Agree–it seems optimistic for top schools as well as newly-popular schools. FWIW, that SAT and that unweighted GPA would be highly likely to be in to NEU from our HS, but not from the HS down the road. The school-dependent factor is real.
ALSO, the graphs on Niche do not indicate ED or EA or any of that.
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College Vine allows you to select EA or ED, but it doesn’t seem to adjust chancing based on that choice. For this example of my kid applying to NEU, College Vine gives him a 29% chance regardless of whether he selects ED or EA… and I know ED makes a big difference at this particular school. He would be applying EA, so my guidance to him was “you can apply to NEU if you want, but don’t expect to be admitted” 
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I used Niche as you suggested. Thanks!
Niche is also often overly optimistic, I think, because of reporting bias—I would expect that submitters are more likely to report positive results about themselves, and those who submit applied-but-no-decision-yet are less likely to update results if they’re a denial. (I’m not sure if this is a desire to look good even in anonymous contexts or rejected colleges simply being less top of mind—and it’s quite possibly both.)
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Our HS historically posted a list of how many applied to which schools, how many were accepted and how many attended. Obviously doesn’t help not knowing stats or anything but was always interesting regardless. However they have not done so since the class of 2020. I would have loved to see class of 2021.
If you plug in your stats and it says, “you rank higher than x% of admitted students,” that should be translated to mean, “you rank higher than x% of students who submitted their scores to this website and indicated they were admitted.” There is no reporting bias in that. The stats of students who were admitted do not change based on who was not admitted.
I understand the desire for a website to tell you your kids’ actual chances of admission, but the Niche data is just that - data. It’s neither optimistic nor pessimistic, it’s just statistics. A person needs to make their own inferences from it.
Well, yeah, but then again I’m a social science nerd who gets annoyed at things like news about political opinion polls (in the US, Canadian reporting does this!) not including the confidence interval along with the margin of error. I’d have no problem with it if the labeling wasn’t (slightly) misleading.
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@sllemon - thanks for sharing. I’ve been looking at the things like % female students, and admission rates by gender. While there are some obvious signals in this direction. What I haven’t seen is any data identifying differences in stats by gender for admitted students.
My son is at BU which has this promise. My impression is that the college grant will not go down over the 4 years, and will increase with tuition increases. And that has been the case for the second year at least. I’m assuming our Pell Grant amount will vary over the years, but otherwise we’re good. BU just started their “promise” in 2019 I think, and we didn’t know about it when DS applied, but we’re happy it’s there! DS was a NMS applying in 2020, and BU offered the best FA outside of UMaine which was completely free (except for the cost of owning a car to get around, which he doesn’t need in Boston).
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NU’s acceptance rate last year was 7%, I think? My son was a NMS with 1530 SAT and from a tiny rural school, and didn’t get in RD in 2020 (along with lot of other top-notch candidates). Maybe ED gives an advantage?
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Yes but that number is highly misleading. They were over-enrolled in 2021 and had to cut back the class size significantly for 2022. Hence the single figure acceptance rate. This year is more likely to be 15-18%, closer to 2021’s acceptance rate.
Yes absolutely. Again, haven’t seen an official published figure but some sites estimate ED acceptance to be over 30%
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Do you mean Nortneastern? I always thought NU was Northwestern which does have acceptance rate of around 7%.
How is he liking it? BU is on my son’s RD list, he really liked it when visiting but we weren’t able to do a tour.
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It depends what you mean by that. The data itself is very reliable. It’s taken directly from the HS schools electronically, so it’s linked to official transcripts for GPA. There’s the potential for incomplete or manipulated SAT and ACT data depending how the school handles it. Similar with the applied, accepted, attended schools. At my kids school, the data is very comprehensive and goes back 12 years. You can see exactly how many students from that high school applied, were accepted and chose to attend for each school each year, then see the average GPA and SAT or ACT score that was accepted and precise points on a scattergram for acceptances, deferrals and denials broken down by RD, ED and EA.
If you mean, how reliable is making judgments based on the data, that of course is subjective.
Do you mean Naviance? We don’t have Naviance at our school, sadly, but it sounds great. My post was talking about Niche.
One thing to keep in mind with all the tippy top schools Ivies etc with very small class size (brown, Princeton, Dartmouth Williams, etc) they get 30K applications for maybe 2000 spots. They fill a bunch of the limited spots with athletes and legacies. Then you have the ED. So often more than 50% of the freshman year spots at those schools are filled before they even get to RD. And then acceptance rate which might be 15-18% overall goes down to 6-7%.
Oh and all the kids have top 98% test scores and 3.8 or better UW GPA.
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Additionally, in the early rounds the top talent gets somewhat distributed amongst these tippy top schools due to REA and ED. In RD a large number of them (other than successful ED applicants) are applying to the same schools so the competition is much tougher.
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I am an alum of Northeastern University School of Law from many years ago. It was always called NUSL and never NEUSL.
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My son likes his classes. He sort of likes being in Boston, although he doesn’t get away from campus much. He has struggled over the year and a half with numerous bureaucratic issues, from getting emergency maintenance in to fix his flooded dorm room (4th floor room flooded 4 times; it’s a long story), to getting the financial aid office to recognize his scholarships, to getting the employment office to fix his W-2. If I had known all this I would have pushed him to apply to small schools, even though he’s in engineering. You can get a good sense of BU from the Unofficial BU Parents Page on FB. Many students love BU. Many have struggled this year to get into the classes they need to graduate on time (this seemed to be more in CS than other departments. My son is ahead of his class in the course sequence so he’s been fine except for trying to get into HUB classes). It’s a mixed bag, but I do feel very fortunate that BU offered my son such a good FA package.
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Question about ED, EA and ED2. My daughter wants to apply to a ivy in the ED cycle, and several EAs 9none are restrictive) . If she does not get into her ED college, can she apply to ED2 at another university? Will EA acceptances that roll in before ED2 deadline prevent her from applying to ED2 at a college? Is it just going to be based on ED rejection that she becomes eligible to ED2 at another college come January?