@londondad rejected at NYU and waitlisted at Midd seems a little odd, unless he was applying to a super competitive school/program at NYU (not too sure what those are besides theatre and Stern, maybe?)
Can schools see where else you’re applying?
@ormdad I think being waitlisted at Harvard & MIT and rejected by Brown, and being waitlisted at Vassar & Carleton while being accepted by Tufts could be considered odd in some cases.
@bodangles it’s our loss and PSU’s gain.
@homerdog - I should have added that it was a friend’s kid. She was one of the tippy top students at New Tier, and did not visit before applying.
@homerdog, schools used to be able to see what other schools were listed on the FAFSA, but that’s not the case anymore so I think the answer is now, No.
Case from my HS graduating class in the mid '90s:
Admitted to Harvard and several other peer elite colleges, rejected by Long Island University.
Granted, that rejection’s most likely because LIU rightly figured he was using them as a safety school and wasn’t likely to attend even if offered admission.
@cobrat still surprising, though!
Another from my graduating class is a buddy who was rejected by SUNY Binghamton* and accepted to Middlebury.
- He felt short of their 90/100 HS GPA cutoff. Think he was close to if not the lowest GPA accepted to Middlebury from my graduating class. And he wasn't a spring semester admit like a few other classmates.
Back in March, a high school senior posted that he got accepted by Williams, Stanford, Duke, all of the UCs, Vanderbilt, John Hopkins, & MIT, yet he was rejected from USC. Someone replied saying that they also got into Stanford and Duke this year, but rejected by USC. One kid was accepted by Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and MIT but then rejected by BU, UVa and USC.
Well I agree… But I left out that we are from Cambridge so the Harvard/MIT WL are not that surprising. Plus she had a unique connection with the Harvard CS dept. Location may have helped with Tufts also, but more than that I think she really fit the profile and almost did ED2. Her SAT score was really too low (2140) as an unhooked white girl from NE to expect any wider success.
One other oddity was $0 in merit aid from Northeastern. I guess they knew she did not want to attend.
They used to be shown the list of schools on the FAFSA, and some would infer that the order of schools listed is the student’s preference order. FAFSA no longer shows the list of schools to the schools.
Some schools’ applications ask what other schools the applicant is applying to.
Heard of a case of admission to an Ivy League school but not Berkeley, which looks strange, except that the student applied to Berkeley EECS, notoriously one of the most difficult majors to get into there (and probably even more so with the recent rise in popularity of CS), so it is much less strange than it looks at first glance.
@Zinhead If a student lives in the Midwest and does not show Wash U or NU the love, that is definitely a strike against them. So many strong applicants apply to those schools from our suburban high school and many make visits to these schools. I think, when they are comparing students from one school, they have to come up with some differences and a visit always helps. 73 kids applied to Wash U from our school last year, 10 got accepted, and only 2 went. I think Wash U is a little gun shy when it comes to admitting kids from our school. As for NU, 95 applied, 20 got in and 16 went. I heard that all 20 were ED. Not sure if that’s true. Meanwhile, I heard one of the kids who got turned down by NU is going to Brown.
@ucbalumnus If a school asks to see your list, do you think you have to tell them? Maybe you can leave that blank but it looks bad?
If 20 got into Northwestern ED but only 16 attended, that means that four broke their agreement for one reason or another.
One of the problems with suburban Chicago schools is that the state exports so many kids, being from Chicago doesn’t help with geographic diversity whatsoever. In fact, it seems it might be a negative at some schools.
He just applied to Arts and Sciences at NYU. The rejection was a bit of a surprise as in previous years NYU was seen as a low match/safety for London kids, particularly as NYU is test optional for internationals.
Every year my D’s small private high school has students accepted to Ivys and Ivy-equivalents who didn’t get into UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley cares more about nearly perfect grades while taking the maximum level of class rigor possible at your school. If you don’t have that, even a 2400 SAT score and amazing extracurriculars and recommendations won’t get you in.
My D had a friend who was accepted to MIT but not to Berkeley.