<p>eyemamom: Case is not the only school not to have a website where kids can check the decision. USC also mails decision letters the “old” way. I think it will be fine. My kid applied to UGA early action and the night the decisions went live the server crashed repeatedly. It was pretty frustrating.</p>
<p>My S is applying to 10 schools. </p>
<p>I’d say about three are reaches, and one of those is a financial safety (a 100% tuition grant is given to all admitted students but that fact gave it a 15% acceptance rate last year). </p>
<p>A few schools are on the list because of music programs which he’ll audition for. If not accepted to the music program, he’s not very interested in attending the college. There are 4 of those.</p>
<p>A couple more are good LACs he should be able to get into, but going will only be possible with good FA.</p>
<p>He’ll apply to the regional campus of our state flagship only if no other good options present themselves by January 15th.</p>
<p>I think I am OK with how all this worked out, though I am encouraging him to beef up the “matches but depend on FA” category to 4 schools instead of just 2.</p>
<p>Re: Case admissions. This is the response my son received when he asked about decisions.</p>
<p>"We will be notifying via post and email. We will be including scholarship information at the same time. "</p>
<h1>54 I used the term “school” which may have been mistaken for college. I am inquiring about high schools and their formulae.</h1>
<p>How about Occupy College Admissions? In short, make the reaches lose their low percentages of acceptances by just NOT applying. Many in this thread have labeled the reaches as lotteries; and, think about that term – which basically means no chance to win/be accepted. If you stay away from the lottery reaches, you diminish their application base, which decreases their numbers of rejections, which increases their acceptance rate, which decreases their scales for USNW listings, which lowers their name in the public’s perspective. There is power to the applicant, especially when the action is taken in droves. </p>
<p>BTW: to those thinking of the lotteries – here is an eerie statistic. If all of the perfect SAT scores were to attend a lottery school, there would be overcrowding. The perfect SAT group outnumbers the freshmen classes at the Ivies plus those few others by a margin. Taking that into perspective, what are the chances for the 700/700/700 SAT kid with a 4.0 who is not a minority, and who has no athletic, no musical nor other skills to offer to the university? Lottery sounds like an appropriate term.</p>
<p>Boarder - if we could get every child to only apply to the schools where they were well qualified we’d all be much better off. But everyone feels like they need to apply to safeties which then makes the people at the level of a safety being a good match feel anxious. It all flows downhill. Then add in all the int’l students to the mix and it seems like there are more applicants than slots available. </p>
<p>I don’t know what the technical term is for a “reach” - if it has a lower admit rate, but your stats fit the profile, is that a reach? I consider that a reach for my ds. I consider the safety where his stats are above the sat range and gpa range, and a likely where the admissions rate is upwards of 60 - 70% where his stats are on the upper range.</p>
<p>After looking at tons of schools over the years we ended up not visiting ds’ safeties. We spent our time focused on the “better” schools and narrowing that list down and coming up with a criteria. These safeties fit the criteria he wants for major, size, housing, m/f ratio distance from home - so we figured we’d go see them after we hear from everyone. We think all the safeties are also good fits. </p>
<p>We applied to 9, and if every kid applied to that many, no wonder it becomes a rat race. But lots of ds’ friends are applying to only 1 or 2. And many ed’s don’t even send in their apps til after they hear.</p>
<p>eyemamom - a safety is not only an academic safety, but a financial safety as well. When you need a ton of aid as in our case, you have to cast a wide net. My DS has applied to schools that meet full FA and schools that also give generous Merit.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to blow over the financial part of it. We are fortunate that we saved for college for the kids entire lives and finances aren’t our primary concern. I think if I had to add that to the mix I’d probably keel over from anxiety. Not to say we don’t want merit, because I certainly don’t want to have to pay 50k/yr, but at the end of the day we’ll see where he gets in, the cost associated with it and decide what makes sense.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m not certain what you mean by this. THere were a total of around 394 students with perfect 2400s last year. THat wouldn’t even fill the freshman class at Harvard.</p>
<p><a href=“http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-Composite-CR-M-W-2011.pdf[/url]”>http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-Composite-CR-M-W-2011.pdf</a></p>
<p>It’s no lock for these kids, but they are still pretty scarce.</p>
<p>If you mean anyone who has a perfect score in any section, yes, that would probably be too much.</p>
<p>It is still a matter of chance whether you will get in with perfect scores.</p>
<p>Response combining 65 and 66</p>
<p>If your child is applying to school where the numbers don’t work, then maybe not applying is the better alternative. You may be wasting your time, a few dollars, and some possible emotional scars. If the school requires better academic numbers than your child holds, it is obvious that the lottery term is appropriate – e.g. why apply to Harvard when the valedictorians of many schools are not accepted? </p>
<p>The harder to gauge is financial. But, you may know the answer of the lack of likelihood of offering your child money because of : (1) their financial constraints; or (2) your child’s lack of unique talents compared to the campus as a whole. </p>
<p>Alternatively, you may apply to numerous schools with good chances of admittance, but not receiving the packages you hope for – that is not the formulaic problem. In fact, the increased application to such schools is sound economic strategy, and will lessen the scores to those your child does not attend, after admittance. Your child’s acceptance will make the acceptance percentages increase; and, the failure to give aid to your child will require to refuse the acceptance. This will affect the “yield” number, the yield will decrease – something which USNWR uses for its rankings. In the perspective of USNWR, high yield increases your rank and low yield does the opposite.</p>
<p>And, as the university bubble is about to burst, the state and other less expensive schools may see this phenomenon – their yield number decrease making their USNWR numbers drop. In short, this is one more reason not to trust everything in those rankings.</p>
<p>Response to 68</p>
<p>The number for me is not 2400-- but 99+ percent. The chart your gave shows 7,219 with 99+ ranking.</p>
<p>For 99 percent or above – the number is 23,110. For 98 percentile, add another 16,000-18,000. And, each percentile increase thereafter only brings greater numbers.</p>
<p>So when your child comes home with 98 percentile numbers, understand the numbers ahead of him or her. Then think about the 96th percentile or so many other highly respectable test takers who may pale in comparison to a large number of the applicants.</p>
<p>“BTW: to those thinking of the lotteries – here is an eerie statistic. If all of the perfect SAT scores were to attend a lottery school, there would be overcrowding.”</p>
<p>There aren’t too many kids with 2350+ and multiple 800s on SAT IIs.
We see a lot of them here in CC though.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Okay. THere are a lot more of them. When you said “perfect” I thought you meant 2400 - because there are sometimes other posters on here who contend there are thousands of 2400 scores. </p>
<p>But everything else you wrote is 100% true.</p>
<p>And the other thing that is true is that Harvard et al. care a lot less about the difference between 2200 and 2400 than we tend to here. Not that they don’t care at all, just not so much. In the admissions department world, it’s not a question of where the 400 kids with one-test perfect scores will go, or the thousand or so with superscored perfect scores, or the 7,200 top half percentile, or the 10,000 with the same scores on a superscored basis, or the additional 5,000 kids with equivalent ACT scores and no (or worse) SATs . . . the pool of kids with “high enough” test scores is probably something like 30,000 strong. And the top 1% of that pool, the perfect scorers, don’t have that much of an advantage over the bottom 1%, except – and this is imprtant – to the extent that the score difference reflects ability differences that show up on myriad ways in the application. Then, on top of that, not everyone in a class is admitted using the same criteria, so the SAT “floor” on part of the class is far below the SAT floor for others.</p>
<p>Looking at the Palos Verdes information, I am prepared to believe that a number of kids are applying to Harvard, especially, but also its peers, with no meaningful chance of acceptance. These kids are not quite top students, and they can’t ALL have the kind of sensational non-academic qualities that Harvard seeks. But I bet these are great kids, most of them, and that a good number of them DO offer a credible narrative why Harvard should accept them, even acknowledging that Harvard can’t possibly accept everyone who offers such a narrative.</p>
<p>One issue that hasn’t been discussed, and isn’t discussed on CC at all is that the demographic “bubble” has burst. I know that it doesn’t feel that way to parents of current high school seniors, but we are actually now on the downward edge of the curve of number of potential college freshmen. 1992 was the peak year for births (at least in the U.S.) Colleges are intensely aware of this, and this demographic slide may be what’s driving a lot of admissions office high level decisions.</p>
<p>Oh, please. Enough with the demographic bubble already. It has been discussed on CC ad nauseam, and it isn’t discussed more because it’s so unimportant.</p>
<p>The trough in US births has nothing to do with elite-college (or even moderately selective college) admissions, especially not in California. 18-year-olds are in the process of declining from a peak, but the decline is projected to total about 4% at its nadir. That is completely offset by (a) increasing rates of high school graduation and college attendance, and (b) applications from international students. California is, I believe, still experiencing net in-migration from other regions of the country, so even if you ignore the other factors the “baby bust” is unlikely to affect the UCs.</p>
<p>Applications to Harvard more than doubled over a period when the population of 18 year-olds increased 5-6%, and they have continued to increase in big steps while the population of 18 year-olds has declined slightly. At that end of the spectrum, there is essentially no correlation between the macro demographics and application numbers.</p>
<p>If you were president of a third-tier public in the Northeast or Upper Midwest, you would be very worried about demographics. But it wouldn’t be the national numbers that kept you awake, it would be the much sharper declines in your state. You would be planning your recruitment campaign in China, or thinking of other markets you could serve. Your colleague in Texas, however, would still be looking at rising numbers of 18-year-olds, with many, many more choosing to go to college.</p>
<p>I do think that one response to demographic decline is nationalizing the reach of formerly regional universities. Some of those are public (of many tiers), and some private. Certainly as you look at the schools that have moved to the Common App, this seems to be part of the impetus. University of Chicago is a great example, as is Northwestern. The push from Pitt and Alabama for a more national reach comes into play here as well.</p>
<p>CA is a different story because the public systems are such a mess. Even more so than other states.</p>
<p>Well, the University of Chicago is not such a great example, because it has been significantly more national than regional for a long time. Pitt, maybe, but it has been looking at sharp declines in college-age kids in its region for 30 years, not 3. Moving to the Common App is a perfectly good marketing tactic, but plenty of schools were doing it while the population was increasing, too.</p>
<p>People used to cite the baby-boom echo as a reason why elite university admissions had gotten so much more competitive, and there was something to that, but other factors were vastly more important. And the modest easing of that boom on a national basis makes no difference at all. There is really only a handful of institutions who draw from a national applicant base, and even the most successful of them draw applications from less than 1% of the total. Thousands of regional institutions are affected by demographics, but they are regional demographics, and they do not generally coordinate with the national aggregate. And, meanwhile, economic and educational conditions in emerging economies are producing a flood of applicants from places where the number of applicants to US institutions has little or nothing to do with overall population numbers, and where the overall population numbers are different in any event.</p>