They need to completely revamp this system and do a “match” like program. Too much money being made from the families of average kids just trying to find some place to go to college. MAJOR SCAM when the application fees alone generate millions of dollars for these colleges and universities.
2 Likes
How is it a scam?
I know many families who make too much for fee waivers but the application fees represent a significant dent in the college budget.
They apply to a rolling admissions college where their kid is a “sure thing” admit and where the kid is excited to attend, the day the applications open. They’ve run their NPC, the college is affordable.
With that in hand, they carefully apply to four or five other colleges. Or none-- nobody needs a “hail mary pass” type application, and nobody needs to apply to a college which the NPC says is unaffordable “just for bragging rights”. We read about those all the time on CC. “I can’t afford it, but I want to try”. Ok- so try. But that’s not a scam, that’s YOU being ridiculous.
If someone has the time and the cash to apply to 20 schools, that’s on them. Personally I think that’s an insane strategy, but their money, their decision.
It’s easy to read CC and assume that every kid in America is spending over a thousand bucks on fees. But it’s not the norm. And you can’t blame the college if parents and kids won’t take the time to craft an affordable application strategy.
20 Likes
Now might be a good time to trot out one of my favorite college admissions factoids: Most four year colleges accept most applicants.
So with 3,000 four year colleges seems like there are lots of choices for every applicant.
20 Likes
I’m in NC and there is a week in the fall where most NC colleges waive application fees, too.
1 Like
There’s a lot of blame that should go to colleges for this, it’s definitely not just families. Waiving application fees is a big one, followed by no or minimum supplemental essays followed by emails and other marketing they do to convince kids (these are 16-17 year olds which I think people tend to forget) that their college is a perfect fit for them, when the colleges know they’re not, usually academically or financially.
2 Likes
Sure. It was Ethan Allen that made me spend $30,000 on furniture and rugs recently, what with their damn advertising, fall discounts and 24 month 0% financing.
If only they hadn’t made me buy so much new furniture. Damn that place.
Does anybody know a good attorney?
10 Likes
I fully agree with you, but I’m still afraid of being rejected…
My kids’ bedrooms are done entirely in Ethan Allen’s Custom Room Plan (CRP) line–one in the yellow (“daffodil”) and the other brown (“nutmeg”.) Solid maple, outstanding quality, yet the pieces cost me only $25-$50 each on Craigslist.
Furniture depreciates, but education is an investment. Furniture does not provide social connections or lifelong access to alumni networks or career offices. Furniture doesn’t provide marketable job skills or raise incomes. Colleges and furniture stores both advertise, but families and students are susceptible to college marketing in a way that they are not to furniture marketing, because education influences the future prospects of the entire family. I was a Pell student, but my children will be full pay. Education was the difference for us.
3 Likes
Can you take me shopping? 
On a more relevant note, yes, the college admissions process can be very emotional and tied in with a lot of fears and insecurities and expectations. And the students who are doing these applications are adolescents. That’s why the adults in their lives need to be grounded and either be learned in the process, or learn about it. The adults need to provide guidance, advice, reality checks, suggestions, and pose questions to help these young people figure out the solve and the best plans so they build those skills.
And when I’m referring to adults, I mean parents as well as school officials. And yes, I know that many public high schools don’t have the resources/capacity to do much in the way of college & career guidance, but school boards should allot money for it (and citizens pay appropriate taxes) to make it happen.
3 Likes
Yes, it’s a real pity that the college process is so byzantine in the US. So many pitfalls! You have to be so savvy or you can get screwed! And this is true at every level from the elite down to the lowliest. The rich can work the system by hiring private CCs. The poor have only an overburdened school CC and end up making tragic errors like enrolling in barely-accredited, for-profit institutions when much better public community colleges are available at 1/3 the price. It’s because the for-profits advertise, and it works.
It doesn’t have to be this way; it’s not this way in many other countries. But here on CC the attitude so often is that kids and parents are getting what they deserve for the sins of not being hip to the unwritten rules. I mean didn’t you know those particular schools don’t offer merit unlike these other particular schools? Didn’t you know that violin is all wrong for Asian students? Didn’t you know that when Yale sent a packet to your daughter with her name customized throughout that there was no way on earth they actually wanted her? Didn’t you know AOs are sick of that essay theme? Didn’t you know that the admit rate for these schools have gone down an order of magnitude since you applied? So many unwritten rules!
14 Likes
The worst of which is incorrect. “Don’t you know that you won’t be successful if you don’t get into a highly selective school?”
14 Likes
Followed by “don’t you know you’ll be homeless and miserable if you don’t make it into an impacted major (generally nursing or CS) and have to major in history or urban planning?”
9 Likes
The number of applications that each student sends out feeds on itself. It drives acceptance rates down, which means that students have to send out more apps just to make sure they get in somewhere.
Schools could solve this problem by discouraging kids who have no chance of acceptance from applying, but then they would lose the race to be the first college with under a 1% acceptance rate.
4 Likes
Yes, you are right about so many of the unspoken rules that abound and how easy it is to make mistakes. I’ve made them as well. There was a thread where people were talking about using a typewriter to complete their college applications, and I was thinking back and couldn’t remember what I had done. I’m still not 100% sure, but I’m pretty sure that the application said, “type or print neatly” and I printed neatly!
Even for someone who is not aware of all of the nuances of the college application process, there is the general concept of applying to a mix of schools: the reaches, targets/matches, and safeties. What boggles my mind is when 90% or more of the list is reaches. It’s like house hunting homes that are way out of your price range on the off chance that a seller will accept an offer that is significantly below the list price. Yes, it does happen, but I wouldn’t think that would be an optimal strategy. But I suppose that’s my biggest bugaboo about when the college search goes wrong. I can understand not knowing about so many of the unwritten rules, but when acceptance rates are plastered all over the place and one only applies to schools with a 20% acceptance rate or lower, I feel as though the adults really did a disservice to the student.
But thank you for your post with all of the unwritten rules. Helps ground us when we’ve been spending too much time on CC. 
4 Likes
This is only true if an applicant is only applying to schools that are highly rejective. If a student has a balanced list of schools s/he is applying to, then there should be schools on it with guaranteed admission, or a rolling admission that came early in the year, or 2-3 schools that admit 80+ % of their applicants (or 80+% of students with the applicant’s profile). If that has happened, there’s no need to apply to 15 schools that admit less than 10% of applicants.
2 Likes
There are some schools between <10% acceptance rates and >80% acceptance rates. I know because my son applied to several of them. There is no way to know what schools a borderline candidate like my son will get into.
3 Likes
I still feel like it is an easy mistake to make. You check out the most recent Fiske (2019) from the library. It was actually printed in 2018, with admit rates from 2016, so 6 years out of date, but you might not realize that. You look at your kid’s SAT and it is 100 points higher than yours was, and you got into these schools. You don’t realize that SATs have been re-centered and your kid’s score is effectively lower than yours was. But anyway, you look in the Fiske and see your kid is above the 75th percentile for the school’s SATs. And he’s been on the A honor roll every semester! You think that is amazing without realizing about grade inflation (I just found out that a full 50% of my kid’s class makes the A honor roll in any given semester!) Then your kid gets LOTS of mail from Ivy’s and other selective schools–REPEAT mailings.
I know the unwritten rules only because I have wasted many hours on places like CC. That is how I knew to look in the CDS to know that Columbia was only ■■■■■■■■ my kid. That is how I knew that the sticker price is NOT the real price, and which schools have merit, and how to get it. That is how I knew about “spiky” and knew to tell my kid to mention a certain hobby that he wouldn’t have known to call an “EC” otherwise. I really feel the system is sick.
10 Likes
All of which comes back to being an average excellent student. There are too many for too few spots.
For you parents, or students reading this, there needs to be something exceptional. As I stated many years ago, unless your kid is exceptional in some way, or hooked (not that those are mutually exclusive), the chances of getting into “highly rejective” colleges are slim. It’s not impossible, so even kids without a chance apply. But they need to focus on colleges within the realm of possibility.
Apply to a good range of schools, where your stats put you in up in the 75th percentile of accepted students. That does not mean 20 apps to all the USNWR top 20 and 1 app to Directional State U as a safety.
8 Likes
I’ll add a few things things.
-
Except the rare few (athletes, high dollar donors, children of presidents, actors, etc.), an applicant will not know what that exceptional thing is, especially now days. Everyone thinks they have the exceptional thing. I know multiple HYPSM students. They didn’t have anything that was out of the ordinary from their HS peers. Only the adcoms know what that thing is.
-
For the very most selective schools, even being in the top 75th percentile won’t move the needle much. The difference between the 25th and the 75th is minimal since so many highly qualified students apply.
-
Given that reality, assume EVERY highly selective school will reject you. A high volume of applications does not change those odds.
-
Always start the quest with the hardest to find schools, safeties. They are guaranteed admits, guaranteed to be affordable, and, ideally a school the applicant is very excited about.
Great thread.
18 Likes
Yep! And we mere mortals have no way of knowing what might be exceptional this year as opposed to last year.
So to be exceptional, make your app so good that you can’t be ignored. That doesn’t mean you have to win tons of awards. It’s about presenting yourself in a way that makes them want you on campus.
4 Likes