Swarthmore Rejectees/Waitlistees...Where else did you get into?

<p>Swarthmore Rejectees/Waitlistees...Where else did you get into? I've been seeing some interesting combinations of acceptances with rejections from Swarthmore and vice-versa.</p>

<p>Okay to start the ball rolling I'll say that I got accepted to U Chicago and University College London....</p>

<p>I got in to the university of washington, the university of puget sound, uc santa cruz, and evergreen state. I keep getting rejected/waitlisted everyplace else though....</p>

<p>I was waitlisted by Swat.</p>

<p>I got into Amherst, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and William & Mary.</p>

<p>rejected by swat, in at:
middlebury, haverford, wesleyan, colgate, hamilton, uvm</p>

<p>Swat was my only waitlist. I got into Duke, Emory, Oberlin, Northwestern, Tulane, and University of Rochester</p>

<p>I was rejected by Swarthmore ED (I saw this thread and thought I'd post). I've gotten into Vassar College, Ursinus College (merit scholarship), and Franklin & Marshall College (merit scholarship). Am currently planning on attending Vassar.</p>

<p>
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Swat was my only waitlist. I got into Duke, Emory, Oberlin, Northwestern, Tulane, and University of Rochester

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</p>

<p>Wow, Shaquita. That's an embarrassment of riches, huh? Lots of great schools. Personally, I'd be really torn between between Emory and Oberlin, I think. Others would find Duke and Northwestern very tempting.</p>

<p>littleathiest: my D travelled overseas with four Vassar students and became quite good friends. I think there's a lot of overlap in Swarthmore-type students and Vassar-type students.</p>

<p>Looks like everyone has some great choices.</p>

<p>yeah seriously! i myself will be attending the university of chicago. i realized that I wanted a "big school" feel, especially coming from an intl school with barely over 300 students from PreK-12! (my ib class has 8 students, haha)</p>

<p>Rejected by Swat. (only rejection)</p>

<p>Accepted by Amherst, Williams, Wellesley, Haverford and Penn. </p>

<p>Waitlisted by Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, JHU.</p>

<p>waitlisted at Swarthmore
Accepted at Stanford!!!</p>

<p>I was waitlisted and will be attending Dartmouth. My friend was rejected ED and will probably be attending Brown.</p>

<p>I definitely agree with your comment interesteddad about the similarities between Vassarites and Swatties. Apparently, however, the guy in my grade who did get into Swarthmore disagrees with me... when he found out I got into Vassar he congratulated me on getting into such a good school and then commented on how liberal Vassar is! Pot calling the kettle black much? :-)</p>

<p>I think the main difference is that Vassar tends more to the humanities side than Swarthmore does. English is the most popular major. A lot of art majors and drama majors. Swat has that whole engineering thing which combined with Bio pre-med makes for a fairly strong sciences side to the student body.</p>

<p>I can't say that one has the edge in "liberal"...although there probably is some obscure distinction between artsy New York City liberal and Philadelphia Quaker liberal. Sounds like a good sociology thesis waiting to happen!</p>

<p>Duke is SO tempting. Their acceptance package was so pretty I was very impressed. But alas.. Duke is kinda large for my taste, I don't want to be a number</p>

<p>I had never heard of CC before spring break, but my mom had mentioned it and i decided to take a peek. This is all very interesting. I had always kind of assumed that there is a "pecking order," so to speak, of colleges whereby, most students at Y college are there because they couldn't get into X. This particular thread is confounding some of my assumptions. When the layman speaks of schools, most consider Brown and Stanford as "better" schools than Swarthmore, yet, acceptees to those institutions were rejected or waitlisted at Swarthmore. I'm sure that this is more the exception than the rule, but what does this say about Swarthmore? Is it possible that it was a "we'll reject you before you reject us" type situation?</p>

<p>BottomLine,
Welcome to CC! And no, IMHO, the situation you lay out "we'll reject you before you reject us," is not going on here. Swarthmore is a very highly selective school, same as for Brown and Stanford. It is also very "self-selective." Students who seriously pursue an education at Swarthmore are looking for a certain intellectual climate. My S is currently a senior at Swarthmore. He went to an independent high school which is considered one of the best in the country. And, he was at the top of his class. This is a high school which routinely sends 33%-50% of its graduating class to "the Ivies." Yet, the head of college counseling told my S that if he went to Swarthmore he would not get a finer undergraduate education ANYWHERE ELSE in the country. (My S applied ED to Swat.) More name recognition at HYP, Stanford, etc.? Yes. But many students who choose Swarthmore are not looking for the name recognition.</p>

<p>um not quite bottomline.
swarthmore is one of the most elite schools in the country, comparable to any IVY, despite what the average person might think.
fortunately, the people that matter (grad schools, academia, business, etc) are quite aware that there are other outstanding places outside the ivy league.</p>

<p>
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When the layman speaks of schools, most consider Brown and Stanford as "better" schools than Swarthmore, yet, acceptees to those institutions were rejected or waitlisted at Swarthmore.

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</p>

<p>Unfortunately, the layman doesn't understand much about college admissions. At best, the layman makes broad generalizations. For example, I think it's fair to say that, in general, getting into Stanford is more difficult than getting into Swat or that, in general, getting into Duke or Brown is roughly the same as getting into Swat.</p>

<p>But, those generalizations really don't tell us much. Admissions is not general. It's specific. It's all about matching up applicants from the pool with the specific qualities and specific slots each specific college has defined for its incoming class. </p>

<p>To really understand admissions, you have to figure out what kind of slots each college is trying to fill. Which are easy slots to fill? Which are more difficult? Slots that are easy to fill at one college may be like finding a needle in a haystack at another.</p>

<p>It's easy to tell that the layman is off base because there is so much talk about SAT scores. In reality, SAT scores mean almost nothing at schools like Swarthmore. Sure, you have to have good scores, but the entire applicant pool has good scores. </p>

<p>I found a chart from the admissions for the class of 2003 at Swathmore. 10.5% of all applicants that year had a perfect 800 on the SAT verbal. 58% of those were not accepted. </p>

<p>30% of all applicants scored 750 or higher on their SAT verbal. Three out of four were not accepted.</p>

<p>53% of all applicants scored 700 or higher on their SAT verbal. Nearly four out of five of those (78%) were not accepted.</p>

<p>As far as SAT scores go, the pool of applicants is nearly identical to the pool of accepted students. It's not the SAT scores that are determining who gets in and who doesn't.</p>

<hr>

<p>As far as "better" schools, I think you would find few academics who would tell you that the undergrad program at any R1 research university is better than the highly interactive, undergrad education at Swarthmore. As the recently-departed President of Harvard reportedly told two of his students, if you had wanted to get to know your professors, you should have gone to Swarthmore or Amherst. Or, as he put it in a speech last month, of all the professors he'd seen other research universities poach from Harvard, he knew of not even a single case where a professor was poached for his or her great undergrad teaching.</p>

<p>BTW, this admissions thing works in reverse, too. I'm sure there are accepted students this year at Swat who did not get accepted at Brown or Stanford.</p>