@NJFL123, agree that it’s not random.
People like to use the term “lottery ticket”, but it’s not a lottery.
How many of those kids applied ED, though?
@PurpleTitan The one who knew the admissions rep, the athlete and 2 of the legacies were ED. The unhooked superstar applied ED to an Ivy and got rejected but later got into 3 RD. The URMs were RD.
@NJFL123, ED would help.
I was more curious about those top kids who were rejected. Did they apply ED? And to what places?
@NJFL123 surprised that superstar got REJECTED ED? Is it a school your hs normally does not send to?
@SeekingPam, may also depend on the uni. I’ve noticed that some are really idiosyncratic even in ED (where you can’t explain at all why they reject one and take the other).
I don’t think URM really confers an advantage for wealthy RD applicants.
Kids go to a small HS. There is one ED ivy that no has gotten into for YEARS! Superstar applied ED and was deferred and rejected. Ended up at another Ivy and accepted every non Ivy she applied including Amherst etc. Had she realized or not been so arrogant, would have had a much better senior year.
@SeekingPam - No not surprised at all that any unhooked gets rejected ED. Just the way it works. And it’s not a great school for our HS - I think the last to get in was 2 years ago.
@PurpleTitan - Oh gosh -so many ED rejections…8 rejected at Brown, 3 rejected at Dartmouth, about 5 rejected at Penn, about 3 at Princeton, 3 rejected or deferred at Harvard (including an Olympic gold medal winner which doesn’t really apply here). Not sure about Cornell, Columbia, Yale.
@usualhopeful - I wish that were true. It’s a box you check. There’s no caveat about how much money you make.
Well, H and P are SCEA. Gold medal winner may have done better at an ED school.
Brown can be quite idiosyncratic. How many of the Penn ED’s were to Wharton?
But yeah, in rounds with admit rates below 30%, it’s hard to say that non-hooked non-superstars have a good shot these days.
A little surprised about Dartmouth and UPenn, curious what Cornell was.
Brown only seems to take people ED they would have taken anyway.
@SeekingPam : such things can happen because a student signed the ED agreement and then dropped it when they got a better offer in the Spring. "blackballing"has been known to happen at some schools because the GC didn’t keep the student to their agreement and signed off on some RD schools AFTER the ED acceptance was accepted, so that GC’s are strict with the students, make sure they’re aware of the meaning of ED, and try to enforce the commitment.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to th SCEA/REA Ivies/Ivyplus/LittleIvies.
The ivy my kids hs cannot get has been going on way longer than that, more than 10 years. It may be random, just a small school and no one they wanted but I am not sure that is the reason. Interestingly, there is a school that they have a good relationship with in the top 30 that someone broke ED about 3 or 4 years ago. I forget why but I think it was a distance was too much for him. The following year they took 3 kids including 1 ED (which is a lot for this school).