Parents of the HS Class of 2024

Parents Forum Class of 20xx Community
4503

So it is true the A Level system makes it WAAAAAAY easier to compare students academically.

But again, you have to remember their system is way more concentrated, such that something like 18ish universities would all be within Oxbridge.

So I’m not going to bother doing this precisely, but there would be something like:

A: Harvard/MIT/Columbia/Chicago/Dartmouth/Hopkins/Northwestern/Vanderbilt/Rice

B: Yale/Stanford/Princeton/CalTech/Duke/Penn/Brown/Cornell/WUSTL

And one slot would be applying to either A or B, but not both, and the colleges within A and B would decide for you where exactly you ended up (although you could state a preference, your offer might come from a different college).

OK, now you have four more slots, and again each covers more ground. So it would be basically impossible for a high numbers kid to not have like 2 or 3 slots involve colleges which would almost surely admit that kid in the current US system too, using just numbers, as long as the kid was not also like a convicted serial killer.

So yes, their system has better numbers to use. But really, the same 4/5 type options exist in the US for high numbers kids. You just have to be open to those colleges.

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4504

Several schools adopt the deferral as a soft rejection. I could be wrong but I think that MIT does that.

4505

By the way, I guess that is a proposal of sorts.

To make it a little more flexible, how about this.

We’ll divide the “top” private colleges into coherent sets, probably regionally based. So, like, the Ivy League is a set.

We could put together a set in the Midwest (Chicago, Northwestern, and WUSTL, maybe Notre Dame although the Catholic colleges could also be a separate thing), and the South (so like Duke, Vandy, Emory, Rice, and Tulane). Probably at least a couple sets for the most selective LACs. Maybe a second East universities set to include Hopkins, Tufts, Georgetown, BC, NYU, and BU. Or again maybe the Catholic schools opt out.

I’m not sure MIT and Caltech need to be anywhere.

And in general, we don’t need to go crazy. Like, Rochester and Wake and such don’t need to be in this system if they are not yield protecting and don’t fill up their classes with ED applications. This is just for the schools where relying on ED and/or yield protection has become necessary to deal with the volume of applications.

You apply, if you choose, to a whole set. You can tell them in advance if you will NOT accept an offer from any schools in the set. Like, you can apply to the Ivies but say you are not interested in Harvard.

They can then coordinate, and only one can give you an offer. That college can include merit if it sees fit. Obviously merit would not be available from the Ivies (unless they change their policy), but it could be from other sets.

Public universities would generally be out of this system. But maybe they could opt into the system for their OOS admissions. Like, maybe you do not need a set in the West for just Stanford and USC. But toss in the top UCs OOS, and then that starts making sense. This would cover kids who might want to apply to Stanford, USC, Berkeley OOS, and UCLA OOS, say. But you could opt out of the UCs, and just apply to Stanford and USC, or indeed just Stanford, if you want.

Maybe Michigan OOS, possibly others, go into the Midwest set (again, you could opt out). UNC OOS and Virginia OOS into the South set. And so on.

I can’t imagine this going over very well initially. But I wonder if people might get used to it. You’d be like, “I applied to Ivy and Midwest, plus these other colleges,” or “I applied to Ivy and LAC Northeast, plus . . . ,” or “I hate the cold and applied to just South and West, plus . . . .” And so on.

4506

Big waitlists can serve a similar function.

I am not sure this is always in the kids’ true best interests, though.

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4507

Uncaffeinated initial thought, coordination = potential antitrust violation

But, we can assume a carve out by statute for this hypothetical

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4508

It is never in the kids best interest IMO. Soft rejection is like “everyone gets a trophy”. The issue is that it allows kids to hold on to the belief they have a shot - they didn’t get rejected, they must be competitive right? - and prevents them from moving on and submitting an ED2 application.

I know lots of kids who would have loved to attend a school that had ED2 as the next best thing. All were very likely to have been accepted with an ED application (based on historical data for the school) but ended up rejected in RD.

We are allowing our son to shoot for the moon but we have strongly expressed that a deferral needs to be treated as a rejection and he needs to then apply ED2.

Note: for the record I do not believe in applying ED1 are ED2 to game the system. My D did not have an ED2 school that she really wanted yo go to. My S #2 and #3 do offer it.

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4509

I’ve thought before that it could be beneficial to have multiple sets of admission rounds to colleges. For instance, there could be something like Mutual Decision Rounds (MDR). In an early round, students would be limited to applying to 5 schools. So they don’t need to 100% commit to one school, while the school knows they would have at least a 20% chance of getting the student (rather than a 5% chance in RD). There are no deferrals in this case; the school has to say yay or nay, and provide the financial aid package. At the same time, the kid will need to make a decision one way or the other by an early deadline, not getting to wait until May 1. So a kid can compare a limited number of packages (and show those packages to other schools to potentially get a better one), but once they say no to a school, they can’t reapply to the school for that same school year.

It’s not as good as ED for schools (100% certainty), but it’s much better than EA (not knowing until May 1 who’s showing up for how much $ and better able to craft the class knowing who you’ve gotten so far). It’s better than ED for students (not needing to commit 100% and can see limited options), but not as good as EA (getting to wait until May 1 for all options, better deals, etc).

For visual folks, this could be an example of how it might work.

Round Max # of Schools Can Apply To Application Deadline Notification Deadline Application Decision Deadline
1 5 August 1 September 15 October 15
2 5 October 15 December 15 January 15
3 10 January 15 March 15 May 1
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4510

Or use a system like the algorithmic medical residency matching system? (At least for schools that meet full need). I know it’s unlikely, but since we’re dabbling in hypotheticals…

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4511

Or Questbridge Match

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4512

I’m not sure why. There are many elite public flagships that have very competitive admissions, at least for certain majors, if not for the school overall.

And many do have yield concerns with OOS applicants.
For example, UMich defers most highly qualified unhooked OOS applicants in EA, to “shake off” those using them as a safety in parallel with applying ED/REA to private elites. And UMD is wary of OOS applicants applying to their highly ranked biomedical engineering program (because they figure most of them have also applied ED to JHU). And so on.

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4513

I’ll delete this if not appropriate, but maybe it would help some families if we could list some potential EA/RD target schools of interest for high stats students? Feel free to redefine the parameters - maybe that is where it gets tricky - but let’s say mid-1500s or 35/36, near 4.0 uw with sufficient rigor, major undecided or at least not especially competitive majors like CS, with the caveats that affordability is a separate issue altogether and demonstrated interest may be important for targets (with DI/yield concerns having turned some other would-be targets into reaches). I probably missed some, though most others ranked above or around these that are not listed would be reaches due to low acceptance rates. This is using US News National Universities, basically at a glance.

High target, Privates: U Rochester, Brandeis, Case Western
Target, Privates: Lehigh, RPI, Pepperdine, Santa Clara, Syracuse, GWU, WPI, American, SMU, Fordham, Clemson, Baylor, LMU, Stevens Inst of Tech, TCU, Howard, U San Diego

OOS Target, Publics (naturally weighed against the most obvious alternative, the student’s state flagship): U Wisconsin, UIUC, W&M, UGA, Ohio State, Purdue, UMD, Rutgers, U Washington, Virginia Tech, UMN, Pitt, SUNY Stony Brook, SUNY Bing, CO Mines, CU Boulder, Auburn, some of the less-competitive UCs

And then potential safeties, depending on affordability

Safety, Privates: Marquette, Gonzaga, Elon, Clark, U San Francisco, RIT, U Denver, Saint Louis U, Drexel, Fairfield, Loyola Chicago, Creighton, Chapman, Temple, Clarkson, New School, DePaul, Seattle U, Providence College(?), Bentley, Loyola Maryland, U Portland

Safety, Publics: UConn, UMass, FSU, Indiana, NC State, Mich State, Penn State, U Iowa, SUNY Buffalo, UDel, UIC, NJIT, Miami Ohio, U Oregon, U Utah, U Arizona, U South Carolina, U Tennessee, KU, UVM, Mizzou, ASU, Iowa State, U Oklahoma, UNH, U Alabama, some of the Cal States

I’m sure folks here would arrange these differently or add; please feel free to share your view :slight_smile: And I’ll leave LAC categorizations to others.

If I recall, Wake is a reach in RD, so I didn’t list it here. I was hoping that listing these out may be comforting; I don’t know why it doesn’t feel that way just now.

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4514

LACs:

High Targets/Targets: Dickinson, Skidmore, Bryn Mawr, Mt Holyoke, Smith, Denison, Kenyon, Rhodes, Whitman, Reed, St Olaf, Vassar, College of the Holy Cross, Franklin and Marshall, Occidental, Connecticut College, Trinity, St Lawrence

Likelies/Safeties: Wheaton (MA), Sarah Lawrence, Bard, Simmons, Drew U., Gettysburg, College of Wooster, Ohio Wesleyan, Beloit, Lawrence, Goucher, Furman, Knox, Whittier, Hope, Centre, Earlham, U Puget Sound, Lewis & Clark, Agnes Scott, Kalamazoo

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4515

Add Oberlin to high targets. At olaf to safeties.

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4516

Good first cut, but the caveat (as you mentioned, and important for people to note) is that many of these are only targets for non-competitive majors.

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4517

I introduced my daughters situation in #3637 in this thread. Her quick summary is she is looking for schools with strong scholarship money for her undergraduate, as she wants to go to medical school after. She has been applying to select schools the past two months, and we are taking tours of some of those schools in the months ahead. However, she received some news this past week that really changes things for her. Her IB program in her school has an anonymous donor that will cover ALL school applications fees and also ALL fees to send test scores for as many schools as she (and the other students) would like to apply to. How crazy is that? It is truly unlimited and she is encouraged to use it for as many as would like. So her game plan has now changed. What was looking like around 15 schools (mostly in the MW) she was going to apply to, might soon be double that or even more. What an amazing and generous gift that will be for those students.

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4518

Good idea but in reality target/reach/likely is highly school dependent. Off the top of my head, just in our general mid Atlantic region: Two private schools(one slightly more competitive with a higher % of the class top-scorers nationally and a higher % acceptance rate to most top schools), and one public magnet would assess many of your targets as likelies and some T25s as targets not reaches, for the top few students in each class(ie top rigor, scores, and high rank). Luckily 2 of the 3 schools have excellent college counseling that parses it out and has a fairly high accuracy on “chance” estimation. Sadly, parents from the third school seems to be less well-informed (and more surprised by disappointing results).

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4519

I think in-state admissions could not be in a system like this because of what that means to both the state and the applicants.

But I agree if some “elite” publics wanted to put OOS admissions into such a system, that could be fine.

4520

Our state is doing free applications to most public schools this month. So, he whipped off 2 easy ones this morning. Little or big a colleges savings is worth it.

Congrats on being awarded the fee waiver. True blessing.

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4521

There have actually been complaints for years by some in Virginia about the number of OOS students admitted to UVA, W & M, and Virginia Tech engineering. These schools are not easy admits for even strong instate students and they take about 1/3 OOS overall. And VT engineering seems to have been taking much more than that in the last few years, while the school overall stays closer to the 1/3 OOS numbers.

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4522

While I think classifying low acceptance rate colleges as targets is a questionable practice, families at such special high schools would presumably be aware of their access to expert college counseling. (The college counseling office at my older kids’ private high school are not at that level.) I would favor caution in the face of ever-increasing uncertainty.