<p>placido- Wow. You know absolutely nothing about her family. Would you say the same about mine because we barely have any college savings for me? If you did, I would tell you that my parents had to spend it on medical bills for myself and my brother and on unexpected renovations, that we have been incredibly frugal my entire life, have never gone on exotic vacations, never go to movies, and never eat out. I have bought my own clothes and electronics since I started high school, and my parents have drilled the concept of saving into my head. Not everyone is careless with their money. Sometimes it’s just not there, through no fault of the parents or the children. Life happens. Anonymity doesn’t give you the right to be a rude and snarky child. 5boys is not the only parent who needs financial aid to send a child to college. In case you’ve been living under a rock, the economy is not too hot right now. </p>
<p>I don’t think 5boys misinterpreted calmom’s post. I think calmom has been rather rude to her without knowing all the facts, and I think 5boys grew rather tired of it, understandably so.</p>
<p>We visited Col College in early 2010 and know someone who is quite senior there (a family friend). He said to us that Col College was committed to being able to maintain fin aid for the students already there (including “new” cases, such as students whose parents had lost jobs) and therefore they were going to be need aware for the next few years. That’s unfortunate esp for a student like yours who loves CC (and we, personally found it a very appealing school – D applied there EA but withdrew due to being accepted ED elsewhere) but the alternative is – they don’t act need aware and thn they jeopardize the FA to current students already in the fold, which isn’t better either. I am sure your son will do fine ad best of luck.</p>
<p>I haven’t read through the whole thread, but I wanted to comment on this. I think this is very true and not just for inexperienced teachers. A few years back DS had an experienced teacher write a LOR and he gave DS a copy (I don’t think teachers should do that). My heart sank when I read it. He was extremely positive about DS but then mentioned that DS’s parents (me) were very involved at the school. He said DS had no sense of entitlement and had become involved in his own right. He was trying to make DS look good, but I felt like a college would see that and maybe presume that DS had gotten special treatment or that the teacher was paying back my hard work with a good letter. I may be wrong, but it felt like a mistake to me for him to mention it and that it took away from DS.</p>
<p>I won’t comment on everything except to say that there is no real difference between the students who are accepted EA and those who are deferred. Many who are deferred end up getting in. My daughter told me that at her college (Yale) there was no difference between the quality of the students who got in EA and those who were deferred and later accepted. They can’t take everyone EA, they have to make choices and limit who they take to be fair to the RD pool. My kids was deferred EA and I know he’s qualified. But there are only so many kids like him they could accept from the EA pool. Maybe if he’d played the bassoon instead of piano he’d have been admitted early. Maybe if we lived four hundred miles east of where we live he’d have been admitted. Who knows? If he wasn’t qualified, he’d have been denied outright. It has nothing to do with seeing another semester’s grades. He’s had straight As all the way through with difficult courses. There is no need to see another semester’s grades. It’s just what it is. They are looking for a diverse group – geographically, socio-economically, academically, talent-wise, etc. They are looking for an even division between male and female. They want some public school kids and some private school kids. They want some athletic kids and some musical kids. There weren’t 700 spots open to my son (or whatever it is they took). There were a few spots open for kids like him who came from the kind of school he does, had his strengths, came from his city, etc. The supply exceeded the demand on their end. It doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with the applicants in the supply pool who were deferred.</p>
<p>There’s a lot to chew on here, but I’ll just add my opinion- while in most respects there may be no difference between the student accepted EA and the one deferred then accepted in the regular round, there is often one glaring difference: who applied for aid? Been there, done that and in my limited, anecdotal experience, it is the LACs that have been affected the most in the last couple of years. I know of students who applied for aid, WL at numerous LACs who matriculated at Ivys (I’m using the ancient 8 definition here) with sufficient aid. Counterintuitive, but some students have better outcomes at schools with a lower acceptance rate, and the OPs son just might be one of those. I think the practice changed in the last several years, and the language has not kept pace. Phrases like “need aware” or “need aware for WL” weren’t used by the top LACs until endowments shrunk.</p>
<p>With one affordable option in hand, the OP can relax. I do hope you tell us how it all plays out.</p>
Wow. I never said that. I never said anything like that.</p>
<p>I said that there are 2 kind of schools, those that are “need blind” and those that are “need aware”. Your son was deferred from a bunch of “need aware” schools. When he was applying to those schools he was not simply asking for admission; he was asking for funding. None of them turned him away; they all said, “not now, we need to see what our entire class looks like before we decide whether we want to give him a full scholarship to attend our school for 4 years.” (Whether they call it a “grant” or “scholarship”, “need based” or “merit” – the result is the same.).</p>
<p>Your son’s results at need-blind schools would not have been impacted by this issue. You said that he is applying to several need-blind LAC’s in the RD round, so there is no reason for you not to expect that he will have options in the spring. I have told you every which way until Sunday that the “deferral” means the school wants to see the mid-term grade report, and have the same information in front of them for your son as they do for the vast majority of their applicants. I told you that my financial-aid needing kids got into most colleges they applied to – RD, not EA – and that I didn’t think that in the long run finances had that much of an impact. It might have impacted the decision for my daughter at 2 schools where she was waitlisted, but those schools did not guarantee to meet full need in any case – if a school does not promise to meet full need, then the outcome of an admission is often “admit-deny”, meaning the student is admitted with clearly insufficient financial aid. </p>
<p>Anyway, I don’t know how you can read my posts to say that your son will have no options in the spring… when I keep on trying to point out that a <em>deferral</em> is not the same as a final decision. </p>
<p>Colleges offer ED & EA programs primarily to increase their revenues. ED allows them to lock in revenue producers, EA provides an opportunity for enhanced targeted marketing toward revenue producers. Early distribution of financial aid money hampers the ability to use that money to attract highly desirable students later on, so it is in the interest of colleges to conserve their assets early on, and then make their admissions & financial aid decisions in the spring when they have a complete picture.</p>
<p>Look up the phrase “enrollment management” to get a better perspective on how college administrators see the process.</p>
The Ivys have stronger endowments. You can look at financial aid figure for any LAC vs. Ivy and see that the Ivy’s subsidize a higher percentage of their incoming students. </p>
<p>It works both ways. Colleges aren’t looking to avoid paying out financial aid; they are trying to keep their financial aid budgets at targeted levels. The financial aid departments want to spend the money they have – they just don’t want to run into trouble going over budget. Colleges that offer need-based aid only thus have an interest in admitting whatever number of needy students is required to utilize their financial aid budget. Colleges that offer merit money as well may have somewhat different priorities – dollars that aren’t spent on needy students may represent money that can be spent on discounted admission for other, non-needy but desireable students. </p>
<p>I am currently a high school senior, and I just want to add my own opinion.
Please pardon me if I sound pretentious or rude in anyway, and point it out so I can fix things ASAP.
People might have already mentioned my views before, but my lurking has been sporadic and so i haven’t read most of the posts.
I feel tha 5mom’s son was qualified for the amazing schools he applied to. However, as shooting silver has demonstrated, admissions are random and sometimes unfair.
Last year, one of the students at my school applied to 18 privates. He had a 4.5 weighted gpa (extremely high for my school) a 2400 on the SAT, and he was a state champion for the national forensics league (speech and debate).
His first choice was Stanford. He had three generations of legacy, so everyone thought he was a shooin.
Sadly, he was rejected by every single private except for Northwestern. He ended up going to an in-state school, UC Berkeley.</p>
<p>I think that there are so many qualifying candidates in the application process, that some just won’t make the cut. It’s harsh, but in America, as long as you work hard and go to a top 200 college, you will be able to be successful.
Going to top ivies doesn’t mean anything; a few years back the only person accepted ED to Yale from my high school(I think Yale used to have ED back then… at least it was binding) from my school ended up dropping out first semester. No one has gotten in since; did my school get blacklisted? lol</p>
<p>5boys’ son will do well anywhere so long as he works hard. He does not have to go to a top twenty university to live happily and successfully :)</p>
<p>Excuse me for any typos I might have; my English is definitely not the best XD</p>
<p>My so-called need-blind alma mater (#1 LAC) just accepted 239 ED applicants, out of 572, or an acceptance rate of 42%. Since the final class will only have 550 students, they actually have 44% of the class already. It also means that, for the rest of the applicants (including those deferred), the acceptance rate will likely be around 12-14%.</p>
<p>Of the 239 accepted, only 14 (5.9%) were internationals, and only 23% were students of color. Since the final class will have a larger percentage of each, either there were fewer “qualified” internationals and students of color applying ED, or they deferred a higher percentage (which is a reasonable, though unprovable, hypothesis, and it is also reasonable, though unproven, that a higher percentage of each will require substantial financial aid.) They did not publish how many were legacies, or how many were full-pay, but it is reasonable (as Calmom assumes) that they will want to figure out how to use the bulk of the financial aid budget in the next round. In other words, all other things being equal (they never are), those with high need will end up with a lower admissions rate (this assumed they applied at all, as per Calmom’s last point about marketing). </p>
<p>At this so-called need-blind school, a reporter was invited in several years ago to watch the admissions process. The admissions director literally “counted” the number of “socio-eq” admits (think high-need) as it happened. It is likely he had a number in mind - and it might be just as likely that he wanted to have enough of them as wanting to keep the number down. </p>
<p>The only place where I differ with Calmom is here: “Your son’s results at need-blind schools would not have been impacted by this issue.” On the contrary, I think it very well could be.</p>
<p>Calling admissions “random” is an insult to very well-trained, highly experienced professionals. The fact that they don’t meet the eye of what a parent or student unconcerned with the total shape of of a class or the long-term ability of a school to meet its institutional mission doesn’t make it “random”, only “non-transparent”.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Have your school send us a “mid-year report” containing your 1st semester grades. Occasionally, students are deferred because we want to see these senior year grades. If you have new testing, be sure to send those scores as well.</p></li>
<li><p>Send an email to your regional counselor. This should be a thoughtful paragraph or two specifying why UChicago remains your first choice. We would prefer to receive this communication by e-mail rather than paper mail. There are no hard deadlines, but keep in mind we will release decisions in March. One thoughtful email will have MUCH more of an impact than many shorter e-mails.</p></li>
<li><p>Continue your college search. UChicago represents just one school in a sea of incredible institutions of higher learning. At the end of this process you’re going to end up with an wonderful place to call home.</p></li>
<li><p>Optional: You can continue to upload supplemental materials directly to your Portfolio in your UChicago Account. Doing so is not required, and please be judicious in deciding what to upload. Again, more information is not better here; we appreciate updates but please make sure that new information is not something that duplicates information you have already sent to us. We would prefer you to upload these materials to your Portfolio rather than sending them by paper mail.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>++Very Optional: Students who have not already had an interview (either on campus or with an alum) may request an alumni interview through their Chicago Account. Please remember that interviews are NOT a required portion of the admissions process, and we are not able to match every student who requests an interview with one.</p>
<p>Don’t:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Book an overnight flight to Chicago. While we always enjoy welcoming students to campus, we do not make decisions based on whether or not a student has visited. Besides, there’s nothing we can tell you in person that we couldn’t do over phone or email (or CC).</p></li>
<li><p>Panic. An admissions decision is not an evaluation of you as a person. Decisions are made over a long period of time, by several people, with some conversation, taking into account the entire applicant pool. We cannot give reasons for decisions over the phone or via email, as it really is impossible to condense the conversations behind our decisions in a way that would be adequate or helpful to the applicant.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Actually, my comment there was made with the kid’s particular profile in mind – unless the LOR’s or information in the essay reveal that the kid is on scholarship, everything else in the application suggests that he comes from an affluent background, given the schools he has attended. The difference between “need blind” and “need aware” is that the need-blind ad coms are guessing at economic circumstances from other indicia in the file, whereas the need-aware college have actual knowledge. I think that the same considerations applied to my own kids: without the actual financial aid application in view, they look like upper middle class kids. Two parents with professional degrees from well-known universities, essays referencing international travel experiences – and in my d’s case, years of dance lessons ($$) and attendance at a public magnet that is a draw for well-off families as well as poor. I’m not poor in any case – I’m a median income earner, qualifying for financial aid at pretty close to the “average” figures reflected in college data – so there would have been no potential advantage in disclosing finances to a college looking to fill “socio-eq” slots. </p>
<p>If you listened to the NPR Amherst adcom session linked several pages back, you might rethink the “random” comment as an insult. They may be highly trained professionals but they are going with their gut emotions in many cases, seemingly setting aside all that training to choose a kid that makes them chuckle. </p>
<p>A friend was an adcom for a small but well regarded LAC. He had no specialized other than being an enthusiastic recent grad of the school.</p>
<p>I know only a limited range of admissions outcomes, but I have to say that I do believe that there is an element of randomness in the process. This is not to say that admissions are totally random–not at all. </p>
<p>By an “element of randomness,” I mean that if the same files were presented to the same group of admissions committee members, but in a different order, or under different personal circumstances, or with the most/least experienced members of the committee reading different files, or even with the very same committee members reading the very same files again (but with their memories of the previous outcomes hypothetically wiped clean), then the set of admitted students would not be identical to the set actually admitted.</p>
<p>bovertine found an analysis of Harvard admissions, by the Office of Admissions staff, dating to the late 60’s or early 70’s. If you look for a thread started by bovertine on the Parents Forum, sometime in December 2011, you probably will not have a difficult time locating it. The admissions report mentions the concept of the “happy bottom quarter,” and may indeed be its origin. The admissions report also mentions the concept of “bridge students,” which I had not encountered before. The discussion of bridge students in the report is classist in the extreme–that has probably been repudiated. Nevertheless, I would guess that some version of the “bridge student” concept still exists, because it is logically consistent and offers an explanation of outcomes that otherwise seem inexplicable.</p>
<p>The number of students who are qualified to be in Harvard’s “happy bottom quarter” is very large. The number of students who are qualified to be “bridge students” might not be quite as large, but they are still numerous. Then constructing a class is somewhat like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces in the box, but with some choices constrained by the choices that have already been made.</p>
<p>I would consider admissions “non-random” if the class composition was deterministic–that is, completely replicable, given the same set of applications. I do not believe that this is the case. Nor do I really think that it is insulting to admissions staffers to say that it “just ain’t so.”</p>
<p>To give one example of what I mean: A Stanford applicant wrote an essay on the topic “I hate my dog.” The admissions rep who read the essay thought it was hilarious and cited it as the reason for her admission.</p>
<p>I have a dog. He’s getting old. He had successful cancer surgery this summer, but may possibly have to have a second round of surgery in the future. My reaction to an “I hate my dog” essay would definitely have varied over the past year and a half. I doubt that I would ever have seen it as a sufficient reason for admission (but then I don’t work in Stanford admissions), but whether it counted positively or negatively would have varied. I think this would be true of any admissions staffer who had a dog, or had recently lost one.</p>
<p>Also, before it comes up, I realize that an application is generally read–at least in a cursory fashion–by more than one admissions staffer. However, the total number of admissions office members is relatively small at many places in the HYPSM+similar schools group. For instance, I was astounded at the small size of the admissions group at Princeton. If you consider the number of applications, the personnel size of the admissions office, and the number of minutes from the time that applications are due until the time decisions are made (and then factor in the need for admissions reps to eat and sleep), I think you’ll see that it is logistically impossible for the entire committee to read each application–and I doubt that the entire committee even reads each application that is considered competitive, although the apps may be discussed in committee. I would guess that one person (maybe two) acts as lead for each competitive application. This in itself tends to introduce an element of randomness into the process.</p>
<p>I believe each regional rep gets to read/recommend an application first before it’s submitted to the committee, that’s the first gatekeeper. Looking at few schools, I have seen 10+ reps.</p>
<p>The stock market, lost of job, medical problem, business failue could easily wipe out someone’s savings, even 18 years worth. Some of us have been more fortunate, and there are some who maybe just few months from being homeless. As fortunate as I have been, I wouldn’t be so quick to judge…</p>
<p>I understand what you are saying QuantMech. I don’t think it is at odds with what mini and I are saying – we are just interpreting the word “random” in a different way. On an individual basis, the results can be random – but what mini and I are saying is that on a global basis, the admissions committees have an agenda and are making decisions to fit that agenda. The results at the individual level may seem “random”, but the decision making process that goes into the results is not random – it is an agenda-driven process.</p>
<p>I think the fly-on-the-wall filming of admissions committees in action gives a distorted view, because it doesn’t show the process which leads up to the committee discussion. I think the book “The Gatekeepers” provides more insight into the beginning-to-end process.</p>
<p>Typically, many students who are rejected will never have their files read or discussed in a committee setting. The readers will simply concur that the student is not appropriate for admissions. I think it is many colleges employ a system of having two readers, each of which rank or score the file with a no/maybe/yes type of scale, sometimes with more gradations (such as a 1-5 score). Two no’s and the file is out – perhaps at the most selective colleges it only takes a single no to exclude the file. Two yeses may mean that the student is going to be admitted without further discussion, and at some colleges the director of admissions has the power to unilaterally make decisions to take a given student.</p>
<p>I also personally know of cases of recruited athletes having a firm commitment at a prestigious university well before the admission season is underway. </p>
<p>So those admission committee scenes are all about carving up the middle – making choices among a set of students who have been pre-determined to be appropriate for admissions, but not special enough to be admitted without discussion and comparison to other applicants. </p>
<p>Thus the process can be seen as “random” if you are asking why student X got in while student Y was turned down – but it is not at all “random” if the goal of the admissions committee was to meet a set of targets and at the end of process all those targets have been met.</p>
<p>Placido, contrary to some of these threads, many of us on CC have been hit hard by the economic harships over the last few years. College savings went to keep up mortgage payments and cover living expenses when jobs and medical bills took priority. Hopefully when you get out in the real world you will understand that the poor are not just irresponsible and lazy.</p>