I think you have hit the nail on the head. Often parents get frustrated when they realize that there isn’t a formula that ensures success in selective college admissions (at lower ranked schools, of course, top grades/scores are more than enough). My perception is that this is especially true among parents who didn’t grow up here, and are less familiar with our system, because it is so different than university admissions anywhere else in the world.
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@norik95 As others have said your kid seems very impressive and I empathize with your disappointment.
Up thread at one point you summarized all of her efforts and achievements and concluded something along the lines of so much wasted time and effort.
This presupposes that her sole purpose, enrichment and enjoyment from getting good grades, being a leader and pursuing ECs was to get accepted to college. I sincerely hope this was not the case.
If so she was misguided to assume there is a checklist or formula for success. My hope is that when she goes off to college you encourage her to pursue things she is passionate about so that she can benefit “while doing” versus “operating in the hope” of some elusive payoff down the road.
Good luck.
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After what feels like 100+ posts debating one particular case - it’d be nice to get back to the thread’s more general question about yield protection and the colleges that appear to practice it.
This thread is about yield protection. @norik95 shared the situation of her daughter in which she felt her daughter had been yield-protected at Northeastern, an institution that others have mentioned in this very thread as practicing yield protection, as her daughter’s stats placed her in the top 25% of admitted students’ stats and was deferred to RD. There were then many, many posts about how others thought it could have just been a holistic admissions decision rather than yield protection, and then various back-and-forths related to that.
Post 389 that norik95 responded to essentially provided some of her daughter’s stats and what SpreadsheetMom thought was an example of yield protection at Tulane. Nobody argued as to whether it was a case of yield protection. Yet this other post has accrued was @DadOfJerseyGirl reflects is about 100+ posts about it. I think it would behoove this community to reflect on why the reaction has been so different to these posters.
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Good for your kids ! )))
Thank you for your insight !)))
I appreciate that .
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MIT particularly comes to mind. New England and Mid-Atlantic account for 29% of the student body, which you can consider are its natural catchment areas.
These two regions have a 70mm population out of 330mm in the US. These are broadly the “North East”.
Even Harvard, which is less diverse, picks about 40% of it’s student body from the mid-atlantic and new-england regions.
By contrast, Stanford picks (for the same 2024 class) over 40% of its class from California, which is 40mm population out of 330mm.
In addition to what @AustenNut said, it’s also ironic that so many posters are telling @norik95 that she can’t be sure it’s yield protection because we don’t have all the details (with some even suggesting her D’s application isn’t as strong as she thinks) - but because we don’t have all the details we also can’t be sure it wasn’t yield protection (especially at a school like NEU that has made a fine art of it), or judge the strength of her D’s application.
Anyway, I think it’s best for everyone that we move on to the more general topic of this thread.
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Because many Californians prefer their more temperate climate while people from the Northeast and MidAtlantic states tend not to such a strong preference, a greater proportion of Californians apply for and choose to enroll in colleges in CA. This isn’t unique to Stanford.
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The pushback around yield protection in general (to get away from specific cases as several posters have asked us to do) seems to be when a kid or a GC or a family decides that the generally accepted advice- reaches, likely, safeties (or whatever your terminology might be) doesn’t apply to their specific situation. So that a likely school (which is in NO WAY 100% sure thing) for their kid is a safety. Not true. Or that a safety- a college which might have an admit rate around 25% (which means 75% of the kids get rejected) does not apply to them because their stats are higher than the median.
I think this is the essence of the agita. You might be a kid living in Michigan, and your GC tells you that since the HS started compiling statistics, nobody with your profile has ever been rejected by U Mich. And because you are instate, you and your parents agree you can afford Michigan. Great! You have a safety!!! But that same kid, same stats, same income- is actually in Ohio, not Michigan- well then-- no. Michigan is no longer a safety.
Or it’s not Michigan-you’re looking at a private U where your stats are well at the top, but it’s only affordable if you get the top merit award. Again, it’s not a safety, and it’s not yield protection if you don’t get that award, it’s that they give 5 full tuition awards and you didn’t get one.
I know many people in real life (and have read threads by SCORES on CC) who claim 'My kid doesn’t have a safety" or “We plugged her stats into their formula and it showed that Northwestern was her safety and Dartmouth was a match” and you have to cringe.
It might be frustrating, it might be counter-intuitive, but the math is the math.
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I don’t think anyone denies that yield protection exists. The practice of ED itself is proof positive. Once we establish that it exists in principle, then all manner of yield protection is possible / likely, including the case of @norik95 's daughter.
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The points you make are true in general. What I’m questioning is (and I believe @AustenNut is as well), why spend so much time and energy beating up on @norik95? I think enough has been said from both sides and it’s time to move on from that specific case.
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The best advice on this website, IMO, is to find one’s kid a real safety (or more than one safety) rather than messing around with subjective notions of “likely” - and the advice to find a way for you and your kid to “love your safety” is also excellent. Blossom has outlined the necessary characteristics of a true safety. Questions of yield protection are interesting to talk about, but families should know that if a school is being discussed with regularity on a forum about yield protection, then it probably doesn’t count as a safety, regardless of how your kid’s stats match up with the CDS. And yes, we are following the advice this cycle: kid’s safety admit was the first admit, made us happy and relieved, led to fun downtime bonding like watching YouTube dorm tours etc…I’m grateful to CC for all of that, because otherwise I probably would have approached college apps with the attitude I used for my own apps in the early 90s - applied to a mix of “great” schools that generally took top students - it worked then, but is a dangerous strategy now.
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I think you are right about this. Parents (and kids) need to be careful to pick a “true” safety (or several) as opposed to viewing schools where their kids’ gpa/scores puts them at the top of the admit pool as safeties, when the admit rate suggests otherwise. Every year there is a kid who gets shut out because they don’t apply to any true safeties and you don’t want that to be your situation. Unfortunately, US college admissions is unpredictable at the higher levels so better to be safe than sorry.
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I strongly agree with this sentiment. And parents should do their part to help the kid come to terms with their safety school if it becomes necessary. Our kids went to a private school, and my son went to the Rutgers (instate) presentation at the school that was attended by just 3 other kids. The head of the counselling department was livid at the class for not attending. My son’s thought process was that if he became truly comfortable with what Rutgers had to offer, it would be a credible safety, and at a minimum it was a stress reduction technique in an otherwise very stressful year. Other kids were laughing at him. This is the time that parents need to step in and reassure the kid (I didn’t need to do this in my son’s case) that it is in fact the right thing to do. Kids face a lot of pressure in school as to what is cool and what is not.
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Unbelievable. (Ok, I believe this happened. I just am astonished that the students at this school were so shortsighted.) Denigrating an in-state flagship and anyone who shows interest in it is beyond infuriating. It also shows how elitist some have become that it’s private and Top X or bust, as everything else is worthy of derision.
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I recently saw someone in here say that a college list should be built from the bottom up. I think that’s a great approach, and reinforces loving your safety school.
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A lot of them pick less good privates over the instate flagship public. I am loathe to do this primarily for reasons that the local privates are pretty bad for his chosen STEM major. But for humanities majors, I can see the argument for a private (if you can afford it) vs the large public. But I see no reason to denigrate the public – and I agree with you on that. It is not a prestige issue for us. It is more a size issue. I was reading reddit comments that in large publics, when there are 300-400 sized classes, you can’t see the black board from the back of the class. UCBerkeley, we heard, had classes that were more than a 1000 in size, and the largest classroom seated a 1000. So kids were sent to a spillover classroom where they watched the lecture on closed circuit TV. I get all of that. But you still need a safety. I think they are laughing at my son because they thought he didn’t need it and it was a remote contingency. But we still need to council the safety in case the kids waffle :-).
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If my post gave the impression of having an issue with your son, that was not my intent at all. And private colleges with smaller classes and a smaller student body are better choices than larger public flagships for many students. The issue I had was with the students at his school not attending the presentation and making fun of kids who did, presumably because they would think poorly of anyone who did decide to attend a state flagship.
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I am not a New Jersey resident but I have seen this phenomenon as well re: Rutgers. Which really baffles me, ESPECIALLY in the humanities. Rutgers has a top-flight Poli Sci department, just to pick on one area of strength, with affiliated institutes and research opportunities, etc. It is held in very high regard by corporate recruiters. I know many people believe that ANY poli sci program is fine- and if a kid just wants his/her ticket punched it probably is-- but for a kid who wants exposure to both the theoretical AND the practical applications of the disciplines, some of the smaller U’s really don’t provide that.
Literature, Economics, some of the foreign languages- it is really hard to beat Rutgers in you are in-state.
Neela’s son sounds smart. Everyone needs a safety.