Fair enough. @beebee3 I do apologize if my observation came across as a personal “dig”.
Yours might be a better way of expressing my thoughts.
So agreeing on that underlying generalization, my motivation was that the different parent who had accommodated a “valid concern” for their student, shouldn’t need to feel they had furthered an “academic ghetto”.
If that’s how it read, I apologize for that too. Quite opposite I do share all the concerns voiced about inequity/elitism, and recognize my own hypocrisy, including that my contributing to “the right causes” is a contemporary form of the 1500’s indulgentia.
Critiquing someone’s distaste for either inequity or elitism by pointing out that person’s own participation in such is a reasonable point to raise, but it isn’t reasonable to put it forward by itself as evidence (even as weak evidence!) that that person’s concerns are invalid.
so it’s either clean up after having all 4 kids home - or read a little on CC.
I had to read that about 4 times to get it; but i think i do.
eg: my affluent sibling and other friends with BLM signs in their yards or doors would in no way live in some of the very racially segregated neighborhoods of our cities; nor have their kids attend HSs with a very high percentage of low SES kids, nor would volunteer time at organizations that mentor these impoverished HS kids . . but do give $ to support those causes. So even though i see a little hypocrisy in their actions, they still have valid concerns.
Completely agree. Unfortunately, CS-A is all that my daughter’s HS offers – no real scaffolding-- so she had to just dive in cold. Worse, they hide it in the math dept, so the only kids tracked into it are gifted in math. My artsy tech-curious kid had to petition just to get in. Fortunately, the teacher is excellent and it’s my daughter’s favorite class. But what a shame.
As a parent of a Freshman 22 at SDSU, they required masks in class only. In general, the students could care less, they’re used to it. But, most got COVID anyway in the first month, schools aren’t providing COVID isolation living, so be prepared for your kid to get COVID, while living in a dorm.
If you live 3000 miles away, it can be stressful. So prepare for air purifiers, nebulizers, meds and if the campus can’t get your kid into the health center, where a local urgent care is located and if they do tele- visits.
I believe this has been discussed before but are any of you still getting a lot of marketing material?
Cornell College and College of Wooster send my son an email almost every day. I kind of get why since they are smaller colleges that we didn’t know much about before this, so I think marketing is helpful and email is low cost.
The surprise is University of Chicago. We get a few emails every week, he’s gotten beautiful brochures, and some marketing swag as well. And then earlier this week, he got another large marketing packet and a pad of UChicago paper. My son is well below the range of the GPA and SAT scores, and UChicago is very well known in my area, they’ve visited his school, he attended their session (so they have to know that he already knows about them). I get that they want to cast a wide net, but it seems a bit overkill to me.
That was our assumption. It seems like a really odd use of marketing dollars to me, but I guess a low acceptance rate is a good marketing attribute as well I guess?
Yes, still many emails. But mostly from schools he asked for more info on that he has chosen not to apply to. (Yes, we get emails from Wooster. Never had a single email from U of Chicago as my son doesn’t fit their stats.)
My son isn’t in their stats either, but maybe they figured since he attended their session at his high school they could get him to apply to help lower their acceptance rate, maybe?
We got lots of mail from Case Western… Btw, did your son get in Comp Sci at VT for ED? Curious if you know VT engineering’s acceptance rate. I know it’s lower than the average school’s acceptance rate.
Yeah, but some of the stuff they send is really nice, very high quality stuff, and if they are sending this out to everyone with my son’s profile, it has to be quite expensive in production and mailing costs (even in bulk).
But I guess they probably make it up in application fees and as you said, getting the lower acceptance rate which helps “prestige”, I guess.
My son gets tons of University of Chicago (paper) mail too. He is on the very low end of their stats, and there is no way he would get in. Also, he has never indicated any interest in the school. However, he doesn’t get the “swag“ just endless brochures.
No, he actually made a mistake in his app (which on an ED app is a huge bummer), and applied to the college of science instead. Basically, he saw they had nanoscience and nanomedicine as majors when scrolling through and never changed it back before submitting. Sigh.
He emailed the admissions officer who was very nice but told him that he could appeal the major in May, and hinted that they probably wouldn’t hold it against him if he decided to go to one of his already accepted schools for engineering. But since he’s still unsure of what he wants to do, likes VT’s science program, and he signed that he was going to commit to them, he put his deposit down and will go to VT.
If he gets into engineering on appeal (unlikely) great, otherwise he’ll be happy with where he’s at in the science department and if he really wants to do engineering he can try to transfer or just take some of the required engineering courses and go to grad school.
I don’t know the acceptance rate for engineering… he had two classmates get in ED and several deferred for engineering, and they were all competitive students.
Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise! That’s great he can appeal and good that he’ll be ok staying in science.
Ok, thanks! Just curious what my son’s chances are! My son applied EA and won’t hear back til end of Feb! He got into Pitt and Penn State though, so he has good options.
Basically, kids with a 3.7 UW gpa or higher and SAT of 1400 and higher have a very good shot of getting in (seems to be better than 50% with those stats). I know of kids with slightly lower stats who got in engineering, but the demarcation seems to be about 3.7/1400.
They also apparently really weight the UT Prosim essay very heavily as well.
a) that even seemingly “measurable” criteria (such as acceptance/rejection rate) in the rankings hitparades are not entirely representative of a school’s desirability - but also a measure of a school’s marketing budget.
b) how dollar-valuable the position on the “acceptance rate” scale is to them.
@DadBodThor@MAmomto4 : my son also got emails and snail mail from U Chicago despite never signing up for anything. He unsubscribed from the emails, and I don’t believe he’s received any correspondence from them since them.
We were surprised that he got (expensive!) mailers from schools like U Chicago, Yale, and some other fancy places. He never filled out his demographics etc on his standardized tests and he had actively opted out of every college search thingy on Naviance, Common App, College Board, etc.
He unsubscribed to emails from every school not on his list and the mailings dramatically decreased. Some still sneak in though.
Interesting… my son’s approach to email management leaves a bit to be desired… he has something like 20,000 unread messages in his personal email… he just scrolls through and reads the ones that seem like they’re “real” and just leaves everything else as unread… sigh.
