It seems to me that if there are more and more top students but not additional places for them in the traditional top schools, then those who don’t get into those schools will filter down to the next level and with increased mass of top students going to those schools, they too will become “top schools”. Instead of the metric being top 20 schools perhaps it will become for example top 30 schools.
@RockySoil - I’m 100% with you. Luckily, we kind of took that route from the beginning also. S19 only applied to two “reach” schools, which we have yet to hear from, and 2 top-20 LACs (where he was above 75% academically). He got into the LAC where he’s a legacy, wait-listed at the other. He’s on 3 waitlists (but one is Case, which says it will come back with a financial aid offer next week), he has 7 match/safety acceptances with various levels of financial aid. (Thanks to mom’s pushing) The one consolation we have is that, since the tippy-top schools don’t seem to want the high academic achievers, they will be filtering down to lower-tiered schools, so at least they will (hopefully) have some company wherever they end up. And they won’t be shelling out $70k a year!
But I completely agree with you - it’s not worth it. We always felt we should just let our kids be themselves and not try to push them into activities for the sake of college admissions. Next time around is going to be so different. The next kid wants to be a veterinarian, so we’ll probably just be looking at public schools anyway.
@ucbalumnus “Perhaps even more so at small schools, where the number of athletes to field the usual set of teams is a larger percentage of students than at large schools.”
I definitely agree, and since many of the sports at those schools are overwhelming Caucasian (crew, hockey, squash, lacrosse, field hockey, etc.), the racial profile of tipped athletes probably skews non-POC, which means even fewer spots for non-hooked applicants in the general pool.
It also occurs to me that as admissions becomes more competitive, the top colleges are probably getting more applications from legacies. For instance, kids who are legacies at Harvard but really like Yale better might just decide that they are better off firing the ED bullet at Harvard, where they have a better chance of being accepted, rather than risk the long odds of applying to their #1 school. College admissions is such a warped world!
@Trixy34 yeah I agree that a lot of really bright kids are going to be attending lower ranked schools, and raising the reputations of those schools over the next few years. I would bet a lot of them will be the honors programs at Public Universities, where the education is top notch and the price is right. My DS is now deciding between his LAC and our Flagship’s honors program, with a big scholarship to boot. Needless to say, we are secretly hoping for the $12K per year option! FWIW, my DS and I have talked about it and he wouldn’t change a thing in order to get into a more selective school, which makes us very proud!
“The one consolation we have is that, since the tippy-top schools don’t seem to want the high academic achievers…” The common data sets for those tippy-top schools would seem to indicate that is not the case.
@RockySoil - we have a 12K option too! He hasn’t visited yet, though, and it’s 6 hours away. I’m not holding out too much hope for that one, even though it’s a great school. We’re still waiting on 2 decisions. I’m dying to hear one way or the other so we can move forward on this.
@Trinity2016 - I have seen the type of info you are referring to - (admit rate by score) occasionally on college websites. Hamilton, Brown, Amherst come to mind. In years past, the Hamilton info was very specific, but think it is not quite as specific now.
A friend’s kid goes to a private school - every kid in his class receives private test prepping at a very high cost.
Combination of no score reduction for wrong answers and significant increase in test prep must contribute to higher scores. When I was in HS ('82), mid 1400s was considered a GREAT score.
I’m wondering how our generation would match up in today’s world. Glad I’ll never have to know. I applied to one school. Was accepted in November and was done with the whole thing. S applied to 15 schools. Accepted to 8. It was arduous at best and a royal pain in the butt. He must have written over 20 essays / supplements. Was not a fun experience although he loves his college.
Don’t think it’s been mentioned - international students take up 10-20% of slots at top schools and probably 0-1% (speculation) in the 80s. This is a lot of seats not available to domestic students now.
@Mwolf Anecdote is not the singular of data, but here is one data point: The recently accepted class at Pomona is 13.5% International and 57.9% Domestic students of color (includes Asian decent). That leaves 28.6% of the accepted students who identify as Domestic Caucasian. The majority of athletes and the vast majority of Legacies, Rural State advantaged students, and Development admits come from that 28%, so the real number of slots for unhooked non-Asians is very small, easily less than 20%. Pomona is National in scope but is in very diverse CA, so these numbers may be a little bleaker for the unhooked than similar schools, but I would bet Amherst, Williams, etc. are in the same ballpark, as well as many Ivies. It’s ugly out there.
One other thing that has further reduced the number of slots for unhooked applicants - first generation. That was not a thing when I was applying to schools back in the mid 80’s, or if it was, I don’t remember ever hearing about it. Now a lot of top schools really emphasize it.
A long time ago, I started a thread about the chances for acceptance at Lehigh with top SAT scores. I used Lehigh because they reported admissions by “bands” of score. There was some quibbling about my math, but the general idea stood. A student scoring above their 75% did not have an enormously better chance at admission than the school’s stated admissions percentage. I posted this thread because I kept running into people who assumed that if their kid had a score above the 75%, the school was nearly a safety. If I remember correctly, at that time Lehigh had an acceptance rate of 26% and the highest scorers were being admitted at about 32%. Thats still a 70% chance of rejection for a top student at a school that is not an Ivy.
Every year, there are posts here by students devastated by being rejected at schools they assumed were easy admits. Often, people assume its because they treated the school as a “safety” and didn’t show enough interest. But that really isn’t a fair assumption. Many of these students visited and showed about as much interest as one can expect. The truth is that the world has changed. The schools that were safeties in years past are practically reaches now for most kids. We can debate the math of the standardized scores all we want, but any parent helping a student navigate this process needs to understand that. It was a shock to me with kid number one. Luckily, we were able to figure it out.
I don’t know if you could call it a “reach” school if the kid is more than academically qualified. I would simply say - admission has become at a certain set of schools has become a crapshoot.
@trixy34 It doesn’t really matter what you label it. The important issue is that kids need to understand that even at schools that are slightly below the top, admission has become increasingly difficult. That is one of the reasons that so many of us push the EA and rolling admissions schools. There is nothing better than having a usable acceptance early in the process to take away some of this stress.
I agree with @gallentjill’s post #71. IMO, if a school’s acceptance rate is below 30%, it is a reach for all students.
Read the posts in some of the decisions threads to see the fallacy in the “my kid was above the 75th percentile” thinking.
Or try applying to schools with more transparent and predictable admissions policy. Canadian universities rely upon test scores and GPA, and are often both very highly ranked and affordable, even for Americans. British universities also have more predictable outcomes. Why stress over Lehigh if one is sure to be admitted to UBC?
@roycroftmom I think we are suggesting nearly the same thing. You need to ad an element of certainty to balance the stress. Whether that is an early acceptance or UBC doesn’t matter. What matters is that you don’t want to be sitting around in March wondering if you are going to be accepted anywhere.
@gallentjill Another way to put it might be: There are no more match schools, just reaches and safeties.
. . . and the impression I’ve gotten is that many schools will reject students they think are overqualified and are using it as a “safety,” to protect their “yield” figure. Perhaps that is what is going on with Lehigh. So, if you’re at the top of the scale, the schools you think are matches have admission rates of 15% or less, and the schools you think are safeties won’t accept you because they don’t think you will go there. The entire system is broken.
With that in mind, I have been trying to convince my daughter to apply to my alma mater (roughly T-50) as a safety. She’d be 3rd-Gen so I think she could convince them she wants to go there. What does one do who doesn’t have that option available?
OK, yes, it’s a fallacy that if your kid is above 75th percentile that they will be admitted to a school. But the reason people have these ideas is because, at a lot of schools, naviance shows all the kids at a certain level of academic achievement being accepted. Not at the HYPS types, of course, but out of our 3 wait-list decisions, 2 were at schools where my kid was well within or beyond the stats for previous acceptances from our high school. The other was expected because of lack of demonstrated interest.
Duly noted, and I agree that there is no guaranteed admission anywhere, especially at a school that has 30% or below acceptance rate. Actually, I would extend that out to 40% or below. So consider this fair warning to parents of future applicants.