Parents of the HS Class of 2024

Parents Forum Class of 20xx Community
4483

I by no means want to say I know this happened to the kid referenced above, but one thing that became clear in the Harvard litigation is that the “personal/fit” factor played a way bigger role in determining who got admitted and who did not than many thought possible. And virtually no one got bad personal ratings. But if you were an outstanding student in terms of grades and tests and activities, but only got a “generally positive” personal rating, then unless you were ALDC (aka hooked), you had almost no chance.

And an inherent issue with that sort of factor is typically outsiders to the process cannot really see what is happening in the same way we can be told grades and test scores and such. Of course sometimes that can just depend on the individual reviewers, maybe the individual school. But it is also entirely possible something like a teacher recommendation, counselor report, the main Common App essay, or so on could create some sort of repeat “generally positive” problem. And that could help explain some of these sorts of across-the-board stories.

This is part of why my feederish HS is so strict about how it defines likelies, even holding aside yield protection. We know that too often kids look at their numbers in comparison to the 75ths and think that means it is at least a coin flip–and that the coin flips will be independent. But we also know these stories happen too often for that to be true, and one plausible explanation is something difficult to observe might be happening in the personal/fit factor.

None of which is to say I am unsympathetic. And even more so I don’t want to be telling individual kids they got blanked at all their targets because they were assessed as a person and found to not be quite what those colleges were looking for.

But still–there are colleges we are confident that high numbers kids will get admitted to even if they are only deemed “generally positive”. These are not the most selective few private schools, or the most popular few public universities when applying out of state. But they are still great colleges, indeed in some cases likely better fits for some kids, and often are either in-state or offer merit aid.

And so if a high numbers kid applies to at least a couple of those, they are not going to get blanked. And they will end up at a great college, even if “by the numbers” others were thinking they would end up somewhere else.

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4484

The cases I described are all very not ALDC (to no one’s surprise).

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4485

Sure, but we’re not talking about the general population of applications for “these schools” – we’re talking about schools that are logical destinations for students who are strong enough to have a shot at Ivy+, but obviously not a certain one, who otherwise would have been very strong for “these schools” if they had known in advance that their Ivy+ dreams were not going to work out. Not that many years ago, those students could have considered many of “these schools” great likely matches, and felt good about the outcome. Now, many of the schools previously in the middle between the historic reaches for high-po applicants and the historic safeties, are now effective reaches in RD and the middle has disappeared. Having seen three kids through the process, just in the gap between #1 and #3, schools that seemed very likely and proved out as likely for #1, became very unlikely for #3 in RD despite higher stats and at least as strong or more of EC – and not just because these schools got harder to admit to in general – they didn’t in ED, but they shifted far higher a percentage of their admits to ED. Worked out great for S23, so no complaints personally, but it was easy to see the substantial shift.

Even among the Ivy+, ED is a an unreasonable burden for kids. Mine didn’t do it, but having to decide to gamble a commitment on one highly selective school where there is no rational way to know if it will pay off at the expense of others, is asking a lot of kids. It’s an incredibly one sided proposition in favor of the colleges. Certainly in their interests, so its easy to understand why they do it, but doesn’t make it any more ethically reasonable for the mental health of the kids. If they cared at all for the actual human beings in this process, there are other approaches that could create a better bid/ask balance that matches kids willing to commit to schools if they get in without penalizing them in the process if they don’t.

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4486

Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist I’ve read extensively, has a fantastic quote I think of often. The institution cannot love you.

Colleges are institutions. They cannot and do not love their applicants/care for the human beings behind those applications. That’s not their purpose. Their purpose is to ensure the health and longevity of the institution itself.

If we ascribe anthropomorphic qualities to an institution - we can fool ourselves into believing the institution can give us something it cannot and was not created to give. Admission offices were created to evaluate applications to create school classes that will further the institutions goals and priorities. Not to care for the feelings of hopeful applicants, not to reward the most meritorious.

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4487

Yep, that’s why I preceded the snippet you quoted with: “Certainly its in their interests, so its easy to understand why they do it”

I understand colleges don’t care about there applicants (or student) as more than a commodity/customer/product. But many claim to, so it doesn’t hurt to point out the disconnect between their stated aspiration and reality.

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4488

This is one of the reasons that S24 has added McGill to his list. It’s an excellent school with a strong global reputation and they admit entirely by the numbers. He can be pretty much assured of admission without worrying about ED/EA or yield protection.

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4489

I have a D22 at a Northeast LAC. Early freshman year she noted that everyone she met was at the LAC because either (1) it was their dream school or (2) they didn’t get into an Ivy. Flash forward to the end of freshman year and she says, you won’t believe the number of people transferring out … to Ivies.
This was the first time it occurred to me … those yield protecting schools aren’t just making sure that the kids enroll, the yield protecting schools are looking for kids that are going to come and stay there.

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4490

So by the definitions we use in our high school, it is also true for us that some colleges that used to be possible targets for high numbers kids have become reaches, due to declining admit rates.

But for us, that does not mean targets no longer exist at all. Of course they are not colleges like Tufts, which has way too low of an admit rate. Such kids are usually more treating colleges like, say, Wake Forest as a target.

Now part of what fascinates me about all this is Wake Forest is actually ranked a bit higher in the US News than Tufts. Wake Forest also has only a slightly lower acceptance rate in RD (29.4%) than ED (30.6%):

https://commondatasets.com/Wakeforest.html

But of course Wake Forest is not in Boston.

Similarly, the aforementioned Rochester is barely ranked below Tufts, and it is like 43% ED, 39% RD. And so on.

But this is what I mean about this being such a narrow slice of schools. It doesn’t include Ivy+, because they don’t need to yield protect. It doesn’t include Wake Forest, Rochester, and so on either.

So the idea the “middle” has disappeared necessarily depends on a very narrow definition of the “middle”, one which really wants the middle to include colleges like Tufts. And it doesn’t anymore, but that just means maybe considering Wake or Rochester now instead.

So I think the real root cause of this process being so stressful for kids is the mindset that more selective equals more desirable, and not getting into a more selective college means the kid failed. This is setting many kids up for failure because necessarily the most selective colleges can only enroll so many kids.

And so if we are telling like 10x as many kids as can enroll that they will be failures when they don’t succeed, we are dooming 90% of those kids to feeling like failures. We just don’t know which yet.

To me, Tufts yield protecting is a very small ball issue compared to this big issue. I get that there is a small segment of the US college world that will deem kids failures if they enroll at Rochester rather than Tufts, and that is therefore an example of this problem. But HYPSM, Ivy, Ivy+, T20, T50, T100 . . . there is always something being defined as the more selective and therefore more desirable, and always many kids being set up for failure as a result of this attitude.

OK, so it would be nice if we could figure out a better solution to the overapplication problem at Tufts than ED and yield protection. So how can we stop so many kids applying to Tufts with only a very low chance of actually wanting to go to Tufts? This isn’t going to allow more kids to go to Tufts, but it would in fact reduce the number of kids rejected by Tufts.

But that’s just Tufts, and just a few kids in the greater scheme. If we really cared about the mental health of college-bound kids generally, we would need to stop parents and peers and such from defining success and failure in ways that mathematically necessitated most kids would be deemed failures.

Great, like what?

I note they have tried “demonstrated interest”, “Why us?” essays, and so on, but plenty of kids are willing to fake that up to any reasonable level.

So how would you propose that Tufts stop so many kids from applying to Tufts, faking being really interested, but privately actually preferring many other colleges?

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4491

I mean frankly, if you assigned an admissions office the dual mandate of rejecting 96% of applicants but also making all the applicants feel good, that would be rightly considered insane.

In that sense, the failure has already occurred by the time there are 25 applicants for every one admission slot.

Again, the UK address this problem by limiting total applications to 5, and only one (at most) of Oxbridge.

Is there an alternative in the US?

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4492

I actually believe these admissions officers do care about the applicants as people. They do not like rejecting all these kids.

I just don’t think there is any alternative. It is their job, and there are only so many slots available.

Again, to me, the failure has already occurred when so many kids are applying for so few slots, because that means the admissions office has no choice about rejecting most of the kids.

So far, this is really just math. Ironically, the part where understanding their institutional goals actually matters is when asking how the colleges choose who to reject. And it should be a helpful insight to understand they are not rejecting kids because they are less deserving, but rather because they were not the best bets to serve various institutional goals.

So actually, to me it would be even worse if we had to tell 96% of these kids not only were they rejected, they were rejected because they were less deserving.

We still have to tell 96% of these kids they were rejected, but at least now we can tell them it was NOT because they were less deserving.

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4493

My S24 is looking at St Andrews for similar reasons.

And that is fine, but I think it is pretty interesting to think about what is really going on here.

In McGill’s case, it is a very large public research university with an admit rate of about 40%. Based on global rankings and such, its rough peer in the US would be something like the University of Washington, which has around a 50% admit rate OOS:

https://research.unsw.edu.au/artu/

And indeed, these are the sorts of US public research universities where usually if your numbers are good enough, you really don’t have to worry about yield protection, or holistic review. Nor do they tend to have ED at all, and sometimes not even EA (UW does not, although it has an unusually early regular application deadline of 11/15).

But of course UW is the sort of US university that the high numbers Tufts crowd does not want to have to “settle” for.

Now, that doesn’t mean a person could not rationally prefer McGill to UW. But I really don’t think the problem in the US is the lack of options like McGill for high numbers kids. It is more the fact that our college prep culture, at least in certain circles, is telling high numbers kids having to “settle” for our version of McGill, namely a university like UW, is a form of failure.

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4494

All I can say is that this whole situation is actually making me glad that we are a full pay donut hole family. There is an entire tier of schools that D24 didn’t even look at because I told her we could pay for them, but then she’d be entirely on her own for grad school. So we ended up with a list full of safeties where she will receive merit to bring down the budget, and might be pleasantly surprised by one or more of them. Where she is really comparing these schools on the strength of the honors program and the opportunities they present for mentoring. There is a lot of opportunity for these kids at schools ranked in the 70s to low 100s if you look for it.

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4495

IMO, this isn’t an accurate way to look at McGill. In every country outside the US whose higher education system I’m familiar with, the best and most prestigious universities are public, not private. And McGill is the equivalent of a “T5” school in Canada.

The admit rate is, of course, driven by a school’s desirability but it’s also a function of the size of the applicant population - and Canada has a significantly smaller domestic applicant population. Admit rates don’t necessarily tell you how strong (or not) a school is.

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4496

Of course there are other state flagships that S24 could consider - but many of them are a lot further away than McGill; or not city adjacent (his preference - though he is considering a handful of more rural schools). He may still look at a couple. When it comes to global ranking, UW is actually typically in the the top 25 (or near) - ranked far ahead of schools that most here consider to be “better” (UVA, Emory, Vanderbilt etc). One of the challenges for us, as a family, is that S24 is completely uninterested in UMass Amherst, our state flagship, where his brother is a sophomore so that makes things tricky - especially since he doesn’t perceive (rightly or wrongly) the other New England flagships as academically strong (plus most of them are also rural).

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4497

No kidding!

In our HS, you can tell families are getting more savvy about this. Like, the pre-med kids of doctors and such are very much looking at colleges like that in order to both save for med school and also maximize their chances at having stellar grades. Barely scraping into a highly-selective college where that family would pay the full private college market rate is not an optimal strategy.

And I think in general, these colleges are often very smart about honors programs and named scholarships, the kind of stuff you can stick on a resume. So, if you have State U., Honors College, Chancellor’s Scholarship on your resume, you really don’t need to explain why you went there and not the now-over-mentioned Tufts. Of course you did, because you are a smart kid who knows a great deal when you see one.

So it just kills me some kids are not getting that message. That is winning the admissions game! Not losing. Not to be crude about it, but you monetized your intelligence and hard work, like a lot, and that is very impressive for a HS kid.

And for that matter, even if you are not a super high numbers kid, and so don’t get the honors college and chancellor’s scholarship and such, but you got affordable in-state tuition at a good State U.? That is winning too! For the same reason, that is still a really valuable monetization.

And so on. These kids are winning great things for themselves at many, many universities. How did we get to a situation where so many kids think otherwise?

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4498

But grades and tests seem to be a much bigger part of the equation there. The unpredictability of TO/holistic admissions makes it very difficult to predict which 5 schools might be good options.

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4499

Our D24 also views that has a consolation prize if she doesnt get into any of her top choices.

At her state flagship (which she would attend but not her favorite), she would already have about 24 hours of 4.0 due to dual enrollment credits. That would give her a good start if she wanted to go to law school since law school admission is primarily based on GPA and LSAT. She woudnt have to deal with the curve at some of the more “presitigious” undergraduate business schools.

Unfortunately our flagship state university is not a target school for the top IB or Consulting firms which is why she’s aiming for T30.

4500

Canada’s postsecondary population is also about 1/8th the size of the US’s postsecondary population.

Indeed, one of the many unusual things about the US system is how unconcentrated it is compared to other countries like Canada, the UK, and so on.

Like, if you take just Toronto (about 97000 students), UBC (72500), and McGill (39000), that’s around 10% of the Canadian post-secondary population.

The aforementioned HYPSM are all much smaller–in fact, together they basically add up to just UBC or so. And collectively they are about 0.4% of the US post-secondary population.

I actually have no idea how deep you would have to go into the US News National University rankings before you got to 10% of the US postsecondary population. But I am sure it is very far. Indeed, I suspect it probably includes the University of Washington.

That being said, I get some US people see value in going to one of the Top N universities in a different country, where N is a much smaller number than the N they can get in the US. But when you really think about it, that is typically only possible because N in that country is a way larger percentage of that country’s student population.

By the way, I did this for Oxbridge once, and roughly speaking Oxbridge undergraduates in terms of collective percentage of the UK bachelor’s level undergraduate student population is pretty equivalent to the top 15ish or so US National Universities plus the top 5ish or so LACs (that are typically comparable in selectivity to those universities for college). Again, I think a lot of people would think that going to Oxford or Cambridge is more “prestigious” than going to, say, Vanderbilt, Rice, or WUSTL. But it is another version of that Top N game.

And yes, I have pointed this out to my S24 who is interested in St Andrews. My point to him is if he really wants to go to college in Scotland (and it has a lot of appeal), then that is great. But the fact it does so well in, say, Guardian League Tables is in fact not inconsistent with him having a very good chance of admissions there. That’s complicated by St Andrews valuing US students for the extra tuition, such that is probably harder to get in as a UK applicant. But even so, when you add up Oxbridge, St Andrews, LSE, UCL, ICL, Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow (or whatever you would think of as the “top” UK universities for undergraduate studies)–that T9ish in the UK would be equivalent population-wise to a much bigger TN number in the US.

So that’s a big part of why admissions to those sorts of non-US “TN” universities seems so favorable to high numbers US applicants. But hey, if you want to go to those colleges anyway, and then also some people at least seem them as more “prestigious” due to a lower N? Then that is all good.

Exactly! But the same thing is true in the US.

This is why I referenced a global ranking (actually, aggregation of the three most prominent global rankings). UW, and various other public universities like it, are some of the most important research universities in the world. It is truism about the United States that it is completely overloaded with such universities, which is actually in part a function of our federal system and the land-grant system which built up so many great public universities. But is further a function of the fact we have a bunch of great private research universities too, which virtually don’t exist outside the United States.

But then along come people with their TN rankings, and necessarily because we have so many great universities, some of our great universities have to get big N numbers. And a lot of how that gets sorted is selectivity.

But this does not mean universities like Washington, or Wisconsin, or Illinois, or so on are not great global universities! They very much are.

But the people who think in TN/selectivity terms as to US colleges are very much in danger of not realizing that.

4501

And to be very clear, I am in no way discouraging your kid from applying to, or indeed going to, McGill. McGill is great! Montreal is great! There is obviously nothing wrong with wanting to go to McGill.

I’m just pointing out when people see universities like McGill as “better” for high numbers US kids than McGill’s research university peers in the US, for different sorts of reasons (meaning not personal preferences), there is something a little funny going on there. But if an individual kid just likes McGill better than its US peers for personal reasons, that of course is perfectly reasonable.

Yeah, this sort of thing is a bit unfortunate. Our S24 is similarly not particularly high on his in-state option (although he is applying). And to be fair, it is like 15 minutes from our house. I would also not have wanted to go to college 15 minutes from my parents’ house. I was thinking more in terms of a minimum number of states away, not minutes away. So I get it.

But of course these are the classic “first world problems”. There are many kids in the US who go to no college at all because they cannot afford in-state tuition, don’t have the numbers for private colleges that would be cheaper, and don’t have a good 2-year college in commuting distance. Meanwhile while I might wish our in-state option was at least a couple hours away, we will survive if he goes to St Andrews, or some private or OOS college in the US.

4502

Absolutely. I tell my kids that they are very lucky that they have parents who can (and will) pay for college.

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