<p>I've been looking at the admissions statistics for the top 20 schools, and fiddling with the numbers. The conclusion I reached seems counterintuitive, but inescapable. If a candidate who roughly matches with Ivy standards (decent EC's, 3.7+ UW/ 4.4+ W GPA, 2200+ SAT's, etc) applies to all of the top 20 schools, there is less than 13% chance that he/she DOESN'T get admitted into any of them (assuming that the acceptance rate of each of the top 20 schools is 10%; it's actually a bit more). Though the probability is extremely high that he/she gets rejected from any single one of them, the probability of total admissions failure is extremely low. Is this true, or am I attempting to make the intangible tangible?</p>
<p>you are trying to make the intangible tangible.</p>
<p>But there is no probability, that is just an illusion. You don’t have a 10% chance of getting in, you either will or you will not. There are no dice, no roulette wheel, no randomizing. If 10% of the applicants are admitted, it doesn’t mean that you have a 10% chance of getting in, it means that if you randomly select one student from the pool of applicants, there is a 10% chance it will be one of the ones deemed deserving of admission. </p>
<p>Further, even if it was “chance,” it wouldn’t work the way you said. Flip a fair coin, it will land on heads about half the time. Is that affected by the last result? No, the chance remains the same, independent of other flips.</p>
<p>But again, if you aren’t qualified for a school, you likely won’t get into its peers. However, if you are qualified, you’ll have a pretty good shot, and thus it would be advantageous to apply to several.</p>
<p>that’s right - you can’t extend the admissions rate to individual probabilities. The 2400 varsity team captain legacy from Wyoming has about a 100% chance of admission. The 1900 3.5 kid from suburban NJ applying on impulse has about a 0% chance. Everyone else is arrayed in groups in between. if you fall into a high probability group, you’re likely to get multiple acceptances. if not, you’re likely to get none.</p>
<p>What about the stats I just outlined? What group do they fall in, Ivy-wise?</p>
<p>Usually Ivy acceptances, especially the most selective like Harvard tend to receive applicants that all have that all have extremely good academic stats to the point where the applicants all look the same. You get into Harvard if you have something special or unique about you (i.e. major acomplishments, extreme passion, awards, athlete, etc.)</p>
<p>You are assuming that the admissions decisions for each school are independent events. They are not. They are all driven by the same factors. That’s why the probability of getting in is actually much lower than would be indicated by taking one minus the product of the rejection probabilities of 13 different schools. </p>
<p>However, in my opinion, if your school had Naviance with sufficient data, and you were able to account for your GPA and SAT score in assessing your probability of admissions (and in some cases it would be zero), then you will have eliminated many of the factors that correlate the results and I think you can then come much closer to using a strategy of treating each admission as an independent event in order to develop a reasonable application strategy.</p>
<p>It’s not true in such a clear-cut way, but yeah, if you have those stats and you apply to all of the top 20s you will probably get in one.</p>
<p>There is some random element to it, though. Admissions representative at Yale said that they could take 1,300 of this year’s admits and fill them with 1,300 other equally qualified applicants.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>A 3.7 UW GPA is really pretty low for a top-20 college and 2200 is not really all that compelling for these schools, either. I would somewhat agree with your premise if your raw stats were somewhat higher – say, 3.85+ GPA and 2280+ SAT. At that point, your stats would be solid enough that your ECs (which are more of an independent variable) would heavily affect the outcome at any given school. At that point, each decision becomes more of an independent variable.</p>
<p>With the lower stats you suggested, you’d be behind so many applicants at all these top schools that you might sometimes make the cut to the last 25% of the applicants, but ultimately end up the reject pile everywhere, unless your ECs particularly attracted some admissions committee’s interest.</p>
<p>BillyMc is wrong to a point, and you are right to a point.</p>
<p>If it was a 10% chance, then yes, applying to more colleges would raise your chance of getting in, but there is no set probability of someone getting into a top university. </p>
<p>Billy said that flipping a coin and getting a tails doesn’t increase the chance of getting a heads next time, but I don’t really see how that affects anything.</p>
<p>If you flip a coin 20 times, you’re WAY more likely to get a heads, than if you were to only flip a coin once. You can’t dispute that. </p>
<p>Applying to 20 universities doesn’t increase your chance of getting into one specific university, say harvard, but it probably does increase your chance of getting into a top university.</p>
<p>Oh man,</p>
<p>I’m nervous now. I have a 3.7, though I’ve taken highly advanced courses (AP BC as a freshman, AP Bio and all core honors sciences by sophomore year). This does not look good.</p>
<p>Haven’t read through the answers but this doesn’t work because admissions to these schools are not necessarily independent events. In addition, admissions relies on intangibles. You can’t quantify an essay.</p>
<p>“If you flip a coin 20 times, you’re WAY more likely to get a heads, than if you were to only flip a coin once.”</p>
<p>Not necessarily. The probability of heads is 50% per flip. It never changes, assuming it’s a fair coin. If you’re talking about all heads, then there is an even slimmer chance that that occurs.</p>
<p>all you need is one isn’t it?
then just apply to all, most you can, all you can.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It doesn’t look good for anyone. The truly qualified should apply to a wide range of top schools to eliminate some of the randomness (Harvard’s adcom doesn’t like your essay, Brown has enough Texan violinists, etc), but the less qualified aren’t going to get into a good school just because they apply to 20 of them.</p>
<p>
That was merely to demonstrate that even if it was chance, things wouldn’t work the way the OP thinks.</p>
<p>HOWEVER, it is not by chance. Read my full post (don’t just skim).</p>
<p>Violinistchan, that’s not what I was talking about and you know it.</p>
<p>If you flip a coin 20 times you will almost always get at least one “heads”. None of this matters though, because we all agree that admissions doesn’t rely on probability.</p>
<p>BillyMc is struggling a bit with both the problem and the math. </p>
<p>ClassicRockerDad got it 100% right in all the subtleties. Read The Rocker’s explanation, and learn. That’s the way you carve up a math problem!</p>
<p>
With what math? I stated that college admissions is not probability-based, then corrected a misconception the OP had about probability (when they combined the probabilities into one). However, as all have recognized, college admissions is not driven by chance. Are you struggling with this concept?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In all the subtleties? I don’t think CRD was trying to do that.</p>
<p>I think BillyMc is not far from right in one sense. If we had perfect information (everyone’s applications and the admission decisions), it is reasonable to think that we could identify most of the reasons for accept vs. reject and take a lot of the uncertainty out of it.</p>
<p>However, we don’t have perfect information, far from it. So often, we use probability as a substitute for all the information we don’t have. In a practical sense, CRD’s analysis is the best any ordinary applicant can do.</p>