From a family income perspective, our DS (rising Senior) qualifies for the Questbridge program. I am curious from anyone who has gone that route if there are any cons to applying to the partner schools via Questbridge rather than just applying in a regular fashion. Thanks for the feedback.
The first big benefit is that there’s no (bad) surprise, you get a full ride (run the NPC on a variety of colleges to see the differences).
The second benefit is that you get the “priority application” equivalent of ED, but instead of being limited to 1 college (+ no leverage for financial aid), you apply to 8 colleges.
The third benefit is that you don’t have to pay the application fees and test scores, (which really adds up), and your application arrives “distinguished”
Also, you’re not prevented from applying to public universities (in or out of state) that offer generous merit scholarships and since your application has been ready for a while, you can apply to as many of them as you wish, including the Park, Robertson, Stamps, etc.
Downsides:
The student needs to prepare the application over the summer. It needs to be polished and read to go in September. That’s less time to make it as good as possible. If the student has to work over the summer, that makes for a difficult summer.
You want to include half LACs half universities, or all LACs, because including only universities may lead to poor results. If you’re interested in small, highly selective institutions focused on the undergraduate experience and can express why (how what they offer matches your strengths and qualities) then you’re in luck, but if you want to study at a large national university, then it’s a bit harder.
Questbridge doesn’t mean “slam dunk/admission guaranteed” - QB sometimes lets you forget that you may well be rejected.
In my daughter’s case, I don’t think advertising the fact she was low income helped… she did not get into a single Questbridge school she applied to, despite her stats being over the 75% range for finalists. She did, however, get into all but two of the non-Questbridge schools (and was waitlisted at the two she did not get into).
Her situation is a little unique since she is not first generation (or an URM) and I graduated from an Ivy league school (living proof an Ivy degree does not guarantee economic success). The QB application focuses on the hardships a student has had to overcome and while money has always been an issue and myself and her older two siblings are domestic abuse survivors, she does not feel that she, personally, has had much to overcome. So perhaps her QB application was just not very compelling (and probably even less so when compared to other QB finalists).
She did not talk about these “hardships” at all in her Common App, instead she choose to write her personal statement on her identity as an artist. So the non-QB schools would not have had any indication of her low-income status and would perhaps assume she had little need due to my Ivy-calibre degree.
One of my big concerns at the beginning of the process was getting a waiver for the Noncustodial Parent Profile. QB says if you’ve had no contact with your NCP for over a year, you would not need their info. A huge benefit, I thought. And was wrong, you don’t need the info for QB but the schools all still require it.
The only other benefit we may have received from applying through QB was some of the schools accepted her SAT scores as official from her high school so we saved some money by not having to order those through College Board. My income is low enough that her college application fees would have been waived anyway. I also want to note that applying through QB made things a little more difficult for her high school guidance counselor who had to submit mid-year reports separately to each school rather than just uploading it to the Common App.
So, in my daughter’s case, QB did not help, the actual benefits were minimal, and I do truly feel that applying through them may have hindered her chances at those schools.
And in retrospect, it didn’t matter in her case since she’d probably be going to Cornell (my alma mater) anyway regardless of where else she was accepted. It just made the decision easier when she didn’t get into any of her other top choices.
"In my daughter’s case, I don’t think advertising the fact she was low income helped… she did not get into a single Questbridge school she applied to, despite her stats being over the 75% range for finalists. She did, however, get into all but two of the non-Questbridge schools (and was waitlisted at the two she did not get into)
So, in my daughter’s case, QB did not help, the actual benefits were minimal, and I do truly feel that applying through them may have hindered her chances at those schools."
This is a fairly typical experience. Above all, QuestBridge is good at marketing. Most QuestBridge finalists do not get into a QuestBridge school (there is data online). A lot of kids put a lot of stock – too much stock – in the program, only to see minimal or no results. It’s worth applying, probably; but not worth counting on, or investing lots of time and effort into.
Sorry to hear about dedex13’s experience. It is a good counterpoint because as noted ^ QB is not a guarantee.
We had a great experience with QB. The advantages noted in post #1 were what worked. S got a head start on essays and putting together a coherent application, which saved him time and stress later. He used (early spring junior year) College Prep essays for 4 non-QB fly-in program essays (summer before senior year.) He then used a another fly-in essay for his main QB essay (Sept senior year) and polished it up for the Common App (early Nov).
The conference was very helpful and he made friends there some of whom he is still in touch with. They supported each other thru the app’s process.
However there is an important caveat: he decided not to do Match. I have a masters and he is not URM. So he figured since his chances were so low, and since he had a clear top favorite, he would rather do a straight EA through the Common App. He emphasized being a QB finalist in his application.
If he had not done EA he would have applied to at least 10 schools. We would have had to send in SAT and app fees and transcripts (our school charges per transcript).
Would he have gotten into his school without QB? Maybe. Is he glad he did QB? Yes.
There’s no harm in applying and many students are very successful.
For them, it means a full ride to a college that literally changes their life
(as lower income students, URMs, and first generation students
are most likely to benefit from the resources and network elite schools offer.)
But Questbridge is not a guaranteed ticket and shouldn’t be thought of as such.
It’s like 8 lottery tickets instead of one. If you win, you’re golden. But you better
do everything else, too.
There’s also Posse, which seems surer in terms of admission ratios.
Actually now you can rank up to 12 !
Match program allows for 12 schools now.