Maybe they are, maybe they are not. I have not personally quizzed them.
What I can tell you is that more and more kids in our school district are dual enrolling and going over their typical workloads.
You are 100% correct. Parents need to be savvy. Because wealth creates opportunities. I think I saw somewhere that 90% of med students come from families of the top quartile of earners in this country.
URM, first gen etc. – those are mostly window dressings. Just about every private school in this country barring a select few have revenue targets that must be met.
Public schools also need to pay attention to their finances. At state universities, in-state students are subsidized (i.e. they are a net loss because in-state net tuition is lower than the cost of education). If finances are tight (perhaps because the subsidy from the state government is insufficient to cover the subsidy of in-state students), then the state universities try to bring in revenue from out-of-state students.
I suppose it depends on the state? Here in NC, it is restricted to 18%.
Thank you for trying to spell this all out. As a parent I must say this process has been awful. Applying ED1 is difficult if financially you can not for certain make that commitment. Applying EA does not mean you applied ED someplace else as in our case for instance. Getting deferred from your safety school, but a top choice, and then waitlisted from that school is heart breaking. Getting deferred from your top schools just because you chose not to take the ACT or SAT is even more difficult and feels like a punishment. There are so many students like my daughter who have learning differences, such as Dyslexia, who can not take a standardized test but still pull straight A’s in school as well as have a rich well rounded resume. Now we wait for RD with the tress and anxiety level at an all time high. There must be a better way of doing this!
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One thing we did learn from some others with inside knowledge about last year and this year’s admission cycles- many schools are really trying to figure out how best to manage the applications that are test optional. For many schools, their initial approach in an EA read is whether the application meets the initial GPA/Test score requirement so high stats are in a “yes” pile more quickly and low stats are “no”- but then you have TO which requires a different kind of read -not better or worse- just different and more time consuming. Many schools are opting to defer more of the TO applications so that they can see senior year grades as another data point. While definitely disappointing to be deferred (and trust me, we have a few in this house), this year it is absolutely NOT a “soft reject” it is genuinely b/c many schools want/need more time.
This might not make your DD feel better in the short term, but when I learned this from a competitive AO, it actually made sense.
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Thank you. Yes, I would rather know that my daughter’s app is being looked at holistically but, this wait is still so agonizing. Her number 1 school did tell our admissions counselor that her app reads well so that is a plus (I hope). I think what surprised me most of all is that the schools that should have been safety schools surprised us by differing and one even waitlisting her. She did send in her fall transcript to all the schools which happened to be her strongest semester yet since her freshman year. Do you any anyone else have suggestions on the best way to show demonstrated interest? The three schools she has left to wait for all are demonstrated interest schools. She has participated in virtual sessions and special programs but now that decisions are coming up she hasn’t found many more virtual sessions to join.
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Colleges are coming up with all sorts of creative ways to evaluate students. I got a DM from an AO on Reddit. Apparently, colleges are using logistical models to predict how students from particular schools perform at their college – obviously a nod to grade inflation or deflation.
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What are “logistical models?”
Probably some kind of “best fit” model where you put college GPA on one axis and HS GPA/score on the other and then do some type of curve fit to see if one is predictive of the other. I did not get details. I guess a 4.3 from a small title 1 school in NC might not be the same as a 4.3 from Exeter Academy?
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I would think at this point, most colleges would have access to data (if they wanted to harvest it) that would give them some type of conversion factors for various high schools that they regularly see in applications/admits. Not saying all of them do so though.
Meaning that the Exeter kid probably has inflated grades?
Not quite :).
can she visit the RD schools that require demo interest? can she think of a topic to reach out to the AO about? maybe connect with a professor in her intended major? or ask AO if there is a student ambassador she can connect with? trying to be creative, these were suggestions I have seen elsewhere on this forum. for the deferred schools, send a LOCI.
good luck- this is a stressful process for sure.
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I’ve always wondered about this. I can understand at top D1 sports programs like NC basketball or Alabama football where the programs generate millions of dollars in revenue and can trigger large alumni donations… but why is a swimmer or fencer or even a football player at an Ivy league school ( not talking about an olympic caliber or future NFL caliber athlete to which the overwheming majority of athletes in these schools are not) so important to the program and alumni that they will compromise or simply drop their academic standards to admit a kid who is going to be a right tackle on a D3 football team to which few people will watch and certainly will never have an NFL career).
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That’s a great question. And the answer, I believe, is because sports is such an inseparable part of the American college system. Unlike other countries where colleges focus solely on academics, and students who want to participate in sports do so through independent clubs and organizations not backed by the University - here the college is expected to run its own sports teams. I am not saying this as a judgmental (good/bad) statement but merely making a factual observation.
So, even if a college’s football team is D3 it does need a full roster. And if the coach needs a right tackle starting next fall he’s going to get one. If that means admitting a right tackle with lower academic standards than the “typical” non-athlete at that college, then so be it.
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Fixed it for you. 
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I don’t think you will find that top schools (Ivy and D3) compromise that much on the academic quality of their athletes. We know a double legacy who is ranked 30th nationally in his sport and was told that he needed to break a 1430 on his SAT, so he took it once at the end of sophomore year and was done.
Also, I have heard from several development people that former athletes give more money on average. Athletics goes a long way into fostering school spirit and an emotional connection. The reason people come back for the Harvard - Yale football game every year is not because of the quality of the game. Not a 1580 but very very far from a low score.
…and yet our top prep school has had several outlier admits with SAT in the 1200s/near the median GPA for ivy recruited (fball and lacrosse) athletes in the last 5 yrs…so it is definitely a different standard. The college chess game still happens for athletes—it just happens earlier and the Sat/gpa are not as important as the athletic skillset.
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At our public high school the divers, swimmers, tennis players, etc recruited at the Ivies were top in their sport and had stats like 35 ACTs. They have it all- there really isn’t any “lessening” in their academic profile.
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Yes and no. Depends on the program. Ivy schools to the best of my knowledge do not offer athletic scholarships but do offer need based scholarships and require their athletes to meet academic standards necessary for admission. Now they might well be in the bottom 25%, but still they are pretty good. Each school has its own benchmark.