They are at Amherst…but not everywhere (Wesleyan ?), the important distinction at the college level is Accepted and Enrolled I am told.
So then what is the difference between admitted and accepted?
On an SAT score about 41 points at Amherst. I guess not everyone who is admitted accepts a college offer! Yes?
According to the figures you supplied, Amherst loses 41 mean SAT points between their accepted applicants and enrolled students, yet you make reference to a 16 point higher mean.
@englishman, my confusion: your term “accepted” could refer to the student who has been accepted by the school (admitted) or to the student who accepts an offer of admissions (enrolled). Still not understanding exactly how you are using the term “accepted” in post #38.
@merci81
In this case enrolled students at Wes have a 70 point lower mean, whilst in this example Amherst has a 16 point higher mean, illustrating that NOT all schools have a lower mean for enrolled students, some are actually higher! I think you stated the opposite is common for most, but clearly NOT all.
@Ir4550 Well you are NOT enrolled until you matriculate (ie:turn up the first day of classes) whilst accepted would be the college sends you an offer of acceptance to attend, I would suggest that although a college may offer a place, not all students accept them, thus the admitted scores in this case are higher, since some students although admitted do not accept the colleges offer.
@Englishman wrote:
“Admitted 2139
Accepted 2196
Enrolled 2155”
Admitted and accepted are synonymous terms, so, logically, your figures cannot make sense.
@Englishman has basically taken two different words that mean the same in common English usage, “acceptance” and “admittance”, and substitutes one for the other depending on which makes Amherst look better in comparison to Wesleyan.
According to most reliable sources (cough, not @Englishman) there are only 50 mean SAT points separating the CR and Math scores of Wesleyan, Williams or Amherst:
The difference shrinks in significance by the time you add writing scores to the mix… It’s important to remember that none of these are intelligence tests. Nor, do they say anything about the social scene or mix between athletes and musicians that you will find at any particular college. They do not predict the access you will have to externally funded, peer-reviewed research; the number of labs that are not in a dark, dank cellar; the number of spontaneous student-run house parties; hours of sledding after a heavy snow; hours of community service, political activism; quality of food; or amount of time you will spend on a competing school’s discussion board.
What to say when a student fits well into the accepted student pool, but was not accepted? Why is that the case? The schools rarely give a reason that explains the denial. And the student could get accepted to a like school.
We say the student was a victim of “category admissions” where his/her category (perhaps multiple) was filled by others the school wanted more.
I would suggest that, in addition to assuming your usual role of enthusiastic Wesleyan critic (not an opinion, but a verifiable fact), a hobby I find to be terribly odd (just my opinion), you are also terribly confused about the use of two words in the English language. I find that confusion somewhat humorous given that it occurs in a man who assigns to himself the internet name “Englishman”, and who claims to have been educated at Oxford. Or was it that other school in England? I forget.
What will you do when Wesleyan raises another hundred million $ or so and climbs back into the top 10?
https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/583079
A couple points:
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@Englishman made a mistake and meant “Applied” for the first category (2139 SAT mean). There are not separate Admitted and Accepted categories. Accepted and Enrolled SAT means are indeed 2196 and 2155, which means Amherst had a 41 point drop off between accepted students and enrolled students. Yes, a smaller gap than Wesleyan, but it appears Amherst is also losing stronger admits to other schools. A safety for Harvard and Yale, perhaps even Williams?
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Median and mean aren’t the same thing.
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Still unclear about the origin of the bone @Englishman likes to pick re. Wesleyan.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Stop the bickering and insults, or you will receive timeouts. I had to edit quite a few posts.
“… illustrating that NOT all schools have a lower mean for enrolled students, some are actually higher! I think you stated the opposite is common for most, but clearly NOT all.”
And I think you glossed right over @merci81’s use of the words “[a]lmost all”. In matters of categorical logic, those words imply, among other things, a lot of something, but not every last instance of something.
“Clearly alot of students apply using Wesleyan as a LAC ‘safety’, with no intention of enrolling if accepted elsewhere, as in Williams or Amherst , Swarthmore, Carleton, Pomona, Pitzer or pretty much any other top 25 school?..Debate?”
You completely lost me at Pitzer. Sorry. And assuming, as you do, that every kid makes every decision on the margin based on the most current US News rankings (there are people out there who take a longer view of things), the fact that kids may choose Williams, Amherst, SWAT, Carleton and Pomona means … what?
THAT, to your mind, makes Wes a safety? To the same extent that Cornell is a safety to HYPSM? Ok, then what? What if it’s ‘guilty as charged’? Of that list, excluding Pitzer (absurd) and Carleton (starting to drift away from the top 5), you’re talking about what many regard as the best of best in category. So what?
Is the fundamental basis of your criticism that Wesleyan is not currently ‘as good as’ WASP? If so, what’s the criticism?
Honestly, I don’t appreciate or comprehend at all your platform. What point are you making? There is no way you could possibly be serious in your charge of “Top 25 school”.
@HuskyLawyer FYI Pitzer is an extremely rigourous LAC in Cal with a acceptance rate of about 13% ranked well above Wes, probably the hottest LAC out there this year, my DS was rejected! I don’t disagree with regard to Carleton…Really you want to spend 4 years in MN, not me!
I think @Wesleyan97 put it best earlier, where I think I am right in saying he to, even before I suggested it, that Wesleyan was is indeed a safety for many of the ‘tippy toppy’ students, which it now is, That’s my point!
No dog in this fight, nobody in my family attended Wesleyan. But FWIW, I don’t know what people here are getting worked up for.
My kids did not find all these very good LACs to be just the same in “feel”, They applied to some but not others because they perceived differences in the schools, and their prevailing campus cultures, that transcended some trivial differences in their reported average class SAT scores or acceptance rates. All of my kids liked Wesleyan. They didn’t equally like all the schools mentioned in #54.
Pitzer is a teeny and quirky school. Its admit % has plummeted recently, but I don’t recall feeling it was “extremely rigorous”. My son was admitted there, but turned it down. He wrote a tremendous essay for them. I think it’s all about the essay there, and actual fit. I imagine a lot of great students get rejected there now, because they didn’t adequately prove that they “fit”.
SATs are higher in the admit pool than the matriculated pool at virtually every college. Is anybody claiming that Wesleyan is the most selective college in the country? Because every school that isn’t at the absolute top of the SAT pyramid is likely to exhibit a similar profile. Including those that are near, yet not at, the top. So big deal!
Wesleyan was not perceived as a safety by any of my kids, or the GCs at their schools. Maybe a hair less selective than a few other schools, most of whom it doesn’t fit perfectly with anyway, but far from a safety. I think it’s a great school.
@moneydad, you just saved me a post. On both scores (concerning Pitzer and Wes) I think you are right on. My point on Wes was, even if its true that, say, Williams, Amherst and Pomona are a smidge ahead in terms of admissions, who cares? That hardly makes Wesleyan something to apologize for. Guy has an axe to grind; and I’m confident in my guess as to what it is.
“@HuskyLawyer FYI Pitzer is an extremely rigourous LAC in Cal with a acceptance rate of about 13% ranked well above Wes, probably the hottest LAC out there this year, my DS was rejected! I don’t disagree with regard to Carleton…Really you want to spend 4 years in MN, not me!”
This thing with Pitzer is ridiculous. Sorry. It’s straight up tomfoolery. Are we talking about the same school? The one ranked by US News @#35? Who knows why it has a low admit rate? I suspect that its location and that it has room for like 10 kids may play a part in that. Does the fact that Michigan gets a fraction of the applications as Berkeley and UCLA, and thus has a significantly higher admit rate than those schools, make Michigan a “safety school” for the kids in that app pool? Only a fool would say so. Only a fool.
Besides, Pitzer is test optional man. Isn’t that one of the points on which you take Wesleyan to task? I noticed you had no response for the woman who pointed out that Bowdoin has been test optional since the 1960s, and is widely viewed as very highly selective. I suspect I won’t hear from you on this point either.
Hotest school out there? College is not like the latest rap video. Most thoughtful people take a longer view. My daughter could have walked into Pitzer half asleep, but didn’t ever seriously consider attending. And they recruited her hard … harder than Wes. In fact, Wes’ recruitment (along with Wellesley’s), felt the least like an athletic recruiting process, where in each case the school was the focus of the visits and the communications.
“I think @Wesleyan97 put it best earlier, where I think I am right in saying he to, even before I suggested it, that Wesleyan was is indeed a safety for many of the ‘tippy toppy’ students, which it now is, That’s my point!”
Confusing sentence structure aside, there are a lot of schools that are safety schools for some other school. In that sense, for someone out there, Dartmouth is a safety school. You seem to be entirely incapable or unwilling to comprehend this point, which renders your point rather pointless.
Well, it’s obviously a point you seem to feel needs reinforcing for some reason. And, on a regular basis.
Personally, I don’t spend that much time lurking the CC forums of “safety” schools. There are a group of LACs I do peek in on from time to time to compare notes and because, broadly speaking, I do think they, along with Wesleyan, compete in the same limelight. Those colleges tend to be Amherst, Williams, Middlebury, Bowdoin, and Swarthmore. I tend to be a little less interested in the Claremont Colleges (Pomona, CMC, Pitzer et al), not because they aren’t excellent colleges, but, because they are such a different kettle of fish (Honestly, with the exception of Pomona, could any of them actually exist independently without the others?) and because they are so far away from Wesleyan’s geographic base.
I think the same goes for such excellent colleges as Carleton, Reed, Oberlin, the University of Richmond, Washington and Lee, Kenyon, Denison, and Davidson. Their names tend not to be on the radar screen in my part of the country (New York City).
Oh, and there is one other CC forum that I pay attention to on a somewhat haphazard basis: Brown University, an Ivy League research university, located in Providence, Rhode Island. See how many times Wesleyan gets mentioned in this single thread. I believe it’s a token of the fact that Wesleyan, because it is a miniature university, competes in two different realms, one with the above-mentioned small colleges and the other with universities much, much bigger than itself :
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/18032780#Comment_18032780
With regard to Amherst, it is a wealthy college that receives a lot of scrutiny because of the size of its wealth; they would be in constant danger of losing their tax exempt status if they didn’t give enough of it away every year. But, other than their financial aid, which is indeed very generous, I don’t see a lot of stuff going on there that would, in the ordinary course of things, engender a lot of envy on the part of the average Wesleyan alum. Architecturally, they have played it pretty safe over the space of the past forty years; even their newest buildings tend to be pokey rehashes of things Wesleyan has done better. As far as student bodies are concerned, I’m almost sure the average Wesleyan alum would not want to trade Wesleyan’s for Amherst’s. We are proud of the risk-taking attitude many of our students have toward their studies. Our science students win prizes and a good number of our arts students have gone on to collect Oscar, Tony and Grammy Award nominations. We need a little more money in the kitty to make the job of maintaining our edge over Amherst a whole lot easier. And, to me, that’s really the whole issue here: Access and affordability for the middle-class.