I don't know what to believe regarding chance of admissions

Chance Me / Match Me!
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They waited til the interviews to ask when their first raise would be? I thought today kids ask when they are writing their cover letters.

Yes, work ethic, tenure, and loyalty seem to be out. Heck, my company offers “summer hours.” I laugh. It’s another major auto OEM.

In general, kids from Northwestern will outperform De Paul - if you look at long term growth. I see the point though - a lot more of Northwestern likely comes from wealthy families who sent their kids to expensive private schools. Other kids have to use grit and determination. Engineering is engineering - if they are ABET, they’re going to learn the same stuff.

As a Northwestern wannabe - turned down for both undergrad and MBA, I love the school. My sample size is just two kids of friends of mine - and both were wonderful and have done very well.

As for lecacy, I don’t know about NU and about aunts, etc. But I have read a lot where at the elite schools, they are starting to minimize the importance because the legacies are overwhelmingly white and they are trying to get more under represented populations. No doubt at the 2nd tier schools, they would love the legacies.

The chain was very old but I went and looked back - and I just said a Norhwestern type school - meaning your student is great. Maybe that means Notre Dame, Rice, Vandy, WUSTL…or maybe you mix it up and go for a LAC - like a Swarthmore??

I’m sure your son will have wonderful opportunities - as long as he has those targets and safeties. I was reading back and I said Purdue is a safety and I believe it is. Or a low reach. Others disagred. But schools like Pitt, Michigan State, Case Western - all wonderful and if those are his fallbacks, he’ll have no issues.

Good luck.

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Tsbna44,

Was NU at least civil to you when they rejected your applications? They rejected TLAT’s MBA application (her undergrad grades were terrific and she had solid work experience, but she did not do well on standardized tests), and they were a bit condescending and demeaning in their rejection letter. Rather then be gracious and give the standard “…we had so many strong applicants we couldn’t take all of them…” verbiage, they hit her with a “…you’re not Northwestern material…” jab. She knew NU was a reach because of her GMAT score, but they did not need to get petty.

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No clue - the first was in 1986 and i had a 2.8 in HS and they told me up front not to apply - but i did. I ended up at Syracuse in the prime time of…we won’t put you in your major (Journalism) but we’ll take your money for two years til you fail out and let you into Arts & Sciences but we’ll let you try and transfer in - I did!!! Yet, I’m employed in nothing even remotely related to journalism and only spent a year.
btw - 2.8 sounds bad - but let’s be honest - with grade inflation and weighted grades, that’s like a 4.8 :slight_smile: ok, maybe a 3.6.

MBA was in 1996 - so I also don’t remember but Kellogg and Duke Fuqua said no. UT Austin and Indiana were nice enough to say yes. Yet, perhaps given my value slant - when Indiana cut half my tuition if i sat in a computer lab, UT Austin was gonna be like $60K or $80K - and Arizona State actually paid my tuition and a stipend for merely having to host a weekly break out for an undergrad class - well I went for the $$.

After all, their average salary was within $2K of IU (placing in Chicago, no doubt) and $3K of UT. Their #40 ranking vs. the top 20 of UT and top 10 of IU (at the time) was based on the non-financials.

It’s all worked out.

No pretty much means no whether they are nice about it and telling you how wonderful you are but there’s more kids than slots…or if they are prima donna about it. The message is the same.

All that said, all these kids getting rejected - so many of them are so lucky and they don’t even realize it. People think - i’ll just take loans or i’ll just spend $320K.

Wait til you get the loan payments or you stroke the $80K check. That money could be used in other ways, including to make money.

It amazes me, and it’s personal choice of course, but how many people spend so much money for something that is an unknown, with no guarantees, whereas there are similar opportunities, granted with less pedigree and often less outcomes, for a fraction of the price.

I just paid two bills yesterday - Alabama OOS engineering - less than $2K for the semester - tuition only. And College of Charleston - liberal art - also OOS - and less than $4K for tuition, room and board. You know how much stress relief that brings vs. if I was paying $80K - $40K a piece for the semester? People don’t take that enough into account.

I’ll take that any day and every day (although secretly I wish my son accepted Purdue for engineering which would have been another $20K a year). But he saved my bank :slight_smile:

Anyway, Northwestern said no (twice) in whatever way they said it and perhaps I could be wealthier or higher up in the company…but in the end, it’s all worked out.

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FWIW, Niche seems to track pretty closely with the Naviance profile for my S’s high school for the universities that have sufficient data in Naviance to generate a result.

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Unfortunately that is a coincidence, and other HSs would not be expected to ‘track’ with your Kids’ HS…making those comparisons meaningless.

Naviance can be misleading because it’s incomplete (but at least GPA and composite test scores are accurate)…it doesn’t show hooks, major/program/subschool applied to, superscore, and sometimes doesn’t show round of admission. Of course naviance doesn’t take essays or LORs into account either. The third party scattergram sites are missing all of that as well, and we have no idea if people are even reporting accurate info.

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Are you recommending people just guess at what is a match, reach and safety? Or rely on opinions of anonymous posters on CC?

Naviance is a solid reference that uses what actually happened from a similar cohort group to an applicant. We all get that there are a lot of variables, but enough pieces of information put together eventually does become data. Niche tracks with Naviance based on what I have seen. So they are not meaningless.

People are free to use whatever source of information they want though.

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No need to put words in my mouth.

Naviance can be a good tool for categorizing schools, but typically the student needs more insight from the GC to accurately do so. For example, U Michigan and UIUC engineering and business might be categorized differently than their respective LSA and LAS schools. One also can’t use Naviance when the n is small, for example at the NESCAC and other liberal arts schools (for many HSs)…when there is a small n, again the GC should be able to say that was a recruited athlete, or a URM, or a legacy that was admitted with similar stats to yours…just to take an example that happens frequently at our local HS.

What data does Niche use to populate its scattergrams? Are you comfortable that is accurate?

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The GC can be a good resource, but handing over a young adult’s future to a single person who may or may not understand the needs and abilities of that young person is fairly risky for a family. The other side of the “n” being small is that GC’s often do not have a lot of experience with certain colleges. I get that the GC’s at prep schools are skilled and connected, and can make a phone call to a T20 school and get a marginal candidate in, but GC’s at even good public schools, for example, have a much broader mandate, and do not have the connections at the T20 schools. Whereas a top prep school may send 10-15 kids a year to Brown or Penn, a public may send a kid to one of those schools every second or third year, if that.

Families need to do their own research. That is why some of these scatterplot sites are helpful. Work with what you got.

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The third party sites (Niche, Parchment, et al) are not accurate at all. If one doesn’t know where they are getting the data from (colleges certainly aren’t giving it to them), how can one use that info? It’s irresponsible for people to suggest using data from sources when they don’t understand where the data comes from.

Students should only use data from vetted sources… the colleges (from CDS and other publicly available data), general data like acceptance rates, and Naviance/Scoir. Categorizing schools using those resources is generally accurate, and likely directional. For schools with small sample sizes in Naviance/Scoir, more research is imperative.

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The CDSs are not particularly useful for a kid because every combination of scores and grades is a little different. Maybe your kids went to a prep school that had 20 kids per GC or something, but most GCs are swamped, and don’t have time to put a college list together for each kid. They will probably go to Naviance and print one out and tell the kid to figure it out themselves and come back once they have a shorter list of schools to talk about.

With most of the mid-size and bigger colleges, there are dozens and in some cases over a hundred data points on the Niche scatterplots. They won’t be precise, but they will be a good start to see if it is worth applying. Generally, if the scatterplot is saying “no shot”, then an applicant should not waste their time on that school and should focus on other programs that are a better fit. Are you saying that a 3.4, 1350 student should apply to MIT because the scatterplot is inaccurate? Or that the same student checks out Univ. of Rhode Island and the scatter plot says they are in pretty good shape, but you think they won’t get in?

Why wouldn’t a kid use a Niche scatterplot as an initial screen? It seems to match up fairly close with Naviance, but has a bigger data set and covers more schools. The Niche scatterplots are good screening tools to figure out what a school’s initial screen is going to be.

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Niche and other scatter plots can be a good general screen. Another tool if you have some Excel skills is the Reddit A2C college census from a couple of years ago. You can use that to set up some basic screens from their self reported data: RD, non-URM, SAT/ACT the equivalent of 1500-1600, unweighted GPA near 4, weighted over 4.25, exclude compsci majors…that sort of thing. The vast majority of those kids are unhooked (legacy/athlete), which is why they apply to 15 schools in the first place.

It won’t tell a given applicant his/her true odds, but you can get a general sense of relative selectivity: 8-12% at HYPSM, 15% at most other Ivies Dukes and NUs, 20% at Cornell, 25-30% at the Rice, Vandy, WashUs, 50% at USC and Georgetown, 60% at ND (though that one is likely more legacy heavy), etc.

None of these things can address the quality of a given applicant’s ECs, recs, essays, how his/her particular curriculum and GPA is assessed, life experiences/narrative, quality of guidance/placement, etc. But if you’re in the most competitive portion of the applicant pool, I do think it’s useful to know where the transition points are where you see relative odds increase appreciably.

This allows an applicant to interpolate a bit where Naviance data at a given school is thin. Maybe you’re a very competitive applicant in an above average but nothing special Midwest HS. Your counselor can remove the hooked applicant history and give you a pretty good read on NU, UChicago, WashU, ND and UMich, calling you a reach on the first two and a low/medium match for the last 3. You could take the rough non Naviance plots to introduce Vandy, Rice, Cornell, Tufts, CMU, USC, Georgetown, Emory as schools that range from low to high matches, etc.

I think a lot of folks on here come from HSs where there is a pretty good volume of kids looking at T30ish universities and their LAC counterparts every year. That’s probably less than 2% of all high schools in the country. Most high schools are lucky if they have sufficient data on 4 or 5 of the most selective 50 colleges and universities in the country.

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JV76, Jack has legacy status at CMU (me), MSU (his mother), UIUC (me), Northwestern (his grandfather, grandmother, aunt and cousin), and UofChicago (grandfather and aunt). His HS is ranked fourth in MI and is known for it’s strong STEM curriculum. UofM seems to like grads from Jack’s HS, and two of his Robotics teammates last year were accepted into engineering programs there.

While his HS does not have Naviance, his counselor is excellent, and she knows where students with academic records similar to Jack’s landed. MI is pretty parochial, and many kids go to schools in-state, both public and private. Luckily, we have a top notch research university just 1.5 hours away that prioritizes in-state applicants for admission and has relatively affordable tuition.

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Jack seems to be an excellent student and will do well on his own. As an FYI legacy has zero impact at UiUC. Obviously MSU is a slam dunk. You should check each school’s policy…yes it counts at CMU and Northwestern although I know most high endowment schools are looking to de-emphasize as they try to diversify their student body economically.

Jack has a great record and this should not impact his desires. Just pointing it out so you know where his strengths are and aren’t.

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Good point about legacy. Many schools don’t consider. The ones that do all consider it differently. For example, at UNC out of state legacy admits get a big boost, and have the same admission percentages as in-state students. At Georgia Tech, legacy is not considered for admissions purposes. However, if you are a legacy and are a qualified student you are offered a conditional transfer pathway which is reserved for these students.

Definitely explore how legacy is used at the various schools.

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