.“I’m a white male, but I identify as a Giant Psychelic Butterfly Who Poops Raspberries, and as such, I am therefore oppressed, marginalized, and underrepresented. Do I get to live in the Rosa Parks African American Theme House?”
Some recent posts seem to have shut down this thread. :-/ Please, if you want to start a thread specifically about California schools or raspberries, feel free to start your own thread. In the meantime, I’d like to repost the original post to kick-start the original discussion:
OP: “05-04-2017 at 11:42 pm edited May 4 in Parents Forum
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?”
However, does she know how the essays compare to the entire college applicant pools at various colleges, or what the admissions readers at the colleges are looking for (beyond generic good writing skills)?
If you search here on collegeconfidential, you will easily find multiple threads from students who freaked out when they discovered this limit with their 21st application, e.g.:
So it is clearly possible to restrict the number of applications submitted through the Common App. The only question is whether the limit should be lower than 20. I vote “yes”.
Our DD’s submitted 16 and applications, respectively. They were each admitted to 3/3 of top-30 LAC’s as safer choices, 4/4 and 1 WL of top-20 LAC’'s as target choices, but fared much worse with 1/5 and only 1 WL of top-10 LAC’s and 0/3 of Ivies. Not certain that it was the wrong strategy as while the reaches didn’t happen, there’s no what if now to worry about.
@Sam-I-Am Yes that was the original question and my answer was that seniors in my area that went ED or EA were accepted in far greater numbers to their 1st choice schools than the kids that went RD including my D #5
@Corbett Totally agree that they should be a lower limit on the Common App. I’ve been through this four previous times starting in 2002 and D 1-4 applied to no more than 5 schools directly ( I don’t even know if the Common App existed back then) They were accepted to all the schools they applied. Fast forward 10 years and D #5 with the common app applied to 16! At one point I thought I would lose my mind with the essays, Supplements, and other requirements. She was accepted to 8 of them but was WL or denied at schools we thought she had a better than good chance of getting into. I was happy with the 8 that said Yes especially because they gave her great FA but just to see the look on her face when the very same schools that accepted her sisters who had lower SAT, GPA, and very few ECs. was crushing.
Another thing I would change and yeah I’m going to say it, are those ridiculous Essay Prompts or rather not to have so much emphasis on them. They should be used just to get an idea of what kind of student they’re getting not graded like a test paper. If a student has decent stats and has done his homework their college choice shouldn’t depend on whose reading their essay. And don’t get me started on the supplement questions:
" If you could talk to your future roommate what would you tell them"
“Anna Quinlan said she majored in unafraid, Explain a time when you majored in unafraid”
How the heck does answering any of these types of questions determine what type of student you’re getting. I thought grades and hard work the kind of things you can track and see on paper would be the determining factor or at least a major part of it.
Ime, app prompts are not graded like a test paper. Now, poor grammar and impossible to decipher are liabilities, of course. But we say repeatedly, the point is a glimpse beyond the raw points of stats and an EC list. Partly, for a better pic of the kid and a lot about his thinking, how he thinks, if he does.
For top schools, it’s more than stats, the quantitative. Unfortumately, the “trackable” doesn’t mean a kid can write a college app/supp essay well.
The Common App does seem to limit applications to 20, though perhaps there is a work-around allowing a student to apply to more. But the truth is that, when it comes to competitive schools that require extra essays, kids cannot apply to limitless numbers of schools. There is only so much time to answer essay questions, even when recycling old ones written for other colleges. Plus, many schools require additional essay applications for scholarships. And those quirky essays seemed designed not only to ascertain your kid’s true interest in the school, but also to make your kid so busy completing school X’s specific essays that your kid has no time left to write essays for school Y. A kid that applies to too many schools will find it difficult to meet all the scholarships deadlines (I know because my kid missed some scholarships deadlines because of applying to a few too many,j and did not expect one of the deadlines to be 5:00pm instead of midnight). But I don’t think it is correct to place a strict limit on the number of applications. What seems like a common sense limit to most (say a dozen applications) might not make sense to those that have a need to find the best deal economically (either through FA or merit or both). Those families may want to apply to many more schools. Others, targeting state schools that have clear-cut admissions policies may only need to apply to one.
So my take-away from this cycle of admission is that there should be no set limit on applications. However, I have noted many students targeting state flagships that have set admissions and merit aid policies (such as Univ of Alabama) so that kids with a certain ACT score know they will both get in and get a set tuition discount or waiver. Such students do not have a need to apply to dozens of schools if they will be happy with the deal offered by Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas or Oklahoma.
Or even if the applicant writes a good essay, it cannot be known if it is what the admissions reader is looking for.
Imagine an essay that will be graded and will be a crucial (but not the only) part of a passed / not-passed grade for a class. But there is no information on what criteria will be used to grade it, nor will graded essays or comments on them be returned to the student (only the passed / not-passed grade for the class is returned). That is analogous to what a college application essay is like, from the applicant’s point of view.
Along those lines, some schools we visited made it very clear in their presentations that if the school was the students number one choice, to put it in the essay. Other schools said don’t waste your essay telling us that our university is the number one choice; tell us something about you instead. Some people discourage campus visits prior to applying, but that sort of information is very helpful to know.
I learned to not trust Naviance data because it doesn’t always understand the big picture.
For my son, he had good grades and good test scores and decent EC’s. He was above the curve for all of the schools he applied to on Naviance. The one area where he lacked was that he fell outside of the top 10% of students in his school. They don’t track that in Naviance, and there are schools that really care about “students in the Top 10% of Class”. I’m convinced that the 2 schools he did got waitlisted factored that in. And in 2 other cases he did not receive Merit money because of that rule as well. So, his GPA was fine, test scores fine, but if you finish out of Top 10 you are not considered for merit money. The reason son17 fell out of top 10 was he was only placed in 1 Honors class Freshman year, and even though he got all A’s, his GPA was significantly lower than some kids that were able to take multiple honors classes Freshman year. He was never able to catch up. Too bad, we did not realize it at the time.
Our school is voting to do away with ranking next year.
Although it sounds counter-intuitive, the way to de-escalate the system and reduce the number of apps is to get rid of ED at the top 20 schools. While ED saves applications for those who get in (one and done!), it increases the apps for the larger number of kids who aren’t one-and-done.
The system wide effect of ED is to dramatically shrink the supply of seats available to RD applicants. Which then drives down the admit rate and drives up the app number. If the RD admit rate is 25%, a kid needs to do a lot fewer apps than if the RD admit rate is 5%.
My suggested solution is that the top 20 or so schools all go to limited early action instead of ED. Each kid would be allowed to apply non-binding early action to 3/5/7 of the top schools. Getting rid of ED means every school’s yield goes down, Which means everyone’s admit rate goes up. Which means the incentive to do more apps goes down. QED!
Of course there’s little reason to think the schools would ever want to do this. The ED system works for them so long as they have enough money to hire additional readers for ever increasing number of applications.
@lookingforward Yes agree that a well written essay should be submitted but what are the chances that a student who had above average stats submits an essay with poor grammar, and impossible to decipher? If they did then they should be put in the no pile. My issue is not the essay but that so much emphasis is put on a bunch of silly questions read by a group of people who determine based on ones writing skills if you’ll be accepted or not grades and stats be damned. The question should be as simple has "Tell us something about yourself that your test scores don’t and why do you think you’ll be a productive student at our Institution. The other day I read a post that a student got into Stanford by writing BLM repeatedly. Good for him! I only hope he kept the word count.
@RightCoaster - Naviance doesn’t track URM, they don’t track athletes, they don’t track ED, they don’t track full pay versus need…all of that you have to compare for yourself against an assumed peer group in your school. Naviance is a good idea, but the details are weak.
An example of my D messing up Naviance…she took the SAT, and didn’t do as well as hoped, so she bounced to the ACT where she ended up with a 35. The school she applied to doesn’t have scattergram critical mass for the ACT, so you can only see her on the SAT chart. She is WELL below the avg. SAT, but she didn’t use that score to apply. Somebody is going to think they have a shot based on that green dot (beneath a see of red)…but it’s bad data.
One poster was surprised that schools now were pulling kids off the waitlists before the reply date, but that already has been going on a long time; in 1987, Swarthmore initially waitlisted me but then sent me an acceptance before May 1st, and I had plenty of time to weigh Swarthmore vs. Williams vs. Amherst vs. Wellesley vs. Eckerd before having to reply by May 1st.
I think Naviance is totally outdated already; the landscape seems to be changing dramatically. There’s a school we visited that the guidance counselor thinks would be a great “safety” based on my child’s stats in Naviance… but I am less sure of that, because this year College Confidential had a lot of students with my son’s stats being very upset because they were waitlisted, with lots of posters speculating that it was yield protection.
It seems colleges are really unsure who will actually come to them if admitted, and ED has become more important than ever. I agree with posters who recommend making that choice well and not wasting the ED opportunity. But it is hard to tease out target vs. reach when your scores are in range everywhere. It is hard to know to which school you may be admitted.
And, in New York, what will be the effect on SUNY admissions of the new free tuition for families making up to $125,000? Will more kids than ever apply there, making the top SUNYs no longer reliable target schools for a high stats kid?
It is a time of great uncertainty. I agree with posters who said that the reach, target, safety model may no longer apply.
At DD’s HS, hardest part interpreting Naviance is deciphering athletic recruits and legacies, with the latter being a big differentiator at particular Ivies.
