UC’s and now CSU’s are test blind. Plenty of UC capped weighted 4.0+ GPA applicants are getting denied or waitlisted at UCSC and UCR especially Engineering/CS majors. UCM might be the only UC safety and the top CSU’s like SLO, Long Beach, SDSU and Cal Poly Pomona cannot be considered safeties/likely even for local applicants in the impacted majors.
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If all CSUs did like SJSU (and CSUN and CSU Fresno and maybe a few others) and posted prior year thresholds for each major, that would reduce the uncertainty and stress among applicants and help them make realistic application lists.
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The best safety is an “applied to early enough” rolling decision affordable school. For many high stat students in my area, this is Pitt. For some others I know, it’s U Alabama. If affordable, some smaller schools or religious schools are also rolling admission.
Many of our PASSHE schools (PA’s true state schools) will interview students at our school and give them decisions on the spot. These don’t have to be our top students. I don’t know if other states do anything similar or not, but I know some have guaranteed admits.
Once a student has that “you’re admitted” affordable school in the bag they can apply anywhere they like that they might prefer going to. It can help to visit the safety first. Many, many students started off with Pitt as a safety only to decide later (after visiting other acceptances) that Pitt was their #1 choice. A safety is not equal to being “bad” or “lesser” just because of its label.
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Much harder to find a safety for those who can’t count on their state flagships, in CA, TX, FL- the 3 biggest states. Glancing at the UC thread, I still can not find any clear pattern in admissions-some students were admitted to Cal but not UCSC, for example. The NA kid on the thread with 40 applications was denied at schools I would have considered safe and yet accepted to a reach. Many results this year seem unpredictable. Good luck to future classes if this is the new norm.
I dont think it is mostly an issue of kids thinking they are Ivy League bound when they really are not. Most kids seem to get the message that with admit rates under 5%, that is almost impossible and more of a lottery ticket. The big change I see is that high scoring kids who would have counted on the UCSC and TCUs of colleges apparently no longer can.
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Completely agree. Another thing I think many don’t think about is there are a lot of private schools that give extremely good merit aid and need based aid which can bring the cost to a UC or even less making it an option to go to instate or out of state privates. With the UCs getting bigger and more competitive, it’s worth looking at privates that may specialize in your major and have smaller classes. But make sure to have the money talk in your family at the beginning of college list process so finances are part of the conversation from the get go. I was shocked how much merit $ could be had and it was extremely consistent across nearly all the private schools.
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I think it means looking beyond state flagships for an acceptable higher education option. Yes, UT-Austin is very tough to get into if one is not in the top 6%, but there are many other good Texas publics on offer. In Florida there is the Talented Twenty program which guarantees students in the top 20% of their classes a spot at a Florida public if they apply to at least three. Most of the Cal States would probably be safeties, and students with sufficiently high stats have UC Merced as a safety as well. So, there are safeties that students in these states have; they just may not be as “prestigious” as the student/family is desiring.
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The same happens in PA. It’s common for our top students to have offers at privates that at least match Pitt or Penn St, and in some cases better.
Yes, in that sense every student in America already has a safety; there are open-enrollment community colleges in every state where tuition can be covered by the $5500 student loan permitted. Many students do not consider this a desirable option, however, and if they are unwilling to take this path, It is not a safety.
4 year colleges that were safe for high stats applicants 3 years ago no longer appear to be. State flagships are not an option for many. That is the new norm
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The number is APPLICATIONS is rising. The number of applicants is not rising. In fact, there are fewer students applying to college now than in recent years past. And btw, there are posts like this every year since I joined the site in 2014.
This chart is interesting. College admissions in the United States - Wikipedia
I’m not a numbers person at all, but it’s clear that every year since the Common App was created, the number of apps to top colleges is increasing, but the number of students who actually enroll goes down. Look at the last column for each group of colleges.
As long as students and parents continue to view the Common App as a means of buying lottery tickets, and no one does anything to curb the number of apps students submit, I expect this trend to continue. Combined with the last couple of years of test optional, it’s only going to fuel the trend.
(I am aware that some students are submitting many apps in the hopes of getting the best FA, but it isn’t likely that this is driving the trend of apps increasing to the top colleges.)
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To lump in 4-year residential colleges with community colleges is muddying the waters. Yes, all students everywhere have safeties at open enrollment community colleges. But there are many students who want a residential 4-year college experience. High stats students are likely to have Texas Tech, UT - Arlington, U. of Central or South Florida, UC-Merced as options. To equate that caliber of school with a community college experience is misleading.
You are correct, however, that some state’s flagships may no longer be considered a safety, even for in-state high stat individuals in impacted majors. But that just means expectations need to change. How many millennials have been unable to buy their first house? Or instead of getting a 3BR/2BA house as a starter home have started off with a 2BR/1BA or had to move to a less expensive area? The world changes and we need to change with it, including high stat students and their families.
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Let’s use the NA kid’s thread elsewhere as an example. Applicant with Strong gpa and scores, hooked. Admitted to some schools with sub 15% acceptance rate (Rice, Bates), rejected at some schools with greater than 50% acceptance rate (Clemson, TCU). This utter lack of predictability in results is not good for anyone and leads to more applications filed.
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So does that make it harder for the schools to know how many to admit, and then, is there more of a chance of a school going to the wait list? If classes are being settled by using the wait list, it seems like the process drags out several more months.
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We’ve always known that at least some schools protect their yield. If a school is pretty certain a student won’t actually attend there, rejecting them doesn’t surprise me at all, esp when yields can be so uncertain due to the number of colleges some applicants apply to.
Showing a school some love if you want to go there wasn’t invented post Covid nor recently in general.
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Well, plenty of over 50% accepted level colleges did accept the NA kid, including LACs. How one is supposed to predict that Dickinson is a yes and TCU is a no in these circumstances is beyond me, particularly for high school kids. They are not required to be experts at future tea-leaf reading. Is that really something we should encourage hs kids to spend time on?
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Not every school has protected their yield in the past either.
In any given year there have been surprises in my world, both for getting in and not. I’ve never seen a student with a rolling admission “safety” not be able to go to college though.
Yes, but colleges hire people to help them manage their yield and these people should be able to estimate the numbers pretty well. “Summer melt” has been a thing for a long time, and yes, some colleges will make waitlist offers well into the summer, but it won’t be the majority of a class admitted through waitlist.
Ok, here are the Native American student’s results, per this post. I have sorted them into Accepted/Waitlisted/Rejected/Pending categories for easier viewing on this discussion.
Accepted
- Abilene Christian
- Bates
- Denison
- Dickinson
- Pepperdine
- Rice
- UC – San Diego
- U. of Oregon
- Villanova
Waitlisted
- Amherst
- Rensselaer Polytechnic
- UC – Irvine
- UC – Santa Cruz
Rejected
- Cal Tech
- Case Western
- MIT
- Northeastern
- Pomona
- Stanford
- Texas Christian
- UC – Berkeley
- UCLA
- U. of Notre Dame
- Williams
Pending
- Brown
- Columbia
- Dartmouth
- Duke
- Georgetown
- Harvard
- Princeton
- Tufts
- UC – Santa Barbara
- U. of Michigan
- UNC – Chapel Hill
- U. Penn
- U. of Southern California
- Vanderbilt
- Yale
The UCs have been pretty unpredictable for everyone this year. But the student was rejected at the two most selective UCs, waitlisted at two, and accepted to one (arguable, the third most selective of the UCs). This distribution is easier to understand than that of students who were rejected or waitlisted at less selective UCs and then accepted to Berkeley or L.A.
As far as the rest of the results go, Rice and TCU seem to be the biggest outliers (especially TCU). Rice really liked him, and it’s not such an outlier because Amherst waitlisted him. These are smaller schools than some of the others, and admissions decisions in seeking the right fit for the student body aren’t always as apparent from the outside, but these schools thought that the student was going to be a good fit. TCU…well…, I have no explanation.
Nevertheless, though, I don’t think this student’s results have been that shocking when seen as a whole. There’s been a surprise or two which I think happens in just about any year. Now the surprising thing for some is the overall increased level of selectivity of various institutions or the degree to which a high-achieving Native American student is a “hook” or not, but as far as the results…the distribution doesn’t look such a mishmash of results.
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That misses the point. How was that applicant supposed to determine that TCU, for example, was not in fact a safety for him? What kind of rational application strategy should students pursue when apparent safeties are not safe, and who know what those are this year, or whether the yield protection factor will trump? In the face of unpredictable and opaque results, students rationally should increase their applications everywhere.
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In terms of match/target schools I’m not sure that is much different now, it is expected in that category that you win some, you lose some.
Part of the issue is that even high stat kids have to play the demonstrated interest game at schools where it’s critical…CWRU, American, Tulane, Dickinson and more. Dickinson used to (they still might) calculate a yield projection for every applicant where the formula included 20+ variables…which has always made Dickinson (and schools that do similar machinations) unpredictable. IME students and counselors don’t know what’s constitutes enough interest, beyond applying ED.
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I think the NA kid’s results were updated. WL at UNC Chapel Hill, rejected at U Michigan, USC, Clemson.
While I guess I am glad some of you think this makes sense, it should not require 20 years of experience on college confidential to figure out an application strategy
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