Is double-depositing allowed?
It might not be allowed, but it happens. The school the student ultimately attends has no idea it’s taken place, and the jilted school doesn’t have the resources to “prosecute” it.
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I’m not sure what happened last year with WLs as I didn’t have any reason to follow this stuff last year. However, I did look at the Common Data Sets for Vandy, Duke and Northwestern, and they all went to the WL last year. Maybe you’re referring to Ivies only or the WL numbers were smaller than usual.
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If your ZIP code is 10023, then it is not surprising that the people look different, since the demographics of that ZIP code (younger adults without kids) are rather different from the demographics of college tourists (older parents and high school seniors). Your ZIP code may also be unrepresentative in other respects as well.
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The number of students taken off waitlists, even at super selective colleges, can vary wildly from year to year.
Let’s have a quick look at Amherst to illustrate:
Last year: 0
2020: 7
2019: 48
2018: 0
This is a good illustration of why it’s not surprising that colleges have long waitlists.
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I have learnt absolutely nothing from A2C on Reddit. I have learned a lot from wise posters here and using my common sense and reliable sources on the internet. YMMV.
I agree, no one needs to apply to 50 colleges. Even if these are the same 50 that everyone glorifies because a defunct magazine says so. In fact, HS counselors should restrict # of transcripts and LORs to 10 per student per cycle.
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Her argument is that the college admission process is stressful, expensive and disappointing because students have a long list of frivolous desires. My point is that our family did everything “right” (none of the strawman mistakes she claims are the culprit) and yet it has still been stressful, expensive and disappointing.
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I never said or implied they were frivolous- my actual point was that people are happy to do the “research” on a long list of what could be termed secondary or tertiary concerns-- but somehow think that having to do research on a primary factor (is my kid an attractive candidate for this school and can we afford it) proves that the “system” is broken.
The fact that many of the items on the wishlist are contradictory (a college which is VERY RIGOROUS but where your kid won’t have to struggle to get good grades strikes me as an impossibility) and a college where your kid will walk out with a high paying career but which isn’t “pre-professional” is yet another reason why research is important.
I promise you- the Classics department at U Chicago is not the least bit “pre-professional” even though you can grind your teeth that many kids in the Econ department are there to get a high paying job at a hedge fund but have no inherent interest in Econ- surely one of the crown jewels of Chicago’s intellectual offerings. Hence- research. And no- I don’t think it’s “proof” that the system is broken.
I find it fascinating that a generation (our kids) who won’t buy a sandwich without looking at Yelp or similar to learn everything about that sandwich and the store which sells it, somehow pushes back on the notion that you’ll have to do some homework before deciding that UIUC is your safety (out of state, applying for CS) or that Northwestern is your match school. These are kids who can read 50 product reviews on a bottle of shampoo!!! And don’t mind doing it!
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Devil’s advocate:
Not contradictory - just not the way you phrase it.
One wants a college that is thought of by employers and the world in general as rigorous, but
has grade inflation.
One wants to not be pre-professional (i.e. engineer or accountant) and major in something that won’t be overlooked by employers who also recruit engineers and accountants for the same job.
E.g. Bain, consultants. A classics major at Rutgers (does that exist?) won’t be recruited by Bain but it is possible that a classics major at Harvard would be.
GS rejected by Rice but accepted to Harvard, Columbia and USC/Trustee.
I was going to write to agree with you (less applications would be nice) until I realized that my kid’s experience, this cycle, would actually argue against it. One for one in safeties, four for four in matches, and one for 13 in reaches. So unless she’d applied to less matches or no safety, it’s arguable that she “needed” the 17 apps to get the one reach. You could argue that “other” reaches could have been cut (“reachier” ones) but multiple CC posters have been WLd or rejected at her acceptance school, while being accepted at ones that denied her.
So I don’t have an answer. Just an anecdote.
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That is the first thing I told my kids. Student loan is a burden for life.
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I agree with you. This is also what the kids on Reddit a2c argue, but CC generally derides this shotgun approach. But then the CC community reminds us that a school may need a tuba player (lest the school milieu be unbalanced and dull.) But there is no way to know which school, so it may be rational to shotgun after all.
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Agreed. Full pay didn’t help at all. These top schools have such big endowments,it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
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Yes, but…when the waitlist is bigger than the entire admitted class, or 10x the most that have ever been taken off the waitlist then it is just the AdCom avoiding the hard work of deciding who to say a definitive ‘no’ to.
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I agree that part of the reason may be that giving a hard no is more work. But I have also wondered whether it may be a deliberate tactic to raise hopes at high schools to keep apps high for the next year. In other words people hear that their friends and teammates a year older “just barely missed” getting into Stanford or wherever, so it makes sense for them to apply too when their chance comes. Evidence for my hypothesis would be any AO admitting it was true. Evidence against my hypothesis would be if wait lists were always so ridiculously huge, even long before the push by schools to inflate app numbers.
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That would be awful. Waitlisted at 2 reaches here.
I find myself agreeing with the Reddit a2c kids on this point.
Many say that you can’t write that many “why here” essays convincingly or be spread too thin to write one good one, but kids have done it.
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If I were an AO, this would be an extremely important essay topic for me. It demonstrates interest and commitment by the applicant, rather than a cut-and-paste approach to filling out tons of apps. This would be one that I would spend a lot of time on.
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Yes, this! At the BU interested student day, one of the AOs said if you can substitute any of the other Boston/Cambridge universities in your “Why BU?” essay, you should go back to the drawing board and rewrite the essay. Saying you love Boston, rowing on the Charles, access to Boston internships, etc. is definitely not what they’re looking for.
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