Regarding the mailings…
My D was just accepted to CWRU and rejected at Rice. Parents are very upset at all of the mail Case Western sent urging their child to apply to then have them rejected.
It is good to know for the 2nd child that the mailings mean nothing.
@adigel
“I have also asked our Guidance Counselor to reach out to the Lehigh admissions rep to see if she can get any feedback about whether something was lacking in her application.”
IF your DD really wants to go to Lehigh AND you can afford to send her there without merit $$, she should tell her GC that IF she is taken off the WL she will attend. She should ask if there are any other submissions she should send in- essays, latest achievements, etc.
That should improve her “chances” of acceptance there, [ unless her being on the WL is Lehigh’s not so gentle way of saying to her, [as an legacy]- sorry, but no. ]
my sympathies, but eventually she will realize, with your help , that she will be going to college next year!!
College is only one small step along the way in life.
And where she went to college is not going to end up being carved on her tombstone.
@menloparkmom Yes, once we get her other decisions we’ll decide if she’s ready to make the “I’ll attend if taken off the waitlist” statement. Hopefully the GC will have some point of view on whether Lehigh uses waitlists as a soft rejection for legacies.
I’m going to keep my fingers crossed for at least one other acceptance…or more. Please check in, and let us know.
I’m from Ohio…and really OSU is a terrific university. We have friends whose kids graduated from Maryland, and loved it there. I know those weren’t her top choices…but there is much to love at both schools.
@thumper1 Thanks for the positive thoughts. My son is a sophomore at OSU so we are big fans. Each time we are there I like it even more. Other than distance (it’s a 7 hour drive for us) it’s a great option and would in fact be our cheapest option of all of her schools given their great merit. My daughter previously seemed mildly excited about OSU as a prospect but not so much lately. I told her that UMd is a comparable school and a lot closer (she expects she might want to come home a little more frequently than my son does) and has easy access to DC (which was part of what she liked so much about Georgetown). So I completely agree that there is much to love at both schools. Hoping she starts to feel the same way.
Just a couple of notes -
- No longer a concern for OP -- but given that she was concerned about a daughter -- high state female applicants who aspire to high-end colleges really should seriously consider womens' colleges --particularly those that still seem to accept more than 30% of applicants.(Which I think is down to Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr and Smith at this point). Still not safeties, but it can make a school a match
- As to true safeties, as others have pointed out Naviance is definitely not going to provide that information -- it provides onliy rough data points with no indication as to what other qualities applicants brought with them. Other than schools which offer guaranteed admission based on specific criteria (typically test scores or academic index), there really has to be a very high admit rate to make a school a safety. You know a school that admits 75% of its applicants probably isn't turning away student whose stats are at the top of their range. You simply can't assume that about a school that admits only 40% of applicants.
- As to all those mailings: Colleges use that marketing to keep their app numbers high in order to keep admission rates low and their rankings high. So if anything, aggressive marketing might suggest that the college is LESS likely to admit rather than MORE likely, because their strategy is probably artificially inflating their applicant pool. So just more competiton as compared to an academically-similar but less well known college.
- If a college's acceptance rate is 10% --that means there is a 90% chance of rejection (or waitlist). The way to improve those odds is through effective targeting -- do some research to figure out which colleges are looking to take in more students with whatever differentiating qualities the applicant has. You can't figure that piece out from stats - but you can figure it out from other info -- but that can vary over time as well.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes, @calmom.
@adlgel I agree that the Lehigh result is really surprising and I thought I couldn’t be surprised any more. Its that kind of thing that should propel all of us not to take any school for granted. Please keep us posted if you learn anything from your GC. Wishing you good luck!
@adigel One think that strikes me about that list is that a lot of those schools take a large proportion of their class ED. It’s very unfair, but if she had applied to, say, Cornell or Penn ED, with Tufts ED2 as the back-up, there’s a good chance she’d be in one of those right now. I think a similar thing is going on with Lehigh. A lot of schools – and maybe this applies to Lehigh – I don’t know it well enough – a serious legacy candidate is expected to apply ED. With her stats and not applying ED, they’re figuring she was not going to enroll because she’d have other, more selective options. The WL leaves open the possibility for her to attend if she says she will definitely attend if accepted.
I am not sure if OP considers UMich a safety, but I just want to point out that there was a 30% surge in EA applicants at UMich this year! Most of the surge came from OOS, which means the OOS EA acceptance rate was around 10% this year! With all the RD applications in by now, the projected overall class of 2022 OOS acceptance rate is 15%! And really should not be considered a “safety” for anyone applying OOS regardless of stats. Does anyone have a theory as to why the OOS surge at UMich this year?
@adlgel Hoping for good news for your dd! Really hate that colleges are ranked on their yield rate, which adds so much unpredictability and stress to the whole process. It really is not fair to high stat kids who can, in this landscape, fail to get into the lottery schools AND their “safeties” due to yield protection.
Michigan changed from their own application to the common app a few years ago. They have had a big increase in applications since then, it might explain the OOS surge.
@adlgel That Lehigh WL, definitely looks like yield protection. I bet she gets some good news next week.
Michigan was NOT a safety school back in the Stone Age when I went to college. It definitely is NOT now.
@3littlebirds Is this the first of your little birds to go off to college (or just a Bob Marley fan)? If so, you might end up doing what we did, and that is over correcting for #2, ending up with lots of admissions and too many choices! Agonizing in its own way!
That just means that they have to pick actual safeties, not false “safeties”. With high stats, actual safeties are easy to find (including automatic full rides if money is limited). The real issue with finding safeties is that most high stats students think that those schools are “beneath” them.
In CA, seems to me going to CC and transferring to several UCs is a great way for those disinterested students in HS. A great way to go at your own pace. My nephew transferred to UCLA from Santa Monica several years ago with 3.4 gpa. He told me kids who got 3.8 all transferred to Berkeley. If you don’t want to study hard in HS and still go to a top school, there is a way folks. One kid I know went to UCSC, got 3.9 and transferred to Berkeley. Would not be surprised to see him go to a top law school.
It’s also a great access system for smart but lierr income kids who can commute for two years, receive good quality education, and access high level public education at an affordable price.
“With high stats, actual safeties are easy to find (including automatic full rides if money is limited). The real issue with finding safeties is that most high stats students think that those schools are “beneath” them.”
Or that the automatic merit money schools are otherwise a poor fit. For the kid who’s applying to UMichigan, UVA, and UCLA, Bama’s arguably a decent fit. For the kid who’s applying entirely to smaller LACs that have a decent pool of that kid’s ethnic group, there are not a lot of guaranteed admission, guaranteed merit sufficient to be affordable options.
That said, I think the answer there is to cast a wide net and put the emphasis on finding and loving the schools with higher odds of admission.
I agree with @ucbalumnus. My daughter had reasonable safeties and she got into them. At the time she was happy with at least one of the safeties - I made her apply to the other two for better coverage and because I thought she might want a college experience that was different from her brother’s. But now those safeties are not places she wants to go. She’s more against a gap year than she is against going to one of her safeties. So if her remaining decisions are not positive it looks like she will end up going somewhere she is not excited about (but which is a perfectly good academic option) and that’s unfortunate but not the end of the world.
@ucbalumnus “The real issue with finding safeties is that most high stats students think that those schools are “beneath” them.”
High stat kids “dreamt big” and put in the hard work with accompanying sacrifices in order to get those high stats – yes, they hoped to by-pass some easier schools and have a real shot at tip top schools. Some high stat kids may be so naturally smart that they don’t need to work that hard, but the majority have to work really, really hard and make sacrifices in their social lives. I hope you are not accusing them of daring to think of themselves “above” anyone else. We adults should be encouraging all children to shoot high.
It’s a shame that the various college rankings have made “yield protection” so important that some of these high stat kids end up in the same schools as the known slackers in their graduating class. It’s discouraging to these kids, it makes them feel that their sacrifices were for nothing.