Parents of the HS Class of 2021 (Part 2)

They can’t see where they applied on the CA, but wasn’t there talk that AO’s at certain schools shared info on offers of admission or something along those lines? I wonder what came of all that or if I am way off.

That was just for ED. In the ED agreement, the student agrees that if the ED college accepts them, the ED college can share their name with other institutions.

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Full pay waitlist students are often prioritized, as FA budgets are maxed out by May.

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Well good for her to be able to get it given her medical issues, especially when others are choosing not to get vaccinated when they have the choice. As many as can get vaccinated the better!!

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Most schools that don’t have access to the Broad Institute. :rofl:
Most schools say 24-48 hours, but once the virus is active and they test more it gets stretched to 3 days.

This might not be a problem next year though because with most people vaccinated there shouldn’t be a lot of people needing tests.

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@AlmostThere2018 mentioned an ED deferral letter that emphasized how small the deferral pool was. I thought that was quite encouraging. That made me wonder if waiting list letters might differ in language. Do you know @Mwfan1921?

I do think schools have varying waitlist strategies where some keep it smaller, but many don’t communicate their waitlist details.

I don’t know specifically any school that prioritizes the waitlist per se, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they have buckets for gender, major/school, level of financial need…and when they go to the waitlist they pull what they need to fill the holes they have in the class (which one can imagine are different from year to year).

It’s difficult to support the schools with huge waitlists, I mean, what’s the point?

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Right but I’m sure Common App sells/gives the colleges the aggregate data

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Are you guys familiar with the Academic Common Market? My son applied for a major at UTK that would qualify him for in-state tuition. Otherwise, we are full pay. He was deferred and now I’m wondering how that might factor into their decision.

What does this aggregate data show?

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I just added a few lines to my spreadsheet about waiting lists, for one school as an experiment. On the one hand, the chance of getting off a WL is fairly small, as we all know. Time to move on. On the other hand, I flipped it around, and using the # offered a WL spot, calculated what number and percent of the total app pool were straight-up denied at some point by the end of RD. It was a little surprising, if you have a quarter or a third of the app pool that was offered a WL spot.

Going to try this for a few other schools to see what that looks like. I wish we had CDS for 2024, as I think that may have more relevance for us than the prior years.

Kinda puts a new spin on what their acceptance rate would look like if yield protection were not a thing.

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@rbc2018 Good to know! That is one of the universities my daughter is considering!

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Good idea adding waitlist info. Some schools have started posting their 20/21 CDSs, so keep checking. You might reach out to institutional reporting departments and ask if they have the report and/or if they could just give you the waitlist info…these peeps tend to be responsive and helpful, IME

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I’m glad to hear that your relationship with your so is great now. My S and I were very close, or so I thought, but he barely speaks to me now. COVID has not helped this as we are home all day together. I’ve finally accepted that I have little control over our kids’ choices, personalities, and behavior. I think I’m wondering if I did a good enough job as a parent now that S is getting ready to leave home. It makes me feel better when parents of older kids say things get better!

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I’m not sure exactly, but the privacy policy says that they create “anonymized aggregate data that we and our partners can use for research and statistical use”

I am assuming that Common App gives universities some data about what percent of their applicants also applied to various other universities, and the average number of other schools they applied to that are above or below their level (as far as who students ultimately choose when accepted to both).

I am also assuming that the bigger universities have some algorithms that can crunch the numbers of how many shared applicants there are between various universities and come up with some yield probabilities. Universities can analyze the past data and they know the yield of applicants with a certain gpa, race, income level, etc. so they aren’t just flying blind every year not knowing how many kids will commit.

Nothing to back this up. I do data analysis and this seems pretty basic info that the universities would have.

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Their historical data will be a little less reliable this year. There’s no way my S would have applied to so many schools had we been able to travel in 2020. I still don’t know myself how strongly we will consider schools on the other coast come April.

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As I said to @dadof4kids, hearing that they eventually come around makes me feel better. The “soiling the nest” development must be working because there are some days when I look forward to having S out of the house but then at the same time get testy imagining not having S here. Time has just flown by and sometimes I wish I had the last three years to do over again.

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Yes, many schools use advanced predictive analytic models…they probably won’t be as accurate this year.

I was just curious if you knew specifics re: what data common app shares with the schools, such as overlap applications for example. And when do colleges receive said data.

I think it depends. For example, Oberlin randomly tests 25% of the campus population each week. Initially I thought that might be inadequate but their COVID rates have been extremely low - usually 1-2 positive in any given week, the highest was during intake for the fall semester after kids flew in. For the beginning of the spring semester, there was a single positive out of about 1500 tests. All the usual precautions in place - single occupancy housing, grab and go meals, mix of hybrid and online classes, mandatory masks, reinforced by honor code (with violators losing on campus privileges). They are able to accommodate all students by shifting to a three semester year, with 3 of 4 grades on campus per semester. I think this sort of plan works best at small schools with a strong community ethos located in small towns where the campus bubble can be preserved.

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Likely the singles are helping at Oberlin. And I agree with the small school ethos plus no Greek system helps too.