Shifting Definition of Match and Safety Schools

Parents Forum
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<p>Perhaps this whole discussion amounts to the fact that some people are comfortable with the idea of using actual data to make statistical inferences that can then be used to make decisions under uncertainty, and for some people, it’s all just an emotional thing. In either case, there is certainly uncertainty!</p>

<p>I agree that some of this discussion gets too personal. The fact that the data from my kids school showed a high admit rate to Harvard for the upper right corner would be true regardless of whether or not anybody had an entitlement attitude. I mean really. Where does that come from?</p>

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<p>Yeah, I just don’t see why we need to pretend that there is no way to make rational use of data to conclude that an individual student’s chances of acceptance may be higher or lower than the admissions rate. </p>

<p>This is especially strange to me since I think everyone accepts this so far as the “lower” part is concerned. An unhooked student needs to be aware of the fact that a 15 % admissions rate includes hooked students, so the rate for an unhooked student is actually somewhat lower. The “higher” part is no different. Even if Naviance doesn’t have enough data points, if you are a person who has even basic knowledge of elite school admissions, you can make educated inferences about what qualities you or your child might have that would appeal to particular schools. Sure, plenty of parents make uneducated assumptions, like thinking that the service trip to Nicaragua is actually going to be impressive, or that top schools are going to salivate over a perfect SAT score. But that doesn’t mean it is utterly impossible for anyone to make more well-founded predictions.</p>

<p>There are heavily hooked students who are almost a shoo-in at even the most selective schools. And even for others, it still may be possible to say with some reason that a student’s chances are, say, closer to 1/3 than 1/10 depending on where they come from and what they offer. </p>

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<p>I love data. I am all about using it to ascertain chances at a school. I just want people to recognize its limitations, especially when using Naviance. Is it really telling you what you think it’s telling you? I still contend that chancing yourself remains part science (the numbers, yours and the school’s) and art (hooks, etc).</p>

<p>And I don’t feel at all emotional about any of it. :)</p>

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<p>^I don’t think the posts supporting Data10 were referencing your prior post. </p>

<p>But now that you bring it up, your posts do seem contradictory. You say you love data and are all about using it to estimate chances at acceptance. But you also say you would ignore data from Naviance which is significant and consistent because you’d rather be pleasantly surprised. Not sure how you reconcile these comments.</p>

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<p>I think some of us are just saying that having and manipulating data can give an inflated sense of certainty. In this case, the data have a lot of limitations–especially if we’re talking about Naviance data from a single school.</p>

<p>My kids were legacy applicants to Yale. They had very good stats, and some really good ECs as well. What level of confidence did that give me in their likelihood of admission? Naviance was not much help because of insufficient data (and data that I was pretty sure was goofed up). Looking at results here on CC revealed kids like them who were admitted, but others who looked a lot like them who were rejected. So ultimately, we felt that we had to treat Yale as a reach for them–at least psychologically. For some other schools on their lists, the data were clearer, and it was pretty clear they were matches, even though some of them were very selective. So I have no objection to using data–just be sure you understand what its limitations are.</p>

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<p>

I answered this question in my earlier post by stating the following:</p>

<p>“In my earlier post, I said the top stat applicant had a good chance of admission, so they are obviously not reaches. This does not mean that they are safeties. There is a wide range of grey between reaches and safeties. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”</p>

<p>Perhaps we are using different definitions of reach and not a reach. When I say not a reach, I do not mean that a student should assume a ~100% chance of acceptance, such that their only other applications are to colleges with a low chance of admission for that student. And if an individual has a chance of admission that is significantly below 100%, but still high, I would not call that college a reach.</p>

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Considering essays and LORs gives no information about how much weight is applied to those sections or admission results for top stat students. Maybe top stat students are almost certain to be accepted unless they really phone in those sections, such as forgetting to swap out the word “Harvard” for “Vanderbilt” in their essays. The admit rate gives no information about this. Vanderbilt is the only very low admit rate college I am aware of that explicitly tells students that applicants with 75th percentile scores have increased odds of admission (can be derived from published stats at some others). They also mention that such students may get merit money. If Vanderbilt tells you a group has increased odds of admission, why would you choose to ignore their published statements? Vanderbilt is also one of the only colleges with admit rates this low that sponsors NMSs and gives them additional merit money. Would you assume that Vanderbilt is still a reach for all NMS applicants, because the overall applicant pool has a low admit rate, of which very few are NMSs? Or might you consider that some subgroups, like NMSs, have an increased chance of admission above the overall applicant pool, so the admit rate for the overall applicant pool isn’t going to be representative of such subgroups?</p>

<p>One also needs to consider that the applicant pool can be quite different between different colleges. It’s not a big issue for Vavnderbilt, but it can be a big issue for certain other colleges, like my CUNY examples. In several years, CUNY Lehman may drop from their current admit rate of ~20% to 12.5%, but if applicants are still primarily typical NYS public HS students, it will not take what CC posters would call high stats to gain admission. </p>

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<p>"My kids were legacy applicants to Yale. They had very good stats, and some really good ECs as well. What level of confidence did that give me in their likelihood of admission? Naviance was not much help because of insufficient data (and data that I was pretty sure was goofed up). Looking at results here on CC revealed kids like them who were admitted, but others who looked a lot like them who were rejected. So ultimately, we felt that we had to treat Yale as a reach for them–at least psychologically. "</p>

<p>EXACTLY. Same situation with my legacy kid. A reach psychologically - and then a happy surprise if and when get in. </p>

<p>Doesn’t that kind of make it sweeter, anyway? “Hey, wow, they had a 15% acceptance rate this year, and you got in!! Yay, good for you!” versus “Well, they had a 15% acceptance rate, but you had a 30% all along.”</p>

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<p>Thinking the chances were 30% rather than 15% wouldn’t make me sleep much better at night.</p>

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<p>I think the reason I find this so fascinating is because I was on the phone with Naviance on Monday morning, the very day this thread was started. </p>

<p>I had been looking at the scatterplots at my kids’ HS and noticed that we now have several years worth of data. It occurred to me that the scatterplots could be skewed with data from before 2010, and I wondered whether there was a way to not only have data from every year in one graph but to have a second sort where a family could just see, say, just the past three years. I hypothesized that for some schools there could be a significant difference and, if the whole point of Naviance is to give families the best information we can when assessing their student’s chances of getting in, then maybe we are doing them a bit of a disservice by having older, less relevant data. Of course, the fewer data points could result in privacy issues that mean a second sort wouldn’t be available, but that’s tangential to my overall point.</p>

<p>I wrote the HS’s college counselor after talking to Naviance, which told me that it wasn’t possible. Does anyone know any differently? I was referred to their Idea line to make my suggestion. If it’s really not possible to do that, I think it’s a shortcoming of the service, and it’s why I say that the data may not be telling you what you think it is. I’m sure there are HS out there that have even more years worth of data. Are newbie parents who aren’t as versed in the changing landscape as we are here on cc getting “bad” info? Or at least incomplete/misleading info?</p>

<p>That’s why I maintain that data is great for helping ascertain chances, but you have to use some intuition and common sense and read and all sorts of things to help you determine your specific chances.</p>

<p>I have a real-life example of a friend’s ds. He had everything – great scores, great grades, two years of multiple national-level achievements (trust me on this), full pay. He was WL’d at a school that should have been a lock. They were shocked. Every data point on Naviance indicated he had a 100% chance of getting in, per previous posters’ methods. The mom called me to ask what went wrong. Turns out they flew 1,000 miles to visit the campus, but the kid didn’t want to register for the official tour. They went on it; he just chose to be contrary and not make it an “official” visit by filling out the paper work. If she asked me on the front end, I could have told her that this particular school is all about demonstrated interest – it says so right on the CDS – and that getting on the official tour was a must. How else was that school to know they flew across the country to visit and that he truly was interested?</p>

<p>My point is that Naviance, especially an incomplete/flawed/dated Naviance, can only tell you so much. I love Naviance so don’t get me wrong. And I’m not saying I “would ignore data from Naviance which is significant and consistent because you’d rather be pleasantly surprised,” as a previous poster said. But I wouldn’t chance my kid definitively based only – or even largely – on green squares that could be many years old.</p>

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<p>Is it really that hard to believe/comprehend that even though all the private elites say they review applications holistically, that some weigh stats more than others? Many schools flat-out say what they consider very important. Vandy flat-out says (and shows through their admissions data) that they love high stats kids. Northwestern flat-out says (and shows, through its ED admission rate) that they love kids who have NU as their first choice. BTW, the current NU president comes from Williams, which shows the same admissions pattern (as does Amherst). Northwestern, Williams, and Amherst all have ED admission rates that are way, way higher than their RD admission rates.</p>

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<p>As an actuary, I could go into some discourse on Bayesian Credibility but I essentially no high school Naviance data is 100% credible so you would have to weight the probability of acceptance using your HS’s data with that of a peer institution to get a weighted probability of acceptance, but even this isn’t 100% credible. You could weight that with the acceptance rate for people in your child’s academic peer group (using the test scores and GPA) and further weight that with the acceptance rate in general.</p>

<p>Obviously some High Schools will have higher weights on their own data, but the odds that a single institution’s information will be so useful in prediction that HYPSM become safeties is quite low indeed.</p>

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<p>Haha, CHD2013, welcome to this forum! That is just business as usual and you simply listed the weapons of choice. It is also the nature of a discussion forum with many asymetrical discussions. </p>

<p>Agreeing without arguing is just not as fun! </p>

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<p>Ergo, look at Parchment. Yes, there is some selection bias there, but . . . more data.</p>

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<p>There is always the possibility that he was contrary in more ways that are known! Note this is totally speculative on my part. Just like all of us here, I have no idea why shoo-ins are not getting the nod. As I have often said, we do not really know the finer details of applications, and surely do not know why a particular student was rejected, let alone accepted. All we have is a solid collection of anecdotes. As instructive as the collection is, it will never be more than idle speculation for most of the part. </p>

<p>There are so many moving parts in an application package that is impossible to determine what caused a WL aka a polite rejection. Did the HS send the wrong transcripts? Did the school or the student missed a deadline? Were there missing score? Did the school add a pejorative note about character?</p>

<p>It is still a people process and people make mistakes! </p>

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<p>Days into the discussion and we really are none the wiser about … why the predictive power has any relevance at all? What difference does it make to anyone if HYPSM are safeties, matches, reaches, or whatever fancy generic terms we want to use? </p>

<p>Is there anyone here who would suggest students should NOT have a balanced list with schools with various degrees of likely acceptances? What difference does it make to a student who applies to UT Texas or Cal or Michigan and is competitive for Stanford or Harvard? What difference does it make if the UT admission is in the bag months before the deadline for HYPS? </p>

<p>For years --and right here-- we have (mostly) agreed that an application list should start from the bottom and perhaps shoot for the stars when applicable. We (again most of us) also think the WAMC threads are plain silly. Yet, we believe that finding the appropriate label to an individual school selection is important? Makes little sense to me! </p>

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<p>I was just trying to elucidate why certain schools are statistically unlikely to be safeties for anyone, based on Naviance data.</p>

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<p>Well, since we debate definitions, it is doubtful that what is collected by Parchment is “facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis.” and satisfies the definition of data. Some selection bias is way too charitable to describe the self-reported garbage that is massaged and presented as “fact” by the owner of that site. </p>

<p>I could line up 14 monkeys in front of a dart board and get “data” that is statistically superior to Parchment’s output! The problem is not so much that the information entered is questionable (which it is) but that the percentage of “entries” for a school is so small and that the percentage of the students who DO not care to waste their time sending their information is … huge. </p>

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<p>@xiggi:</p>

<p>You left out essays and teacher recs, which are very important for an unhooked applicant at many selective schools.</p>

<p>If a kid decides to act contrary about registering for an official tour, then it’s likely that the school was more the parent’s idea and not a school the kid was willing to jump through hoops to reach. That lack of enthusiasm can be reflected in the essays.</p>

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MIT does too. The admit rate for applicants with scores over 750 is about 50% higher than those with 700-750. See <a href=“Admissions statistics | MIT Admissions”>http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats&lt;/a&gt;. It is of course possible that students with higher scores also have better applications on the holistic side. Given that we are talking about the difference of 8% and 15% at best - what does it matter - MIT is a reach no matter what. My kid at the time he applied had numbers which that year gave him a 25% chance of acceptance. He was deferred then rejected. No real big surprise there. I thought he had a better chance of getting into Harvard even though it had a lower admit rate. Harvard had a history of taking more students from our school, and my kid was a legacy, and Harvard had just announced plans to greatly expand the engineering offerings which would presumably make my kid more desirable. I was right.</p>

<p>YDS, yes that story about the kid is informative, but presumably all the other kids from the school who applied did their homework and demonstrated interest. You have to realize Naviance isn’t everything. No one (well almost no one) is getting into Harvard without the holistic part of the picture in place too. You’d be a fool to think that just because your scores are in your high school’s 50% zone that your chances are 50% if your application isn’t more than scores and grades. (And I do agree that your chances may be less, possibly even much less, than what they look like on Naviance for schools with single digit acceptances.)</p>

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<p>Of course, we don’t have any real idea why this particular kid was WL’d, but my point was that if you looked at the school’s admit rate and then saw his stats living in the stratosphere along with other green dots, you’d (well, not you, xiggi – but some here) would say it’s a safety … and it obviously wasn’t.</p>

<p>And yes, if my kid applies to a school with a 20% admit rate, and he’s in the top 25% of the applicant pool, he might have a better than 20% chance of admittance but not so much that it’s worth taking a sigh of relief. The odds still aren’t great and so, for me, it’s still a reach. But like I said on the first page of this thread, I have a low risk tolerance. YMMV if you are a gambler.</p>