@denydenzig Well Said!!
@osuprof Makes sense. My sister was deferred than rejected by NU. She is an URM, from an underrepresented state with impressive stats, leadership, music, speaks 4 languages and has triple legacy. She was accepted to Columbia Yale and Princeton. Not sure that NU admissions makes a whole of sense at this point. It is a crapshoot.
@aurora2016 a school as prestigious as NU does not really have to worry about yield protection or whatever
just because northwestern rejected a strong applicant doesnt mean that they are protecting their yeild or “playing games”. NU rejects thousands of amazing applicants every year
for you to say that someone got lucky in admissions at a school of northwestern’s calibre is out of line. not only is it rude, but it is also wrong. there are at least 3 application readers, and those who pass the readers are taken to a council where they are voted to either be rejected, admitted or waitlisted. admissions is fully aware of the people they accept.
@CaliCash People don’t deserve things more than others. It is luck at play here.
@WGSK88 Admissions is a game. They tell you it’s based on essays GPA test scores etc but the reality is it is all about institutional needs and the students are just collateral damage. We do a disservice to our hard working students with this arbitrary college admissions game. That’s why I love McGill in Canada. They don’t care about ECs leadership recommendations. If you meet their minimum GPA you are in. You visit, you tour, you tell them your GPA…you are in. It’s as delicious a process as their prime minister…it’s a Trudeau!
@efr009 yes yield is definitely at play here.
@y90y90 Penn, Duke and a lot of other ED Ivies/similar schools accept 40-50% of their class ED. It’s not just NU that does this
Is it possible this was human error? Top few in class of 600+ (school doesn’t rank). Applied EA, deferred, and rejected RD. Weighted GPA of 4.68. School leader and role model. Varsity all years science oly and pong, sports including founding new club team, academic and humanitarian awards, biliterate, best recommendations including school administrator. Have the means to fully fund tuition. 4s on APs and ACT 32, and worked tail off on near perfect grades. Others with lower gpa and fewer extras but higher ACT got in. The disheartening message I take away is, it is not important how hard you work, what you do, or who you are, it is solely about your standardized test score (which better be 34+).
@y90y90 Agreed, the difference in qualifications between ED and RD students is much much larger at NU. By taking almost half the class ED, NU maintains an artificial level of selectivity. ED applicants tend to be wealthy so NU has the added bonus of 100% yield and mostly full pay students in 50% of their admitted class. With the RD applicants they can pick and choose what they want to fill out the class and give financial aid as needed. It is artificial and also unfairly favors the wealthy who are in a position to apply ED. NU rejects more qualified student in RD and takes less qualified students ED in an effort to keep their yield % high and preserve cash for financial aid. There is a reason why NU is ranked low on lists for financial aid and diversity. NU is aggressively playing the admissions game as they aspire to be ranked top 10 in US News. This is at the expense of students. It’s all about NU.
@2017journalismhopeful Legacy is not a HUGE leg up in admissions. I know scores of qualified NU legacy applicants who have been rejected by NU. NU does not value legacy the way Ivies do. Agree with @10isMOM I have lots of evidence from our school that students with lower GPA and test scores were accepted at NU RD while legacy ED students with better qualifications were rejected and went on to be admitted to the Ivies.
@Upnorthone NU is all about test scores. Test scores over interviews says it all.
@ilosic The admissions officer from UPenn stated in a workshop that if they lost their list/database of admitted students and re-read the applications and admitted a whole new set of students, they would not notice a difference. It is luck. Many equally qualified applicants get rejected. To deny that, is to be naive. A different reader, a different result. Top schools care about yield. It’s a fact, not a judgement. I am not being rude. Applicants with amazing credentials are admitted. Applicants with amazing credentials are rejected. It is about institutional needs and since those needs are not broadcast annually to the students, the applicants are in the dark about what it is about them that the school wants or does not want. Applicants are blind to these institutional needs. Blind luck.
The thing is, you can claim it’s luck all you want, and if NU only looked at stats, then ofc it would just be a lottery. They have a huge pool of kids with amazing stats, so how would they pick between them other than drawing from a hat? But that’s not all they consider. When everyone has the same stats, essays and ECs are what really matters. This applies to all top schools.
@aurora2016 It’s fine for you to express your opinion, but can you please do so in a way that doesn’t involve 20 consecutive posts? You don’t have to reply to everyone who decides to comment on the issue, and you can @ more than one person at a time.
Maybe, but it is not the same 3 readers for every student and it is very hard to recover from a “deny” from one reader and by that I mean, it is very easy to get tripped up in this process. Each reader barely gets 15 minutes with your application. They could miss something. They may be in a bad mood. They may get turned off by something that another reader may have reacted to well and mark you as a deny. Then you have to dig yourself out of a hole. Also it is not entirely clear if each reader reads the application without knowing what the other reader thought of the application. Knowing that a previous reader did or did not find an application appealing may affect the next reader’s perception. With all these factors in play, it is no surprise that most applicants get tripped up at elite schools. Just because you make it out at the other end, doesn’t mean you would not get tripped up if you ran the course again.
As @aurora2016 pointed out, it is entirely possible that if NU went through the same applicant pool again, they would arrive at a different pool of admitted students. That by definition means, there is a luck and randomness involved in the process.
This is not to take anything away from the students who are admitted. They are in all probability excellent kids, but so are many of the kids that did not make it. and the difference between them is not that one category “deserved it more” and one “deserved it less”. Some humility and generosity of spirit is what admitted students can show for “rejected students” instead of “bragging” that they “deserved it more”
@denydenzig I don’t think that @blackgirlmagic is trying to brag that any admitted students “deserved it more”. Going back to her first comment on this thread to you–a reply to a comment you made about how an admitted student’s love for NU showing through in her essay meant nothing–you can see that she was trying to defend that person.
@aurora2016 Agree with all of your thoughts. My son was accepted to WashU and waiting for Duke so he IS happy. And my son requested an interview but they could not accommodate. He did meet with 2 faculty members,but I doubt they logged/reported that. He was a good fit for NU but he actually liked the culture of WashU better:)
Feeling entitled is a disease pls stop.
@jjmama Good luck with Duke! WashU is a great school so he has some great options.
@mintchipmagic Maybe we all misunderstood one another 
I was not saying that “an admitted student’s love for NU showing through in her essay meant nothing”. Instead I was pointing out that “rejected applicants showed lots of love too and it did not amount to much” and so “showing love” was not the deciding factor and that luck played a big role in the process. BTW, if you go back and read the responses, you will find that one poster (not the poster you think I was attributing that comment to) did say that people who got in “deserved it more”, which I strongly disagree with
I am perfectly willing to admit that most applicants who got in “deserved it”, but I am also saying that luck played an important role in getting accepted which I feel some posters are having a hard time admitting. It’s not a big deal though, so I don’t want to argue this point endlessly and derail the main purpose of this thread.
Let’s celebrate the students who got in and show empathy for the folks who got rejected. I think we can all agree on that