<p>I’ll bet that one of the schools that admitted the kid was Chicago. Given that the admission rate of U of Chicago is significantly better than the others on the list, the best way for an applicant to those 4 schools to increase “odds” would be to narrow down the list to Chicago only. That would probably have resulted in a 100% admit rate. Barring that, striking Brown from the list would have been a good start toward increasing “odds”.</p>
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Yes, this is true. I am only 38 miles from Google headquarters.</p>
<p>Well kid was accepted at Brown and Chicago, WL at Cornell. Reject at Dart.</p>
<p>My point is simply that Chicago has the highest admit rate of those 4 colleges, Brown the lowest. You can’t determine “odds” in hindsight – if I toss a coin 5 times and it comes up heads 4 times, it doesn’t reflect the overall odds of the coin coming up heads. So if you knocked Brown from the list, then your son’s actual results would have been diminished to 1 out of 3 – but his “odds” would have increased because he would have eliminated the college with the lowest admit rate.</p>
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What does it matter what your admit “percentage” is? This is not a batting average contest.</p>
<p>I think what matters more is getting accepted at a larger number of schools that you like. It also gives you a better chance at a good aid package.</p>
<p>If one kid applies to 10 schools and gets admitted to 50%, and another to two schools and gets admitted to 100%, the kid with the lower percentage stilll has more choice.</p>
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<p>Absolutely.</p>
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<p>That’s because you are doing your research backwards. You are coming up with an arbitrary short list and trying to match it to the applicant-specific criteria – rather than looking at the applicant-specific criteria and looking for schools that will appreciate that criteria. </p>
<p>The information is pretty easy to come by, but you have to develop the application list from the research, not use the research to narrow down a preselected list. In other words – a college that is highly selective and does not seem to particularly need another student like the applicant shouldn’t really be on the list in the first place – and certainly not on a list that is formulated with the idea of increasing chances of admission.</p>
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<p>Okay, let me ask a sample question here. What type of applicant should not bother applying to, say, Stanford, because they don’t need another one of that type of appplicant?</p>
<p>If this is easy to find, you could tell people here that information, and then they wouldn’t bother applying.</p>
<p>Frankly, I don’t think it’s that easy to tell.</p>
<p>What special qualities does that applicant have? How do those qualities benefit Stanford? How many other students with similar qualities apply to or attend Stanford?</p>
<p>How did Stanford get onto the student’s “list” if not because of some particularly offering or program at Stanford that meshed with what the student had to offer the school? </p>
<p>(I can easily answer the question for my region, which is local to Stanford. Stanford takes local public school students who are star athletes. No athletics + public school + northern California means admission at Stanford is unlikely. It might be very different for a student who can add “geographic diversity” to the list of “what the student offers the school” - for example, a kid from Louisiana.)</p>
<p>^We’re in NY and Stanford also only seems to take athletes from our school. But I didn’t tell my son not to apply, because after it might be the year they figure out there are some great kids at our school who don’t play football. (It wasn’t, but I can put the blame on my son, he really didn’t like their application. I suppose in retrospect I could have refused to pay for the application because I didn’t think he put together a good enough application, but that seemed unnecessary.)</p>
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So you think students shouldn’t research the schools they would like to attend, but should research those where they might have an admissions edge? I simply don’t agree. Also, I don’t think there is anything particularly arbitrary about the list I gave–I think that would be a very sensible reach list for quite a few students.</p>
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<p>I just don’t believe it is possible to predict admission to Stanford or any other highly selective college based on answers to these types of questions. Sucking up to the college based on some supposed match between the applicant and a particular program is a fool’s game. There is no way of knowing what is in demand and as soon as that type of information would become known everyone would try to use it to get admitted. Sure, don’t claim you want to major in engineering if the school has no engineering department but beyond that don’t hold your breath that your child’s fit with some particular program will sway the admissions committee. Most students change majors anyway before graduating so statistically they are better off opting for “undecided” in the application process. </p>
<p>There is no set of questions that will help you answer if you have a greater chance of admission to Yale or Harvard, or Stanford or MIT, unless you are legacy or recruited athlete. Most selective colleges do not care about demonstrated interest. They just want to assemble the best possible class. </p>
<p>We also lived near Stanford and from our local public high school a number of non-athletes were admitted every year. Let’s face it, nobody has a high likelihood of admission to Stanford and the vast majority of those admitted are NOT athletes. If everybody who had a low likelihood had followed the advice of not applying Stanford would be essentially empty.</p>
<p>The admission’s process cannot be fully rationalized, especially at the highest level, however much we would like it to be. Universities use a holistic process that defies easy categorization. There is no more a typical profile of the Stanford student than there is of the typical medical student. They want diversity and accept a very broad range of candidates with completely different profiles from nerds to jocks. What is certain, your chances of admission are zero if you don’t apply.</p>
<p>calmom -</p>
<p>First, I agree with what you are saying that a person should research and not just apply willy-nilly. There may be some obvious things that can cause you to eliminate school A or favor school B.</p>
<p>But,
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<p>See, to me these are contradictory criteria. Stanford is famous for it’s computer science curriculum. Therefore, by the second criteria here, it would seem to me that a lot of kids with an inclination toward computer science should/would apply to Stanford.</p>
<p>But, by the first criteria, the fact that so many of such students apply would indicate that if you are one of those “computer geeks” you shouldn’t apply.</p>
<p>That’s why I say it is not so easy, and if you can pick reasonable schools by both criteria it can’t hurt to apply to more than one or two.</p>
<p>The point of this thread is how to increase “odds” or “chances” of admission. You improve your chances by research and effective targeting. I’m not saying that you can’t throw out a few more apps just to see what happens – that’s fine – but it is no more increasing the chances of admission at X number of schools than I increase my chances of getting rich by buying 20 lottery tickets instead of 1. (Either way the odds are against me – obviously if I buy 20 tickets, 19 which are duds and 1 which wins some money, I’m going to feel happy that I bought all 20 – but that just means I got lucky, it doesn’t mean that I did much to improve chances).</p>
<p>I don’t understand why people think it is impossible to research to find out what a college might be looking for in a student – or seem so stymied when it comes to identifying what an applicant’s strengths are. There are plenty of sources of information. </p>
<p>I think the problem is with the whole Ivy obsession – it leads people to clamor after a small number of schools based on their ranking or prestige and essentially choose from a pool where they’ve already excluded many of the best bets for admission. </p>
<p>Sometimes a student will make that choice for other reasons – for example, my daughter wanted a mid-size to large college at an urban campus, and in making that choice she essentially shut the door on the many rural and suburban LAC’s where she would have been a particularly strong candidate. </p>
<p>But she made that choice knowingly. The college list process began with: Applicant wants qualities A,B,C from college; applicant has qualities X, Y, Z to offer college. What colleges offer A,B,C? Of those colleges, what colleges most want X,Y,Z? The more the list narrowed on the “colleges that want X,Y,Z” part, the more the chances of admission went up. </p>
<p>If you exclude the “colleges that want X,Y,Z” part from the equation – then you aren’t doing anything to increase chances. You are just sending out more applications. Yes, the kid might get admitted to some and not all of the colleges they apply to, and in hindsight the kid & parents might be very glad that they applied to so many. But the kid who applies to only 1 Ivy and gets admitted is also happy in hindsight – their parents might say, “we were right to save our money and to focus all energies on one college.” The kid who applies to 8 Ivies and is rejected by all 8 is not going to have any warm, smug feelings about how chances were increased - all they have gained is an unwanted lesson in dealing with disappointment. </p>
<p>You increase “chances” by gaining and applying information. If you throw up your hands and decide it is impossible to get such information, then you might perceive the process as random – but I don’t think that’s the reality. If you went to a private college counselor for advice and that counselor told you, “gee, I don’t know, the colleges are all pretty much the same, why don’t you just apply to all of them and see what happens” – I doubt that you would think you had gotten your money’s worth.</p>
<p>So if it comes back to the advice given by the high school g.c. – it seems to me pretty sound advice if the g.c. is saying “applying to more” isn’t the key to getting in - as opposed to, doing a better job of choosing which colleges to apply to. </p>
<p>I would note that at schools where many students apply to selective colleges, the high school g.c.'s are very much aware of the results over the years of students who apply a scattershot vs. narrowly targeted approach to their applications. So I wouldn’t dismiss the opinion of an experienced g.c. – instead, I would tend to explore it by asking what their experience has been.</p>
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No, that fact would indicate that the applicant needs to either have particularly strong credentials in computer tech, or else the student needs some sort of additional qualities, possibly unrelated to computer stuff, that would make them particularly attractive. I’d assume that Stanford wants to fill its computer science classes with capable students, but it also wants diversity in those classes – so a diversity factor might be helpful. </p>
<p>If the student doesn’t have those added factors, then they really have to be very, very impressive in whatever they do offer.</p>
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<p>I believe that type of distinction would be impossible to draw within the Ivy league for instance. What is the X, Y, Z that Harvard would want but that Yale, Princeton or Brown would not want or vice-versa? </p>
<p>I think the admissions process to the most selective colleges has become more and more like being picked for American Idol: unpredictable and holistic. </p>
<p>First, you need to have a decent voice, otherwise you don’t stand a chance. That is like having solid stats for admission. Without them don’t bother applying unless you have some major hook. </p>
<p>Second, you need some talent in order to stand out. Talent may mean many things and is not clearly defined. It could mean stage presence, appearance, range of voice, playing an instrument… Same thing with college admission. The top colleges look for something unique you may bring to the school: maybe you wrote a novel, are a top violinist, filed a patent, won a science competition, or raised money for the Red Cross. </p>
<p>There is no way the candidates can second guess the jury on the basis of the type of music that will appeal to them or what qualities they look for. You don’t have necessarily a better chance by picking western over pop or rock and roll going through tapes of previous shows to determine what angle will get you to the next round. The judges want variety and what was hot last year may not be so this year. </p>
<p>Unless you have some amazing talent that blows the jury away, whether you get picked depends on many factors outside of your control: time of day, how many candidates they have already accepted that day, how many had similar profiles, if the judges are grumpy or happy. They are just not going to accept ten girls that look and sound like Carrie Underwood, even if they are very talented. Also, if at the end of the day, the judges have not picked many candidates, a less than stellar candidate may make it through. If on the other hand, the day was front-loaded with top talent, afternoon candidates will struggle. If they have picked too many girls, they need to leave room for the boys even if they are slightly less talented. There is also plenty of disagreement among the judges as there would be in any admissions committee and this means many compromises are made. If you turn down all my picks I will turn down yours! </p>
<p>At the end of the day, the jury just as an admissions committee wants to assemble the best possible and diverse group of talented individuals. As planned they end up with such a group. But the process was far from predictable. As with top colleges, they could probably have picked a totally different set of applicants and been just as pleased with the results.</p>
<p>As so often happens here on CC, there are elements of common wisdon–really sensible ones–that just don’t apply all that well to kids who are looking at the very most selective colleges out there. As cellardweller noted, you just can’t position yourself that well among those schools–and there are students who particularly want to go to a school that is populated by high achievers. So while a student might prefer, say, Williams to Harvard (or vice versa), it may be impossible to determine which of those schools is more likely to want him. I think this is less true at schools that aren’t at the very top end of selectivity.</p>
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Plenty, for people who do research.</p>
<p>Here’s a simple example. My daughter’s strength was in a foreign language that had a significant shortage of students at many, but not all colleges. Very easy to research - just a matter of going to college web sites and counting up the number of faculty in that department, including grad students who were supposed to be teaching undergrads – and compare that to enrollment figures for their courses. I figured that any college that had many faculty but few students in a given department would give favorable consideration to students likely to enroll in courses in the under-subscribed department. </p>
<p>Yale was so short of undergrads in that particular language that they wrote an article in one of their publications featuring a student majoring in the language, and highlighting the fact that she was the ONLY student in that major. Brown, on the other hand, seemed to have more students enrolled in that language than any other elite college, and Brown seemed to be the only school that had experienced increases in enrollment during the years it was declining in other schools. So its pretty obvious that a student with a background and interest in that particular language would have a leg up at Yale, but there would be no reason whatsoever to think that it added anything to an application to Brown. </p>
<p>A student who sees each of the Ivies as essentially being the same is at a competitive disadvantage to students who have done their research, even as compared to a student who has identical attributes. Why? Because the student who has done the research would know what to highlight in their application, both about their own attributes and in the “why college” essay that is submitted with the application.</p>
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<p>Yale does not admit students based on intended majors. Nor does any of the other elite colleges. Most students will change anyway. Somebody with an interest in some obscure language in which nobody is interested would have a leg up over an outstanding candidate with undeclared interests or even an interest in a very popular major? No way. Are you seriously suggesting that a candidate should write an essay on how they really, really want to study a Norse language at Yale? Unless you can back it up a with a treatise in the subject, that would appear as brownosing to most adcoms. </p>
<p>The entire idea that you can increase your chances by tailoring your essay around what you think the school may want to hear by looking for hints on their web site is simply naive. Colleges don’t really care about what you say, unless you can back it up. You have a much better shot at admission by presenting a clear and genuine view of who you really are and what you have to offer, not by turning into some chameleon that matches its surroundings. Admissions committees are much more sophisticated that you make them appear. They know when they see a candidate they like. They don’t need any hints. Most elite colleges don’t even have a why do you want to come here. Harvard certainly knows why!</p>
<p>Actually, schools give tips on the websites. Williams went out of its way to indicate that it looks for musicians. Gave us a nudge to consider highly selective colleges and S now attends Williams.</p>
<p>Brown acceptance came from answers to application for 8 year med program I believe. He wasn’t accepted to it, but it gave him more leeway to express values and ideas.</p>
<p>Tips, cues, etc are all over the admissions process. And picking up on them amplifies success, but somehow the majority of kids do end up at suitable schools.</p>
<p>Another approach is to apply against type – like a musical comedy star applying to Stanford and a mathematician choosing Yale. </p>
<p>As calmom said, schools need to keep departments strong. Knee jerk reactions say, “languages, Middlebury.” But Middlebury may be looking for something else.</p>
<p>S had two very arcane interests in Classics and composing classical music. D had much more conventional interests. I think the fact that Williams graduates 6 music and 6 classics majors a year vs. 60 English majors or even more economics majors and bio majors worked in his favor. The adcom knew its faculty would have a bottom in some of the chairs hardest to fill.</p>
<p>D chose American studies, interdisciplinary and easy to fill seats. </p>
<p>She ended up at the perfect school for her, but she probably had to market herself a little more vigorously.</p>
<p>That said, I think the basic premise of the thread is still that more applications usually yield more options. Not a difficult concept.</p>
<p>Cellardweller, you clearly don’t understand what I am saying. The point is NOT telling the college what they want to hear. The point is that the applicant knows their own unique strengths and seeks out colleges that will want students with those strengths. The strengths must be supported by the kid’s record – my d had spent a semester living abroad and studied a language for 4 years. She didn’t say what she planned to major in. When my daughter got to college, she was assigned a faculty advisor – who happened to be the head of the department for her chosen language. I don’t think that was an accident or a coincidence – I think that my daughter marketed herself based on a particular strength, and the college bought what she was selling. </p>
<p>The point is, she qualities A & B. A & B happened to be an academic area and an art area. I told my d. that among reach colleges, she should look for schools that would want A and/or B, preferably both. (Among safety schools it didn’t matter – for the safeties the selling point was her GPA and test scores.) To apply to a reach (or even a match) that didn’t care about A & B was a waste of an application fee – why should that school accept her over students that DID fill some institutional need?</p>
<p>Since the Ivies are pretty much a reach for everyone, then the only way to increase “chances” is by doing better research and targeting. If a school rejects 9 out of 10 applicants, then the odds favor rejection. So it is more likely than not that the undistinguished student who applies to multiple schools will increase the number of rejections. </p>
<p>Put it this way – lets go back to a gambling analogy – we’ll play a card game where I am going to remove all face cards from the deck-- you bet $50 – I shuffle the deck and I deal you one card. If its an Ace - you win. If its any other card (2-10)-- you lose your $50. You have to put another $50 down to play again. </p>
<p>So basically, on each individual deal, the odds 9:1 that you will lose $50. Is playing more rounds a good strategy? It is true that the more you play, the great the odds that there will be one round where you don’t lose-- but the reality is that if you play 5 rounds sitting next to someone who plays 2 rounds, chances are that you emerge the bigger loser. </p>
<p>I’m saying that its better to either change the game or look for a game where the odds are better. Essentially, research and targeting means that you can stack the deck somewhat.</p>