Another option is to increase the number of applications and trust math.
Let’s say you are applying to colleges that your kid has a 20% of chance getting in.
When you apply to 10 schools, the probability of not getting into any of them is ~10%.
If you increase it to 20 schools, then the probability of not getting into any of them drops to ~1%.
When I was in high school, the state university (top 50 at that time) had an admission guarantee if your GPA and SAT/ACT were above a certain cut-off.
We don’t have that anywhere so it’s only logical to apply more to reduce the risk if you can afford the application fees.
Our rule of thumb is that “optional” on a college app isn’t really optional. I don’t have any personal knowledge of Clemson or their acceptance rate to help make a judgment call. I’m confused why the friend did three essays - were there three prompts to choose from and she did them all?
I’m sorry, this is brought up every now and then on CC, and the math nerd in me feels compelled to speak up
The logic above assumes each admission decision is a random event (like drawing a spade from a deck of cards) whose probability is known and that the 10 (or 20) events are uncorrelated. But that doesn’t reflect reality for several reasons but mainly because a) the acceptance rate at a school is the average across a large group of dissimilar applicants, not the acceptance rate for each applicant and b) many of the factors in an applicants profile (GPA, test scores, ECs, etc) are valued similarly across schools, so there is in fact a lot of correlation.
So applicants should carefully select a balanced list of schools, rather than rely on increasing the number of applications hoping “something will come through”. For example, a student who’s not “average excellent” can apply to all 20 “top 20” schools and get rejected by them all. Often, this can be predicted in advance so it’s not just a probabilistic outcome.
We have to make the educated guess and make decisions. If my DS24 is an average unhooked student with a 3.0 GPA and 1300 SAT, applying to all T30 schools will result in rejection. No math would help on this one.
If my DS24 has a 4.0 GPA and a 1550 SAT, applying to 5 T20 schools vs. 20 T20 schools would result in a very different outcome.
If you want to reduce the risk of 0 acceptance, my argument would be to increase in number of schools in the target range instead of adding 1 safety school.
That is an “intuition” that many people follow when they apply to every Ivy or T20 school.
If someone’s application is (comparatively) weak by whatever common measure, then it is universally weak at 10 schools the same as 20 schools - and that person will be at the bottom of every school’s stack. Their application doesn’t become more attractive because they applied to twice as many schools where each has many more strong applications to choose from than they can remotely admit.
Agree with everyone else that there is no harm in having a true safety that she would be happy with. But your guidance counselors should know the situation for your school. It is always possible that this year will be entirely different that years in the past, but very unlikely. For our highly ranked public school we have had similar advice, but will have S24 apply to at least 1 school with a more than 50% acceptance rate.
Highly selective HSs where a large chunk of the class goes to Top30s and kids from the lower quartile go to T75s are a different animal than conventional CC wisdom. Based on your description of naviance, your kid’s HS sounds similar. Trust your college counseling office! For our D21 with max rigor but a few spots out of the top10%, schools like BC and Wake were a match, W&M was an easier match(60-75%chance) and some top15 LACs were harder matches(25-45%). She got into ALL. For D23 (tippy top scores, Val, everything else) all the same schools were likely(75-95) and one was safety(>95), and admissions played out accordingly(all likelies /safeties were a Yes).
These types of test-in privates have a different admissions pattern than the average CC experience, and you can rest easy based on the naviance data and the counselor.
Let me rephrase my question about optional essays - we are/have done one. But how many should you do? Clemson asked for none. We did 1, should we do more? Same for the other colleges that ask for none. Is one enough or should we do more?
I don’t know about that college specifically, but I have always heard that most “optional” things on the applications aren’t really optional. Unless the college really emphasizes that it is optional, “when we say it is optional, we really, truly, mean optional!” then it is not actually. I don’t know if that is true, and my kids have not applied anywhere with optional things so I don’t have any real experience with it, but that is what I’ve heard.
Does anyone here know anything about applying to Northeastern University London - the 3 year London, 1 year Boston program?
DS22 is very interested in programs abroad and just submitted his application. It says rolling admission, but I don’t see any more details about how soon.
I don’t know about the NEU London 3/1 Program,
but DS2022’s friend did 1st semester in London, and then joined Boston campus.
Pro:
friend grew up quickly, doing everything on his own:
– London apartment, cooking/cleaning, etc
– traveled with few classmates to many nearby other countries that semester
Con: there didn’t seem to be a lot of support from NEU, just to get started there. Friend was basically fending for himself when he arrived in London.
In case parents are not reading this thread, in case this SUNY is on your child’s list:
this was shared about SUNY Potsdam,
So sad for SUNY Potsdam…Surprised chemistry even made it to the list.
The cutting programs:
• Art history (BA)
• Arts management (BA)
• Biochemistry (MS)
• Chemistry (BA and BS)
• Dance (BA)
• French (BA)
• Music performance (MM)
• Philosophy (BA)
• Physics (BA)
• Public health (BS and MS)
• Spanish (BA)
• Theater (BA)
Well, the usual question being presented when deciding whether and where to apply ED instead of RD is some form of “Will College A or College B fill up with ED admits before getting to RD?”
But when you think about that question in context, what the applicant really wants to know is whether they will still have a good chance of admissions in RD.
What I am trying to illustrate is that because yields from RD admits can be fairly low, even at generally highly selective colleges, a college which ends up with a pretty high percentage of its enrolled class from ED can still actually admit a lot of people RD. Because given such a yield, the people admitted RD are a multiple of the people who enroll after being admitted RD.
And I don’t think a lot of people care about the enrollment question per se. Indeed, if this question is being asked in the first place, often we are talking about a kid who has other schools they prefer, or at least might prefer. So they are actually part of that group who if admitted RD might well end up enrolling somewhere else.
So that’s the practical question in context–what are your chances of getting admitted RD? Not what are your chances of enrolling after getting admitted RD.
And for that purpose, the relevant observation is not what percentage of enrolled students are RD admits, but what percentage of admits are RD admits.
And so if 71% of WUSTL admits are RD admits, WUSTL has not filled up its admit class with ED admits. And that observation should take some pressure off kids who do not actually have WUSTL as their top choice, but are afraid it will fill up in ED. In the sense meaningful to them, it will not.
Thanks to you and everyone for the advice. I do trust the college advising office at her school, but I thought about it some more. There really is no reason not to throw in a clear safety for peace of mind assuming we can identify one especially since most of the safeties that she and the college advisor settled upon are need-aware. Based on Naviance, she has a great shot at all the colleges; truly these are places that seem to love her school. Nevertheless, I guess that I have a fear that at the end of the day, she might be turned down if we need too much aid. So why not look for at least one need-blind safety school if she can find one that she likes, is affordable, and has a higher admissions rate? I suspect that identifying such a school will require some compromises with location, and I guess that she and I will have to talk through that issue. Or I may end up borrowing, which was the line in the sand that I refused to cross with her older sister.
I agree with your conclusion, but many families are currently thinking differently. They are worried if they don’t pick an ED school for different, more strategic, reasons, they will have missed an opportunity to get into a school they would have preferred to whatever school the kid ends up attending.
So I think walking through some of these issues can help give those families some comfort that ED is an option when it makes sense, but not something you have to do. Or maybe they will think differently anyway, but I think it is at least valuable for the parents who come here to see different perspectives on these issues, and then of course decide for themselves what is right for their kid and their family.
So I think there are a few things worth unpacking here.
First, one of the main reasons not to applying binding early anywhere is because you need or want to compare aid offers. This does not apply to non-binding EA, so that is really a separate discussion. And I know a lot of kids at my feederish HS are applying non-binding EA only (including my kid), at least in the first round, so that is in fact a non-issue for them. And then of course at these sorts of high schools, a lot of the kids have families willing to be full pay, at least for whatever is their ED school, so that also becomes a non-issue for them.
Second, I don’t mean this to sound conspiratorial, but I think the college counselors at these high schools often have a global perspective that is somewhat different from plausible individual perspectives. Specifically, I think from their perspective, for each kid there is likely a pretty wide range of outcomes they think would be a good outcome for those kids. And they view their mission accomplished for the year if they can get every kid such an outcome, AND have every kid excited about that outcome.
And that is really a good attitude! And I am totally on board with that being their goal. And I think that leads to trying to start off open-minded about what would count as a good college for a kid, and then narrowing it by criteria that are specific to that kid, and then from that list there will very likely be some they think to which they should at least apply non-binding early. Indeed, even the kids like mine who have an REA school as their favorite still usually apply to at least one public early too (which is an exception to the REA rules), and maybe more.
The issue, though, is sometimes out here in broader social media, I encounter families who are really stressed about whether they should apply somewhere not just EA, but ED, and not because it is a clear favorite they can comfortably afford, but because they think they need to for strategic reasons.
And I don’t think the college counselors at my feederish HS want anyone to be thinking about college choice and applications quite like that. I think in cases like that, they would be hoping to work out a different early strategy that actually really made sense for that kid and that family.
And so that’s what I would hope parents here would be thinking too. Applying to some places early, in some form, likely will be a good idea in many cases. Particularly if you are comfortable being full pay, but in many other situations too.
But that doesn’t have to mean applying binding early to a college that actually isn’t your affordable favorite. There are other viable early strategies if that particular one doesn’t make sense for you.
Apparently we use a customized version of Kickstart which folds in our own school’s past data to determine which schools should be presumptive likelies, targets, and reaches. Even that can be adjusted since it is just based on numbers. But I agree with the principle that is really what matters.
