse to cooperate with the financial aid forms and have strict budgets for college, or have no idea about the process but are sure their kids are going to get money. Those kids are at a disadvantage for college aid, because they can’t even fill out the FAFSA, and many aren’t going to qualify for enough aid to pay for a lot of college options because they aren’t going to be eligible for fin aid and the parents are not going to pay.
But kids whose parents are low income and cooperate with the fin aid process early, and kids whose parents are willing and able to pay, both can jump on the ED boat. It’s the kids who absolutely need merit money to swing the schools that have a huge problem with ED because a lot fo these schools have no merit awards, and scholarship money often isn’t awarded till late in the process. I daresay, those who go ED don’t tend to get as much merit money if the school has such funds. Why give it to someone already committed to the school?
ED isn’t available to everyone. That doesn’t make it unfair. It makes it unequal. The very low income families who can use ED if they are savvy are not in a better position. I would far rather be a middle class family, unable to use ED, than a low income family who can. Anyone who seriously believes that it is an advantage to be low income can easily avail themselves of that state. I have yet to see anyone give up their high paying job and divest themselves of all their assets.
The wealthy are clearly advantaged, but that is nothing new. The wealthy are advantaged in many ways. ED is possibly one of the least of their advantages. ED at the top elite schools will help very little. The admit rates are still infinitesimal. At the schools one level down – the Lehighs and Skidmores, ED is probably a real benefit, but there are still so many excellent schools out there that the children of the middle families can attend. Those schools need that ED tool to help them assemble a class that will actually attend when kids apply to 20 schools at a time.
ED is one of the reasons why a student needs to apply to 20 schools in the first place. The prevalence of ED drives down the RD acceptance rates, causing applicants to have to apply to more schools to offset the lower acceptance rates.
It is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Its not likely to change any time soon.
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I cannot understand why the ED mania has caused kids to apply to 20 schools. Yes, I get it, yield protection, it’s easier to get in ED vs. RD, benefits the rich, yadda yadda yadda. But a student who is so random in his/her approach that it takes 20 schools to yield the one college that he/she will actually attend- no, I’m not buying it.
And yes, I understand that merit aid is unpredictable. But again- if a kid (with help from the parents) knows what the college budget is (i.e. what they can afford to actually pay), I’m not convinced that chasing that extra $2000 in merit makes a difference, especially if the costs of applying to those 20 schools gets factored in. And VISITING a bunch of those schools, and for some families, a revisit for accepted students days.
I know families like this. And they tie themselves in knots, the parents take vacation time to do the revisits, costs of motels, etc.
For a lot of these “more than 10” applicants, at least 5 of the schools are the ultimate in a Hail Mary pass. The GC says “kid is not getting in”. Naviance shows that no kid with these stats has gotten in within the last few years. But parents want a miracle, and hope that their sweet and kind tennis-playing kid (good enough for club level at college) with the modest stats is going to catch the eye of an adcom at Dartmouth who pounds the table and says “We must have this kid!”
This is delusional. Yes, there are many fine tennis players at Dartmouth. But if you live in Belmont or Atherton or Winnetka or Chappaqua and your kid can’t crack 700 on either section of the SAT’s with a high B average then I’m here to tell you that your kid isn’t getting in to Dartmouth or Princeton or a bunch of other places on the wish list.
Then you’ve got the crowding at the bottom of the list- when a kid needs 6 safety schools “just in case”. No, you don’t need 6 safety schools, even if your list was put together so poorly that you will, in fact, end up at one of them.
20 colleges??? Sure, blame ED.
@scubadive that is very true. At one private school my D applied to they said that most students get some form of aid. They didn’t mention that a lot of that is loans. They offered my D aid that mostly consisted of loans and a small scholarship. We were in the not rich, but make too much for a lot of aid. My D went elsewhere and we didn’t want her to take on that much debt and H and I didn’t want to take on debt either.
@1NJParent said:
Although it feels like this is true, I think there are two fallacies in this argument.
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if a group of colleges decide to take a larger portion of their class ED, they are by definition taking a large group of high-performing kids out of the RD pool. And then consider each of those kids would have sent in ~10 apps RD. Consequently you actually have a lot of strong apps evaporate from the RD round. Yes there are fewer seats, but correspondingly fewer strong apps. I think it comes out close to a wash as far as any one kid’s chance of admittance.
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it is wrong to think just because a group of schools have 20% admission rate, that your kid is likely to get into 1 out of 5 of them. (and by extension that submitting 20 apps is a logical response to lowering admission rates.) It’s not a random lottery (except maybe on the knife edge of where you are truly borderline.) If you aim too high, your chance is close to zero; if you apply to a proper target range, you will get into many.
And to add to pickpocket’s fine post- applying early in the season to your own state U which has rolling admission, and usually- a price tag which is fixed (you either qualify for the limited amount of state aid or not)-- mitigates the need for a ton of safeties.
And that knife edge- boy. No, the peer schools don’t behave in lock-step. And yes- JHU may not need a cello for the orchestra but Duke or Northwestern might. But kids believe themselves to be “borderline” a lot more often than adcom’s do. Kids want to believe that the world’s funniest essay or the most warm-hearted recommendation is going to get the job done. And yes- it can make a difference. But ONLY after the application has been moved into the “acceptable” pile. If the application does not support getting admitted, you can be Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus combined…
@pickpocket The RD round is typically more competitive to get into especially for schools like Vandy and Emory where the RD pool tends to be the kids rejected from the Ivies. I’ve never seen any evidence that having ED reduces the level of competition in RD. My son never would have been admitted in RD and FWIW I am a strong proponent of ED.
My kid applied to 16 schools (his choice, not mine). At the time it seemed nuts, but looking back I don’t know that he should have done anything differently. There were some safeties and at least one huge reach in there, but the bulk of the schools were highly ranked LACs. He had the stats and transcript to be very competitive at any of them. His results with the seven top 20s he applied to: 1 denial, 2 acceptances, 4 waitlists. There would have been no way to predict in advance which ones he would get into (at least 2 of the waitlists were at schools with higher acceptance rates than at least one of the ones he got into). I think it likely mattered which schools are need blind and which are need aware (the two acceptances are need blind schools, and we have a low EFC), and in retrospect I would have steered him toward more need blind schools (so I would have encouraged him to apply to Bowdoin instead of Colby, for example). But if he’d applied to half as many schools, his choices right now would likely look different and more limited. I think it’s very likely he’d have gotten in to any of his waitlist schools had he applied ED…but there’s something like a $14,000/yr difference between the highest and lowest awards at the needs-met schools he was accepted to (wanting to compare offers is the primary reason he didn’t ED). I have to do this 3 more times, and I really don’t know what to change (if anything) next time. Outside of those top 20 schools, predictions are easier to make, it seems.
Good points @blossom @collegemom9 @kokotg . Perhaps I shouldn’t have said “knife edge.” In fact my non-ED kids did apply to 5-6 colleges for which I’d say they were borderline cases, and we did see some of the ‘crap shoot’ nature of results. Nevertheless, I think that degree of randomness (like the surprise acceptance at a more competitive school and rejection from a less comp. school) exists due to the nature of holistic admissions and is not really increased by the existence of ED.
@collegemom9 , those Ivy-Early rejects would still be in the RD pool at Vandy and Emory even if ED were scaled back or eliminated. This is why I question whether RD chances are really harder due to the existence of ED.
Let’s say ED goes away. So to use the example of Vandy and Emory- the superstar kid whose first choice is Princeton, is not going to only apply to Princeton. The GC will tell him-- rightly so- that although he’s a competitive applicant for Princeton, it’s not a sure bet.
So that nice well rounded list becomes Princeton and maybe Yale as the reachy but plausible schools; JHU and Northwestern for the “should be matches but nothing is for certain” and then the “not exactly safe but if you show them the love, you are likely to be admitted” schools become Vandy, Emory, Tulane. So the kid who was borderline for Vandy doesn’t become a more likely admit once early goes away- that kid gets rejected in a much more competitive applicant pool, or gets waitlisted as Vandy evaluates what their melt/yield looks like.
So my fictional applicant- who is in state for Vermont- applies to U Vermont as the safety. 8 schools in my perfect world. But in the current frenzy- even if early goes away- kids take my list of 8 and expand it to 15 or 20. If you like Emory, what about Skidmore or Vassar? If you love Yale, why not U Chicago? If Tulane is on the list, add Wake Forest too, right? And Bowdoin, Bates- shouldn’t they be there?
At least right now- that Princeton kid has a shot of applying early to Princeton, getting IN to Princeton early- and then clearing the field of all these fantastic schools for all the fantastic kids who really, really want to go to Vandy or Emory.
@blossom Just one flaw in your example. Emory is not a show them your love and you’ll be admitted school. They don’t even track demonstrated interest.
@blossom nice theory, but does it account for finances? What if that kid with the EA from Princeton thinks that an RD round FA offer from another IVY might prompt a better FA offer from Princeton? Or a merit award from UChicago or Vandy might make the better choice?
I’d love somehow here who has experience getting Princeton to up their aid.
The one family I know where I had some (limited) involvement in their aid situation told me that the Princeton NPC was $5 off the actual award. But Princeton has a reputation for bringing their A game to financial aid, so I’m not sure how negotiating with them would play out. A kid who gets an early admission to Princeton but thinks that an RD offer from Brown or Columbia is going to be better? delusional.
If a kid has no need- then apply to Chicago or Vandy for the elusive merit chase, since Princeton doesn’t offer merit.
Again- none of this accounts for the frenzy to apply to 20 schools.
I think there are two separate issues.
One is the fact that ED gives an admissions boost to some applicants, which others cannot take advantage of, often due to financial constraints. This means that the ED boost tends to favor applicants from wealthier families, either because of the ability to shoulder high anticipated costs of college and/or because the wealthier students are more likely to have the resources available to allow them to be aware of and take advantage of that ED boost. In most cases, a student who applies ED has a greater chance of admission than a similarly-situated student who applies RD.
But the other is the impact that has on the overall chances of admission – the argument seems to be that if there were no ED, then everyone’s chances in the RD round would be better. But I don’t think that holds true, because for the most selective colleges, the admissions rate for RD alone is only very slightly lower than the admissions rate for RD + ED together. This is pretty easy to work out mathematically. One reason it works out that way is that the ED pool is smaller & there is essentially a 1:1 correspondence between ED admits and enrollees; whereas the RD pool is much larger, and the colleges accept more students in the RD round than they have room for, as they anticipate that many students will opt to attend other colleges. So even with ED, many more students are accepted in the RD round-- it’s just that of those students, many don’t end up attending.
Would it change the dynamics? Yes, it would. Would it mean that the kid who applied ED because of the perception that there was no chance of admission RD have better chances of getting in? Probably not – it would simply create a system in which the admissions priorities would be tweaked, very possibly in ways that would make admissions even less predictable— because the one thing that would become even more important to the colleges would be making decisions based on their own internal yield projections.
@Blossom’s point, or at least as I see it, is that, in the absence of ED, the kid who would have applied to one school is now applying to 20, driving down admissions rates even further, and making things tougher for the kids who for whom Blossom’s fictional applicant’s also-ran schools are dream schools.
These are not the kids being shut out of the top 20 in my area. Its kids with 1580 SATs and near perfect GPAs but no hooks or other special perks. These kids have participated in school clubs and activities and volunteered in their community, but not much beyond that. They had every reason to believe they were qualified for any school in the country and every right to be disappointed. Personally, I think the obsession with t20 or IVY or any other prestige designation is misplaced for most kids. But these kids were not delusional. The had very little shot because of the admissions rates, not because of their abilities or qualifications.