<p>My older son is a student at Princeton. He had 33 ACT, 4.5 GPA, was varsity athlete in minor sport, was extremely well rounded in a variety of other ways, good essays, great interview, etc.</p>
<p>My younger son will be applying to Princeton next year, it's his first choice. His academics will be significantly higher (35 ACT, 4.7 weighted GPA), though he is not as well rounded as my older son and would be a recruited walk-on athlete (so to speak).</p>
<p>Any ideas on odds of admissions?</p>
<p>Can you clarify what you mean by “recruited walk-on athlete”? My understanding was that they were either recruited or a walk-on…</p>
<p>Your son cannot be a recruited walk-on athlete, as that’s not a term used in college admissions. Your son is either: (1) a recruited athlete, or (2) hoping for a walk-on position once admitted. </p>
<p>If a coach is NOT willing to use one of his slots for your son, your son is competing with the rest of the applicant pool based upon his transcript, course rigor, GPA, test scores, extracurricular activities, teacher recommendations, guidance counselor’s report and essays. </p>
<p>Bottom line: Without a firm commitment from a coach, your son’s chances are about like everyone else’s.</p>
<p>He has good chances but nothing is definite</p>
<p>Clarification of prior post: My older son received a “likely letter,” roughly equivalent to a letter-of-intent at a school which offers athletic scholarship. That’s one level of recruiting. </p>
<p>At another level of recruiting, according to multiple coaches with whom I’ve spoken including those at Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Princeton are those candidates in whom the coaches are interested, but are not guaranteed early admission. They apply early with the rest of the early applicants, and the coaches have contacted admissions and indicated their interest in the candidates, but the candidates are not given early indication of potential acceptance. In other words, the coach is interested in the candidate and would like to play on the team, but they aren’t one of their top recruits – in essence, the equivalent of a recruited walk-on at a school that offers athletic scholarships.</p>
<p>The third level of “recruit” are those individuals who have experience in a sport and are interested in playing at an Ivy, but the coach essentially limits her interest to “come-and-try-out-if-you-can-get-in.”</p>
<p>Just a comment on the GPAs - you should realize that “weighted” GPAs are completely meaningless. At my daughter’s HS, a perfect GPA (weighted) would be about a 4.3 given that they only weight the IB courses. How would that compare to your son’s 4.5 (which based on the second son having a “4.7” means the “4.5” wasn’t perfect). Point here is that for comparison, use unweighted numbers (which is generally how the colleges use data anyway).</p>
<p>You’re telling me that colleges are solely interested in unweighted GPAs, not weighted GPAs and to quote you, weighted GPAs are “completely meaningless.”</p>
<p>So the student who has never taken an honors class, an AP class or an IB class, and has never had a “B” has a 4.0…and the student who has taken 80% AP and honors classes and has all A’s and one B+…you’re telling me that the student who had all A’s in regular classes (4.0) is considered more attractive than the student who took 80% AP and honors classes but has a 3.93 unweighted GPA?</p>
<p>I have several friends who were recruited by Ivy colleges (Princeton included), if your son did not get a likely letter he is NOT a recruited athlete and will compete with everyone else in the applicant pool, he has no leg up against the others. I’m sorry to disappoint you but to my knowledge there’s no “stealth” process for Ivy recruiting when it comes to athletics in that coaches “mention” specific applicants to the admissions office so they get recruited or a leg up, either you get a likely letter (which means you’re essentially guaranteed admissions, unless something unexpected happens) or you don’t and then you’re competing against all the other applicants for a slot even if you’re an extremely talented athlete.
That said, prodigious athletic achievements will help the applicant in terms of ECs even if he’s not recruited. But I can’t emphasize this enough: If you are not offered a likely letter, whatever the coaches tell you or the admissions office will not matter very much. (I have friends who were not offered likely letters but got “mentioned” by coaches to admissions and that didn’t help one bit, one was rejected ED from Dartmouth and another deferred EA from Yale).</p>
<p>"The third level of “recruit” are those individuals who have experience in a sport and are interested in playing at an Ivy, but the coach essentially limits her interest to ‘come-and-try-out-if-you-can-get-in.’ "What you said here is basically the status of every athlete applying to the ivies who does not receive a likely letter (you will almost certainly know before applying that you’ll get one in that the coach will tell you).</p>
<p>@Mick I don’t think that’s what mekozak meant. It’s just that different schools weight grades differently, which means that a 4.2 at one school could be more impressive than a 4.6 at another, so a weighted (and even unweighted) GPA by itself says little about a student’s academic performance. I’ve been told by multiple college counselors during info sessions that they don’t even look at or calculate weighted GPAs. They focus on the rigor of classes taken and the grades received in each individual course. So the 3.93 GPA with 80% APs will look a lot more impressive than the 4.0 in easy courses.
And it’s impossible to know the odds of your son’s admissions with his scores and GPA alone. He’s obviously academically qualified, but so are most people who apply. As with most applicants, his decision will likely come down to a lot of seemingly random factors over which he has no control at this point. A little luck won’t hurt either :)</p>
<p>@mick what, if I may ask, is the sport?</p>
<p>Until we know the average statistics of the rejected candidates, it’s impossible to predict with any precision the odds of admittance (My opinion ). All we know for sure is that the successful candidate seems to be clustered around a 3.9GPA/u and 2250+SAT with good to great EC’s and essay with some additional holistic fairy dust thrown in. Having said that, you son has the right stats and seems to have as good of chance as any? So what are his exact chances (Based on historical data)? Princeton knows but they’re not telling.</p>
<p>even the average stats of rejected candidates don’t say much because a lot of rejected applicants have the same exact stats as those of accepted students. I think that above a certain threshold it really comes down to whether you’re able to strike a chord with the admissions officers and succeed in making them like you, which is where the more subjective factors like essays and recs are important. The only time academics are the determining factor is when the candidate stands out even among the pool of extremely high achieving applicants.</p>
<p>@Oscarlany I think your comment is very insightful - “it really comes down to whether you’re able to strike a chord with the admissions officers”. So much focus on these forums is around stats and as you mentioned unless you are a significant standout academically, there is much more to the application than just that. I have seen perfect scores and GPA’s who were not admitted so there is obviously a subjective element to it.</p>
<p>If everyone has the same base stats,(which I doubt) but assuming it, then the odds of admission are the same as the acceptance rate. (8%). I would like to think the OP’s son has a lot better chance than 8%, but again we just don’t know.</p>
<p>@oscarlany</p>
<p>I heard the same thing from two Ivy schools.</p>
<p>They only look at unweighted since there are so many differences in how the weightings are done (some schools at 1 for AP, .5 for honors, some 1 for both, some count A+ as 4.3, some cap it at 4.0, etc).</p>
<p>After they have the GPA they then evaluate the course load to determine how competitive the applicant is. Then they move on to all the other factors.</p>
<p>Haberdasher, let me further clarify:</p>
<p>My older son received a likely letter from Princeton. He is now enrolled and playing a varsity sport. When he was touring Ivy colleges, a coach from another Ivy stated that he had a limited number of likely letters that he was saving for athletes who played a different position from my son, BUT he was still interested AND that he could help my son get admitted. Specifically, he would communicate with admissions and his odds of being admitted would significantly increase due to his endorsement.</p>
<p>I confirmed the basics of that confirmation with an associate athletic director (whose primary responsibility was to interface with admissions) who indicated that his odds of admission would indeed increase substantially. And in fact, that school’s roster in that sport during that year added five players beyond those who were admitted by likely letter. I know that at least two of them had similar assurances from the coach.</p>