Wow, only 58% of incoming Main campus PSU freshmen are from PA. I know it draws well from NJ and NY but that seems high for a state flagship.
This is a great point. My daughterâs UW GPA was a 3.5 and 3.6 first two years.
She then had a 3.7 in her junior year, and a 3.9 in her senior year. But many colleges were looking only at her grades through junior year. He WGPA was a 4.2 through junior year, and is up to a 4.5 midway through senior year, and likely to end in the 4.6+ range. Sort of a shame they donât pay attention to the tail end where the kids are more mature.
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Penn St is notoriously stingy with aid. If a student is strong enough to get into it, they ought to have competing (or better) offers elsewhere. My guess is they assume many people will want to go there anyway due to the vibe and love for it in the state. In some cases, theyâre right. Also, for engineering, they are definitely the strongest of our âstateâ schools. (State is in quotes because theyâre only sort of a state school. Our PASSHE schools - 14 of them - are our true state schools, but they donât offer engineering aside from a little bit recently started at Shippensburg.)
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Yes this year was a challenging one for sure. However, T20 schools are a reach for everyone every year. There is a reason when someone gets into a lot of them it makes the national news. He asked for an explanation and I think the best one is he went in with unreasonable expectations. His unweighted GPA (weighted is totally irrelevant) is not in the mid range for those schools, and he doesnât have a hook (which honestly most kids need for those schools even with perfect grades and perfect scores - legacy, state, national or international recognition in some EC, URM, first generation, from Nebraska, etc.). His school will have submitted a school profile so colleges would know where he falls in the class looking at his GPA. Those schools take top 5 % at most at very competitive schools and many schools they donât take anyone.
The answer is to where he went wrong is his college list had a lot of reaches on it and was not balanced at all by targets and safeties (and I agree the 3 he listed may not be safeties and could have gone either way).
Even had this year been different his results may well have been the same - and anyone applying next year needs to branch out more for their matches and safeties.
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Schools tweaking numbers. There have been a number of lawsuits and I can tell you that it is not something they are doing much of these days.
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Hank, you canât compare the two datasets- âadmitted studentsâ is NOT the same (and invariably much, much higher) as the students who eventually attend.
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Please do a guide like for other schools tooâŠ
Pitt and Temple yield 23% and 24% respectively. I couldnât figure out what PSU UP yields. I assume itâs up around 40%. UT-Austin is around 47% and many other state flagships are in the mid-40% to 50% range.
Rutgers admissions profile shows that itâs very competitive. Engineering and business average 1340-1485 middle 50% SAT range. The School of Arts & Sciences, where POLS would be, has a lower 1250-1430 range but still very competitive with Penn Stateâs overall 1240-1410 range.
Just going off of the google search page:
In state costs after aid for UT is $16,500.
In state costs after aid for Penn St is $31,000.
For most families, thatâs a big difference in affordability. For kids from our school who can get in to Penn St University Park, they are likely to have similar or better offers elsewhere. (Our schoolâs average SAT is around 1100, so most canât make it in and donât apply.)
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PSUâs most recent yield was 21.1%.
Texas isnât a great apples-to-apples comparison because a decent number of its students are auto-admits who likely arenât competitive applicants for peer or more highly selective schools. The yield at both Michigan and UVa is 41%, eg. I am guessing that most flagships are closer to PSU than UT.
Yes, thatâs last year yield during the Covid outbreak, when they scrambled to admit more OOS applicants. The yield for the year prior was 46%.
And costs explain some of the yield + always distinguish between main campus and the many, many branches, some of which are just overpriced community colleges with fewer than 1,000 students. Admissions try to offer them to OOS applicants but there are no takers for these (rightly).
Okay, the point still stands (UNC-Chapel Hill was 43% last year, just as another data point): 40-50% is on the higher end for state flagship yield, and those schools tend to be more competitive and attractive to OOS. UW-Madison is 33%, Kansas is 21%, Oregon is 20%.
Basically, OP can order his choices in several ways:
- prestige (in NJ)
GWU> PSU > Rutgers - strength of major
GWU >> Rutgers = Penn State - value
Rutgers >> Penn State > GWU
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I read and commented on this post yesterday and mistakenly thought that OP had a 4.1/4 WGPA. Now I see that it is actually 4.1/5. The first thing schools look at is an applicantâs GPA. Without a major hook, someone with a 4.1/5 WGPA has basically zero chance of getting into an Ivy level school, and near zero chance of getting into a school like Georgetown. They never make it passed the initial screen. This is especially true if, like OP, you come from an overrepresented region (NJ) and and overrepresented ethnic group (Indian). Itâs obvious what happened here - OP shot way to high. But hey, whatâs done is done. I think prestige is overrated anyway, particularly at the undergrad level. Any of the three schools OP got into can get him where he wants to go, and there is always the possibility of transfer.
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It was a 4.1 overall but that doesnt paint the whole picture, since the t20 are hollistic they wouldâve viewed it as impressive growth from 3.4 weighted (freshman) to 4.88 weighted (senior). And for Georgetown, my dad did his MBA there so I had a legacy benefit as well, sadly it didnât seem to have helped.
Before applying I emailed a few schools asking them how they evaluate GPA and if it by year or more overall, the response I got indicates they view it both ways and like seeing growth as opposed to 4.0 all four years
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You misunderstood: they like 3.8-4.0 uw all 4 years. But they like an upward trend of course, more so than a downward trend. And of course they could have thought your 4.1 was out of 4.3 rather than 5âŠ
Your cumulative gpa was 3.6-3.7 including senior year, which some didnât count. What was your class rank? Were you top 10%?
We didnât have class rank, but I wish we did as it would have pushed me to work harder my freshman year as opposed to having to kick ass my junior and senior years to make up for it
Your list doesnât appear to be guided by fit, but rather by prestige. My guess is that astute AOs at these top schools saw that in your application.
Iâm curious about your spreadsheet and your rankings. What factors did you use?
Please scrap the prestige hunting and go for fit. What is truly important to you? I think your ECs were good and show a true interest in your major. If affordable go to GW and make the absolute most of the unique opportunities offered.
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The factors I took into consideration when choosing were
- Quality of Professors
- Access to opportunity & Prestige (Yes Prestige was a factor as it does help with opening doors but it wasnât the sole reason)
- Liberal Arts Curriculum
- Small Class Sizes
- Location (Northeast Preferred, exception UCLA and Stanford)
- Excellence in a wide variety of fields, so that if I want to change my major or try a different field I can do so easily and be at a school at the top of the rankings for that major as well.
- Holistic Review
- Ranking of Major
- Large Indian Population
(not a ranking of factors, the numbers arenât relevant) - Private not Public
- Small student body
if I was going for only Prestige I would have also applied to UNC, Duke, UMich, Johns Hopkins, USC and Notre Dame. All of the schools I applied to, for the most part, fit what I was looking for in an ideal college, there was more to it than just prestige. There were more factors than this, but these are the ones I can think of/the major ones.