<p>I was wait listed by Rice and WashU, and rejected by Northwestern. Has this happened to anyone before, and if it has, did any school "more selective" than your matches accepted you?</p>
<p>The remaining schools I have are Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Duke, Vanderbilt... </p>
<p>(I have safeties)</p>
<p>While you may be a match on stats, those schools are too competitive to be considered as anything but reaches. Yes some people do get into more selective colleges than those that rejected them. You will know very soon. Just remember, waitlist means that you were a contender. They would like to admit you if they have room. </p>
<p>My son is still a junior in high school so this has not happened to him. But, when we first started discussing college choices, we could see that the schools we initially saw as potential matches were actually reaches for all applicants. </p>
<p>He has also looked into Rice and WashU, but I would expect him to still consider those reaches even with 4.0 uw, NMF (likely), etc.</p>
<p>best wishes for a happy turn out whatever happens. There are soooo many college options out there, I hope you end up with a great experience.</p>
<p>Yes, my son was wait listed at many of his target schools and accepted to a bunch I thought were crap shoots… In fact, Wash U and Rice were two of those that wait listed him. He got into Brown, Penn, Cornell, Hopkins, Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill. He applied for aid so he fully expected not to be accepted to Wash U. Not sure about the others. </p>
<p><a href=“I%20have%20safeties”>quote</a>
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Did you run your choices by your guidance counselor? Because all of your other schools are a cut-above Rice, WashU and Northwestern. So, you’d better pray that you get accepted to your safeties!</p>
<p>Thanks guys for the insight.</p>
<p>@gibby- I was already accepted to UW-Madison and UM-Twin cities</p>
<p>Matches means you have above 50% chance to get in. For those competitive schools, no one is really a match disregarding your stat. Northwestern has an overall acceptance rate of 12.9%. With near perfect stat, Parchment only gives 50% chance while their data is not updated (still showing 23% acceptance rate). In other words, near perfect stat would still get much less than 50% chance with current admission rate.</p>
<p>Any school with an acceptance rate of 12% can’t be considered a “match” for anyone, even someone with perfect stats. In crafting an incoming class, top schools could easily fill the slots with only super high stat students, and still have to deny admission to many others equally talented.</p>
<p>@Need34orabove: Many posters in this thread are in agreement: You seem to have applied to 2 safety and 8 reach schools, but didn’t have any real “match” or “target” schools on your list. </p>
<p>I would not base a MATCH classification on parchment numbers at all as they proved unreliable for us. We narrowed our school choice list using parchment numbers which did not pan out at all. Schools yielding parchment numbers of 70, 91, and 95 chance of being accepted all waitlisted my son. I don’t know about Naviance data but parchment needs to factor in your intended major or program since I think this, at least in part, was why my son was waitlisted. He was even a legacy at the 95. I also think the parchment number was outdated for that school which has risen significantly in popularity.</p>
<p>Agree with everyone else. The schools you consider “matches” are really reaches for everyone. </p>
<p>Another problem of Parchment prediction is no differentiation between ED and RD chances. We know that match school becomes reach at RD. Am I correct?</p>
<p>My D was accepted to Rice but was w/l in “lower” ranked matches. The admissions process is unpredictable at best for the kind of schools you are looking at. So, please don’t lose hope - you still may get into the ones that you are waiting on. Good luck</p>
<p>You are a great, strong applicant…but then, all of the other applicants to your schools are too. Your competition is from students who all have the same academic profile you do–and each top school receives several thousand applications and yet has only a couple of thousand seats available. I’m sure you have looked at the numbers for Rice, Wash U and Northwestern–the odds of getting in are daunting.</p>
<p>I think that sometimes when students have really high grades and scores, and they are the stars in their high schools, that they don’t fully realize that it’s a really, really big world out there–and so many students also have high grades and high scores, etc.–that the competition isn’t like that they have had in their high schools where they are top dog over the rest of the “other” students with a 3.3 gpa and 1800 SAT.</p>