Ok, now first of all disclaimer: I don’t yet have a set formed opinion about it and I myself, was a prep scholar and will probably be accepted as a match finalist because I fit in profile very well and while it’s no guarantee, most prep scholars turn into college match scholars. Point being, this is just a ponder from me, please don’t take it as my definitive opinion or as me accusing Questbridge, which does do many a great thing, I just had a little thought about how this program might actually be hindering a lot of low-income applicants in the long run.
So here’s some food for thought and I was wondering if anyone else could expand on this. Questbridge charges their partner institutions a premium for access to these high achieving low income students. These low income students almost all apply for the match program which removes them from the applicant pool of competing schools, and with few exceptions, these admissions offers are binding. Questbridge describes these as full four year rides but does not go into the details that at nearly every school, these full rides are going to include student contributions that represent a hardship for a lot of the targeted low income students. That aside, most everyone knows that ED/EA admissions are your best shot at getting into a top choice school with Ivy leagues admitting as high as 39% of their class through such measures. But these admissions offers are off the table for these low income kids who choose to match. The final match percentage is less than 2%.
So Questbridge collects a fee, colleges select ridiculously few in the match and low income students are cut out of the EA/ED applicant pool in which they would have the greatest advantage?
Thoughts?
I really don’t mean to offend anyone I myself participated in Questbridge, but I’m just curious if anyone has anything else to add onto this?
Participating in an ED would obligate a low income student to matriculate, even if the attendant offers of financial aid were abysmal in the end. Where is the upside to that?
I know you said you are a scholar, and therefore familiar with the program, and , presumably, its outcomes. However, I have looked extensively into the Questbridge program, and given information to students and high schools so they could alert students to the opportunities within Questbridge. I don’t think your overall match rates are correct; I think they are too low.
Yes, but even with abysmal FA, the admission rates are still better and for most Questbridge applicants the FA offered would be the equivalent of a match scholarship as all partner colleges are schools who guarantee to meet all demonstrated need.
The Match rates are based on their released data, you are right though, they hover between 6 and 11 percent, I was counting total applicants, rather than just finalists. Like I said I’m just curious about it because I found it really curious when an admissions officer discussed briefly their frustration with the fee that Questbridge charges and it occurred to me that it has in a lot of ways “cornered” the market on low income students and that the founders, while also philanthropists, are well versed in the art of turning profits from things such as hospitals. Like I said an interesting idea that popped into my head. 
I benefited from a lot of what Quest-bridge has to offer but I also saw a kind of different side to it. I was pressured A LOT by a questbridge rep to do the college match and to rank schools. It made me sort of uncomfortable and she seemed very upset when I asked if choosing not to match would impact the decision of who would become a finalist, as the match form is due before the admissions decisions of finalists are released. Instead of answering my question she just basically said that it would be stupid of me not to do the match. For me personally, the match will offer me no better FA than what I will get from any of the partner institutions and I know that my top choice school has an admit rate of about 20% for its early round, as compared to less than 10% that I would get from matching, which includes many colleges much less competitive than my top choice school. She staunchly advised me to do something that really wasn’t in my best interest to do. I think that honestly for a lot of students the match is not the most advantageous way to seek admissions.
That being said the shining gemstone of Questbridge is the flexibility that it shows with it’s app and the consideration it shows for the struggles I have faced do not go un-noticed by me
Your theory is in opposition of my theory that QB Match is equivalent to ED for the QB pool. I know very well that ED rates are skewed by recruited athletes, which can be 200 heads in Ivy League, and by legacies and other ‘specials’. So you aren’t seeing the ED numbers for what they really are. And I think a lot of QB students try to match with a reach that is too high, just because it is a partner. I do not think you will benefit from your one ED shot. And I don’t think you will benefit over QB with up to 8 choices.
@girlchild You can be released from ED if the package is not sufficient.
S was a QB match finalist who chose not to rank. You are right in that the schools with the most generous financial aid – and I am talking only a handful – will give you the same package. S was admitted EA and there is neither a family contribution nor loans in his package. However I ran net price calcs for all the QB partners he was interested in. With the exception of a few highly selective schools, all others included (subsidized) loans or a family contribution or both.
My points are
1 - being able to write “QB finalist” on an ED or EA app is already giving you an advantage you should realize is entirely due to QB. You are right that very few kids get matched. That is not a secret! But that is not QB’s “fault” – it is the schools’ decision. Yale for example will ONLY take a match which has $0 EFC. But being a QB finalist puts you in the running for EA and RD.
2 - while some schools will give you a package which is as generous, most will not. Run net price calcs not only for the reach schools but also for the more realistic admits with your family’s data and see how they come out. I suspect (and here this is MY theory) that some do not want to give kids that full aid, no loans, no family $ package unless there is a compelling reason of their own. So they will not match you but they will be more likely to take you RD. I have heard of schools calling kids to encourage them to do ED even tho they did not take them as a match. This is more $ on your end but again, the QB advantage is seen in the app process.
3 - great if you want to do ED at a school you would love to attend! That means there will be QB space for someone else. But what if your ED doesn’t work out? If you are set on that school and it is a QB school you could always rank only that one school. If the match doesn’t work out you can have your app forwarded for RD in spring to multiple other schools – for free.
4 - the QB support is so helpful! The other students are inspiring. Maybe you are ina completely different setting but for S it was great to not be the only brilliant low income kid who dreams big. Doing the app so early (and so thoroughly) helps you in your college search to articulate who you are, what you aspire to, etc.
I am not offended by the fee or whatever given by partner schools. QB deserves it. They do a lot of work for that $! Can you imagine paying staff who will answer your email within 24 hours? Where else should they get the money needed to run a professional operation? From the low income kids who can’t afford it in the first place?
And for the schools it is a smart investment.
@BrownParent That is an interesting notion too, likely letters are not ED/EA correct? I definitely think you’re right about QB applicants over reaching I mean the app is free so why not reserve the first 3 Spots for Stanford, Princeton and Yale because they are all non binding and most of these kids don’t have access to the kind of long term coaching it can take to get into one of these schools. Most of them are also pretty unaware of the competition. I hadn’t even heard of Yale until I did the young global scholars, the only college I’d ever really heard of outside of my state schools was Harvard and my parents were very disappointed with how they were treated when we visited there.
@momcinco If you don’t mind my asking, where did your son end up going? I calculated all the net prices for the partners I was interested in and came up only with the student contribution. I am only interested in Yale, Washington and Lee, Colby, Vassar, Dartmouth and Williams though and I just realized that all of these schools have a no loan policy, which would explain a lot I qualify for the fee waiver with or without QB so I’m not super concerned about app fees. My parents actually talked to me about being worried about how to pay test score sending fees for the ACT which unlike the SAT does not have fee waivers :(. I really wish Yale was ED. It’s the only school on my list I would be prepared to make a commitment to attend because it’s the only school I’ve spent serious time at. Doing the app early is also a huge plus of Questbridge, I think it may be more difficult for some students to apply to Questbridge so early and have everything together but it allows students to clean house as far compared to peers who are often working on apps through Christmas dinner.
I don’t fault Questbridge for the fee, I just have a little suspicion is all, with that in mind I feel sort of like I’m being brokered and I do sort of worry that they may not always be up front with students about what the best option really is for them.
@cowtownbrown
Several points:
*All the information on financial aid packages for matched students is readily available on the QB website.
*If you didn’t match with a college, you aren’t bound to any of them unless you choose to apply ED II.
*The attitude of a stubborn Questbridge employee does not fully reflect the interests of the organization or the colleges in question.
I see that you’re applying to Yale, W&L, Colby, Vassar, Dartmouth, and Williams. Are there any reasons you’re not applying to Rice?
@Fredjan Rice is a great school but I don’t think it’s a great fit for me and while the information IS readily available on the website when I went to the conference they really skimmed over the family contributions and focused almost exclusively on how a top school education would be cheaper than a state schools. I think this is very important for families to know, but I also think it’s very important that students leave the conference very aware of the contributions they will be expected to make and in my year at least, our Facebook group is rife with students who were not aware of that.
@cowtownbrown
Fair enough.
Now that you mention it, it’s surprising that QB did not go into detail with respect to expected family contributions.
I do remember that, at least for the group of 2014 Quest Scholars, some were very surprised of contributions expected by Emory and USC.
Are there any statistics on matches and non-matches? Are their minimum test scores and GPAs to enter the program?
I know that on occasion, it seems that low income students are sold a bill of goods by their GCs and/or parents, and don’t realize how tough it is to get into top schools. Like, someone was telling me how they worked hard to get a 2000 on the SAT. That’s nothing to an Ivy, and a reason to say no right off the bat.
"That's nothing to an ivy"
That’s probably correct, but some of the partner colleges (Bowdoin, Wesleyan) are test-optional, and others (Grinnell, Carleton, Davidson, Emory, possibly Colby) will overlook a small deficit if the student has exceptional life experiences or encountered extreme adversities.
@rhandco They do not release those kinds of statistics nor the actual numbers of scholars accepted by each institution, very hush hush about that, as most schools are about the average scores of EA/ED admittances.
There is definitely a skewed perspective on what it takes to get in. Most of us go to schools that don;t know the first thing about competitive admissions. My parents had never heard of any American schools except Harvard and have no idea the kind of applicants that are regularly rejected. I come from a situation where I cannot afford to take a Saturday off from work in order to retest,and while my scores are acceptable (33 ACT, 750 and 740 subject tests) they aren’t perfect and they are what I have to go forward with whether I like them or not. I know I can do better, and I had better scores on practice tests but even if I had completely bombed them, I would be hard pressed to be able to re-take. I studied very hard but I know that a lot of kids don’t have the time to do that either. it’s only natural that low income students have different priorities in the application process. It makes us very vulnerable to what any authority has to say on the topic and there was definitely some serious confusion about the contribution in my “cohort”.
Oh and no definitive minimum but the average ACT is 29 for finalist and 31 for match recipients.
Certainly, but 200 points is not a small deficit. And not all poor people have compelling life stories.
To be honest, the amount of assistance that top students in urban settings get in HS, in terms of homework help, free SAT courses, mandatory ECs that look great, hurts them to some degree because in college you have to search out special help. Programs for poor kids tend to focus on providing money for books and some guidance, but going out and becoming part of the college community becomes difficult when in HS there was significant support.
I have lived both rural and Urban and I have never been offered this assistance! color me jealous lol. I disagree with much of the statement that low income students are “socialized” through mandatory outreach and the like. I think the major issue is that low income students typically live in low income neighborhoods and go to low income schools where they socialize and interact with other low income people. I think the biggest difficulty in becoming part of the college community is the fact that there is a massive difference between the low income social setting I came from and the often high end social setting of an Elite school.
The 15 dollars it costs for me to send test scores is difficult for my family, at one of my top choices 60% of the student body does not even qualify for Financial aid putting their yearly income at probably 200k+. It’s difficult for us to be involved socially around people, who aren’t necessarily bad or anything, they just don’t have any idea of what it’s like to live the way we do.
For example, when I was visiting an ivy school, I noticed that all these kids had this one style of jacket and one of my group leaders was telling me that the jacket was a huge trend on campus and everyone was buying them. I looked it up, it’s an almost 900 dollar jacket…
It is true near where I live, but I live in a state consistently in the top three in the nation for K-12 schooling.
@rhandco
The weight of that depecit depends on the college. Your second statement is also true, which is why colleges only match a very low percent of applicants.
@cowtownbrown
33 is a formidable score. I had similar stats and was matched to a partner college.
re: $900 jackets @ ivy. That’s crazy. I brought a $40 weatherproof jacket along with me to college and it was getting compliments.
@Fredjan totally, I said to myself, “I sort of like that jacket, I might get myself one of those!” NOPE If you don’tmind my asking, what school do you attend and why did you choose there?
It’s funny you say that because my D went to a summer program (2x actually) at a similar school and fell in love at application time…because she was so familiar with it. She could SE herself there in a way she couldn’t at other schools she hadn’t lived in for 6 weeks.
In the end, she didn’t get into that school but did get into a peer school she’d only visited for a couple of hours (she revisited after acceptance for a weekend).
She LOVES it. Is positive that the other school would not have been nearly as good a fit for her, now that she is where she is.
So maybe…caution?
@cowtownbrown brown is a partner And there is some overlap with brown and Yale applicants as they are similar in some ways, undergrad focused. It was the only other Ivy my dd applied to and she loved her time there and being an alum. Also brown and vassar have overlaps. I know a student accept to brown last year, wanted to go but he got the big award at wash and lee and it worked out better financially, so even those have some common applicants, consider it.
@ohmomof2 or maybe the refrain that most students are happy where they land is true?