Syracuse was truly an option. We don’t have a ton saved for college, can’t cash flow a ton, and don’t want debt. Honestly, we have not visited any of these, and she didn’t jump through hoops to show interest. She is the kind of kid that could be happy many places. She transferred to a boarding school junior year, site unseen. I made her apply to Bama. Her dad went there. She hates heat, wants a small school, and not so conservative.
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Agree, my D has been waitlisted at 7 schools (most of which should have been targets) and then got into W&L tonight. It’s wild.
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Congratulations!
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Yes, this! Seems like they “expected” SU to admit! No such thing anymore. SU is a great school.
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I have no idea. Math, whatever that falls under. I was just surprised as she got a TE full tuition to Pitt which had a 5% chance. Assumed Syracuse was a no brainer. Haha. She probably would have gone there.
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My daughter has a boarding school friend who is at Pitt (her parents teach there) and she has had a great experience! She was accepted to lots of other schools, but the price was too good to pass up.
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It will be seriously considered. We are somewhat local, my girl is just not a city girl and wants a campus. We will visit Colgate. And we are still waiting on 2 more results. I hear nothing but good things about Pitt. Except for my daughter’s friend who had a strange roommate who threatened her with a box cutter and now has a single room, and the sexual assault in the Cathedral of Learning stairwell (I know those things happen anywhere but was on the local news). Have to say this protective mom likes the sound of a small town small school.
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Colgate campus is small and rural. If she doesn’t like cities and likes being in a quiet area, that could be a good fit! The sandwich shop in town is good.
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Colgate is beautiful and academically rigorous, and that price you were quoted is an outstanding deal! I hope it works out for her, whatever her choice.
Most colleges in the US are either open-admissions or effectively so.
A fact that it’s easy to forget on CC.
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Safety doesn’t have to be derogatory. It should be somewhere you want to go, stats show you should get in, and can afford it. That is a good thing IMHO.
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I agree with you that any school applied to should be a place you want to go. From the school’s side, they usually don’t want to be viewed as a safety. Bad for the brand. A number of students will choose perceived prestige over other qualities, and the schools know that.
When a school becomes highly rejective, the perception of quality rises. This is why schools like U Chicago try so hard to increase the number of applications. This is how a former commuter school like NU has become “hot.”
“Safety” has a negative connotation to me. I’ve been trying to use “likely” and “sure bet.”
Since we don’t know acceptance rates for the individual colleges within SU, I can’t accurately say SU was ever a sure bet or likely.
I’m glad I didn’t listen to people who said applying to more than 10 colleges is crazy!
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On the topic of what is the right number of schools to apply to, I don’t know what advice I would give to next year’s class.
Looking at the results on CC and for my own offspring, some of it just seems random. I’m sure the schools know what they are doing but some of these rejections and acceptances could lead one to believe there is a fair bit of chance involved. As a result, you need to apply to more schools.
My S23’s college counseling office strongly encouraged having a balanced list with essentially no more than 12ish schools. The theory being that one can only prepare a limited number of high quality applications and your chances of being admitted into a category of schools, like reaches, does not meaningfully increase by adding more of them. “Trust the process.” While my child has great choices, he has a couple of rejections from schools we thought he had a better chance of getting into than his acceptances. Then again, he has acceptances in the same category of school where he has rejections so maybe that supports the office’s approach. For at least one rejection, I’m not sure if it is randomness, yield protection (was probably his second to last choice school), the school realizing that the child might not be a good match for them (not a fit), or better (however that is defined) applicants.
I think it would be tough to put in quality applications to 20+ schools especially if you have to write tons of supplemental essays. However, with the number of applications these schools are receiving and the results we are seeing, I can understand why some are choosing a shotgun approach.
I hope we do not see too many posts about kids not having options because they didn’t apply to enough schools or have a list with enough safeties. My advice for next year’s class is to have at least 3 safeties that you like and can afford on the list.
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I think it depends on
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Budget (or desired budget even if you can afford more).
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Level of school you are applying to - many over estimate their chances by comparing themselves to stats. The issue there is at many schools those with the same stats that are admitted are rejected.
That’s what impacts how many you should apply to.
It may need to be 1 or it may need to be 20. But each and every one needs to be one you’d be happy to attend. And I wish kids would stop saying it’s my dream school. I’ve never been within 500 miles of it but it’s my dream school.
In some ways, kids do this to themselves by only envisioning certain schools and not being open.
You want Kenyon ? Nothing wrong with Depauw or Augustana etc.
You want Wisconsin ? Nothing wrong with Kentucky or UTK.
You want UT Austin? Nothing wrong with Arizona or Arkansas or VCU.
Kids are way too hung up on a name or rank and that feeds this.
As a parent, I was too but now that I see my kids chose safeties and for my first I see his end result, I was wrong. I made my first overdo it. My second wanted to ….
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That is a kind way of putting it! After two cycles from 2016-17 to now as well as being closely tied to colleges through my spouse, I am not as sanguine.
I have little faith the colleges “know what they are doing” especially as the rules of the game seem to have suddenly and radically changed over the last ten years, and I have a strong belief- bordering on certainty- that “there is a fair bit of chance involved” particularly about merit awards or reach-type schools!
That may sound kind of bitter, but it’s not. It’s just my realistic take based on both personal and institutional experiences. The only time it really upsets me is when I read yet another post (not on this thread) denying that there is any chance, any corruption, any bias (of many, many kinds for or against “types” or high schools or parent occupation not just the obvious), etc. on the part of AOs. I have read many posts like that over the past few days on other threads defending the “system” which I am putting in scare quotes. 
The rest of the time I just hope to get my second through the process while I assume that the system (as set up over the past ten years) will implode soon, especially for the “more selective” schools!
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I don’t think there is all that much chance involved in which applications get into one college but get denied from another college. I think what we (from the outside) see as chance, can often times be institutional priorities being fulfilled over the hopes and wishes of any individual applicant/family.
To be clear, I believe that (especially at selective/highly selective schools) many, maybe even most, rejected applications show a student who has all the skills and intelligence to succeed academically at the schools to which they applied. However, I also believe those skills/intelligence are just one (rather small) piece of the pie in how those schools are putting together their lists of who gets in.
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The GA Tech Admissions blog is great and Rick Clark wrote about the role institutional priorities play in admissions earlier this month.
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Ah, I see that the definition of chance wasn’t so clear.
For one kind of chance, I think when they are hiring extra staff to quickly read applications due to getting 50,000+, there is “chance” in which of the part-time seasonal workers- not professionals- read one particular application. There is chance in which full-time AO is assigned to your area as well, which the students cannot control.
When interviewing for merit scholarships that randomly assign students to interviewers, there is chance in getting someone with a strong ability to advocate for you, who clicks with you, and who has the institutional heft to be heard in the discussion based on their position in the college hierarchy not anything the student can control. (That one I know of from the college side as well as parent side.)
Then to beebee3’s point, I call it chance that this year a particular college needs an oboe player or doesn’t “need” someone from a certain state because the oboe player they had failed out or last year they took two people from that state. More things students can’t control.
I totally see beebee3’s point, but I also understand that “institutional priorities” can be viewed as “chance” since they are all outside the control of the student and frequently not transparent at all. This is especially true because as a society, we can’t agree on the purpose of private colleges with an outsized role in public life and government OR on the purpose of public universities “flagship” or otherwise OR on the purpose of small LACs OR even on the purpose of college education (is it vocational like engineering or traditional humanistic learning like liberal arts?) What do selective privates owe society if they are the pathway to many highly sought after public roles? I suspect we would all answer all these questions differently.
For that reason, I think parents can rightfully interpret it as “chance” if their child-- who on paper looks exactly the same (or better?) than another child-- is or is not admitted to UCLA or Yale due to factors that the public may or may not accept as “central” to who should be admitted to an academic institution and are out of the control of students, for instance what state you are from (except in-state vs OOS) or where or whether your parents went to college and finished or whether this year they have someone from Wyoming, but if you’d just applied last year…
I’m not claiming private colleges can’t do whatever they like. They can, but I think it is okay to frame a lot of those decisions as “chance” if the next year or with a different reader or a different interviewer for a merit scholarship or if the person reading it weren’t in the middle of a divorce that day, it could have changed something.
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To some degree, this supports the argument that applicants who have the profiles to be admitted to highly selective schools should apply to many of them since what the schools want/need in a particular cycle and how the schools are weighting applicant attributes are somewhat unknown to the applicant.
I wonder if there are confounding results from schools with >60%-70% admit rates. Possibly all the discussion regarding “random” results is related to the more selective schools.
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Rick Clark is the best!
Here’s what stood out to me:
" If you are a senior awaiting an admission decision from a more selective school, this means your test score, GPA, number of AP courses, or any other purely academic metric is not going to be the entire basis for your admission decision. Yes, holistic admission means more than the academic numbers, but it also means other numbers play in, i.e. IPs. This is what admission deans mean when they say they are looking to “select” or “shape” a class. If Admissions was a language on Google Translate, “shaping a class” would convert to “IPs drive our process.”
And:
"If you are denied from a selective college, my hope is you won’t question your academic ability or lose sleep trying to figure out what was “wrong” with you or what you “could or should have done differently.” IPs mean admission decisions do not translate to “We don’t think you are smart” or “You could not be successful here.”
If you don’t mind I’m going to share this in its own thread. I think it’s a good time of year for students and parents to hear this message!
Thank you for posting!
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