Don’t necessarily agree with this. Usually the most comprehensive essay and the one most reviewed will be the one for the Common App which should be generally applicable to any college. This is the essay that is meant to convey what makes you, you. Knowledge of the applicant is more important than knowledge of the targeted schools. For school specific essays (especially the “why X” and it derivatives), I would agree having some school specific knowledge is helpful.
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Brilliant communicators = not really what the colleges are looking for.
I always remember the essays Emory gave out at an Admissions Event. The one that was admitted was not great writing, even by 17 year old standards. But it talked about growing up in a small town in Nevada, and by the end of the essay you really felt you had a sense of what the applicant was like.
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I hired the same essay consultant for D21 that I used for my older daughter (who got into the T25 that she was targeting). D21 has a mild fainting disorder and has fainted in variety of interesting places. She wrote a very funny essay for one college that told the story of one of most embarrassing fainting episodes (in front of the entire high school at an assembly - she knew the faint was coming and tried to run out of the gym but fainted mid-run into a teacher’s arms, bringing the assembly to a screeching halt).
In any event, the essay she wrote was very funny and entertaining from the first sentence - she’s a funny kid - but she never indicated that she has the fainting issue, just told the story. The essay consultant tried to convince her to rework the essay and use the fainting disorder as an obstacle that she had to endure for years and strive to overcome. Workshopping the essay turned it from a funny, entertaining read into a depressing slog that made me feel, when I read it, that perhaps the disorder was too serious to consider going away to college. Thankfully she agreed to ditch the consultant’s suggestion and go with the original version!
When I mentioned it to my older daughter she said “Yeah, I completely ignored her suggestions and went my own way.” Thanks for telling me after I spent the money 
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Yup, authenticity is critical. I would be leery of the advice of a paid consultant who doesn’t really know my kid to steer an essay in a very different direction from what the kid wanted. I think where a consultant might be helpful is someone to bounce ideas/themes off of that the kid comes up with in response to prompts and to ask questions to help the kid further his/her thought process. Let the kid write the essay in his/her voice with whatever idiosyncrasies they may have.
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Thank you! I realized belatedly that it may seem that I couldn’t take constructive criticism. Which is not the case, as I am looking to see what we can do differently for DD26.
I have seen this trend in our schools as well. The people who are full pay indeed didn’t make into their reaches or super reaches somehow. Again it’s very subjective opinion based off of the smaller percentage of kids I have seen.
Please give us a happy end that D21 got into the school?!
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Yup, but maybe the reaches are not tuition dependent.
Embedded in article is the fact that Trinity sends off a list approx 2-3x (?) the desired # of offers to a consultancy that uses its software to make a list that produces $19 million tuition income.
I had this very much in the back of my mind as I helped DD22 make her list. We picked schools that I thought would need our tuition dollars. She was lucky to not be yield protected. I wonder if the consultancy figures that out too. Good grades, rigor, SAT scores but without “top” ECs that would land her into the stratosphere. We must have landed on the right side of the calculations.
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We are full pay, didn’t help.
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I always wonder what algorithms the colleges use in their marketing. This goes back 5 years, but I was fascinated by which colleges sent my kid brochures and which didn’t. She went to a HS where kids were from multiple towns, and kids a few towns over with similar ACTs received things from different colleges. Of course, everybody received the multitude of mailings from U Chicago.
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Well, I also think the waitlists are large because until a college gets all of its deposits in, it doesn’t know what types of kids will actually be attending. Maybe the college does need the ubiquitous tuba player, and it accepted one (or even two), but those tuba players opted to go to another school. So then, the school has got to make sure it has at least a couple of tuba players on its waitlist. Or taken at the macro-level, maybe the college accepted a pretty balanced class of women and men, but then way more women accepted their spots. Now they will want to make up for that deficit with the waitlist and accept more men. This will be especially true at smaller schools, where it could be really easy, with the smaller numbers at play, to have a deficit of something that the college desires, or needs, in its entering class. Given that, it’s not surprising that colleges make sure they have large pools on their waitlists to draw from, as they simply don’t know in advance which types of students they may want to accept later on.
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Agreed, I work in higher Ed and this is the classic definition of summer melt.
Here is just a small sample of numerous studies, articles, and news pieces describing summer melt as mostly low-income and otherwise marginalized students failing to enroll in a college due to layers of real and perceived obstacles:
https://www.ed.gov/content/summer-melt
https://www.ncan.org/news/559403/Stopping-Summer-Melt-Starts-in-the-Spring.htm
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Goin’ out on a limb … summer melt is a generic term capturing more than one reason why a kid doesn’t matriculate.
Everyone is correct.
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When your total class size is 1200 and you offer 2000 people a space on the waiting list (Dartmouth, 2 years ago) it’s not just to be sure you have exactly the right person on call. Tthe University of Michigan offered 11,000 wait list places for a class of 7000. They took 90.
Being offered a place on the waiting list is the hardest outcome for a student. To give a student the idea that there is a possibility of a place when there simply is not is unnecessarily cruel.
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Is it? My understanding of waitlists is that the person met the grade, but there are simply not enough spaces based on yield projections to give that WL’d candidate an admit decision.
I would hate for my job or performance to be contingent upon a yield estimate being met like with AOs. Can you imagine the havoc that wrongly estimating the yield could have.?
Yield is a complete well-educated guesstimate as to how many who are initially offered admissions will actually accept. I don’t think that’s easy, and the waitlist gives the schools an option.
I agree it’s not great to get the WL as a candidate, but to me, it seems like a sound concept from the school’s perspective. Yes, the chances are small. But the point is that there IS a chance, however small. There is no such chance with an outright rejection.
I agree that a realistic waitlist is a reasonable thing!
But to say to 11,000 students ‘you might get in!’ when you know that there is simply no way that you could possibly ever take more than 100? 500? whatever number your analytics show as reasonable? that is unkind. The teenagers who are wishing and hoping for a place at that school will agonize over what they should do, how long they should hope, when they should give up hope, etc.
These are kids, who are running the gauntlet of college admissions. It is brutal even when it is successful. A place on the waiting list should have some realistic possibility of happening.
tl;dr: a waiting list double your class size is not yield management
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The point is that there is SOME way to get in, however small. There is none with a rejection.
It all comes down to yield. Grade inflation at the HS level, as well as TO (most pronounced in the last two years), as well as the pandemic, have really skewed things.
My point is that it’s not cruel per se. It’s just the totality of the current circumstances.
And, yes, it does most definitely s___ (fill in the letters of your choice!)
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Yes, older D (D13) got into her “dream school”. She’s always been a great writer and now volunteers as an essay reader/editor for a nonprofit that helps FGLI kids navigate the college application process.
D21 did get into the college she wrote the fainting essay for but chose another that she liked better. The one she chose had a series of short essays that we didn’t use the consultant for (she was hourly, so we just stopped using her). I did run a couple past older D, just to get a second opinion.
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