I’m not sure how they come to the premise that shorter read times make admissions more unpredictable, but getting to the second point above I believe it points to something we discussed in the 2017 admissions discussion thread that it’s beneficial to focus your application by using something like a Personal Narrative so that an AO can easily categorize what you’d bring to the class much easier. By focusing your essays, short answers, EC listing, Award/Honor listing to back up a central narrative I think you’re more likely to get a positive result from institutions that have a need for your student.
Why? Not all diversity has a socioeconomic component.
At our school it was a great year for full-pay URMs (9 of the 10 Ivy admissions). For the unhooked applicants, they had better luck applying ED at schools ranked 10-25, and were shut out of Ivy schools. I think we will see more ED at slightly below tippy top schools next year by those who don’t have a hook.
Well don’t fret I met 2 sets of parents from London and 1 student while I was at Princeton on accepted student day. The one child of one set of parents did not get into Oxbridge (don’t remember which one she applied to) but did get into Princeton. She had an EC that was a major part of her life and from my understanding Oxbridge could give a rat’s bottom and maybe that’s why she had a positive result at Princeton because they do. So maybe Oxbridge and the Ivies are doing a good job of actually taking kids that fit at each institution.
The difference, @dolemite, is that Oxbridge is upfront about caring only about scores and gpa and Princeton only disclosed "holistic admissions " which keeps us all busy reading the tea leaves instead. This year’s preferred flavor seems to be first gen students. Who knows what next year’s tea will be?
@roycroftmom Actually the preferred flavor every year for quite some time is recruited athlete. How many 1st gens did Princeton take this year?
edit: Looks like 359 offered - wonder if the yield differs statistically from that group.
Nearly 20% of the class is first-generation. That is a change. I don’t think the number of recruited athlete spots has changed in 30 years.
Considering that probably around 65% of people of the age of being parents of high school seniors or college frosh do not have bachelor’s degrees, that means that 20% is still significant underrepresentation of first-generation-to-college students, although obviously much of the reason for underrepresentation is due to factors other than college admission policies.
“ETA: If I know AOs will spend 30 minutes on my application, I would send it to 3 or 4 top choices. If I know its only10-15 minutes, I would send it to 10-12 top choices. If I know its only 4-6 minutes, I’ll probably send it to 15-20 choices.”
As @LoveTheBard noted, that logic makes zero sense if your goal is to get in to a reach school.
Less time spent reviewing each app should mean greater care on each app submitted, not more apps.
@roycroftmom: The Ivies have been adding sports in recent decades, so the percentage of athletes has gone up.
@roycroftmom: Most of the top UK schools only care about objective criteria but Oxbridge also has an academic interview.
In any case, the UK unis are looking to nurture specialists in an academic area (or several) while the American elites are looking for future leaders in society.
@londondad Why are “academic interviews” so much less subjective than reading essays and recommendations? (Of course, academic interviews are much more appropriate when students are being admitted to particular academic courses, which most U.S. universities eschew as a matter of principle. It’s hard to argue that they have been meaningfully less successful than Oxbridge taking that course.)
By the way, my experience is meaningfully out of date by now, but among my children’s various classes my sense – and my sense of what the kids themselves thought – was that the elite universities scored much better than 80% overall, although with some interesting inconsistencies. (E.g., the person in my son’s class whom his older sister thought was one of the most interesting kids she had ever met was accepted at Harvard – and Oxford – but not at Yale where he was a legacy. His Harvard senior thesis won a big prize. My daughter’s class had two fantastic kids accepted everywhere they applied – which was almost everywhere – except neither was accepted at Princeton.)
If anything was a surprise, it was that URM/first-generation/low-income status counted for less than it might have. My son had one friend I (and everyone else) really thought would be accepted everywhere. He was clearly the top Hispanic student anywhere in the region, had the stats to be competitive, and was not only the first generation in his family to go to college (with one undocumented parent), he had two older siblings who had never gone to college. He had been forging his own path with no role models in his community since he was 9 or 10. He was accepted at MIT, but not HYP.
By the way, that “less time per application” article seems misleading in a meaningful way. I think for a long time, colleges have been giving full consideration only to about 5,000 applications per year. They all have some process for giving all of their applications respectful consideration before culling out those with no chance (and accepting a handful of slam-dunks). In most cases, I think the admissions staff is supplemented by admissions student aides, graduate students, and recent alumni who act as second readers of applications, so the total available personpower far exceeds that of the admissions staff alone.
5,000 applications represents a much higher percentage of 15,000 applications than it does of 40,000 applications. At a 40,000 application level, the time spent on the last, most important 5,000 applications may be the same as it ever was, and the time spent identifying those 5,000 applications may be much more than it was in the past, but the time spent per application on the 35,000 early-stage rejected applications will be radically less. And the average time spent per application in the whole process will also be radically less, even if the time spent on the applications that are most worthy of consideration remains the same.
As a practical matter, it means that there is probably more reliance on easy metrics like numbers to exclude applications from full consideration. And it’s much harder for a great essay or supplement to counterbalance a low GPA or SAT. If you have a flawed application and no hook, your application’s argument why it should make it into the group that gets full consideration probably needs to be a subtle as a howitzer. But that doesn’t mean kids with “perfect” applications are getting rejected because no one is spending enough time to appreciate the subtlety of their essays or art portfolios.
I thought the last time Princeton added a sport was 1991. Women’s golf. So for 25 years the athletic numbers have been pretty stable. And I don’t have any guess as to what the percentage of high school graduates who are first generation is. Presumably, lower than that of the overall similarly aged population.
At least the number of athletic recruits remained stable at about 18% of the admits each year. No one can control his/her ethnicity or if s/he is first generation, etc so no reason to be bitter about it. No one’s entitled to a space at any school so use the things one does control like essays to put his/her best foot forward, find the best fits at a range of acceptance levels and choose from your acceptances.
Yes. And realize luck and factors completely outside one’s control may be determinative, so don’t feel bad about the results. They are no reflection of the applicant’s worth.
@JHS - I would suggest that there is an almost automatic sort that occurs for AO’s as they evaluate “their” apps. They have favorite schools, with favorite (and least favorite) GC’s, and they have a sense of relative strength. They will look at everyone from Lawrenceville who applies, because they know that A) it’s a great school, and B) they have had incredible success from that group. They may know that they can get 3 or 4 per year admitted.
Princeton High (same AO) may provide 50 apps per year, and the AO knows they are probably lucky to get 1. Quick math…you can review 40 of the group in an hour and exclude them. The other 10 you have 4 hours to work on (assuming 6 mins each for a group of 50, you start with 300 min, minus the hour, leaves you 4 hours). That’s plenty of time, especially as you sort out half of the 10 in the first deeper pass.
Easy metrics get you in the room…but EC’s, Rec’s and Essays keep you there.
If this keeps up, parents will start disowning their college degrees. You already see kids posting that they did not report degrees earned by their parents in foreign countries. I wonder if colleges will start checking on the degree status of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents in order to confirm first generation status.
Maybe this will lead to a service allowing your kids to be temporarily adopted by high school dropouts.
Interesting notion that wealth changes skin color or ethnic background. Too bad the real world does not work that way.
I joked with my son that to make college admissions easier, I would burn his US birth certificate, place him with an illegal immigrant family, and start calling him “Ricardo Montlabon”