Unless a high school sets up separate Naviance data sets by division or major for colleges that admit by division or major, that nuance in admission is also obscured. Of course, dividing colleges that way can also reduce sample sizes with the problems that that brings.
“read by a group of people who determine based on ones writing skills if you’ll be accepted…” Again, not writing skills, per se. But the thinking. Not some perfectly formed but off-point essay.
And: show, not just “tell us.”
As someone who has occasionally graded high school papers, for an English lit class and for Academic Olympics competitions, and who has read at least a decent sampling of college application essays over the years:
There are vast, vast, vast quality differences among the essays kids with similar GPAs and test scores produce. And it’s not just “writing ability” in the sense of style, or spelling and grammar, although those vary, too. The fundamental qualities are having something interesting to say, and being able to communicate that to other people without demanding too much of their attention.
Lord knows, those two things are not the only things that matter. I respect GPAs and standardized test scores as communicating important information. Long-term committed ECs and concrete accomplishments are important. And recommendations are also important, if they are thoughtful, specific, and personal to the student and the recommender. But the student’s own writing (assuming that’s what it is) in many cases separates the stars from the peloton of smart kids.
My son applied to 2 in-state and 14 OOS via Common App. In retrospect, he should have applied to far less than 16, and the only reason why I say this is that he really suffered – given too many other academic and EC responsibilities and commitments that required and demanded of his time – through the essay writing process for all these schools. After his attempts at quality essay writing in the order of his top college choices, he basically ran out of his time. He had to hurry through the essays for his secondary choices.
When the admission results started coming in, I found interestingly that the majority of his top choices, to which he had spent a greater time in writing the essays for, was a success whereas the majority of his secondary choices was either waitlists or rejects. The obvious lessons I gathered from this experience were 1) essays are a critical aspect of the college application; 2) it’d be very wise to come up with a right balanced list and the number of colleges one is applying that one has enough time to produce quality essays for. Given today’s lottery-like application results, at least with the top schools, I’m sure more and more students are looking to submitting their applications to a greater number of colleges. But that can come with a price.
Exact same experience with my kid.
The essays got weaker and the admit results got lower (in terms of admit/deny and also merit money awards) as January 1 approached.
Yet another reason for the takeaways (i) you need to make good use of your EA and ED opportunities and (ii) RD is not the place you want to be playing.
An admissions officer at my alma mater had some interesting views that I can’t verify or generalize to other schools, so take it with a grain of salt. But she said that future engineers are responsible for the school’s higher test scores and GPAs. In her words, their files all look very similar and the best students often have mediocre essays, so the numbers drive the decisions.
They spend much more time reviewing the humanities students because their AP classes aren’t good predictors of how well they write nor is the difference between a 750 and 800 SAT. Their supplementals and recommendations get read closely and little slip ups or inconsistencies get noticed. And, she said first-generation students got a lot of attention.
@TiggerDad Not only run out of time but run out of things to say. I mean how many more ways can one be expected to write about ones self? D #5 as part of the honors program was not only provided with FREE SAT & ACT preparation by the very same people who teach Kaplan and Huntington but also had access to 10 professional editors and writers helping them with their essays. Now I’m no genius but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with her first draft for the common app. That thing went through 6 revisions going back and forth between her and the editor she was assigned. The supplements also went through multiple drafts. Now get this, the way it worked was that after all the changes the essays were then given to the other 9 professionals and when they all gave the two thumbs up we were allowed to submit. We never worked this hard for D 1-4 and if memory serve me right D3 who attended Cornell didn’t work on her essay until a few days before it was due. My point is that yes the essays are and should be important but that in my neck of the woods the kids that went through the same process ED or EA got accepted to far more first choices than the RD kids with the same of better stats.
That’s crazy. Wring the lifeblood out of a kid’s writing? And were those "editors/writers"up on what the different colleges actually look for?
It’s not a writing contest. It’s meant to be a nice tale that show the attributes the colleges are looking for. (Helps to know what those are.) As we see endlessly on CC, top performers don’t necessarily know what a good college app essay is, nor the rest of the writing, are often wrapped up in stats, how great they think their ECs are, and their assumptions that teachers who “love” them can- and do- write great LoRs.
I’ve said before that most elite colleges will fill the majority of their class through ED/SCEA and WL pretty soon.
I would not be surprised to see a class filled 50/20/20/10 between ED1/ED2/RD/WL.
I think UChicago is already there (actually, possibly less than 20% of their class filled through RD).
It will be interesting to see if UChicago shot itself in the foot this year. Before this year, it was getting a huge number of EA applications – over 10,000 per year – and accepting about 1,300 of them. That represented more than half of the total acceptances it was giving out, and maybe 2/3 of its class, but it was still accepting 1,100+ RD applications. This year, it instituted ED/EDII/EA. It seems to have accepted something like 1,400 students total from those three (no exact figures, though). but only 200 or so were EA, the others were ED. Deferred EA students (of which there were thousands) were encouraged to convert their applications to EDII. As a result, there may only have been ~400 RD acceptances. 3/4 or more of the total class seems to have been filled with ED applicants.
The message to next year’s applicants is, “Don’t bother with EA or RD, it’s ED or nothing.” The problem is, students and their families don’t particularly like to apply ED. I don’t think there’s any college that gets much more than 4,000 ED applications, and most get far fewer than that. UChicago’s RD applications were already down noticeably this year, I think in response to the confusion. Next year, it would only be rational for EA and RD applications to tank completely. The cost of relying so heavily on ED will be to make the applicant pool much smaller and less diverse, and that will not be a good thing.
I would like to see apps limited to 10. Obviously ED is attractive to colleges, the kid is basically saying that the college is their first choice and they will attend if accepted. I would like to see the application cycle tightened up with or without ED and the app cycle over by Jan 1 so more attention can be paid to senior year.
@JHS: ED apps are now so numerous and of such high quality (and diversity) at the elites that they could likely get as much diversity as they like.
It’s at the point now where elites with ED can probably fill their entire class through ED without any measurable drop in any metrics.
@JHS, BTW, I did the calculations for the U of C numbers here:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/20517163/#Comment_20517163
"OK, if the U of C’s numbers are to be believed (and that’s open to question, as their past behavior has shown):
8% of 28K total = 2240 total admits.
EA & ED1 = 9% of 13K total = 1170 admits in ED1+EA
ED2 & RD = 1070 admits from 15K total.
x * .02 + (15000 - x) * y = 1070
We don’t know how many applied to the U of C ED2 but we do know that roughly the same number applied to ED2 at BU as to ED1. We also know that between 3000 and 4000 apply ED to Brown, Duke, and Northwestern, but the U of C doesn’t have engineering (or a lot of schools that Northwestern has). Between 1500 and 2000 ED to Emory, Dartmouth, and JHU (even though JHU does have engineering). Even being generous, say 2K-4K apply to each of ED1 and ED2 at the U of C.
If 4K ED’ed to each of I and II (and EA had the same 2% admit rate as RD):
ED1: 24.75%
ED2: 21.25%
If 3K ED’ed to each of I and II (and EA had the same 2% admit rate as RD):
ED1: 32.33%
ED2: 27.67%
If 2K ED’ed to each of I and II (and EA had the same 2% admit rate as RD):
ED1: 47.5%
ED2: 40.5%
Note that the school with the most SCEA apps (Harvard) only had a little over 6K, so UChicago almost certainly didn’t have 8K ED’ing to it.
In any case, the U of C is giving a massive bump to those who ED.
It seems like your chances to the U of C range from around 30% to possibly even above 40% if you ED, but they are almost nil if you do not.
And yes, taking in a decided majority of your class in ED most certainly would increase yield."
Though with deferrals and conversions to ED2, a bunch of these numbers may be awry.
Nondorf clearly stated many times in public that the quality is the highest they had with highest test scores ever.
It seems like mine is a minority opinion, but I struggle to see the essay as anything more than an effort to deal with outliers. In other words, it makes total sense to me that very poor essays might set off alarm bells about some high stats kids and some truly great essays help to educate colleges about special circumstances that a student has had to deal with that are not otherwise discernible from the application.
But in a world where colleges are receiving 10,000s of applications and therefore 10,000s of essays, I’m just not buying the importance of essays for those in the vast middle of the bell curve. I know a lot of CCers are very proud of well-written essays, but it seems to me that in almost all cases those kids had a ton going for them anyway and it’s logically very difficult to prove the essay made much of a difference.
Btw, you know who loves college essays? Consultants and other services that make money off helping kids with college essays.
@pantha33m: Yes for those in the middle of the bell curve (in terms of essays) who’s essays don’t stand out, essays would not be a positive differentiator.
For those who’s essays&supplements are memorable, the essay&supplements very well could be.
We see on CC just tons of kids with tippy-top stats and a lot of EC’s that seem pretty similar (or at least don’t stand out). So for those who are nonhooked, what would stand out besides their essays and recs?
@lookingforward Exactly what I thought. As I stated daughters 1-4 never went through any of this over kill with their Apps. Now mind you D #4 graduated Barnard 2007 so its been 10 years since I’ve had to look at a college app but I would have never thought it was going to be this competitive or difficult. All the daughters read the essays and D#3 the Cornell graduate with major in English/Psychology said it was pretty darn good. Like I said I was happy with her original draft. I never promised #5 a rose garden. I never promised her she would get accepted to the same schools her sisters did. l did emphasize excellent grades, GPA and SAT plus do whats expected and throw your hat in the ring. While I’m happy and more importantly she’s happy with the schools that did offer admission, I feel that to have put all the effort in this college application process only to be WL by two of our SUNYs while most kids that went ED got accepted was down right insulting. I’m happy for any student who gets accepted to college regardless of their accolades or stats, to me college is college and the winner in my household has always been best FA award but after this long drawn out process and thankfully it’s my last, I can’t help but think I could’ve had a V8!
The advice to go ED just isn’t useful for many families. And I think it can be a disservice to the student too. Many kids just aren’t sure what a first choice school would be for them. Even if they are considering certain majors and apply to a school based on that, kids change their minds all of the time. I’ve seen many threads on CC this year from kids who hated or failed organic chemistry and are no longer considering being doctors. Happens to many an engineering major as well. Also happens to non-STEM kids!
And what about the growing up that happens senior year? A good match in October isn’t necessarily the right place in May. Lastly, parents who will be full pay (like us) would really like our kids to have options in May.
I think showing interest is something that keeps coming up. We intend to have our S19 visit campuses that will be his matches and get to know the environment at each school. Hopefully, we will kill two birds with one stone: he will find some places he really likes AND be able to write insightful essays for those applications that say why school X is a good match for him.
“And I think it can be a disservice to the student too.”
That’s fair, though part of it is that Americans are spoiled for choice.
In England (and many other countries), kids essentially have to decide what they will study at the start of their last year before uni.
In some countries, you track in to some areas (STEM or not) by 16 or the start of HS.
In some countries, where you go to college essentially comes down to how well you do on some test.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
ED also helps keep SES diversity low (and hence financial aid expenditure low) while allowing colleges to claim being need-blind when considering individual applicants, since ED skews toward applicants who do not need to compare financial aid offers (mainly applicants with wealthy parents willing to pay list price). An incoming class with half the students from wealthy families (no financial aid, top few percent of the income/wealth scale) seems to be the target for the elite private schools.