You know…this is a good reason to NOT discuss your college applications, grades, SAT scores, etc with your friends and family. Seriously…it’s no one’s business anyway…and only causes this kind of speculation regarding admission.
@compmom we also live in the northeast, and in an area where HS classes are well less than 200 students. Multiple students get accepted to the same (and elite ones too) colleges every year.
Relax. No need to worry if one’s application affects the other, how many match/likely schools. Are. On her list, how far her other choices are from airports, or whatever else has been on the worry list. Fretting does not change anything. Has your daughter had that alumnae interview yet? It may not help, but it doesnt hurt
@jym626 No, she cannot schedule the interview until her app is submitted. She is still finishing it up, deadline is Nov 15. But she will definitely have one.
As a Vassar alumnae interviewer, I know it can sometimes take a bit of time, at least where I live, for the office to get the local alums to schedule the interview. You are instate so this may not be an issue, but the early bird catches the worm. I’d encourage her not to wait until close to the deadline to submit.
Keep in mind…you also can’t control the others from all over the place who are also applying ED to Vassar. You have no way of knowing the strength of THOSE applications.
Please…stop worrying about this. your daughter will be the same wonderful kid whether she gets accepted ED to Vassar…or not. Once the application is submitted,mreally, it’s in the hands of the admissions folks at the college.
I will try to say this gently, but I strongly think you need to calm down and remove yourself from her college application experience for a while. I actually thought it was a teenager posting this, going by the title of the post. I know how stressful it is, because I was in your position last year. At one point I had to step away, because I realized I was actually causing my daughter more stress. My daughter found out other kids were applying to one of her top choices and she just said “oh well.” What will be will be. Step away for a while, maybe a couple of weeks if you can, and just let her come to,you if she has questions. Give her a break for a little while.
Am I dreaming that there were more posts here just a few minutes ago? Texas cheerleader-mom type posts?
Worrying about other applicants – there be dragons. Seriously – put blinders on now. Otherwise you will be a wreck (and maybe a not very peasant one) by the time this is done. Schools WILL accept applicants that surprise you – and possibly not your kid along the way. You have no way to know what someone else’s full application looks like, so second guessing those cases is not productive or even appropriate. Once that ED app is submitted, the next step is to keep working on the other apps. If your kid gets turned down from their ED school, it can be hard to stay motivated. So put all thoughts of the ED school behind and focus on the rest.
Even so, colleges do have some flexibility in this regard to account for the variances in strengths of individual students in a wide variety of high schools across the nation along with the college adcom’s perceptions of individual high school academic/institutional reputations.
For this reason, there may be cases where even a small HS in the NE may receive multiple acceptances to elite colleges like Vassar. Conversely, there may be other high schools which have a hard time placing a single student in Vassar or peer colleges for several years. Large part of that is the strengths of the individual applicants.
One area where the academic/institutional reputations of a given high school may play a part is whether the high school is known for being academically underperforming or for having a historical record of massively turning down admission to a given college*.
Especially in dubious circumstances such as a pattern of one or more students each year turning down binding ED admission offers for reasons other than financial hardship.
The effectiveness of this can vary greatly depending on the student culture and cooperativeness of some teachers/admins.
In the student cultures of some high schools, such “advice” would actually be like waving a red flag to encourage students to tell each other their GPAs/scores due to adolescent/teen rebelliousness against “do-gooder”* parents/teachers/school admins.
Worse, in some high schools where some old-school teachers/admins don’t maintain confidentiality of grades** in front of the rest of the class/student body outside of schoolwide award ceremonies at the end of the year/graduation, such “advice” would rightly be seen as hypocritical by the students and thus, ignored.
** I.e. Listing homework/exam grades by name rather than by student ID# or by not keeping such a list in the first place.
I’ve told this story elsewhere on CC, but in the same year, my son and another boy from his high school were both accepted at Dartmouth and attend there now! The other boy was a recruited athlete, and my son applied RD and was accepted for his academic and EC accomplishments. Dartmouth is a very small school, and our high school was nothing special, yet there you have it. The students weren’t compared to each other, they each had their place in the class!
I graduated in a class of 40 students, small private school in NYC. 10% of us - 4 - went to Vassar. I’m guessing probably a couple more got in but went elsewhere. This was years ago but I think it illustrates that Vassar wants the students it wants, wherever they went to high school.
We all applied RD as I recall.
Thanks all for the input. I guess it’s hard not to get caught up in all this. Chalk it up to being the mother of an only child! The truth is, there is a lot of hype we have avoided, just by not applying to any of the schools that are common and popular among suburban NY kids. Vassar is the only one any of our friends have heard of! Anyway, the feedback I get here helps to put things into perspective.
We were in your shoes several years ago, when my daughter and one of her close friends applied to Stanford. They had what appeared to be similar profiles. The other girl was valedictorian and my daughter was salutatorian, although this wasn’t known at the time of the application. My D’s SAT was a 2340, the other girl’s was a 2280 (yes, when you have Naviance at a tiny school, you can easily figure out who every single dot represents). Both were active in the arts and in sports. Neither was a star athlete. Their teachers loved them. And both had a parent who went to Stanford.
I knew it was a long shot for both girls and that S was unlikely to take 2 students from their class of 65. So we did what I advise you to do: focus on helping your daughter get her heart set on several good schools, not just Vassar, and help her to make her application as excellent as it can be.
You do this by reminding her of accomplishments she may want to highlight; of stories that show her values and character; and of intellectual depth you have seen in her. Remind her that she will end up at a good school and that this will be HER school.
My daughter did not get into Stanford, but her friend did. They’re both seniors in college this year (my D is at Wellesley) and are still good friends. D has no regrets. She even went to visit her friend at Stanford at the end of their first year, and realized how much better a fit Wellesley was for her. Even though she was sad to be rejected from S (mostly wounded pride, I think), she has no regrets about the way this worked out.
@compmom, if your kid is at a really small high school, it’s very easy to tell from Naviance who each dot represents. A lot of the teachers at my kids’ small school hate Naviance for this reason. It fosters unhealthy comparisons and competition that doesn’t help anyone’s decision process.
For example, only one kid from my son’s grade applied to Rhode Island School of Design. When I looked up that school on Naviance, I saw that dot and knew his friend’s GPA and ACT score, and that he’d been accepted.
Our kids’ high school is small (50 kids in a graduating class). The GC is able to block viewing Naviance graphs for small sample sizes if they want to. Yours apparently has not gone to the trouble to do that. For the colleges with very few applicants, we just asked our GC, and she gave my kid a “chance” based on the dots she knew without showing us the graph. It is something to suggest to the GC once your kid has gotten past this application season to protect students’ privacy more fully.
“yes, when you have Naviance at a tiny school, you can easily figure out who every single dot represents”
Your school’s naviance should only be set up where you can see past results not the current year and then you are booted out of the system after you go through the process. Granted, if you have other children later on, you can look back and see that data from that cycle, but you shouldn’t be seeing it during that particular cycle.
I’m glad the OP is venting her concerns and anxiety here and I hope she isn’t presenting that face to her daughter. Our job as parents is to help our kids live as normal a life as they can over the coming months. A list of colleges has been decided on. Applications are in the works. It’s best to not talk about it with friends, not talk about it within the family, or at dinners, etc. She will land somewhere and she’s crafted a good list so all will be good, with or without Vassar.
Regarding a HS quota for Vassar, some anecdotal acceptance decisions from the high school I attended’s Naviance are below. There doesn’t appear to he an obvious relationship between number of students who applied and number of students who are accepted. Instead they might accept 3 out of 4 from the HS in one year, then reject everyone the next year. It’s strange that all the acceptances occurred in odd numbered years, but I expect that was just a coincidence.
2010 – 0/5 accepted
2011 – 3/4 accepted
2012 – 0/3 accepted
2013 – 2/5 accepted
2014 – 0/5 accepted
2015 – 2/3 accepted
2016 – 0 applied
I now live in on the other coast, so my local high school is much further away from Vassar, but it is a better HS, with a larger potion of students applying to top USNWR type colleges. Their Naviance acceptance history shows almost the same pattern, where there is no clear relation between number of applications and number of acceptances. One year they might accept 2 out of 3, then the next year reject everyone. The stats for both HSs suggest a possible advantage for ED, which is consistent with the information on Vassar’s website.
2011 – 0/2 accepted
2012 – 2/3 accepted
2013 – 0/3 accepted
2014 – 0 applied
2015 – 4/6 accepted
2016 – 0/1 accepted
Yep…our HS blocked all Naviance data if less than a certain number of students applied to a school. My daughter was the only student ever from her school to apply to her college. No one can see her data on Naviance.
Please, let’s not think of these as quotas. You are reviewed as an individual, but in context. That does include other kids in your school or the nearby (or not so nearby) within your area. This year, you could be great, so could a couple of kids from across town. They usually cannot take all and will have to sort. That’s not quota.
Something to note for ED. Yes, it can provide a boost. But for the unhooked applicant, at selective schools, the boost goes to candidates strongly qualified for the profile of the school. And the boost comes from being very qualified in a smaller pool vs competing in a much larger rd pool. It does not make up for stats that are not in line with the school profile. Really, really wanting the school and thinking you are the perfect fit, won’t really sway a decision.