Take Aways From This Year's Admissions

Parents Forum
181

@jym626 I think that if a student is applying for a “reach” school or simply one with a very low acceptance rate, they may hope for either of two outcomes: acceptance or waitlist. If they’re on the waitlist or even on the margin of that based on the merits, but the adcom sees that the student will need financial aid, they’re less likely to offer a WL or an admission from the WL. (I would forget about that old phrase “need-blind,” since I think that has been largely debunked over the years.)

My son put in just one application to an Ivy almost as an afterthought, and checked the box saying he would request financial aid. He didn’t make the WL, despite having superb credentials including NMSF that got him admitted to several selective colleges. MAYBE he’d have had a chance at the Ivy if the adcom had no financial calculus. (Maybe, too, if he’d shown greater interest in the school by visiting, etc. Hard to say, but pretty much everybody who applies to that school is “interested.”)

This is speculative on my part, but I think that if a family is able to be “full-pay” and they’re applying to reachy or just highly selective colleges, they should be strategic: don’t check the finaid box on the application.

182

@hopeful1660 You’re a wise young woman. It’s not just the test scores. It’s you. Delighted to hear your experience.

183

True- the WL is not need blind. But there are a lot of good schools that will offer FA to students that is in the form of tuition discounting, and not specifically “merit” money per se.
That (not asking for FA) may be a good strategy for the elites, but not necessarily all the good/reachy schools. JMO

Thanks for clarifying-- wasn’t sure of your thoughts/reasoning.

184

Mackinaw, what debunks “need blind?” What makes you so sure checking the box even shows up on what an Ivy adcom sees? And now you’re describing WL and we know many NB colleges are need aware re: waitlist pulls.That’s different.

185

@hopeful1660: Congrats!

BTW, before I read your results, I pegged you as being successful with LACs just below the tippy-top based on what you had written up to that.

186

My impression was that this year was more of the same - the trend continues. As it gets harder to predict results, students feel the need to apply to more schools. As students apply to more schools, it gets harder to predict results. This also makes it harder for schools to manage enrollment. Just looking at @hopeful1660 's results, 8 very good (and comparable) schools were competing for one student. Yield has got to be very hard for them to predict!

Schools are dealing with this by addressing a lot of their institutional needs in the ED round. Most schools require athletic recruits to apply ED. Many say that they’ll give legacies the benefit of that status only if they apply ED. Programs like the Questbridge match are ED. So if you think about a school with a matriculating class of 500 that accepts half of its students ED, it’s not hard to see how tough even that round can be. If they have 15 sports each for men and women and each coach has 3-4 recruits he/she can recommend, you’re looking at 90-120 spots right there. Some of the smaller schools take 20-30 Questbridge matches. Add some legacy applicants, some outstanding musicians, etc., and there are fewer than 100 ED spots for unhooked, excellent candidates.

And then in the RD round, with only 250 spots left, it’s ridiculously competitive. And then, because they don’t know how they’ll fare with the students they accept, they need to rely on the WL to make sure that they have enough beds for everyone. WL offers seem to continue to go up while WL usage seems to fluctuate pretty dramatically at the smaller schools from year to year.

I don’t think that a lot of parents (not so much the ones here on CC, but quite a few I know IRL) really appreciate what the landscape has become and are really shocked when their kid, who has won everything at her LPS since kindergarten, isn’t admitted to Harvard. I also wonder, as it has become more competitive, how many kids have been groomed into the “same” applicant as all the others in an effort to be attractive applicants. To that end, essays that make an applicant human (and are consistent with the rest of the application) probably are quite helpful (with everything else being equal).

It also seems like people are increasingly drawn to the “prestige” schools – the number of schools with acceptance rates under 20% grows every year. This may be in part due to how competitive it has become and the need to hedge bets, but I also wonder (based on conversations) as costs rise and tuition is similar across the board, if there is a perception that one “gets more for the money” at a higher ranked school.

There are no easy answers to any of this. But it’s also important to remember that the thing that really differentiates college outcomes is the level of engagement a kid has while they are there. A kid who is smart and has a good work ethic isn’t going to become less smart or hard-working by attending #60 ranked school over #11. If anything, while it isn’t a lot of comfort to current applicants to students, it seems like what may be happening is that American colleges may be developing a much deeper bench – better profs, better students, better facilities – through this process.

With all that said, I wish there was a way that this could be done like medical residency matching – but as long as FA is in the picture, that’s not going to happen. It’s so stressful the way it is now!

187

As you know, throwing an application in “as an afterthought” may be apparent to the adcomms @mackinaw, especially if the “why…” want spot on. And if a school is big on demonstrated interest, not showing it can certainly be a concern. Finally, the elites don’t really care about NMSF. There are plenty of top schools that do, but not sure what “almost ivy” your s applied to so hard to tell if it’s a school that does or doesn’t care.

188

You may be right. The application was fine, afaik, but not tailored at all. Every essay he submitted was the same for all schools but didn’t use common ap, and each college may have had optional essays or short-answer fill-the-box types of questions like at UofC asking “What do you read on your own; why is it interesting to you?” As busy as he was, he didn’t go the extra mile on his applications but substantively and in terms of achievements there was plenty to offer. As I’ve written before here, he let me largely compose the core list; and if he’d struck out with all other colleges he did have a significant merit scholarship offered early by the instate flagship that would have covered ~half of the COA. Instead he went full-pay to UofC.

189

@gardenstategal: Right, and I’d stated, you really can’t look at schools (especially LACs) on a one-dimensional scale like purely by rankings.

William Jewell’s Oxbridge Honors, NCF, and Sarah Lawrence offer Oxbridge-style tutorials. Besides Williams, what other LAC has that? So for a certain kid, they may be better than many higher-ranked LACs.

Likewise, Reed sends a ton of grads in to PhD programs. For some other kid, Reed could be as good as Carleton or Mudd and many LACs ranked higher than Reed could be worse.

190

@gardenstategal, the yield protection issue has got to becoming even harder for schools to manage as my twin DD’s had a similar experience as @hopeful1660. Both the 1 WL / 5 Denial experience at the top-6 LAC’s and then the 8/8 acceptance experience at top-7-25 LAC’s makes it seem like the schools are profiling applicants the same. Given that, how do these schools predict yield when they know their applicants are also applying to almost every other similar school?

191

@Chembiodad
Although you didn’t ask me lol, I’m sure you know these schools use ED/ED2/SCEA/Waitlist for yield protection. However for RD I think institution are aware of the stereotype/ archetype of their University,and utilize the essay and EC’s to get a vague sense of if the student matches the culture of the institution. Take Vanderbilt or Duke for example, these places emphasize the party and play atmosphere and know students that truly want to go will have inclinations toward that type of atmosphere. As opposed to Rice and UChicago that are more intellectually/co-curricular focused can weed out the students that could more likely fit the environment and want to come. Also some schools utilize a difficult admissions process to self-select for yield, like Georgetown. The unique application selects for very interested students. Other schools have very numerous supplementals with their common app requirement.

Well OT:
I also noticed the new SAT had a big impact as some schools averages went up noticeably while others went down, which is very noticeable as the college board estimated scores would increase for everyone. Who know if the trend will continue though?

192

@Chembiodad , I really don’t think they can estimate yield accurately. If you go back and look at the CDS for these schools, it’s all over the place. Bates, for example, offer 1595 WL spots to the 2018 class and 1535 to the 2019 class. Roughly the same number (694 and 671) accepted spots each year. The class of 2018 had 26 of those kids matriculate while the 2019 cohort had only 11. So they cut the number of WL offers for the class of 2020 to 1063. A notable drop, I think. Only 334 accepted, yet 49 of the students who started last Sept. had been on the WL. That is almost 10% of the class! Middlebury had ONE kid in the class of 2018 who came of the WL yet 33 in the next year. It totally makes sense if you look at it from the schools’ point of view.

FWIW, most of the schools that I looked up put fewer kids on the WL for the 2020 class than they did in previous years which is not the impression that I had from reading posts here.

There is so much hair-splitting over the differences between the top LACs (particularly the ones in rural areas in northern climes), but in reality, they are far more similar than they are different, so it’s not surprising that they attract, and then accept, the same kids. Glad this isn’t my job!

193

Yes, am hearing some similar schools over promised, have no where to house them and now are trying to get kids to defer until 2018, as if that’s a win for the student when tuition will then be $5k higher - nope no mention of freezing it for the inconvenience.

194

Men have been men for centuries
I don’t see how maleness is inconsistent with college. I do think it’s funny that the clear affirmative action being applied to achieve that idealized 50/50 ratio is rarely discussed.

195

@homerdog said “We have a friend whose daughter is the cream of the crop in every way and was rejected or waitlisted everywhere but UIUC (our state flagship). She was all ready to go there and then Princeton came through with a spot for her! So…she’s Princeton material but almost ended up at Illinois. Bizarre.”

Sorry to interrupt, but am I the only one whose thoughts went immediately to Risky Business?

“Looks like University of Illinois!”

“Princeton can use a guy like Joel.”

…Carry on.

196

@AREYOUTHEONE: Men have been men for centuries but women haven’t been given the same opportunities as men for centuries.

197

It seems to me that what’s driving the increased unpredictability of college admission decisions is the fact that students are now applying to 12 or 15 schools, with most of those being matches or safeties. I would bet that even just a couple of years ago, if a student applied to more than 10 schools, it was because they were applying to lots of reaches. So admissions to Ivies and equivalents became notoriously a crap shoot. Now the same thing is happening to “second-tier” schools.

I happen to agree with those who think the essay counts for a lot more than most people think. I said this on another thread, but having sat on a scholarship committee, I was amazed at how similar high-achieving students’ resumes are. The very fact that they are almost all “well-rounded” – they all play at least one sport, have some kind of creative pursuit, win a handful of academic awards, do some volunteering, etc. – only serves to make them even more homogenous. If every student only did 2 activities, then each one would stand out more – one would be obviously the tennis player, another would stand out for their interest in musical theater, etc.

So unless someone has a really unusual EC or a really unusual level of accomplishment in one EC, I don’t think ECs make a student stand out. (Of course, if a school is specifically looking to fill a quota of violinists or whatever, that would get a good violinist’s application flagged.)

But certain essays just immediately grab you. It’s not always about the quality of writing, although that definitely doesn’t hurt. It’s the essays that really show you what this student is like (with the caveat that of course if the essay makes it clear that this student is ignorant or petty or a generally unpleasant person, that’s not exactly a good thing). Something has to bring an application to life so it doesn’t just blend in with the thousands (or hundreds if it’s a small school) of other applications where the student has “good enough” grades and test scores. I do think that it’s usually the essay that does that.

198

@gardenstategal @dustypig Thank you both for adding to what I was trying to get at in my earlier post. When you’re looking at colleges that have thousands of applicants with great grades, ECs, and test scores which the college may or may not care about (in the case of all those test optional schools), the qualitative stuff starts mattering a lot more.

In some ways, I wrote my essay just as much for myself as I did for my adcoms, and what I got were 650 words only I could have produced. And I think that’s the point: to say something only you can say and also to breathe life into your application. But really, what I learned about myself through the essay process and through the admissions process in general was/is much more important and much more valuable to me than impressing people I either never met or only met briefly at a college fair. I realize now that it is also more important than where I did and didn’t get in.

As exhausting as it is, applying to college gives kids a chance to learn something about themselves which may be helpful in choosing a school that will help them grow the most in whatever area is most important to them. I’m guessing it will be more competitive next year and it will continue to get more competitive until some real, fundamental changes hit. And the lower the acceptance rates drop, the more important I think it will be for students to find their own gravity and think about what’s really important to them.

199

@EyeVeee Early in this thread I read something interesting that you wrote. You said that someone in your high school got an acceptance by Aug since apps opened up at Wake Forest in July. How does that happen? Doesn’t the guidance counselor have to be available for the recs, etc? D will be a junior in the fall so I’m not sure how this works. Thanks so much.

200

I believe Wake Forest opens applications by June 1st for early decision with a response in 4 to 6 weeks. Presumably applicants have acquired the necessary reference letters by then. Our high school had all reference letter requests completed by March of junior year. The counselor probably wrote her forms over the summer but I suppose one could request an early one.