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I think this is probably true–but it could be that the mystery negative factor is something unknown to the kid, or really unfair to him. Maybe a recommendation that the recommender thought was postive, but sends up some kind of flag to reviewers. There have been a few kids here on CC that made me really scratch my head when I read their results.</p>
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<p>I would think that any student with a flawed application would end up in the reject pile, not the waitlist pile (unless Daddy was a BIG contributor).</p>
<p>My son got into four top-20 colleges and was rejected by three. He was only waitlisted by one school and that one, curiously, had the highest acceptance rate of the bunch. I suspect that school was involved in yield-management, since my son had never had a chance to visit the school or otherwise “show the love.” I wonder how many other students get waitlisted on the lower end because they are expected not to attend and then also get waitlisted on the high end because they fell a hair short of the competition.</p>
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I disagree. If they got waitlisted everywhere, there probably was nothing wrong with the application. If they got denied everywhere except the safety, then yes there probably was something lacking. I don’t have a problem with a student applying to only elite colleges plus the state college as long as they realize that the state college may well be where they end up. That’s what my niece did, as an engineer and a bit of a homebody, I’m sorry that she’s not being stretched more, both by getting out of the state and by being at a top university, but she’s quite happy where she landed. I am told engineering curriculum is pretty much the same everywhere in any event.</p>
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<p>Let’s not forget that Chicago admitted 300 more students in in 2014 early application round than the school’s expected enrollment. </p>
<p>The number of applications is a direct result of “market” reactions to several factors, ranging from the ease to complete an application (read Common Application) to the perception of a relatively better chance of admission (read higher acceptance rates) to the lack of binding early applications to … changes in the USNews rankings. </p>
<p>There is, however, a great constant, and that is that the enrollment numbers at the top schools are extremely stable. Just as stable as the number of students who have reasonable chances of gaining admittance at the same top schools. The biggest differences in recent years are simply traced to increases in the number of applications per applicant and the number of “why not” applications.</p>
<p>Xiggi,
In contrast to the “stability” of # slots and number who have reasonable chances of gaining admittance, what is your opinion of the trends in “quality” of applicants?</p>
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<p>What should one use to measure the changes in quality of applicants? Changes in SAT and ACT scores? Changes in AP scores? Changes in rankings?</p>
<p>Should one think that the quality of education is getting better in our K-12? </p>
<p>Should one give any credibility to the April announcements about the “next Class” when knowing those statistics are wildy unverifiable and quite different from the “real” numbers that represent the enrolled class? </p>
<p>That takes care of possible facts. As far as a pure opinion, I see absolutely no reason to believe that the quality of applicants is any better in 2011 than it was in [fill the blanks.] But, again, that is an opinion.</p>
<p>Xiggi - Chicago admitted 1600 this year too which is 250 over. What I seriously wonder about is what happens when Chicago receives 1600 acceptances because several students who were expecting to go elsewhere (read Ivy?) did nt get in and they have an extra 250 students? </p>
<p>I have seen a listing of the current batch of national merit students from my kid’s school (exceeding 25) and where they wanted to go (last year several from the same school with similar profiles got into multiple Ivies) and I find that although Ivies were their top choice, very few got in in RD and some got in EA/ED. Several of them did get into Chicago, Duke etc. but nothing like the Ivy downpour like last year. What I found interesting is that several got into Chicago and it looks like they will all go there which means from my sample of 1 school, from about a 20% yield last year, Chicago may go upto 80 or 100% and similar numbers for schools like Northwestern, Duke, Vanderbilt. Now these schools have a major problem with their higher yield and it definitely will have to result in lower admission numbers next year right?</p>
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<p>Schools share information in a myriad of ways. But I am highly, highly, highly doubtful (I think the odds are infinitesimally small) that schools will ever form any sort of shared decision plan like is being suggested on this thread. Not that it’s not a good idea or that admissions folks wouldn’t think it’s a good idea, but because it would likely be considered illegal by the Dept. of Justice.</p>
<p>“What?!” you may wonder. Justice? Involved in college admissions?</p>
<p>Let me give you some context for what I’m talking about – and I think this has had a pretty big impact on college admissions’ development over the past two decades too.</p>
<p>In the 80s and early 90s a group of highly selective colleges and universities would meet each spring to go over their shared/common admits, also known as “overlaps.” The group, named the Overlap Group, was comprised of the Ivy League, MIT, Amherst, Williams, Tufts, Middlebury, Colby, Bowdoin, Trinity, Wesleyan, Barnard, Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Bryn Mawr. These schools would come up with a common financial aid package for their needy overlaps, meaning that applicants would receive equally competitive packages at all the participating schools. The idea was that low-income applicants should be able to choose amongst the schools on the basis of fit, not on the basis of variable cost, and that the schools could maximize the use of need-based institutional financial aid instead of “pricing each other out” or getting into some kind of bidding war.</p>
<p>The DOJ determined that this behavior constituted price fixing and violated the Sherman Act (in effect, the colleges were jointly determining the “price” [COA-jointly established FA package=price] for each FA consumer). The Overlap Group disbanded.</p>
<p>In its wake, a group called the 568 Group emerged. Named for the legislative exemption which enables colleges to meet to discuss FA common methodologies without discussing actual applicants’ financial aid packages, the group is comprised of Amherst, Brown, Claremont McKenna, Columbia, Cornell, Univ. of Chicago, Davidson, Duke, Dartmouth, Emory, Georgetown, Haverford, Holy Cross, St. John’s, MIT, Northwestern, UPenn, Pomona, Swarthmore, Vanderbilt, Williams, Wesleyan, and Wellesley. The 568 Group discusses methodologies and institutional approaches and, theoretically at least, have a common approach to calculating need and and awarding institutional financial aid, but they do not discuss individual cross-admits’ (overlaps) financial aid awards.</p>
<p>Of course other colleges/universities also share applicant (non-financial aid) information in different ways. A group of some of the most selective private schools share statistical data that is not shared to the public; schools can share and cross-examine admit lists for Early Decision programs (and some do); two deans may just sit down and talk through some things (there’s nothing that compels or prevents two administrators from private institutions from comparing admit rates on 17-year-olds from Wyoming or the yield rates on Asian private school kids from Seattle or what-not, though usually these categories are much more broad). </p>
<p>HOWEVER, if a group of schools were to sit down and sort out individual applicants amongst themselves (whether the first time around or on the WL or what have you) it would likely be construed as some sort of price-fixing, given that different schools charge different rates and different schools would offer differing financial aid packages. . . Schools would otherwise have to charge a common fee and provide financial aid at common rates. . . . I think it would construed as an anti-trust violation.</p>
<p>Does that make sense?</p>
<p>“You can so easily get into the upper echilons of finace”</p>
<p>Hence the term “Wall Street” rather than “upper echelons of finance.” I meant exactly what I said. You offered some perfectly good arguments about why students shouldn’t care about certain advantages that Harvard offers over Chicago. That’s fine. You did not offer any arguments that the advantages don’t exist. I stand by my position that your statement at the end of post #628 went a bit too far. There are indeed places in the non-academic world – places a lot of young people want to go – where it might matter that a kid went to Harvard instead of UChicago.</p>
<p>Justmytwocents - this should have been my moniker!</p>
<p>“A group of some of the most selective private schools share statistical data that is not shared to the public; schools can share and cross-examine admit lists for Early Decision programs (and some do);”</p>
<p>I mentioned this issue on another thread about the Stanford adcom mentioning in a presentation that someone this year got admitted EA to Stanford and ED to Columbia and when they found out, both schools cancelled the admission. The question everyone had was “how do they know”. </p>
<p>Are you saying there is a practice to compare lists of SCEA/ED listings to look for violations?</p>
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<p>While I think there’s some truth to what xiggi says, at the level of any particular college it could be completely wrong. Look at the thread in the Harvard forum about their mailings. The thread was started to repeat the now familiar complaint that Harvard does mass mailings solely to boost the number of no-chance applications it receives, thus increasing its selectivity numbers for ranking purposes. Except several current or accepted students have shown up on the thread saying “I never thought I had a chance to go to Harvard until the mailings convinced me to apply, and now I’m going to Harvard.” (Or in one case, Yale.) Even at Harvard, when applications come in from kids who would not have applied in the past, it turns out that some of them have a reasonable chance of admittance, at least. And that does not mean that the traditional sources of applications suddenly stopped producing candidates with a reasonable chance of admittance. I have to conclude that the number of students in the Harvard applicant pool with a reasonable chance of admittance has increased, not remained constant.</p>
<p>And what’s true even at Harvard is true in spades at the University of Chicago, which has more than doubled its application numbers in the past six years. Does anyone really think that has happened without increasing the number of quality applicants in the pool? I don’t.</p>
<p>What’s more, while some of these increased quality applicants are simply the same people applying to more colleges per person, some of them are clearly people who would not have been applying to ANY “top” national university in the recent past. They would have gone to a state school and been really successful there, or gone into the Army, been hippies, stuff like that.</p>
<p>This makes me think of one of my favorite families. The parents each migrated to Canada as children from Guangdong Province, where their families had been peasant rice farmers for centuries. They went to McGill and became a mid-level aviation engineer and a school teacher, and wound up married to each other and living in Los Angeles. Their children graduated summa cum laude from Berkeley, Yale, and Princeton, and included a Rhodes Scholar, a Marshall Scholar, two Supreme Court clerks, a high federal government official, and a multimillionaire software developer. And today, the original couple’s grandchildren would be legacies (and thus prima facie not qualified, according to some here). Over the course of 40 years or so – not much more than the time since I applied to college – that family sure as heck expanded the number of quality Ivy League college applicants. </p>
<p>The same process is going on today.</p>
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<p>I thought the same thing. It is an advantage to a point, but then may become a liability depending upon how many legacies apply that year.</p>
<p>I am reminded of my D’s friend, the 5th and youngest child of two Princeton parents and 4 Princeton siblings, who was rejected from Princeton. She attended Harvard instead.</p>
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<p>Some schools have always exchanged lists, for a variety of reasons. I can’t speak for Stanford or Columbia currently.</p>
<p>Even if not for list exchanging, there are many ways an ED school could find out about someone cross-applying elsewhere and trying to pull the wool over the other school’s eyes. I know of a handful of examples. I know of one well-discussed example where a student told an ED school in the summer prior to Orientation that s/he couldn’t enroll because of a sick family member (thus needing to stay on one side of the country for school) but used another school’s email address (in the same side of the country as the ED school!) to send his/her email. I know of students who are accidentally exposed by unwitting guidance counselors (the ED admitted student never pulled their applications and an admissions officer calls to talk to the GC about the file or ask for mid-year grades or what have you). This one will sound crazy, but I’m not exaggerating: two admissions reps are on a recruitment trip together, they cover the same territory geographically and they’re having a drink (or if you prefer to keep a wholesome image of admissions folks, they’re eating dinner), talking about the past year. One rep says to the other, “Oh! I have this amazing kid enrolling from Blankety Blank High School in Anytown - did you read him too? <insert highly=”" specific=“” story=“” about=“” essay,=“” or=“” family=“” circumstances,=“” amazing=“” talent=“”>." Other rep says, “What? He applied to us ED! We admitted him! What are you talking about!” And the story unravels from there. </insert></p>
<p>. . . . and so on.</p>
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I don’t think the applicants of today are any more intelligent than the applicants of, say, 30 years ago. But it is my observation that the applicants–and the admittees–of today are significantly more accomplished than those of 30 years ago, at least at the very top schools. I’m talking about things like number of AP courses, advanced courses at colleges, research, prizes, extensive ECs, etc. Those things have expanded far beyond the private schools and top urban/suburban schools of past decades. So in that respect, I think applicants of today are “better.”</p>
<p>^ I totally agree … two pieces of evidence. First, I applied 30 years ago and got into 6 of 8 schools to which I applied … if I applied now with my qualifications from 1977 I’d get into 1 or maybe 2 of the schools if I was lucky. Second, my kids friend’s and the kids whom I interview for my alma mater blow the doors off the kids from my high school.</p>
<p>I agree for the most part, but I did take 4 APs, and had the equivalent of a Girl Scout gold award as well as a bunch of other ECs. My husband was on his school tennis team and a finalist Intel (then called Westinghouse) finalist. No one took more than 1 AP before senior year that I can think of unless they came in fluent in a language. OTOH when I was comparing myself with my oldest - since I graduated at 16 and he was 19, I think I actually was more accomplished if you compared us by age instead of grade. :D</p>
<p>At my school, when I graduated in 1976, there were no APs at all. TCalculus wasn’t offered; only pre-calc. I can’t imagine there are many schools of any size like that anymore. At the Ivy I attended, there were quite a few students with backgrounds like mine–top grades and scores from decent public schools, but nothing amazing. The kids from private schools and from places like Fairfax County had more impressive academics. But there just weren’t the huge number of people with super-impressive achievements outside school as there are now.</p>
<p>My kids are pretty accomplished–but they’ve had opportunities that I couldn’t even have imagined.</p>
<p>Hunt - out of curiousity, what was the annual tab at Yale back then?</p>
<p>^ Cornell for the 77-78 year was $6700 … $4400 tuition and $2300 room & board … and yes a student could put themselves through school if they hustled.</p>
<p>room and board - 2300 to - 12,000? How does tuition go from 4400 to close 40? Should nt it be 25000.</p>