We have so many experienced and knowledgable folks on here - just wondering if there are any interesting patterns to be seen in this year’s round of admissions. To my lay eyes the big story seemed to be the waitlisting of kids at higher than expected rates. Is that a real change?
The continued move toward earlier decisions seems noteworthy. More colleges seem to be filling a larger percentage of their classes before regular decision rounds and some colleges have opened up admissions to June of junior year.
I agree with your waitlist comment OP, however I think the cause behind that is that kids are applying to more and more colleges. They think if they apply to more colleges, it improves their odds. I am especially thinking of colleges in the category below 20% acceptance rates. They erroneously assume that those colleges are matches or even safeties. It really doesn’t work like that. They are then shocked when they get waitlisted everyewhere. By and large, most of these students are of the “average” excellent type. Plenty of stand-out kids are obviously still getting into great colleges. The waitlist results seem to be clustered around the colleges that fall just outside the Top 25 category. Bottom line, people need to assess themselves realistically, and they don’t.
I noticed fewer threads of people wanting to back out of their ED acceptances. Last year there were a lot of them, many fewer this year.
I personally don’t see the waitlist trend as larger than in the past few years. If you wanted to put numbers to it, wait until the common data sets are published for this year. Then go back and check against previous years. You can see if the # of students waitlisted was higher or not.
I came across quite a few news stories about kids gettig into all eight ivies. It seems to be more than usual. And there are a few non-URM kids. Quite unusual.
@intparent We had a parent on the parents thread this year who was pretty open about having backed out of an ED2 acceptance for an RD acceptance. He claimed financial issues to the ED2 school.
Yes, I saw a couple. Last year there were a lot more.
One thing I noticed (so I’m not sure it counts as a trend) is a continuing focus on 1st generation college students. Princeton said almost 20% of its accepted students for the class of 2021 are first gen.
The most obvious one is that all top schools recorded the most number of applicants than ever with the accompanying lowest percentage of admits. Given this pattern over the last several years, I can only predict that the number of cross-applying will increase next coming years. I detect a panic setting upon this year’s admissions data, and that future applicants will submit applications to great number of schools. I suspect that we’ll be seeing more students applying to 15-20 colleges as opposed to 10-15 in the past.
- Things continue to creep more EA/ED. Which means RD continues to become more of a crazy lottery game at many schools. Which means RD apps continue to go up and RD admit rates continue to go down.
- TBD what the waitlist data will show. My hunch is that waitlist practices are the new drug of choice for schools in the 10-30 range who want to goose their numbers a bit. Probably because the ED gimmick is pretty much played out when you are filling 50% (!!!) of your seats that way.
I wasn’t aware of the waitlist gimmick until this year’s rodeo. You could see that becoming kind of like RD2. Some schools now filling 10% of their seats off the waitlist…
The list continued to grow–the list of schools to which the average excellent unhooked kid cannot gain admission. The planning and school targeting process that parents are using continues to lag behind the reality of a changed admissions landscape. This message is all over CC, but somehow it hasn’t registered early enough in the parental planning process.
Admissions to better schools are getting more and more competitive.
More kids applying to more colleges. Every college I read about reported having received “highest” number of applications.
Sooner or later Common App will come up with a cap is my suspicion
Then kids will use the 8 or 10 slots wisely
Ivy apps will drop by 50% or more 
Some expensive colleges’ COA bordered on $78k per year? or around there…
More than what many families make in a year in this country 
Looks like UChicago is pushing the envelope forward on early decision.
Apparently U of C took a huge percentage of their class between ED and EDII, then only accepted 2% regular decision. If that got them a better class then others will probably follow suit.
Who will be the first with EDIII?
Maybe there is ED 1-10 and no regular decision in the future. Then all schools will have 100% yield!
I noticed that due to the increase in the number of schools that students apply to, the colleges have to lower the acceptances because they don’t know what the yield will be. They don’t want to overenroll. So, for example, when I checked our school’s Naviance I noticed that for this year even the less competitive SUNY colleges (i.e., less competitive in terms of admissons selection criteria–mid 50% range of standardized test scores of the freshman class profile and the high school class rank) like Cortland, Oneonta, Oswego, Plattsburgh, New Paltz, had acceptance rates in the low to mid 40% range, which was very similar to the acceptance rates of the more competitive/selective SUNY University Centers such as Binghamton (44%) and Stony Brook (42%). The two other SUNY University centers–University at Buffalo and Albany had acceptance rates in the low to mid 50% range, probably because their larger class size could accommodate more freshman students.
UChicago basically is doing ED3 by allowing kids to waitlist for Class of 2022 and taking some already for that.
@BoiDel, I can’t imagine that the Common App, an association of the 600+ member schools, would ever restrict the number of applications that could be submitted as this current application submission hysteria is working well for the schools - the plummeting acceptance rate looks great from their perspective.
On a positive note, one thing that I’ve noticed this year is that the nice kids we know seem to have placed well; those who “played the game” didn’t. By “play the game”, I’m referring to kids who have interests a mile wide and an inch deep.
To pile on the ED complaints, the first person in our high school to know where they were going was accepted ED to Wake Forest in August. Important to note: not an athlete. Good student, but no special gifts. I believe applications open in July. Being accepted somewhere so early is silly, and dramatically changes Senior year (in a bad way). The other thing it did: scared the hell out of everyone else in the class that they were somehow behind in their search. Schools need to start taking responsibility for the environment they are generating away from campus.
Regarding waitlists, I think it’s a clear indication that schools have less of a handle on broader trends. ED is a great way to lower acceptance rates early in the process, and waitlists help identify likely acceptances after the fact. If a school needs to add to the class from the waitlist, they look at the kids who have verbally committed to coming “if” they get off the list, protecting their yield. There were stories of waitlist offers within days of decisions…which makes no sense.
I also wonder if all of the statistics are as clean as they should be. More and more moving parts makes detecting accuracy and completeness more difficult.
For all of the talk of first generation and URM access, money still carries the day. An upper class, private school kid with high test scores and an ED1 promise of $280k-$300k is tough for any school to pass on (except for maybe schools with large per student endowment…but even those probably struggle).
@intparent --there were still a few who backed out ED decisions 
I guess this happens every year? Wow.