This is not true if you go by the current year’s roster of high stat students who are deferred from EA to RD pool (including my kid who has 4.0 UW/5 W GPA, 36 ACT, 8 APs all 5, 18 DE classes at flagships). Most of these will be rejected eventually. It’s not uncommon, among UM, Duke, etc. This goes back to intangibles such as yield and COA (how likely is the student going to be with high EFC) issues.
That’s for certain!
The same can be said about many schools though, especially Stanford who rejects far more applicants with those stats than it accepts.
The thing about saying they reject overqualified candidates is that there are always students with the same record accepted.
It’s a weird game!
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My son got accepted OOS in CS at GaTech (his top choice). His ACT is 34 (35M, 35E, 35R, 31S and Writing of 8) and took it once in his sophomore year. He hated the ACT and never took it again. His GPA is 4.42W and a national merit finalist. He founded a Youth Emerging Leaders Program in our area, worked at McDonald’s, voluntereed in the soup kitchen for the homeless and concentrated in improving his mile time (currently 4:32). He is addicted to running.
He is also accepted to West Point, Ohio State University (Morill Scholarship), Northeastern, Rose-Hulman (Free Tuition) , University of Tulsa, University of Alabama. He is denied in UIUC, waitlisted in USC and Purdue. He is currently deciding between WP (would love to serve the country) and GaTech but seems to be leaning to GaTech.
College acceptances seems like a lottery with our experience. Your daughter has impressive stats and I am sure she will do great in whatever school she chooses. Goodluck!
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Congrats on your GT acceptance. I agree it is a complete lottery. My in-state son was accepted at Georgia Tech. He was also accepted at Purdue into their Honors program and deferred at UIUC. Similar stats as your child. No mind blowing EC’s but very involved with leadership, volunteering, music and sports. He applied as a mechanical engineer for all.
He is my third child and I have given up on trying to predict who gets in where😂
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I’m sorry your child did not get into Ga tech. There will hopefully be better things. My husband has employees under him and they discourage Ga Tech for undergrad when he spoke to them when our DD was searching for schools. Your child will do well whatever school they attend. It’s hard to understand why admissions results turn out the way they do but there is the right school for your child.
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Curious what their reasons are
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Curious the reasoning for that? Georgia Tech has a reputation for being very challenging, but everyone we know that goes there (and we are in state so a large sample size) loves it and kids who have good time management skills do very well. It is a rude awakening for some though!
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Same! We’ve been pretty blown away by all the opportunities our current Georgia Tech senior has had, and he has loved every minute of his time there!
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Me too.
My firm hires a lot of GT grads, and we haven’t seen any red flags.
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There are students at any school who haven’t had a great experience, for many reasons. I know one student who went to Ga Tech who didn’t particularly care for the experience, more so from the academic perspective than socially. Completed their masters degree right after bachelors and had a hard time finding a job (two years ago), didn’t use the Ga Tech career center at all (i don’t know details). Ultimately got an engineering job, but starting salary was low $60s in a major metropolitan area.
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This is not the first time I heard this. An friend of mine that owns a company working with DOD encouraged me to convince my him to join WP instead of GT. He told me he had not had such luck with hiring GT grads and see their performance as not up to par.
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What is WP?
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West Point
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West Point (United States Military Academy)
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I don’t think we are comparing apples to apples when looking at military academies and traditional schools.
FWIW, my D’s company recruits heavily at GT.
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I think there are companies that recruit at certain schools and there are companies that avoid certain schools. Obviously, no one can deny that Ga Tech is considered a top shelf school - for engineering and more.
It’s no different than where I work - a multi national - our head guy (an engineer) has a degree from Devry and an MBA from another not ranked school.
We have some Ga Tech as my company is local - engineers and otherwise- some are ok, some aren’t…the same as people from any other school.
My son interned with two engineers and they weren’t invited back a second summer and he was from a school far from Ga Tech rep wise. They missed the mark - as will some kids from any school.
I’m sure there are reasons why people avoid Ga Tech - perhaps poor prior experiences, ego, or an expectation of more money. But there are companies that only will recruit at Ga Tech or schools with a similar ilk - and no others and certainly not a school like my sons.
So it’s totally realistic that a company would purposely avoid a Ga Tech - but 98 times out of 100, you’d rather be at a Ga Tech…I’m sure…than not.
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Our son covered both bases, West Point for undergrad, GT for his master’s. You know, just to be safe. 
Coincidentally, though, he was accepted to the honors program at GT for undergrad where he would have done ROTC but opted for the service academy. They definitely ARE apples and oranges. No comparison.
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The service academies are completely different from a “normal“ elite college. They require a certain type of kid, and foster a level of discipline inherent in their training that just simply does not exist at other schools. When I was on a recruiting committee for my law firm, the senior partner on the committee would always prefer applicants with military experience or from military academies over more academically qualified students from other top schools. What these kids are required to do, and are subjected to, in Boot Camp (I think they call it something else) and as cadets is not for everyone, or even for most. You have to really want it to go to school there. A good high school friend started out at West Point and transferred to Vanderbilt after a year. He was miserable and needed a change - and wanted a more traditional college experience. Comparing the service academies with other colleges really is apples to oranges.
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This gets back to rankings and how reputations are made. We want to stratify schools, when in reality, on balance, many of them are good.
My son had a close friend at Cal Poly whose brother went to Georgia Tech. When he looked at her lab project notebooks and senior her project, he said that the CP work was much more robust than what he was expected to do at GT.
One of the founders at the first company my son worked at had degrees from Cal and Stanford. They didn’t recruit at either.
I know two former Caltech/JPL professors. Both spent time with my son. Both dissuaded him from applying, one saying “Caltech is not an undergraduate institution.” In fact, one of them, a holder of dual PhDs, outrightly declared “it doesn’t matter where he goes to school for undergrad.”
None of this is to say that the above institutions are in any way bad. They are all good. It’s to say that there are MANY institutions where a high horsepower, curious, individual with a strong work ethic can be molded into a top notch engineer.
There was a day where schools like University of Missouri - Rolla, now Missouri S&T, and Iowa State we’re seen as peers to Georgia Tech for undergrad. Many hiring engineers still see the world that way. Rankings have the general public believing that they are radically different. They aren’t. All three produce solid engineers. Iowa State even houses a national lab.
We, myself included at the time, think too hard about what a specific institution will open for our students. Their future success is largely baked in by the end of high school. The intelligent ones who are curious and driven will thrive at a lot of institutions.
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I’m not sure what these two professors referred to. When I was there (many, many years ago), I heard graduate students complaining about them being treated as second class citizens relative to undergrads there. After having seen a number of colleges up close, I’d say that, for the right students, Caltech offers an unrivaled experience for undergrads.
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