I know a very few admitted EA - but with near perfect scores. It is rare.
have a high-stats kid with NEU on the list for EA. We have not gotten around to discussing what might be on the table for ED2. (Personally, I would prefer BU, but it is not up to me lol.)
MIT is already the MIT of Boston (more or less)!
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Yes, I know. It was a (bad) joke. Trying to lighten the mood with all the heavy SAT talk.
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Funny store and 100% true. I will not exaggerate a word of this story:
Several people brought up MIT today. I have not had that school cross my mind in years, but I have a friend that graduated from there with a Doctoral degree. As you might guess, he is truly a genius. Anyways, he did his graduate thesis on a new theorized type of rocket propulsion. He could not actually build a rocket to test his theories, but did extensive computer modeling that predicted his idea would make rockets go faster than they did at the time. After submitting his thesis, he gets a call from the department head at MIT asking him to come in and bring all of his notes and computer files for his thesis. He enters the office and the department head tell him the thesis was excellent, that he had earned his Doctoral degree at MIT and well done. He again asked if my friend had brought all documents and back ups with him which he replied that he did. There is then a knock at the door and two men enter wearing dark suits and wearing sunglasses. It is like a scene straight out of a MIB movie he said. They said âthis is now property of the US governmentâ. They gathered up all papers, drives, backups and the actual thesis itself and exit the room. How crazy is that?
This story has nothing to do with this thread and I promise not to go off track again. I think it was one of the crazier stories I have ever been told and just wanted to share for a quick break.
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Maybe more appropriate to call it the UChicago of Boston 
Not in terms of academic focus and style, but in harvesting huge numbers of applications by handing out fee waivers, not having a supplemental essay (which Chicago does have) and conducting tons of aggressive nation wide marketing - so they can later boast how much lower their acceptance rate has dropped.
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Yes. U Chicago plays that game well.
Jefferey Selingo gets into quite a bit about how NEU played the system well to improve their ranking and profile.
I have heard that they only count âBoston Campusâ when they report their acceptance rate. All those kids that get into the other programs only count as applications received.
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That hasnât been the experience at our HS (strong public HS in MA). I glanced at SCOIR and last year (class of 2023) NEU had an acceptance rate (among our students) of a little over 50%. There wasnât an appreciable difference in acceptance rates between ED, EA and RD. About 88 kids applied and 49 were accepted. I think around 20 are attending.
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That is encouraging. It might be interesting to know whether that NEU acceptance data is for Boston alone or includes the satellite campuses.
I think if you dug further, I think most of the 49 accepted students were not for BOSTON campus.
Our Naviance showed about the same, but my guess is that only about 8 of the 49 accepted were to Boston campus, and 7 of them ED,
having heard/read online local FB, etc of where so and so kid is going to London, oh, London was full by the time we decided so Becky is going to Berlin, etc.
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If I recall correctly about a quarter of their students are from MA. That indicates high yield from MA students. So itâs not surprising there would be a higher EA acceptance rate for your HS vs schools in other states.
Oh, absolutely. Itâs popular here. Also, a lot of full pay kids. I will say, though, that test scores/gpaâs among accepted students are generally very high. Itâs a popular back up for tippy top students (most of whom donât attend). And, definitely, a fair number of kids were accepted by agreeing to start abroad.
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I was only counting direct acceptances to the Boston campus. Not an alternate location.
Thatâs probably right. Maybe 10 kids got accepted to Boston. A lot are starting abroad. I will say one of S22âs good friends did that and loved it - created a close cohort that has stuck together even after being back in Boston for 2d semester.
I looked at BU and BC while I was at it and those werenât quite as strong (but still over published acceptance rates) - 20% and 36% acceptance rates, respectively.
You canât tell that from our SCOIR data, unfortunately.
Selingo wrote the NYMag article I referenced. Example: For Stuyvesant HS, arguably THE top public high school of NYC, the acceptance rate at NU went from 30% to 11% last year (no distinction in article about boston vs abroad). For BU, acceptance rate went from 43% to 14% last year.
So application counts are way up at some schools, and admissions rates are down. But it is not like higher percentages of the total pool of applicants have any given high test score (potentially less, in fact, with test optional). A lot of what is happening is actually just some particularly high volume applicants applying at even higher volumes, but ultimately the schools still have slots to fill and those applicants can only take one.
What test optional logically can do is move up outcomes for some people who were only more competitive outside of test scores, and therefore add new competitors for a given high test score group. This combined with changing application patterns could explain why some high schools were not âfeedingâ as well to some colleges. But in the end, some other high schools must be feeding more students now to those colleges instead to compensate.
And it really shouldnât do much to devalue what were good scores in the past. Because it is not like there are way more of those to go around. Instead, it just might more often not be enough to have those good scores, you might more often need more other good stuff too. But that is a very different conclusion from actually subtracting a good qualification from your application.
Long story short, I think some high score applicants may be talking themselves out of using a helpful qualification, when the real issue is just that they now need more other stuff too to get admitted to some very selective colleges.
At our school BU is a much tougher admit these days.
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In terms of the âfeedingâ phenomenon. It tends to be cyclical at our school - for example, one year 8 kids went to Tufts, this year 10 kids went to BC, another year it might be another very selective (but not tippy top) school.