@norik95 , it’s not just academic ranking. When you have an academic superstar kid, you feel like it should be, but for most schools, good enough is good enough - val is not preferable to sal or anyone else who can cut it! And when a school offers merit to top performers, it needs to manage how many offers it has outstanding. Hence the deferrals.
As for academics and rank – it’s a little bit like saying a kid should have made the soccer team because he’s the fastest runner. Yes, most kids will need speed and stamina for the game, but they also need particular skills beyond that. Each team is picking for those.
Your D will end up at a school where she will no doubt use her academic chops to have a great experience. No doubt!
What do you mean by less qualified? Would she have gone if accepted (read the post above)?
I have no doubt that there were many, many top students who were accepted to NE. I assume they demonstrated something that perhaps your daughter did not. I am not putting your daughter down- she is clearly a top student.
Did your daughter do her research and show that NE was a top contender for her?
Yes. CWRU sends out these fee waivers broadly to target, not low-income students, but high-stat students. It generally follows the same playbook UChicago successfully used. At least at UChicago, an applicant needs to check the box to indicate that s/he would apply for FA in order to get a fee waiver.
Does your daughter need financial aid? What major is she interested in? For engineering & CS admissions are much more difficult - fellow students may have applied to less impacted majors. Our HS (in MA) sends a lot of kids to NEU - last year about 50 kids were admitted (only about 17/18 end up attending). All kids applying ED were accepted - some with grades/scores less than typical. It is definitely the easiest path to admittance. Most kids with top stats were admitted, but a couple were not. You never know why.
You have no idea what the application of these other students looked like. You don’t know what they may be doing after school, what their LORs say, etc…
Minuscule differences in GPA/rank and test scores aren’t what distinguishes top applicants.
This hits a nerve for me because my D was “only” in the top 10% of her class, not one of the top 3 kids GPA wise but she still had an unweighted 4.0 and missed NMF by one question for her year. (Her school was very competitive and the top 20% of the class were all high honor roll students ).
One of her friend’s parents did a lot of griping that she was admitted to honors colleges and received more merit $ than some of their kids who were ranked higher. Frankly, what you are expressing right now in your posts.
What those parents didn’t know is that she had a patent pending, had won all kinds of accolades outside of school, and was a top musician in our region. She was a humble kid and never would have talked about that. And her GC told us she was the top female STEM student he’d ever had in his 20+ years at the school (a private STEM HS). He told us her that would be in his LOR. Her other recommender talked about her leadership qualities in and out of the classroom (we ended up seeing it after the fact because he submitted it for an award and it captured who she was as a person and student beautifully). The other parents would have had no way of knowing any of that.
I understand that you are disappointed for your daughter that she wasn’t admitted early, but disparaging other students’ achievements is not helpful to the discussion. And, IMO, being humble is a positive trait.
No fin aid need . Demonstrated interest . On line tour, Emailed AO for a specific question about the major . Uploaded her research paper and Rec letters . major - biology / English
Nearly every school needs to find students whom it deems to be a fit and to manage its yield. That’s understood. However, yield protection is more than yield management. To me, it means that the school tries to decipher the intentions of applicants beyond whether they are fit for the school. I’ll use UChicago as an example. Among its top EA applicants in STEM, many would also apply to MIT/Caltech. If the top STEM applicant appears to be a likely admit to one of these other two schools, s/he will almost certainly be deferred, regardless how strong the application is and how much interest/fit s/he demonstrated in essays and visits. The same may happen to some applicants (particularly in NYC area) who may be suspected to be a likely Columbia ED admit.
Less qualified academically . Less rigorous classes , and lower GPA. Not sure about their EC .
If university reviews applicants from one school they should be able to see the qualifications of all kids applying . I am actually done with This
discussion . It’s time to move on . There is no valid point )).
I’m firmly in the camp that momofboiler describes…that no one knows the full extent of any other applicant’s application package.
All your kid can do at this point for CWRU and NEU is to submit whatever materials they ask for (e.g. LOCI, another LoR, mid year grades, etc.) and wait for RD decisions. Meanwhile, you can help them celebrate the great acceptances they do have. Good luck.
Did she research any details about the school- traditions, student life, student interviews, info about clubs, professors and their interests, etc?
My daughter was also a top student and applied to schools that did not want to be viewed as a safety. One particular school stated that they routinely reject students who appear to be using them as a safety.
We visited that school 2 times and attended 3 local events. She spoke to students, researched weekend traditions, emailed professors, inquired about research interests, asked about life on campus, researched/spoke about the library and specific rooms inside the library, wrote about an on-campus restaurant, about a location on campus where kids seemed to hang out, etc. She wrote about all of this in one of her essays, down to the furniture in the dorms.
This information was weaved throughout one of her essays. She was also on a first name basis with the admissions counselor, who she met at all 3 local events and spoke with for long periods of time.
She turned the school down and cried for 3 hours because she felt bad and thought she was leading them on (she was not leading them on). Sobbing…on the floor…due to guilt. She was surprised and grateful for the acceptance.
As for NE, just because the accepted students did not have scores in the 99th % or were top 1%…does not mean they were not worthy of an acceptance. As noted above, graduating #1 or # 10 is not what truly distinguishes students at many of these schools.
And yes, there is a lot of competition out there. You just don’t know what somebody else is bringing to the campus.
You know the system is unfortunate. You need to show love to every school you apply. Like, really, can you show love to NEU? Can you gush about it? The answer is no. It’s an ok school. Until not that long ago it is a commuter school. It is ridiculous for a school to have 15k undergrads and charge 75k a year, as if they are some cozy intellectual place. Incidentally I view the coop program as a negative. There is opportunity cost of lost pay for a year or two. I expect top undergrad programs to place kids into jobs without requiring a coop. They should be able to place kids into internships from the freshman summer, and those should suffice. The employer does the rest of the retraining after the student joins full time. The fact that the school is offering coops is a negative for me. Do you know that Cornell lets you graduate in 2.5 years if you have a bunch of pre-reqs and APs? So does GTech. So does Princeton. I think even Harvard lets you do this. Harvard doesn’t offer coops. Coops can be a choice for kids that want it. But it should not be campus culture – to me that is a weakness. USC also pretends to be this way in terms charging 75k with a 20k undergrad size – although they do seem place to well into tech and the performing arts. Then you apply thinking they should see that they are lucky enough to get me :-). It is a little bit like dating. If they turn you down, you should just think it is their loss. I wouldn’t go to a school that wouldn’t want me. Period. NEU shouldn’t think it is MIT. Just by the fact that they want to be shown love, they demonstrate that they are insecure. The very top schools don’t ask you to show love. For example, Harvard doesn’t ask you to write an essay on why Harvard – they are like “duh. We are Harvard”. You don’t need to tell us why you want to come to Harvard. They do want to hear how you are going to use the school of course. They want you to use the school as broadly as you can. So they prefer STEM kids that also have a humanities footprint and interests. Because they pretend that they are training future leaders. Maybe they are. I don’t know. I’ve seen some pretty average non-leader type kids go to Harvard, as a separate matter. There are indeed personality differences even amongst top schools, if you observe closely at who they pick. In contrast, Stanford asks “why Stanford”. To that extent, I think they are slightly insecure. I am truly surprised why they have that question. It shows weakness. I am sure nobody told them that. Don’t bother about a school that doesn’t want you :-).
If not they’re is something about them…major choice, LORs, demographic….something about them …first gen, interview, interest, a talent that they had. Rank is NOT of the highest importance at NEU per the Common Data set. But yes GPA and rigor are which you’d argue translates into rank. But perhaps maybe the others took more AP classes even if performing less. You are saying they didn’t but u don’t know. And truth is not every student knows the exactness of other student profiles. They simply think they do. Same with LORs…maybe your kids weren’t as strong as theirs.
My son’s class had a person never included in the top 25 breakfast and went to Princeton. So u just never know !! You think you know…ie they had less this or that. But you don’t really know.
Your daughter is fantastic. Your are ticked. I get it. But if she’s driven , persistent, and hardworking she’s going to have a great life. And if you suck up to a school where she was deferred, maybe it will be there. Again many schools defer. Miami. UGA. it does not mean rejection. Unless you add no extra stated desire.
Hopefully she applied to a range of schools and not only the ones that all the smart kids apply to.
Finally I’ll add…admissions people are like sales people. This is business. How many can they close?
It’s not as easy to yield protect as when they knew how many schools u applied to or fafsa rank. They don’t see that now. Ultimately they are using other sources and algorithms.
These people have goals. Closing ratios etc. so u getting into 10 or 12 or 16……it’s only impactful to one of them.
Are they yield protecting ? Short of ED or need aware, how could we really know…but clearly ED is a huge factor with top schools now placing 50%+ which makes it even more brutal for EA and RD kids.
HYPSM don’t do ED. I think their EA yield is 97% or so. I think HYPS EAs are somewhat restricted – as in you can apply EA to only them. M doesn’t even care whether you apply to any other place. It is beneath a school to offer ED vs EA.
Every methodology will have “errors”. Both false positive and false negative. Besides parts of the application we don’t see(LORs, essays), we don’t know what else happens right around the reading. Maybe the reader had five outstanding applications in a row and the “average excellent” doesn’t look so good and ends out on the deferral/WL pile. Maybe the last 20 apps were all easy rejects. Now that same app may be an easy accept. Schools try to put in controls and processes to minimize this, but nothing is perfect.
Depending on degree and course progression, you cannot graduate early from Cornell. And for a bio major, who may have pre-med intentions, that can completed backfire.
I’m also a huge fan of co-ops. Kids can earn a ton of money, which for students who would other wise need loans can be a huge advantage; they are more sought after by companies and having higher starting salaries. It’s not for everyone so I get not wanting to go to a coop mandatory school, but most employers look very highly on coop students.
My son was told by the department when we were visiting that he can graduate Cornell in 2.5. It depends on the school and major. I agree. And, the absolute top employers don’t care about coops. They just don’t. They want to pick the brightest kids and train them themselves. They want the kids to learn the stuff that cannot be taught at the company when they are still in school — eg all the math, the theoretical underpinnings of everything else you are learning etc. As an example, does Google really care that you had a coop at a local company for six months? Or Goldman for that matter ? I know a top mol-bio kid at my son’s school that got a top banking internship . They don’t care whether she knew any finance or not. They really want her to understand cancer research, and be able to understand current research being published in that area. She is going into health care banking for the summer.