Overconfidence & Significant Unknowns

Parent Cafe
21

It is that hard. And actually gender was something your son had in his favor for most of his schools.

My son’s close friend has very high SATs, about 2300, and high grades, difficult subjects, and a busy EC life. Great kid. Fine young man. His parents figured HPY et al were the reaches and the rest would be the choices. It was a shock to them, that he was rejected from all but his likely and safety school. The safety I talked them into PLEASE send in an app with my son. It became a safety only because he got an accept EA for it which meant he got one school with merit money. He may end up there. THe likely school is still a selective school but last on his list and he’s full pay there. I know tons of kids rejected from the ones you are listing; more rejected than accepted, and most well in the midstream of the stats of accepted kids. It wasn’t their stats that kept them out. Just too many of them for the seats available, and so the school cherry picked those they wanted for a diverse class. Gotta get the athletic programs filled and some high flying accomplished kids on the national level. Geographical diversity is important–these schools can fill their class with east coast kids near certain cities alone without moving their average stats. URMs are also in the picture along with development, legacy, celebrity and other special pools. For the most selective school, it is my opinion that there are less than 1/3 the number of total seats available to those not specially tagged, and we aren’t even talking ED kids. The accept for RD for Harvard is about 2%, just to give you some idea how it works there. Total accept is over 5%. Do the math.

22

For the schools that don’t admit only based on numbers the numbers put you in the mix as @Camusich said. With small schools there are many more students who are in the academic conversation than they can possibly admit so after that your information about “painting a picture” comes into play. With LACs that are just a tick down, those higher scores will add something to their school profile. Still, even if you aren’t looking at places that need Olympic medalists and Nobel Prize winners, every small school needs a balance of leaders and doers and athletes and artists and academics who will make it a strong and vibrant community for 4 years. Part of a kid’s sales pitch to a school is to show that they will add to that community in a significant way.

For others reading this thread going forward . . . when the mail started arriving after the PSAT I had D really look at the brochures before recycling them. Part of the lesson was to see what types of kids they were hoping to attract. Many LACs include a list of many of the things that last years admitted class does e.g. last year we admitted a juggler and an underwater basket weaver and a rodeo queen and a dog sled musher and an ice skater and a person who hiked the PCT and an African drummer and a home pickler and a bee keeper . . .

The take home message in my mind was yes, get good grades to be in the conversation, but after that be who you are and be sure to TELL US ABOUT IT and highlight that in your essays. Let us know how who you are will add to our academic and living community in addition to the grades and test scores. There are many threads with people bemoaning the idea of holistic admissions (not this thread), but if you have a community of 1200-3000 kids all living on campus and often in a remote location building a class matters.

To the OP, while your son’s guidance counselor gave bad advice about the admissions chances at the top ranked small schools, your son did apply to a great mix of similar schools where his admitted choices could be considered very good proxies for the ones that he didn’t get. Most kids who post don’t seem to have such a well composed list of alternatives. Congratulations and good luck going forward.

23

Congratulations on his acceptances, he has some great choices.

Did your son’s HS utilize Naviance? We found it a very useful tool in managing expectations. My child’s HS was meticulous in updating the data, so it gave us a very realistic picture of the acceptances over the last 6 years from that particular high school. The data itself was helpful but the graphs really hit home that there are many high stat applicants that for whatever reason are not successful. Just the reality of today’s college admissions environment.

24

There is exactly one kid at my daughters school who was close to a “shoe in” at the Ivy’s: First generation Hispanic from a low income non- English speaking home with a 36 on his ACT in the top 3 percent of class with some solid extracurriculars ( president of two clubs, and won several debate awards at the state level.) he got in at 3 Ivys. Other than those kind of hooks( or some other amazing ones) on top of great stats no one is even likely to be admitted at an Ivy

25

Naviance can be tough when, as the OP states, the application circumstances change on a dime from one year to the next. A shift to test optional or some other sea change can make it instantly obsolete. It is also not very useful for niche LACs where there are fewer applicants. Those scattergrams are often not even available on a school level for confidentiality purposes. We did find some of the other scattergram services helpful to see the aggregate profiles of the students who were rejected. You can sort by rejected students only and see masses of red dots in the upper right for many selective schools. That alone is instructional.

26

Naviance isn’t helpful when there are few kids applying from that school to a particular college. Nor is it helpful when you have a lot of students who make the special pools and your kid isn’t even in one. Things look mighty good at our school for Dartmouth this year, but two of the kids are athletes that got special writes even before ED, and one is a legacy. Another a URM. My son is right up there in stats (exceeds them in fact ) but I doubt he would have been accepted as he would have been in the general pool.

27

@Crabby932 please do not be so hard on yourselves. Your S got into some great schools as a result of his hard work and achievements, and your guidance. Despite bad information from the GC, you wisely (not ‘luckily’) advised him to apply to a wide variety of schools. As a result he now has some fine choices - congratulations.!

I realize that the results were not what you expected, but that’s not overconfidence, just the way it goes, I think that it’s really hard to grasp how uncertain the process it when you’re first tackling it. (And I went to Harvard, so that makes me super smart… right? :))

We were in a similar boat: my D is a student with an excellent academic profile, good essay writer and so on but not that unusual in other ways for a good student - middle class, college educated parents, hates sports, dabbles in piano… involved in ECs that she likes, but nothing spectacular. Very very special to us, of course!

Our GC was excellent and told us from the getgo that the top tier schools are a lottery for every student, but also that because of her school’s close relationship with UofM, we could treat UofM as a safety (The UofM admissions officer specifically told us that students from her high school who had above a certain GPA would get in - don’t yell at me CCers!).
She also made it clear that we should spend time finding other schools that D would like that she was certain to get into - she gave us a lot of great advice. I just didn’t understand until pretty late what ‘certain to get into’ meant!

In late November when we realized that D was applying to schools that were waaaaay too selective (Yale (her top choice), MIT, UChicago, Harvard, Amherst, Wesleyan, UofM) we had to scramble at the last minute to add a few more schools, making pretty poor selections for the most part. Two of them weren’t really any better in terms of selectivity (Northwestern & Swarthmore - what were we thinking?) plus D didn’t particularly like them, and we had no time to visit. Fortunately one of them she did like, and was a bit more within reach, and we could visit - Oberlin.

She ended up getting into one of her top choices (Amherst) as well as her safety (UofM) and another closer-to-match school (Oberlin), so she is very very happy, but to me it feels like we dodged a bullet, and I wish we had spent more time trying to find schools that were more within her grasp. (She also got waitlisted at UChicago, Wesleyan, and Swarthmore).

The other mistake was not searching out a safety that she would have liked more. I couldn’t understand that she didn’t want to go to UofM, but she really really wanted a small school. In the end she came around to it, and she’s even considering it now, but it would have felt alot worse (to her) if it was her only choice. So it was a safety in the sense we felt certain she would get in and was affordable, but not a safety in the sense that she didn’t feel good about it.

The final mistake we made was not realizing that because of her high stats (she was an NMS finalist) she could have gotten a lot of merit aid from a number of fine schools. I didn’t know about this until she got a letter from ASU in November. The GC told us NMS would open doors for her, but didn’t tell us what those doors were, for the most part.

In the end, it all worked out great - Amherst is giving us a good financial aid package, and we all think it will be a great school for her… but doing it again, we DEFINITELY would have focused more on finding affordable, less selective schools that were a good fit, and researched more about merit aid.

Too bad we only have one kid… :smile:

28

OP: Your son had no safeties on his list. Certainly, all the colleges on his list accept students with lower “stats,” but as you’ve seen, test scores are not as important as they once were. (I suspect that may be a result of widespread standardized test prep.)

All of the liberal arts colleges on his list are “test optional,” according to Fair Test. The universities were reaches for everyone.

I think it would be a good thing if colleges released not only the test scores of their enrolled class, but also the test scores of the waitlisted and rejected students.

29

@crabby932 Our friend’s daughter did not get into Bowdon with higher stats from a top private school, great ECs, volunteer work in Africa, both parents legacies, she did interviews and visits. And she applied ED. The competition is that tough. Worse for girls.

30

A lot of statistical safeties among the smaller schools are NOT safeties or even likelies if the kid does not show some real demonstrated interest and enthusiasm for that school. Most of these young people are ever so transparent and an experience admissions officer can smell it when the kid really doesn’t care for the school and think s/he’s too good for it. My one son got into a number of such schools with lower stats than peers because he has that gift of loving who he’s with and making them feel it. My oldest would not have made their wait list with his body language.

Also visits and contacts are very important at such schools which can be expensive and time consuming if you have a bunch of them on your list. That’s why it’s easier to have a larger stats driven school as a safety-likely and a lot of them will let you know right away if you are in, and that takes care of having at least a place to go. And if you apply very early in the season to such schools, your chances are even more enhanced for entry. For those who have high stats, great merit is often available which is salve for wounded egos.

My husband’s colleague’s daughterr, some years ago, ended up at Temple. Full tuition, perks, big city, honors college vs other pricey schools she really wasn’t that keen on anyways, though higher up the prestige ladder. She went to Temple, had a wonderful experience there and is now at an Ivy–was accepted to a number of top schools for grad studies, by the way. She didn’t lose a thing in quality of education, according to the grad schools at Harvard, UCh, Penn, Columbia, all giving her great packages for her to continue her studies there. And she and her parents don’t have a dime in loans. Heck, the parents could have paid a nice chunk of grad school had she not gotten those grants and stipend for what they saved in UG costs. They were all set to be full pay for UG, but it would have hit them hard financially and in terms of retirement savings. This was a win-win all around.

31

Thank you all. It all worked out for us just fine. The reason I joined and posted was just to highlight that assumptions and using acceptance rates are a bad way to approach this. Thinking that Bowdoin is higher than Dartmouth and Bates is higher than Bowdoin and Colby is higher than Bates in the end proved nothing to us. In the case of Notre Dame, a 22% acceptance rate meant nothing because the stats of accepted students were on par with students accepted at Brown, Cornell and Dartmouth with much lower acceptance rates.

Live and learn!!

32

OP - Glad to hear your son has good options. Thanks for sharing your story so others may learn form it.

My suggestions for those heading down the college application path.

When it comes to the LACs, you need to show demonstrated interest. Show these schools the love! Visit, INTERVIEW!, write a thank you note for the interview, meet with your regional admissions officer, get on the mailing lists, etc.

Yell your child NOT to check off that box on the PSAT where you get all the college mailings. Hand your kid a Fiske guide and let him/her read through and start developing a list of safeties, matches, and reaches for further research. There no reason to be influenced by or deluded by all the marketing mailings from colleges.

33

Umm. Those flyers, brochures can show kids that some of the schools that are not so well known look and have as much as those that do. They can have an impact on kids, which is why the money is spent on them. FOr the top schools, name schools, the advertisments are not needed,and you can pitch those. But it can take some doing to get a kid to look into schools that are not as well known. That’s a huge problem with a lot of kids in putting together likely and safety lists that are more than throwing in the state U.

34

I agree cpt. My older D applied to, and was accepted by, one such college. She didn’t care for it when she toured, but would not have even known to look at it without the mailer.

35

That’s why I recommend they read through the Fiske Guide.

36

Think of it this way. Going 4 for 14 is a 28% admission rate. Considering many of the schools he applied to have much lower admit rates, he did really well.

37

I’m not sure what resources she used, but my older daughter (now two years post graduation) managed to put together a list of schools to apply to, almost all of which were “fits.” Several of them I hadn’t heard of before she decided to apply: Earlham, Drew, Goucher, Bennington, and the place where she ended up and thrived: the University of Redlands. I think she used a few of the printed guides and also some online program that was able to pick schools to show her based on her preferences.

38

My son was accepted to Goucher when a high stat guy who went with him to look and interview did not . He was clearly looking down his nose during the entire visit and it did not take a psychiatrist or behaviorist to figure that one out. So, the kids have to get that demonstrated interest is key, and that they may well not get into the name brand schools they are seeking. It’s tough to gently get that through their heads. They have their fears and issues, and one doesn’t want to be pushing on those but a lot of bravado, egotism and denial wrapped in there too. I could not get it through one kid who was into classics that Union was a great choice for him. Nose up in the air. Colgate wait listed him (and don’t ask me or tell me that the two schools are about the same in quality, I know) as did all his top choices, and denials, and he’s now stuck with two schools that not only does he not like, they really don’t fit his interests and wants. He let the selective issue overcome most anything and then lost it all because of that. Groucho Marx’s remarks about not wanting to join any club that wants him is ever the best when it comes to some kids’ attitudes.

39

Congratulations on the great acceptances, OP. Your son has four good choices.

Some posters are saying that this kid was denied at Colby, Bowdoin, Bates, Hamilton and Wesleyan because he didn’t show enough love. I say that a kid like the described kid is not going to stand out in the applicant pool at Bowdoin, Bates or Wesleyan (I don’t know about Colby and Hamilton), and his guidance counselor was an incompetent.

Fortunately, the OP’s son executed a solid admissions strategy of including schools where he had a good chance of acceptance, so it all worked out.

40

He did get into Hamilton and is very happy.
Most likely will go there.