Absolutely. UPitt, it only takes three days.
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Congrats to your son!
GAH! C24 was supposed to have a meeting with their counselor today ā they signed up early the first morning slots were made available in order to meet as soon as possible. Today, the counselor was absent and C24 couldnāt get a new appointment until the first week of October!
This is so very not ok. C24 is applying EA at a few schools with arts auditions, and they cannot wait to apply right before the deadlines. At the latest, they should have their applications completed before October 15. But theyāve literally never met this counselor before (their counselor assignment changed since last year), and they have to wait until that October just to get that far.
I have been trying super hard not to be a brat about our schoolās utter lack of support for kids applying to college, but Iām starting to get frustrated. There are literally no resources or information provided at all until two weeks into Senior year (and even that consists only of a single one-page handout and three optional lunchtime presentations focused mainly on applying to in-state schools), and now itās hard even to get a basic introductory meeting before application deadlines!
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Itās great to hear about kids who already have an acceptance! Congratulations!
For rolling admission, S24 has an acceptance from Ole Miss and has submitted to Auburn and should get a decision on 10/15. It really helps take the pressure off. He is applying EA to 7 more with deadlines between 10/15 and 11/15. I love that he is making steady progress with applications. I. wish D24 could find a rolling admission school she was happy with. But, her time for celebration will come.
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Yup nothing better than a rolling admission decision to a school that is acceptable early in the cycle. Pressure off. Congradulations.
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We are waiting on Ole Miss and Auburn 
Rest of apps hopefully being submitted Sunday evening after S24 and I can sit down uninterrupted and go through Common App to make sure everything is checked, etc. He plays football and has had zero time for anything else. It is Rosh Hashanah this weekend so they are not allowed to have practices and FNL was pushed to tonight so hoping the weekend is a chance to catch up. We are also expecting Lee to make landfall as a tropical storm in Saturday so it will be a good day to stay in.
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Getting those early acceptances is awesome! It is such a busy time of year for athletes. My S24 also is a fall athlete and finding time for applications has been challenging. He has finished a draft of the common ap but his personal statement needs work. He also is planning to apply to several schools with supplementary questions so we will see how those go. My S24 is definitely excited about Auburn at the moment. I did not really see him at such a big school, but Iām finding a lot to get excited about.
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Colleges with ROLLING admissions:
- how do they manage their low yield rate?
ā
High stats DS2022 applied Rolling Admissions and was accepted by 8/30 to this college. We were hoping for great scholarships, to make it comparable to our great state college. But scholarship was just ok, so COA was still ~$50K/yr, so son definitely wasnāt going there.
Colleges with Rolling admissions must know that theyāre a SAFETY school for many applicants. How do their admissions algorithms know what the yield would be?
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So senior year has definitely been more work here than we expected. S24 is going to use the no homework holiday weekend to finally start his common app essay (I do continue to find more and more grey hairs every day). The thing I cant get my head around is that his physic C teacher has never taught the class before but was his teacher for a survey of physical science they had as freshman and basically S24 says that the class is at the exact same level. Guess this will not be an AP test that the class passes, YIKES!!!
Question for experienced parents, I have been following an online college counselor who says not the report AP scores of 4 to highly selective schools. I am torn since he only took 2 and has a 4 and a 5. It seems ridiculous to not report these scores and leave it to the imagination of the AO what he actually got.
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I would report 4s.
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Iād report the 4. S24 got a 4 on the Spanish and is going to report it (granted as a foreign language AP I donāt think it is as critical) along with his two 5s.
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Iāll add this - I think that CCās mindset does a disservice to kids. It makes them think a single less than optimal grade or score is going to be the reason they donāt get into x, y, z school. I donāt think that is true - elite schools arenāt racking & stacking kids that way and even kids with near perfect grades/scores get rejected all the time.
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I believe the vast majority of public schools are not yield sensitive so they donāt care about being used as a safety or improving their yield. They will simply issue acceptances to qualified applicants based on expected yield. In other words, if their yield is 10% and have 20,000 seats to fill, they are fine issuing up to 200,000 acceptances.
(Footnote: schools have different yield rates for IS vs OOS and theyāll take that into account).
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Weāve been struggling with this as well. S has a good gpa at a very competitive public school, great ECs, Captain of Varsity sport but is a poor standardized test taker. He has been frustrated with this but decided to move along with going TO. However he will report the 4ās even though he has an A in those subjects.
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Congrats to all the kiddos getting accepted with Rolling Admissions! We also have Auburn on our list as well. I think that will be our first college we hear back from. D24 has Clemson and South Carolina has her #1 and #2 and those arenāt until Mid December. So will be nice to hear back from somewhere while we wait it out.
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Congrats to all of those with acceptances under their belt. D did not apply test optional, so many of her files were incomplete until official SAT scores were sent. I confirmed that her August scores were sent a couple days ago, so we should have an acceptance or two within a month or so. Our in-state safety says 2-4 weeks, and technically sheās top 10% auto admit, but she needed to send scores for automatic merit $$, so her file was incomplete until we sent them.
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So the typical rolling admissions college is a large public. And while their yield rate might be low, they have an enormous and useful body of historic data to draw on to model yield.
Part of why it is so useful is just the cost question. Their in state COA will place them in a certain position relative to typical OOS COA, and then their OOS COA will place them in a certain position relative to privates, and possibly other OOS if they feel like competing. So even before getting to merit and need aid, they have a good idea of their value proposition for different applicants.
And then they can use experience with merit and need aid to fine tune that further. I note a lot of need aid is pretty standardizedāindividual colleges might vary, but overall most colleges use a mostly standardized model.
So yeah, predicting whether any given individual using them as their safety/very likely will yield is hard.
But take 10000 people who fit a certain residency profile, basic academic and demographic profile, basic need profile, and who are given tailored merit aid as desired . . . and now you probably have a pretty good idea of what percentage of those 10000 will yield, even if you donāt know exactly which.
Not that they never make mistakes. You can see at many universities how COVID threw them off. Often first they underenrolled, then they overenrolled, and so on. But I think it usually takes a big unexpected external event like that, either systematically or as to their college specifically, to make it hard to predict yield pretty well.
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If the schools you are considering award credit or acceleration credit for a 4 (which most that I have looked at seem to, if they accept AP scores) why not? They seem to value it enough to give credit or let a kid take a higher course, so it seems it would be a positive on an application.
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The very large in-state dataset makes sense as helpful for yield algorithm-building - I hadnāt thought about that. One of my pet peeves, as discussed some days back, is the swath of would-be target privates having turned into reaches, apparently unable to build an algorithm that can sufficiently determine how many high-stats applicants to accept for every one that will yield, and simply WL/deny rather than accept.
As (homeschooled) S24ās guidance counselor I almost have all of my paperwork together for his applications. School profile is 90% done. List of all classes taken in high school with extensive descriptions of each (for S23 this was a 25 page document 
) is about 50% done, but I can reuse a lot of the info from S23. GC letter is drafted but definitely needs revisions.
S24 has finished everything on the Common App except the essay (and supplemental essays). He hasnāt actually written down anything for his essay but he says it is written in his head. 
First hard deadlines are Nov 1, but heās applying to a couple of rolling admission schools that I think would be good to get in earlier. Weāll seeā¦
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