I’m sure you already know this but just in terms of the nursing school and post graduate hospital situation PITT is incredible. The University Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is a world class hospital system and has its flagship hospitals literally on the campus. That said Free is Free…Good luck to her. I’m sure you will make the right choice and thrive.
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Our small, avg hs usually sends 1-2 to an Ivy or MIT. I haven’t heard of any acceptances yet. My S cracked the top 50 for admission. I think that’s where the exceptional kids have landed so far, maybe a tier better. He’s at the bottom of our top 10% by choice (grades/life balance) so he’s remarkably happy with his year and choices. Maybe it still happens for the others, but without a early clear path.
Wow. I have several hundred posts to read! Congrats on the Duke acceptances and hugs for the waitlists/rejections. My D got the very kindly worded denied letter.
Good luck to everyone with today’s decisions! Ivy Day is finally here! 
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My niece won a Rotary scholarship (they gave her $55k) to do her Masters in Human Rights at the London School of Economics…she went right after finishing med school at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and delayed starting residency. She came back from London and matched at NYU Langone for her Pediatrics residency. She’s two years in and wants to practice Global Health.
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Congratulations to all that have been admitted. I am truly baffled by this process. My S has not gotten into any school that he has applied. He is at the very top of his class (a large public HS). In fact he is the highest ranked male. He scored in the top 1% on his SAT. He has great EC’s (sports/volunteer) and recommendations. There is a female at his school (in addition she has no EC’s and is not need based) that is ranked well below him and her SAT score is a little more than 150 points below his that is getting in to these schools. He has been chugging along not letting it bother him but last night was hard. It is difficult to work so hard and have these scores and be rejected. This process is definitely not for the weak of heart. I do congratulate all it is quite an accomplishment!
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I’d like to see some media reporting on the process this year. I know our results were unpredictable in regular round. Better with publics, worse with privates. I was so excited when my S got that last minute test score but now I’m wondering if he might have been better off not submitting it to a couple of privates that ended up with a slightly higher, extremely high submitter average. IDK. We have friends with high achieving kids who were shut out of the mid-tier UCs.
I feel like even with the deferrals early round was kind of key TO. But we just couldn’t travel.
Good luck to your son on the path forward.
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I am sorry to hear this. Do you need some help identifying schools still accepting applications? NACAC will also have a list at the end of the week of May 3 with colleges that still have openings after deposits were due. That will get posted to CC as well.
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Was your son waitlisted at any schools? I think there will be a lot of waitlisted students accepted later this spring and summer. There are schools that are still taking applications. Have him look at the NACAC list that comes out in early May. There will be some very good schools that miscalculated yield on that list. If he is open to a gap year, he can apply to a whole new set of schools early this fall.
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I’m so sorry about your S. It’s definitely demoralizing when this happens (it’s happening at out kids’ school to some degree). A friend of our S’s who is at the very top of the class (with a great score and great ECs) finally got an acceptance from a private and we were all overjoyed. It would be nice to get clarity from schools on how they did admissions this year, but I’m not expecting that because I’m not sure they had any kind of formula. Maybe it was more gut based this year because they hadn’t prepared for TO with the huge influx of apps. Hugs to you and your S.
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We do not but we know many kids who are enrolled at average or underperforming public schools. My sense is that given TO and a lot of uncertainty about how much learning is going on at financially strapped public schools, admissions officers probably assigned greater weight to the school’s academic reputation pre-COVID. High performing public and private schools almost certainly had an advantage.
My kid is blessed to go to a very good private school with scholarship support. While there have been rejections and waitlists aplenty, a number of top students got into T-20 schools, although perhaps not the ones they anticipated. But even here, there are disappointed kids who got very different results than they might have pre-COVID.
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Yes. We are in an average, lower income public school (almost 60% free and reduced meals.) Although Naviance is available, it wasn’t a big factor in S21s college app choices, because so few students from his HS apply to the schools he is interested in that data wasn’t available for them. That said, the safety and target schools (according to Naviance) that he and his friends applied to did not turn out to be safeties or targets this year. The high stats students at our school, S21 included, have really had a rough go this year, with some waitlisted and some flat out rejected from schools they thought were safeties.
Big hugs to you. I am increasingly of the opinion that submitting test scores did not help this year, and may have even hurt. I read somewhere (maybe Jeff Selingo?), that there were two different buckets for test optional and test submitter applicants because the proportion of admitted students couldn’t favor one group or the other if the commitment to TO was real. I would expect at elite schools that the tests submitted would skew very high to the point where everyone looked the same.
Anyhow, hopefully today’s the day and he gets good news at last!
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For travelers to Vermont: New rules starting 4/9! Masks still required of course. Come visit! Come to college! Come to live here, we need more folks:)!
From VT Dept of Health website:
CROSS STATE TRAVEL
4/9
No quarantine required with negative test within 3 days of arrival in or return to the state
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After days without being able to read the posts, I feel like Joe Wisenthal on Bloomberg asking “What’d you miss?” lol…
Good luck to your daughter! 
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That’s an interesting take. Kids with high stats come a dime a dozen…I am wondering what the differential was this year. Truly baffling.
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I’d wager the essays were really important this year, even though they had so many extra apps to go through.
My S has unusual ECs that I think helped him, but more with big public STEM research schools. Not so much with the smaller Northeast privates. His results kind of make more sense now that I think about that. Of course, he leans private it seems.
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You’re probably right. I hope we will all get some insight from the schools once this is all said and done.
Good luck to your son!
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Clemson is a May 1 deadline
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Thanks! They are going to walk around (masked, distancing) outside at the U and the lake. Will drive around Burlington. They would barely have time to reroute by Friday. He’s going to love it. Wish they could spend more time there but we want to be respectful.
I do not really understand what happened in admissions this year either. Somehow we lucked out. Everything I read said go test optional, but my gut said otherwise and I sent my son’s score. He wanted to take a practice test at the beginning of junior year just to see if he would prefer to take the ACT. That ended up being the only test he took. He didn’t get a stellar score, but it wasn’t terrible. My hope was that the AO could tell that had he taken the test again he would have scored a couple points higher.
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