<p>yehalb, I’d agree with you if waitlists were honest waitlists and colleges were transparent in explaining to students what being waitlisted means for them. If that were the case, then there would be no victims. But what some of us are saying is that colleges may be using waitlists for reasons other than the stated purpose, which is manage their enrollment and ensure they fill their class. What we are questioning is whether more is going on here. Are colleges expanding their waitlists to manipulate rankings? Are they waitlisting kids they have no intention of ever accepting off the list simply for PR reasons?</p>
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<p>I don’t like EA, particularly SCEA, because of what a disappointing result does to the kid. In RD kids have some acceptances to counterbalance the rejections. That doesn’t happen with SCEA. You’ve just got that deferral or worse that rejection staring you in the face for the next 4 months. It makes for a long, cold winter. I know because both of my girls played the SCEA game and fell short, one rejection and one deferral. If I could do it over again we’d skip that and go straight to RD.</p>
<p>You may not like it because of personal results for your family, but the point is what it does for the overall pool, which in fact does help your family, RD.</p>
<p>“Counselors need to counsel students” Heyalb - I’m guessing you don’t work as a counselor. All I can say is, we try. You have no idea how difficult it is when students and parents have unrealistic goals. We COUNSEL them to add safety schools and remove some reaches. We show them Naviance graphs to illustrate how unlikely it is that they will get into Duke or Princeton. All to no avail. Parents have inflated ideas as to the worth (in the college admissions process) of their precious child. We spend countless hours assembling packages of transcripts, recommendations, etc. amd mailing them out to schools where we know they are going to be rejected. It is beyond frustrating. Then comes April and the angry phone calls from parents, demanding to know why their precious son or daughter did not get accepted at prestigious university - as if it is our fault. </p>
<p>All I can say is that most counselors work hard in a demanding and fairly low paying job. I think it would be appreciated if posters on here recognized that and stopped painting us as part of the problem.</p>
<p>Just to clarify, I’m not whining that there is a WL. But I do think the size of Duke’s WL is ridiculous. And for the record, ds did get WL’d at one school – the one school he long thought was a dream school. He has since cooled on it (even before the WL decision), but he decided to stay on the WL. I told him that he could only do that if he agreed to put no mental energy into wondering/hoping that he’ll get off it. I think that was easy for him once I told him that not a single person got off the WL last year. I’m not sure he’d even go there now if he did get off that WL.</p>
<p>I’ve also come around to epiphany’s idea of a match system, but I would make it more like med school admission and not residency match. In med admissions, an applicant sends a file of stuff for preliminary review. Those that pass the first hurdle are asked for extra stuff (round #2).</p>
<p>HYPS et al could do something similar. Over the summer/early fall, a student could send a ONE page letter of interest and a ONE page resume for review. The college could then scrub out all of the non-hooked applicants with sub-2100’s, sub 3.8 gpa’s, second decile applicants that have zero chance (and always had zero chance). It would be kinda like an early read, but with only negative consequences: Thank you for your interest, but…"</p>
<p>heyalb: “If you go with the argument “my my son MUST apply to 15 schools because there’s a financial factor thrown in”, then your son should be focusing on financial safeties.”</p>
<p>I disagree. In my daughter’s case, her state “financial safety” school (tuition/room/board = $19,000) was MORE expensive than many private school offers. So, for us, it made more sense to focus on high-end schools that give money.</p>
<p>Bluebayou: great idea…!</p>
<p>[(1) Early application and notification options (EA, EDI & EDII with FA escape clauses)]</p>
<p>this gives 90% plus applicants an out clause- so what’s the point when over 90% of applicants don’t have to honor the ED-.</p>
<p>For HYPS, their #1 concern over the past decade or so has been to open up their admissions to talented students who don’t come from wealthy and sophisticated backgrounds. That’s why, progressively, they abandoned ED, and then even EA (some of them). They wanted to stop weighting the scales in favor of students who were ready to go and knew what they wanted (or thought they knew) a full year before entering college. They also wanted to have more information on their applicants, not effectively to be limited to test scores and 10th-11th grade grades and teachers; they wanted 12th grade information, and essays.</p>
<p>But now, no. In order to spare people the psychic pain of possible waitlisting, we should have them screening applicants in the summer before 12th grade based on completely skeletal information? </p>
<p>Not going to happen, and rightly so. Come up with another fix.</p>
<p>This is SUCH a limited phenomenon. At my kids’ public school, 80%+ of the kids applied to one college where they knew they were likely to be accepted. Maybe two. It’s only a thin layer of educationally ambitious students that gets involved in double-digit applications and sticking out waitlists. OK, those students are important to us, because they ARE us, or our children. But all of this is special pleading. </p>
<p>Once you walk out the door of your fancy private school, or suburban powerhouse high, or urban public magnet, the sun is shining, it’s a beautiful day, and no one gives a crap about waitlists.</p>
<p>In theory I like the concept of a pre-read, mainly because it will help students adjust their self-assessments and better focus their application targets. But I’m imagining an application process that is already long and complicated becoming more so with this extra layer added. It would be more work for all involved, and no doubt it would require an extra fee. The only way it wouldn’t be more work for everyone would be if it were totally empirical, that is totally stat-based instead of holistic. But if it could be that, then a pre-read would be unnecessary. A college could instead simply say: “Any student with SAT’s below X number need not apply.”</p>
<p>As a recruited athlete, my D engaged in a process with similarities to what is being proposed. She researched schools, visited them, and then submitted to her top choices a resume, an unofficial transcript and SAT scores for review by their Admissions Office. Once successfully through that phase, she visited her top 5 choices again, and finally submitted only 2 applications. The drawback: the process has to begin earlier and drags on longer. It entails two rounds of document submissions, with the inevitable follow-ups and re-sendings. The huge advantage: only a few applications (and essays!!!) were needed, and we saved about $500 in application fees and test sending costs.</p>
<p>UC Davis waitlists 5,000+</p>
<p>[UC</a> a tougher bet this year for Californians, with 10,700 wait-listed - latimes.com](<a href=“http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ucadmit15-2010apr15,0,4245995.story]UC”>UC a tougher bet this year for Californians, with 10,700 wait-listed)</p>
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So if you were a counselor, and the top student in the grade came in, you’d advise him to apply to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Tufts, and the state flagship? If so, he may come back and see you after he gets his results.</p>
<p>On the other thread, a poster pointed out that some top schools have reduced the size of their wait lists. He says Stanford’s went down by about 500. Supposedly UPenn’s also went down. Any thoughts about why?</p>
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<p>That would be nice. My S’s counselor was counseling about 200 students. She couldn’t even be bothered to update S’s recommendation to include the very significant honors he won jr year–and she was at a ceremony where they were awarded–much less mention ANY of the things that demonstrated his intellectual initiative and made him stand out from his peers. We couldn’t even get an appointment with her to discuss safety schools for him between the SCEA deferral and the application deadlines.</p>
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<p>See above. This counselor was incompetent, but do you really think that they have time to craft a list of only 4 schools for 200+ kids? I agree that 15 seems like too many, but as I said upthread, “too many” is usually “one more than MY kid sent.”</p>
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<p>Newsflash: for the high-statted kid who needs a full ride or close to it, the financial safeties are the Ivies and other schools such as Pomona, Amherst, and Williams that actually meet full need without huge loans. And ALL of those schools have acceptance rates ranging from the single digits to at most 15-20%. </p>
<p>You can’t just pick 4 of them and assume you will get in to one, even if you have SATIs above 2300, 2270 SATIIs, an A- average, demanding ECs, a 3-season varsity athlete, a maximum-rigor schedule including 8 APs (with all 5s on the exam) plus all honors where available, independent study, state and national awards, etc. Trust me. :)</p>
<p>"or the high-statted kid who needs a full ride or close to it, the financial safeties are the Ivies and other schools such as Pomona, Amherst, and Williams that actually meet full need without huge loans. "</p>
<p>Those aren’t safeties for anyone. With admission rates in the single digits, they certainly aren’t financial safeties: schools that one knows one will be accepted to and can afford.</p>
<p>For high stat students looking for full rides, their chances are better at second tier colleges and at their in-state publics, which often give excellent merit aid to in-state high stat students, and those students also tend to be first in line for need-based financial aid.</p>
<p>Dropping down a tier or two is likely to give high stat, needy students the aid that they need for college.</p>
<p>I also have known high stat, needy students who started out with full rides at their local community colleges then transferred to in-state public universities offering excellent merit aid to transfers from in-state community colleges.</p>
<p>Frankly, I would rather my kid go get a job than go to our local CC. The classes there are less rigorous than our HS. It would be a complete waste of his time and money unless he had a desire to train in a vocation. Mythmom teaches at a CC that has wonderful-sounding classes. Not all do.</p>
<p>From everything I have seen reported, “dropping down a tier” is likely to garner at most $30K in merit money. And that is a lot. For us, as I have said before, $30K against a COA of $50K would not do it.</p>
<p>Our state U has just dropped the major in the subject in which S is now planning to major. Budget cuts. Good thing he didn’t depend on that.</p>
<p>He applied to a range of schools and the result was as we hoped, more or less.</p>
<p>I don’t think people really understand the plight of high-stats, low-income kids. Yes, you can – and we did – apply to the financial safety, in-state public school. But that shouldn’t preclude a kid from applying to more selective, costly schools that have good financial aid policies. That’s why the numbers of apps increase.</p>
<p>Youdon’tsay, you are completely correct.</p>
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<p>In our suburban public, the student/counselor ratio is 600/1!</p>