@inthegarden I’ll add my two cents of encouragement. Our school that no one has heard of, and I’m guessing only a handful of people on this massive thread have even heard of our town, routinely gets kids into Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc. Very few apply, but the ones who do have pretty good success. I think it varies from school to school, and I think it’s hard to know which will care, especially with the smaller schools. But we usually have a small handful of kids apply to Ivy and equivalents, and most who are realistic candidates seem to get in somewhere.
I would guess that very few, if any, would get in with their resume if their home address was Scarsdale or Larchmont or the Upper East side.
Thanks, everybody for the encouragement and the tolerance for my pity-party! Am feeling better, and embracing the “love the schools that love you back” mentality anyway.
The EA “safer” school D applied to last week has merit scholarships of up to $36,000 for all applicants without any additional supplements. However, there is a slightly bigger scholarship for the top applicants that does require a 500-word essay. My D, already having written one supplement for the school, and feeling tired of everything related to college applications didn’t do this extra essay, since she knew she was still eligible for merit without it. However, someone from the school emailed her yesterday to say she noticed my D had not applied for the big merit and extended the deadline for her until tomorrow noon. I told my D that was very nice to have been sent that personal email (it wasn’t written like a mass -email). I also said that, by not doing the supplement she may not be regarded as a serious applicant. My D hemmed and hawed a little after school and I was in no mood to nag her. However, right after I posted my little pity-party post she appeared with a print-out of a very respectable 483-word supplement. Fortunately, the prompt was something that she could easily address (what diversity she could bring to campus). I suggested a few tweaks…breaking one of her paragraphs into two, clearer wording here and there, and a couple of grammatical changes that resulted (only ten minutes later) in a surprisingly polished page of exactly 500 words. She just submitted it, along with a thank you email for the reminder and time extension. And to think how many weeks she had to work on that main CA essay!
Anyway, feeling better about everything now. Who knows, that school may turn out to be the “one” ?. It’s one of the few we haven’t visited.
Just listened to a Collegewise free webinar. Cal Tech and MIT (I think it was) early applications up 40%, but they speculated that a good number of these are just people gambling with TO and not die hard science fans who max out of high school math in sophomore year and can fit fun activities in with the most rigorous coursework. They encourage families to have a balanced list.
They said colleges are serious about TO and TO applicants are not at a disadvantage, rest assured. Test scores are way more important to parents than to schools doing holistic admissions. Discussed that scores are more like one factor of 13-14 at very selective schools where they worked in the past.
Colleges are hurting financially and they predict that ED admission rates will definitely go up even at the most selective colleges. Even colleges with big endowments took a hit by having fewer 20s attend and getting less revenue. Summer high school programs being canceled largely.
PS. Also said Coalition app crashed when WA was due. Advise not to wait until the 29th or 30th to submit UC. UC crashes. Our counselor said the same thing.
I add my encouragement along with everyone else. I remember feeling so unsettled after reading Selingo’s book because of the arbitrary nature of it all. My D21 is from a very small, unknown school as well. Her school is so small that none of the T20 colleges visit, and in fact, I’d say none in the top 50 visit. I hadn’t heard of the vast majority of colleges that have visited over the last couple of years. In addition, the SAT has been canceled for all three dates in our state. Each time there was a cancelation, D’s test prep was extended and she’d study for another three months, only for it to be canceled again. We’re doing the same as you and your D, which is taking a closer look at the matches and safeties on her list and finding things to get excited about.
I agree with Selingo that meritocracy is a fantasy. We’re acquainted with three students who are currently attending Harvard and all three are legacies. One had both parents and one grandparent attend, another had a father and grandfather attend, and the last had a mother attend and an aunt who is a current professor. I can honestly say that none of these three students are any more remarkable than the majority of high stats kids you see on cc, they’re just privileged enough to be legacies.
D21 just hit send on her RD first choice with a 12/1 merit deadline. The end is in sight! Two more to get done by the regular RD date. I will say the common app and payment site loaded WAY slower than earlier this month.
COVID needs to leave the building. We had plans to drive to UT Dallas and stay overnight next week but now Dallas cases are starting to rise. It’s a bit of a stretch for a day trip (4 hours each way) but we SO need a change of scenery around here. Maybe we’ll head to the beach for an overnight instead? Back when cases were stable and low, I had also booked tickets to visit my elderly mom in MA the week before Christmas (haven’t seen her since last Thanksgiving!), staying in an Airbnb, testing and masking,…now I am thinking not worth the risk. Feeling frustrated over here.
We got another acceptance yesterday though - University of South Florida. Yay!
@goldpenn I know a few kids who are attending Harvard and TBH I can’t tell you what distinguishes them from the kids that don’t get in. Yes, they all have strong stats and each had a different EC in high school that they pursued deeply and achieved excellence (but not national prominence) in. No legacies, two from very ordinary families, and one is the child of a professor at a regional university. Similarly for U Chicago, I know two who were accepted that seemed strong academically to get a serious read but I don’t know what in particular earned them an acceptance. Neither seem like intense life of the mind type kids.
CC just ran a AMA with a former Stanford admissions officer that I found to be extremely helpful in describing what Stanford was looking for when he worked there. It was a particular kind of intellectual fit. I suspect that top schools all define that fit slightly differently but they know it when they see it. And then if there are too many applicants that have those qualities, they then look for reasons to eliminate, and that’s the stage that Selingo spends a great deal of time describing.
@MorseLewis i just found out about it! I thought all this time the 9% is based on your school ranking and then I was searching ACT with my questions on if you submit score to all or one UC and ran into the grid on how they calculate 9% and it was the entire pool in CA based on grades and test scores vs actual school ranking
@MommaLue Interesting. After I read an earlier message about where to see if the student is in the top 9%, I went into my son’s application portal and found the information. How can they calculate that percentage so quickly? My son submitted his UC app last weekend. How could they know when the pool of applicants isn’t defined yet?
The UCs also have the ranking in a local context, you qualify if you are top 9% of the UC GPA for your high school based on past years, if your high school participates in this program. They use a fully weighted UC gpa of 10th and 11th grade a-g courses, not the capped at 8 semesters of honors UC gpa.
They say it’s calculated based on transcripts submitted by the high school counselors of previous students.
I’m not sure if they consider CC courses in this gpa since it’s compared to high school averages. My daughter didn’t do dual enrollment, it’s not on her HS transcript, but has A-G CC courses that are in the UC GPA but maybe not this way since it’s compared to gpa submitted by the high school.
@inthegarden you raise important points about the lack of equity in this process. In your D’s case, I’m so glad you have found a way to lessen your anxiety, and I personally think your D is in such a good position. Yes, she’s from an unknown rural school but your D is also ranked #1 and did (after much stress and far too long a process) manage to get the excellent test scores to validate her grades/rank. And while colleges may often worry that a student from an unknown rural school won’t yield for them, that won’t be an issue at your D’s ED choice school because, well, ED. So she has the potential to be especially appreciated in the admission process because she does come from a rural area (which many of the colleges she’s interested in will want) and, within that category, is that rare gem who has grades, rank, scores, extracurriculars, and recommendations that should be extremely worthy of consideration, is full pay (for the schools where that may be a factor…certainly that’s going to be unusual for a kid from a school district such as your D’s) and has gotten excellent support/counseling (from you and your research) through this process beyond what would have normally been available to her at her school.
In comparison my D23 is from an unknown Title I suburban school that won’t have sent many (quite likely zero) applications to the selective LACs she’ll be interested in, so I suppose she gets the drawbacks of the unknown piece without the potential benefit that being from a rural underrepresented area might bring, and she’s not full pay. She does have access to a little more rigor, but therefore she might take 13 APs and still not get that “most demanding” box checked. We are preparing for the fact that she’ll have to do her college research carefully, work quite hard on her applications, apply broadly, not get too emotionally tied to a favorite choice, and just see what shakes out. But of course that mindset is easier stated now than lived in the midst of the waiting for college decisions.
In the end (especially this year), it’s all more unpredictable than we’d like. It’s really wonderful that you and your D are finding some things to appreciate about the safer EA school (I believe I know the one). ? I agree with others that if ED doesn’t work out, your D should still go for it with her RD choices! Will she consider EDII anywhere if her ED doesn’t work out?
The trend continues. A current student at Rice pasted part of an email to students. No details on percentage TO or anything, but I see no reason why they’d be different from other highly selective schools so I’m guessing a lot did not submit scores.
“We were pleased this fall that we had a significant increase in early decision and Questbridge applications and that the most significant increases among U.S. applicants were among underrepresented minority students (Black, Mexican-American and other Hispanic).”
My S just got his first admit today – Pitt engineering, OOS! He had a great smile on his face. Just under four weeks from application to acceptance – gotta love rolling admissions!
Phew, nice to have an admit under his belt. He did submit his score which was close to 50th percentile.
We had a busy weekend finishing up all of the applications that were due Nov. 15th. As usual D’s friends camped out here all weekend, while it is hectic and loud and sometimes very hard for D to concentrate on what she needs to do it is also a great support system. Sunday night D still had not finished one of her applications. It was getting late but two of the girls hadn’t left. I finally had her go int he other room to work and wasn’t sure why the other girls were still here. I thought maybe one was working on something and I didn’t know it. At 11:55pm D hit submit on her last application of the day (memories of D19 waiting until almost midnight as well…) and the tow girls jumped up, gave D a hug and said congratulations then packed up their stuff. They said we had been so supportive of them they didn’t want to leave until she was done.
D got her first acceptance to USF, it is not somewhere she really wants to go but I convinced her to pick place with a rolling application. I thought she wouldn’t care when the email came but she did have a big smile and took a picture of it to show her friend who is a freshman there. She said it made her feel good to know someone wants her, so the rolling application did its job!
I think she only has one more to go due December 1st then the long wait for answers.
