Let's find out the extent to which college admission is a crapshoot

Parent Cafe
21

<p>curious:</p>

<p>I'm not buying.</p>

<p>I don't know the USNWR rankings, and I don't care. There's too much crap in them anyway. I have my own rankings. Plus, because selectivity and yield figure heavily in USNWR rankings, the rankings are really not independent of admission results.</p>

<p>SAT ranges are completely misleading. At the top end of the prestige market, I don't think people care that much about SATs, and there are lots of other well-ragarded schools that don't care much about them either.</p>

<p>The rankings, like all rankings, do a lot of comparing apples to oranges. To take an example, Dartmouth and Columbia are both highly regarded, and probably have comparable rankings. Yet the overlap of kids to whom they appeal has to be relatively small, and I really would be suspicious of any kid who said he or she liked them both equally. Dartmouth is far more likely to accept a kid who looks, on paper (and interviews) like a Dartmouth type, than Columbia, and vice versa.</p>

<p>Or you have the "Tufts effect" (or, right now on CC, WashU), which I think of as the Barnard effect. Among my daughter's friends, Barnard waitlisted every single girl who had also applied to Columbia, all of whom had at least somewhat better numbers than the girls it accepted. Coincidence? I think not. They care about who really wants them as first choice.</p>

<p>So, even before you get to who wrote really good essays, and to subtle differences among recommendations, there are too many factors creating differences to get any kind of read.</p>

22

<p>
[quote]
Perhaps we should just ask, did your results meet your expectations? If not, in what way were you surprised (getting into mega reach, not getting into safety, etc.)?

[/quote]

This is actually a much more interesting question. One can probably safely assume that the CC community is sufficiently well-informed and critical to correctly assign reach/match/safety schools based on their knowledge of the applicant's stats/ECs/essays/recs (if known). It would be useful to know how well these expectations matched outcomes.</p>

23

<p>Ok, </p>

<p>How about two questions.</p>

<p>Questiong 1: Did the ordering of acceptances and rejections match your expectations if not how so?</p>

<p>Question 2: To the extent that you are aware of them are the results consistent with the USNWR rankings if not how so?</p>

<p>Answer both or either.</p>

24

<p>I'll answer curious from my S last year:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Yes - two rejections from Stanford and MIT, four acceptances from Penn, WUSTL, CMU ,and UIUC. All were within expectations, especially after reading these boards and seeing the kinds of students who were getting accepted into Stanford and MIT. This information really helped with understanding what the other applicants are like.</p></li>
<li><p>I don't have the rankings handy but I'm pretty sure that's consistent with USNWR. </p></li>
</ol>

<p>This is amusing since there's a group of parents in my town that are now convinced it takes the right connections to get into Ivy's since the sal from last year got shot down from all of them. The mom is spearheading a campaign to revise the (already excellent) counseling dept in the high school - two younger children! After reading about the kinds of students who do get accepted I can see that our sal - a really great kid - was still a dime a dozen!</p>

25

<p>Marilyn,</p>

<p>Thank you.</p>

26

<p>I think the situation becomes more of a 'crapshoot' when you are applying to HYPSM (or whatever the abbreviation is) or a school that's a real stretch/reach.
With the exception of the one school that was a favorite pretty much from the start, our son's opinions regarding what schools he could aim for changed a lot from the time he first started looking to the time he applied a year or more later. He was admitted ED, so we don't have a lot to compare to, but if he had not gotten in, his remaining choices included both higher and lower "ranked" schools. In hindsight, it looks as if his school was a good match admissions-wise. Before that, though, after reading and hearing so many tales of woe in the media, we were really biting our nails. I don't think you should get too intimidated by everything you read or hear. </p>

<p>I think results threads here on CC are actually pretty helpful, because a lot of the kids seem pretty honest about including information (hooks, ECs, etc) that wouldn't be covered in one of the websites that give indications mostly via SAT scores.</p>

27

<p>I think a big piece of it is whether the school thinks a very qualified student will actually attend. This is especially true of schools such as Wash U. (Of course Wash U is also not need blind which is a huge factor as well.)</p>

28

<p>Curious, I see by your join date that this is your first college admission season, at least as a member of this online community. I've been around longer -- I've been following this stuff for about 6 years now. </p>

<p>I can assure you that (1) the "data" is already readily available -- the best form is some online databanks that students have set up to record results, and (2) the "data" won't help. The problem is that it is all too stats-focused and subjective. How do we know the quality of the essays and recs that accompanied the application? </p>

<p>If I just gave you raw data on my daughter, it would make no sense:</p>

<p>ACT 28; SAT 1200/1930; UW GPA 3.85:
Race: White
Sports: None
Honors, Awards: None
Rejected: Brown
Waitlisted: Brandeis, Boston U
Accepted: Barnard, Chicago, NYU, Berkeley (+ assorted safeties)</p>

<p>To me it makes perfect sense. The admissions were a pleasant surprise, but I know exactly what she had that fit what those colleges were looking for. </p>

<p>I could tell you what it is, but that wouldn't help because it would be hard to replicate the qualities. </p>

<p>So all I can say is to be more general: she targeted colleges that were a good fit for her personality and interests, because those colleges clearly valued some or all of the specific qualities that were her strongest points; and she did a good job conveying those qualities to those colleges. </p>

<p>She was waitlisted by colleges that didn't particularly value those qualities, and rejected by a college where she never stood a chance in the first place. I attribute her success (only one outright rejection out of 12 colleges) to good aim. </p>

<p>Each of my kids applied to one longshot, hail mary level college and then targeted the rest of their applications to either safeties or colleges where they had a reasonable chance. My daughter's reasonable chance colleges were rather reachy, by objective standards.... but that doesn't change the fact that they were well targeted.</p>

<p>I don't doubt that in some cases it might be much harder to do the targeting - my daughter's strong points are a rather easy to sum up and present, and a little out of the ordinary but not strange. It wasn't that hard to find the colleges that might like to have a kid like her. A kid with strengths that were either more esoteric or more common might not have as much luck. </p>

<p>But the point is the same: the colleges that liked her admitted her, even if on paper they looked like reaches.</p>

29

<p>Calmom, is Barnard a competitive environment or a nurturing environment? Or, what kind of environment is it? :)</p>

30

<p>I think posts #28 and #23, for all their apparent disagreement, both hit the nail on the head: this question is interesting if you pose it as a qualitiative one, and pretty uninteresting if you're looking for a quantitative answer based on SAT scores or USNews selectivity rankings.</p>

31

<p>Calmom,</p>

<p>Your D is another sample point. Thank you for providing the data.</p>

32

<p>Twinmom,</p>

<p>If we have some more cooperation, we may be able to shed some light on the issue you raise. So far we only have two data points but no rejections from schools that should have been safe schools yet.</p>

33

<p>Accepted to Harvard, waitlisted at Wash U (did not remain on waitlist.) However, we never looked at Wash U as a safety. In fact, we expected a waitlist decision with no visit and an application for financial aid.</p>

34

<p>3.9 GPA.
780 Math, 710 Writing, 670 CR.
SAT IIs of 790/780/700 - math, spanish, chem - respectively.
AP courses starting soph year - one 4 and three 5's through junior year.
7 varsity letters.
ECs including national and international awards for robotics.
Rejected EA from Notre Dame.</p>

<p>Go figure.</p>

35

<p>Twinmom, </p>

<p>In my original post I asked folks to explain anomalies, if they could. Thank you for explaining the Harvard / Wash U flip. Lots of colleges make it pretty clear that they like to be visited. Someone on this thread or another argued that Wash U practices managed admissions. If this is true it helps explain the flip.</p>

36

<p>Gasdoc,</p>

<p>I'm not picking on you. But single point results, like your D's EA rejection at ND are incomplete data. Could you repost when she has some other acceptances and/or rejections. We are looking for relative reasonableness here, so a single outcome while interesting, isn't the kind of data we are looking for. If she gets accepted by a school that looks clearly tougher to get into than ND that would be the sort of thing we are talking about. And good luck.</p>

37

<p>Twin mom,</p>

<p>Was Wash U the only surprise?</p>

38

<p>Double nomination (senatorial and congressional from a very populated state) with early admit to the a service academy (value $325k).</p>

39

<p>Gasdoc,</p>

<p>I gather you were surprised at the ND rejection, given the acceptance by the service academy. I know the number of candidates accepted is very low for the service academies in part becasue so many apply given the "free ride." But ND SAT scores are a lot higher than any of the service academies, so in that sense the outcome is not an anomaly.</p>

40

<p>Curious, I gave you the figures, but its not a useful data point because the one thing I am sure of is that my daughter's test scores were not a factor in her admission to the reach colleges -- she was admitted in spite of the scores, not because of them. So unless you know what her "hook" is and try to quantify that, you've got nothing useful. I posted those stats mostly to illustrate how tenuous the connection is.</p>

<p>For example, my d's "why Boston U" answer on the application was less than compelling (she said she liked the buildings when she visited - seriously) -- so maybe we need to factor "bad essay answers" into the equation. But we'll never know if that was the reason for the waitlist; there are some equally plausible explanations. My son wrote an equally inane "why Macalester" answer a few years back... and was admitted in a heartbeat.... but then Macalester likes NMF's.</p>