I don’t have a lot of insight, but we did visit the 5Cs on our search (HS class of 2020.) We did the tours for Harvey Mudd and Pomona, saw the CMC campus while walking/driving around. We got the impression that CMC had a business/econ focus. Each school slightly different. Pomona and Scripps are the oldest, graceful Mediterranean buildings, lovely campuses. CMC sort of middle ground; Harvey Mudd and PItzer very modern (kind of ugly, in my opinion, but the campuses are all right next to each other in 1 square mile so it’s easy to seek out different areas if you’re tired of your own campus that day.) We were impressed with the students we talked to, they all seemed smart and motivated. Our small, competitive private CA HS sends 5-10% of its class each year to the 5Cs; they are well-regarded. We got the impression that the crossover between campuses socially is very high; you have to check each school to see the rules about where you can take classes (i.e., you can’t do a “stealth” engineering degree at Harvey Mudd by being admitted to Pitzer, or something like that. I can’t quite remember.)
The adjacent town seemed like a pleasant suburban town. Not really near LA proper and nowhere near the beach. Good access to Ontario airport which is convenient, especially if you fly Southwest.
1 Like
Thank you! We will wait until the last minute I guess.
1 Like
Congrats, what a great choice! I am sure she will be very happy.
2 Likes
Your daughter is truly a warrior, congratulations! When we visited Smith in 2019 the library was under construction. Now it’s a masterpiece. If you haven’t read this article, it’s a must. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/arts/design/maya-lin-smith-college-daniel-wolf.html
2 Likes
Congratulations to your family! Beyond some of the more obvious differences of location, housing etc., of Ivy League schools I haven’t seen a lot of discussion on what differentiates them. What was it was about Harvard that you thought wasn’t a fit? Is there an Ivy on her list that seems more appropriate?
Congrats! Is your older D there too? That will be so fun to have them there together!
português e outras línguas estrangeiras não são permitidas aqui
1 Like
Looks like schools abbreviations ending in “A” like your daughter!! The odd one out however is UF so maybe they’re calling her! 
1 Like
The Jefferson Scholarship is much more prestigious than Stanford. The difference in cost is the icing on the cake. Has @littlerobot read this thread by a girl who turned down Stanford and Princeton for a scholarship at UNC (and would have preferred the Jefferson over any of them): Finding an intellectual college for a clueless 17-year-old - #398 by OutOfKantrol
3 Likes
I just heard that Syracuse officially announced that they are mandating the vaccine for students return in the Fall! They must be fully vaccinated before arriving to campus it sounds like.
6 Likes
We visited last summer and spent a day walking around the closed campuses. D21 was not particularly thrilled with the place but it was the end of our CA road trip and she was getting tired. The campus is gorgeous and very upscale in a southern country club sort of way. We spent more time walking around Pomona than the other schools but saw all of them. Once you get off campus it is car-centric suburbia on the far eastern edge of the LA metro and honestly looks more like say…Plano TX than I expected. D21 much preferred Occidental to the Claremont colleges in terms of setting, in an eclectic hilly part of LA vs suburbia.
But the Claremonts are dripping in money and I expect no expenses are spared in providing educational opportunities so there’s that.
@famOly Alright! Another prospective Carleton student! Maybe we will see you around Northfield.
1 Like
Reading some of these posts I gotta say, some of your kids are really off the charts. I’m a HS science teacher at a big public school and I probably go years at a time without encountering kids with some of the qualifications and stats that I see posted here. My own kids are ordinary bright kids but not in that league.
D16 was a pretty median HS kid. She was right at the 67 percentile for class rank so just barely top-third. And had an 1190 SAT which never budged in 3 or 4 tries. We lived in TX at the time and she wanted to attend a big public university so we toured LSU, Alabama, FSU, OU, Texas State, Texas Tech, and Arkansas. She applied to OU, Tech, Arkansas and Texas State. Arkansas was the first to respond with rolling early action offer in the fall of her senior year and she jumped at the offer and never finished up any of the other applications. She did the southern SEC sorority thing, made a bazillion friends and really thrived. Once she found her study habits and self-discipline she was able to be a leader in many of her classes which would have been unlikely has we managed to get her into a much more selective school where she would have been in the lower end of the curve in every class. So a big non-selective school was really the right choice for her. She graduated with honors last spring and is moving on to the next stage in life.
D21 has the smarts to compete for spots in some of the top 20 schools that many here are applying to. Perfect straight-As, lots of AP classes and ECs. And apparently brilliant essays although she never let me read them. But early on in the process she informed me that she wasn’t interested in the college admissions “rat race” and that she wasn’t going to organize her entire HS career and life around what “looks good” on college applications. She also wanted to stay on the west coast and preferably the Pacific Northwest. So she only ended up applying to what would be match and safety schools. We visited some high reach schools like Stanford, USC, and Pomona but she didn’t bother applying to any of them to my relief actually once I figured out the cost. She was accepted and into the honors programs (where they existed) at every school she applied to: UW, WWU, WSU, UO, Whitman, Lewis & Clark, University of Puget Sound, and Occidental. And received merit aid offers from every school but UW. But since we are in-state that is already affordable. I’m happy with the result and frankly would have been quite conflicted had she applied to and been accepted to a $75k+ reach school like Stanford or USC.
D24 is on deck and she is likely to fall somewhere in between her two sisters. So we’ll likely be looking at local public options and mid-range privates with the expectation of less merit aid. Top schools are not likely to be within her reach. Which is just as well. if she doesn’t get into UW then we’ll probably send her to WWU or WSU or one of the local mid-level privates like Gonzaga or Lewis & Clark or maybe UO.
25 Likes
Help me interpret. From Selingo twit ter:
Admissions dean: “I don’t know if the tests predict academic success, but they sure as hell predict yield.”
Is the general yield idea that an applicant is more likely to enroll if they are inside the middle 50 percentiles? What about an applicant with a discrepant gpa (high score/low gpa) who applies somewhere in the middle (per scattergrams) but the score is well over the 75th percentile, gpa closer to 25th - obviously the gpa is the main issue but, in addition, are they dinged in the admission process for being less likely to yield due to score?
1 Like
That is how I read it. If you are the admissions office of a mid-range school with median SAT scores in the 1200 range and you get an applicant with perfect 1600 SATs. It is much more likely that applicant is going to get snatched up by a more selective school than an applicant with say a 1250.
I don’t know if they are being “dinged” for having high scores. But it is probably accurate for the admissions office to question whether that student is a “good fit” or just using that school as a backup safety.
Yield is not an unreasonable thing to take into consideration if you are an admissions office. You don’t want to only accept those students who are least likely to enroll. That’s like some average middle aged dude going on match.com and only contacting perfect 10 women who are all 15 years younger. His date yield is going to be pretty low.
14 Likes
Ok, that might explain a few results. Maybe should have applied to more schools where the score was inside the middle 50 rather than above (except that those apps would seem doomed by gpa and low acceptance rates). I would have thought the score/gpa tradeoff was obvious from anyone looking holistically, but if an algorithm generated a yield index of some sort where score was significantly involved, then, well, maybe bad things happen that put the app over the edge. Some weird oxymoron of being yield protected while at the same time not being good enough, which of course doesn’t even make sense. Hindsight…
2 Likes
D is one of 2 females in AP physics C Mech and E/M, one of 3 in the post BC math class.
2 Likes
I legit cackled at your example but it is 100% accurate.
1 Like