bump
I feel you… rejected at my dream schools
Forget about the WLs. The only people who get off them are those who are either full pay or somehow neglected to mention they had a hook/filled an institutional need.
@MYOS1634, being full-pay would help a lot, but you don’t need a hook; schools are using WL more aggressively so being full-pay and showing love may get you off the WL if the schools need to enroll more.
@PurpleTitan I agree that many schools seem to be using the WL more aggressively, especially this year. As colleges rely more on ED, EA and WL to fill the class, I wonder what is going to happen to RD.
@MidwestDad3, if these crazy trends continue, in a decade, RD will be used to fill only a quarter of the class at super-selective schools (with the majority filled in the early round and the rest filled by WL).
Does anyone here remember when we applied to 5 colleges tops, no EA/ED, and we got in to most of them? When a 4.0 was the best you could do? When being a 3-sport athlete was possible because you didn’t also have to cure cancer before senior year? When our parents put us on a plane to school and told us to make good decisions? What happened???
@Osserpusser – I sent my SAT score to one college (state flagship) and that was the end of it. The whole process these days is just crazy!!
@Osserpusser haha, that was me. I went to school in the early 80s on an athletic scholarship. At the airport, my mom gave me 5-20s, and said" make this last and see if you can get a holiday job, so you can fly back home…"
3 Ds later…well, things have mightily changed.
You have strong academics, so it probably came down to the details or lack thereof in your ECs and essays. Admissions is a 2 part process. First the academics, and once you qualify academically (above the bottom 25% of last year’s acceptances is a good estimate to go off of) you will be considered equally with all the other students, even with lower GPAs and test scores as long as they were above that bottom 25%. The determining factor at that point is the fit for the university. And those details needed to come out in your ECs and essays. If your details didn’t convey 100% of what you actually did to contribute value, the admissions officers would never know it happened.
@woogzmama I wish that I had read your posts prior to nearing the end of this arduous process. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience - your insight is tremendous!
@Maggio528 Thanks for the kind words!
I have been noticing an increasing number of students applying to large numbers of selective colleges with the idea of increasing the odds that at least one will “hit”. A lot of the top schools are reporting increases in apps and record apps. How many of their accepts are “phantoms” remains to be seen. I don’t know if anyone has done a valid statistical study of what is evolving here with more of the select school crowd applying to far more schools, and how this is affecting the wait list when the chips are down and it’s one school per kid. Like a game of musical chairs but possibly some chairs left empty.
I know a young man at S’s school who got an embarrassment of riches in admissions. No, he did not hit the HPYSMC jackpot; was WLed or denied at any of those. But he got into everything else and is now on the admitted student list at about 10 highly selective schools, and he can only go to one of them. Maybe none of them if he clears the WL from those school that have him there. How many of such kids are out there, I don’t know, but when there is a significant bump in multiple apps, the old prediction models of how many will be accepting admissions offer are not going to stand up well. Think about it. A school, a highly selective school figures that X accepts are needed to fill the class of Y students, and the excess is covered by the wait list. BUt out of the X accepts, fewer than anticipated pick the school, because they have other choices. Also those who accept the school could well be pulled off the WL of a preferred school. Which means that school we are discussing has to go to a WL that might be getting a lot of activity with those on it on so many other waitlist and the calls might be coming heavier than usual.
Interesting to see how this works out.
im exactly in this situation…
didnt really think and invest enough in the app process… was just hoping that applying to 10+ top schools would guarantee admission in one of them, given that decisions are completely independent of each other… in retrospect, what the *** was I thinking…??
waitlisted at mit, gtown, amherst, swat, colum,
rejected from brown (ouch :(((( ), and a couple of ivys i never cared about anyways
accepted to state schools (stony brook, geneseo, baruch) and vassar…
and now ive started to fantasize once more bout mit… FOR ***** SAKE I HATE SENIOR YEAR
3 of the best sunys and Vassar hardly seems like a bad result.
Excuse me one cuny and two great sunys
@ggwpafk823: Wow, you got Vassar and top NY public universities…Congratulations! Those are GREAT choices and you’re sure to have at least a couple that should be affordable. So in the end, you’re not shut out.
You may want to make a “hindsights” thread to teach young’uns about what you learned (ie, applying to 10 colleges with acceptance rates below 25% does not result in 1 chance in 10). Every year there are kids who believe in this fallacy and neglect their match and safety schools (something you didn’t do, although you should have had 3-5 matches.)
I feel it. 36 ACT, 3.8 GPA, prolly 7.5/10 ECs…
accepted to only my safeties, rejected/waitlisted from 11 other schools. But I got a really prestigious full ride thing at my safety so it all ended up for the best.
no, no, im not complaining, not at all, not one bit. Sorry if it came across that way. i love the atmosphere and overall feel of vassar, (except the fact that supposedly their math dept isnt quite that strong, and thats pretty much all im interested in)
The only thing I really regret is not applying ed anywhere, namely brown. I researched brown quite a bit, and absolutely fell in love with it… but its too late now… even my interviewer said that I had an abundance of brown-esque qualities.
and perhaps the fact that i didnt full rides anywhere, only full tuition from baruch. I would love to go to stony, but i only received a relatively minimal amount of merit aid… and i dont really qualify federal/state aid.
overall, im quite content with the way the things turned out, esp considering my horrible approach to the app process. Thanks guys, all of you, for answering my questions and helping me along the way, especiall you, OHmom, your thumbnail is quite hard to forget 
you’ve been kind.
Edit:
in response to captainofthehouse, i think the trend can be quite easily explained. Any given person, after reading any number of posts here on CC (or from other sources) will become familiar with the notion that admissions (at top-tiers, and similar) are a crap-shoot. The applicant (with decent objective stats, but decidedly not great, like me) will therefor reason to himself that anyone, virtually anyone, has a shot at any school. All one has to do is apply to enough schools with a certain desirable wow factor, and voila!, you’re in at least one of them, as each admission decision are independent events, and do not all take place in one giant room. Fantasizing about the campus for hours on end also plays a part, haha.
anyways, the ease with which the common app brings all these colleges together is definitely also an important thing.
id also like to say something else. If there’s one thing that truly makes me uncomfortable about this whole business, its the culture that’s being created in high schools (perhaps theyve been prevalent for some time now, i wouldn’t know). Its a culture that starts to come into formation junior year and revolves around perceived prestige. High-ranked students are expected to get into “better” schools than the norm, almost to the point where if they dont, their image somehow becomes darker, becomes less of an asset to the image of the school. Call me overly cynical, but this is something ive noticed in my school. Admissions becomes the absolute culmination of pre-collegiate life, and everthing else gets almost sidetracked, at least for a while. Its so sad.
I watched the valedictorian and salutatorian get shut out of all ivys while #5 got into yale (albiet, through ed/questbridge, although hardly makes a difference, remarkable accomplishment perhaps). I felt bad for them, i really did. Nicest people, too. #5 is a bit obnoxious, to be truthful. Anyways! Life is good, and life goes on