<p>^^because they can’t. It may be that your high school has yy high performing URMs, or other hooked candidates, and they accept them all.</p>
<p>OK. I guess I am suggesting that schools manage expectations, or allow the media to manage them for them, because on the surface of it, a sudden reduction in admissions from a local, competitive admissions school does seem strange.</p>
<p>Why? What does Northwestern (or U Chicago) “owe” IMSA, or New Trier, or the Latin School of Chicago, or Stevenson High, or (insert Illinois school of your choice)? Nothing. If they want to admit 5 one year and none the next, who are these schools to suggest that they are “entitled” to X number of admits? I don’t get it at all. If IMSA, or New Trier, or Latin, or whoever, doesn’t like it - well, tough toodles for them. There’s no shortage of qualified applicants out there.</p>
<p>You can’t build a national presence if you stick to “we admit 5 kids from every high school within a 50 mile radius.” Colleges have the right to decide that this year, they’re going to explicitly go after more west coast kids, or more oboe players, or more math nerds, or more jocks, or more legacies, or whatever. And they don’t need to make that transparent, since no one is “owed” any explanation. Look, I’m a local girl - if NU had decided to dis-favor suburban Chicago this year, it would surely have hurt my kid - but they would have had every right to have decided that this year was going to be the year to up their California admits (or whatever). Ditto, of course, for any other highly selective school and its own backyard.</p>
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<p>But it can increase the chance of misfits, since some students are not quite sure in early fall of their senior years in high school. If a student feels pressured into applying ED before being ready to decide on a first choice, or later decides on a first choice to which s/he is unable to get admitted to RD because the school filled up is class with ED acceptances, then the student is more likely to go to a non-first-choice school.</p>
<p>Is there any evidence that ED-admitted students are less likely to be happy, more likely to transfer, etc. than RD-admitted students?</p>
<p>As for a school filling up with ED acceptances - well, the early bird catches the worm. No one’s ever guaranteed that they go to their first choice school.</p>
<p>@Treetopleaf, for how long do you think a college should court a student body that doesn’t seem interested? This year, 10 IMSA students were admitted to U Chicago, but only 2 will matriculate. The figures were apparently similar last year. This may mean the Chicago experience isn’t working out for IMSA kids and they’re spreading the word. (No/new engineering and the Core likely contributed.) This may simply be a reflection that IMSA kids see “the world is flat” and are increasingly more interested in leaving their home state. (Certainly happened in my household, boo hoo.) This may mean nothing more than quirky yield results for those two classes! But it is hard to fault a college for giving a heads up that we would really like our relationship with your students to improve. Obviously, if IMSA is truly concerned about the possibility there will be fewer U Chi and NU opportunities for its students, they’ll engage the respective schools to brainstorm how best to address root issues and spark relations.</p>
<p>@texaspg, without going even farther down that “too much mail” rabbit hole!, is it possible your kid got duplicate mailings because College Board sells a high SAT list as well as a NMSF list? I do think one of the best tips we experienced parents can pass on to the newcomers is, tell your kid to watch closely for and tick those “don’t contact me” boxes! That’s such a good life lesson to learn, as those default marketing and privacy preferences are so darned insidious!</p>
<p>I don’t believe students really feel less happy because they are not going to their first choice or ED students are less happy because they felt like they were forced into it. Students really have no comparison of one school is better than another, or if they would be happier at one school vs another. </p>
<p>D1 had a choice between Cornell and Duke. I think she would have been just as happy at Duke as at Cornell. As a matter of fact, I think she would have been happy at Tufts also. I don’t think she would have been as happy at our in state public because of calibre of students.</p>
<p>Just another note - I think students tend to fall in love with a school once they know they are going there.</p>
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<p>But in 2010, it was 6 of 16 who enrolled, in 2009 it was 13 of 29 (of 51 and 54 applicants, respectively). So not only was yield down this year, applications were too. I’ve no clue as to why, though it would be great fun to speculate.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure why they should be all that concerned - this year’s acceptance rate to top colleges in general was the highest since 2006, the GC told the parents group last Saturday. NU’s and UChicago’s loss is Yale’s and Penn’s and Cornell’s and Princeton’s gain.</p>
<p>Except that there a LOT of kids badly disappointed by the NU results, because many of them had cathected the place because of student research projects they had done there over the last two years.</p>
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<p>“Insight” bingo!</p>
<p>Txartemis - the admission phase is long over in our household until next round in 2-3 years. UC did not get any more flags than any other school - lets say NU, which always sent a single copy of their mailings. UC sent not only lots of mail but two copies of each. I have seen many people on CC complain about the duplicates from UC and some of them were asking why their kid was getting two emails with a 170 PSAT score and no chance of an admission. </p>
<p>I threw the second copy in recycling bin as soon as they came in. Let us assume it cost UC at least $25 for each copy with the volume of mailings that were sent out. If 10,000 kids got an extra copy, that is an extra 250k wasted? The extra copies are not a big deal for our household and recycling bin always gets filled each week but shouldn’t someone in UC care about wasting this much money?</p>
<p>I’m sure if you took 20 small HS (whether religious, private, magnet or other) and examined their admissions results over the last 10 years you’d find all sorts of funky things. I don’t think the results are evidence of anything except that HS Seniors are becoming more national in their college interests (whether or not they end up going as far afield as they apply is another issue since the statistics suggest that most kids end up close to home). That means that the top kids at Roxbury Latin and Belmont High can no longer count on Harvard or MIT; that means that Stanford isn’t going to be populated by only the top kids from Menlo Park or Atherton; that means that growing up in Winnetka is no longer a ticket to U of C. All these kids are now competing for what is essentially the same number of seats as there were 50 years ago at these school, but now there are more smart kids from Mumbai and Dubai and Tulsa and Scottsdale who also want to go to these schools. So colleges either expand the number of seats (a strategy which has had very marginal impact on total enrollment at the elites) or just keep looking further afield than they used to.</p>
<p>Parsing numbers as small as 6 out of 16 or 13 out of 29 from one school seems absurd to me. Except if you’re trying to prove that numerically speaking, college admissions at top tier schools is more competitive than it used to be. If that’s your point, QED. But for someone who does not believe in the value of an elite school, all things being equal, I am wondering why AnnasDad is looking so closely at these numbers.</p>
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<p>Or simply trying to point out that one year’s numbers are not typical?</p>
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<p>Excellent points, blossom.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why anybody should expect a “typical” result from a high school. This year X may be the hot school; next year Y might be. This year this college might take 5 kids; next year, they take none. Expecting a “typical” seems really odd to me. The year before my kids were going through, NU didn’t accept a single kid from our school. In previous years, they’d accepted several. But so what? The next year they accepted at least 3 - my S and 2 others - and they might have accepted more for all I know who just didn’t go there. The whole concept that it should be static at the individual high school level from one year to the next doesn’t make any sense to me either intuitively or mathematically. Nor does it make sense in light of the fact that they’re trying to build national classes, which means that “loyalty” to a certain set of high schools is a bad thing in that context.</p>
<p>"Or simply trying to point out that one year’s numbers are not typical? " </p>
<p>Typical of what? The good old days when it was easier to get into top colleges? Those days are long gone. Or as financial advisors say: Past performance is not a guarantee of future earnings. To bring up historical admissions data from your D’s HS and say that this years results are “not typical” is like waxing poetic about the Model T your great grand dad had, and how little it cost! Times have changed. </p>
<p>Blossom has sufficiently summed up the reality of how competitive elite college admissions are TODAY for ALL students at ALL HS’s, including top private HS’s ,and the reasons for that new reality, which many CC parents have either seen coming or experienced in the past 8 years. It’s time to get used to it.</p>
<p>Well, I, for one, was interested in the first post, because I’m interested in what colleges say they are doing, and what GCs think about it. I do think there are reasons to be skeptical about what the GC said. But if I were Chicago, I think I would want to increase yield, and not just for the purposes of ratings–just as applicants want their first choice of colleges, colleges want their first choices of students, too. Thus, for example, if I were the admissions committee at Chicago, and I saw an RD application from a very high-stats HYPS legacy–especially if there was another hook as well–I’d be sorely tempted to waitlist. I can’t see any value in rejecting such a kid, though. (Before H and P reinstated SCEA, I really wondered how EA schools dealt with legacies of those schools.)</p>
<p>In many cases, we’re talking about lottery schools. (I think anything with an admit rate of < 20% and for whom there is a surfeit of super-qualified applicants is a lottery, personally, but I’m pretty risk-averse.) Suggesting that the admit rate from any given high school “should” be similar year-to-year is rather like suggesting that the # of lottery winners from a given geographical area should be similar year-to-year.</p>
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<p>Better predicting yield is just a good thing in general. No college wants to underpredict yield and have to scramble to find beds, put kids in triples designed for two students, etc. - and no college wants to overpredict yield and have the slow trickle of offering people spots off the waitlist and hoping that the first round acceptees don’t melt. If a college could employ someone with ESP who could accurately predict how much a given applicant wants to pledge his troth, why wouldn’t they? It’s not some evil, nefarious plot like it’s being portrayed. When I give job offers to people, I’d like to hope that they really will come, otherwise we’ve all wasted our time. What’s the difference?</p>
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<p>Perhaps not, but it does say something about a college’s claim to admit students based on merit. Unless their crystal ball is perfect, they’re turning away more meritorious students (based on however they otherwise define merit) for less meritorious ones who they think have a higher probability of accepting the invitation.</p>
<p>The more-meritorious student who doesn’t show up doesn’t count for anything. </p>
<p>Anyway, if there were these hordes of less-meritorious students making their way into these highly selective schools just because they knew how to bat their eyelashes, you wouldn’t see the incredibly high stats that you do, no matter how you slice it. There is no wholesale “problem” of high-stat kids being shut out of good schools. They may not all make it into the top 10 or 20 or whatever, but as you have pointed out numerous times, that doesn’t mean they’re not going to wind up at good schools and receive good educations.</p>
<p>It’s odd to me that you’re concerned with the plight of high-stat kids not getting into top colleges when you don’t believe that the top colleges are the keeper of the best educations in the first place.</p>
<p>I think that a policy of factoring probability of enrollment into the admissions decisions achieves higher predictability of yield for the admissions office, while reducing the predictability of admissions for the applicant. (I am commenting on the general implications of such a policy, rather than the specifics of whether it is/isn’t being implemented at the University of Chicago or Northwestern.)</p>
<p>If universities that are excellent, but that might tend to lose cross-admit battles with the CC single-initial schools, adopt such a policy, I believe that this will make the application season more difficult for what I’ll call the “Harvard-qualified” group–that is, very strong applicants who might be admitted to Harvard if luck is with them. Of course, no university wants to be the back-up plan for a student. On the other hand, many Harvard-qualified students would be very happy to go to Northwestern or to the University of Chicago, even if he/she would go to Harvard instead, if that opportunity arose. (“Harvard” is just a shorthand here–no special fascination with it.)</p>
<p>Earlier on this thread, collegealum314 has provided a very clear explanation of the difficulties with a (hypothetical) university’s policy of passing up an applicant, when the admissions people suspect that their university is not the students top choice.</p>