The results in the Lehigh admissions thread have been truly eye opening to me. I apologize if I am stating the obvious for many of you, but it certainly wasn’t obvious to me. In response to the dismay and bewilderment of many high stats applicants who were waitlisted or rejected. @collegemomjam posted this interesting statistic.
According to Naviance, Lehigh has an overall acceptance rate of 26%. High stats students, well above Lehigh’s average are not being admitted in significantly larger percentages then their general rate. Yes, 32 IS higher than 26, but not as much higher as I would have expected. I had assumed, and maybe others had also, that if your stats were fairly far above the schools average, your chances for admittance were FAR better than the general admissions rate.
What this result tells me is that if you are at OR ABOVE the school’s average, you should assume your chances are about the same as the schools overall rate. Maybe a slight bump, but nothing earth shattering. So a high stats candidate at a 30% school has a 30% chance of admission. Not a shoe in. Not a safety or anything close.
Now, lets say a school like Lehigh is a match – your stats are as good or better then the average. You apply to 5 of them. My math is not great, but I believe that means that you have about a 17% chance of being rejected by ALL of them. Thats not minimal. That’s a real danger. Its also a reality check on expectations. I have had people tell me Brandeis is a sure thing for my D. No way.
I think this just reinforces the need for real, true safeties. It may be paranoid, but perhaps even several true safeties. Also, treat the safeties like any other school. Show the same interest, use the same care with applications. For so many reasons, that just makes sense.
I think your data above show what used to be called “Tufts’ Syndrome”, where the school fails to accept students that they believe will not attend because they are likely to be accepted at more desirable schools.
There’s no other logical explanation for the fact that the top group of scores that spread around 1550 has a lower acceptance rate than the group that spreads around 1450. (In other words, Lehigh doesn’t want to suffer the effect on their yield number that would occur if they treated the top group logically.) I’d say the spread between the 1450 group and the 1350 group looks reasonable, and the deep falloff to the 1250 group makes sense too.
You conclusion about the chance of being rejected by five schools with the same acceptance pattern seems about right. But if you add two more schools, then mathematically the chance of coming up empty gets cut in half to about 8% or so, other things equal.
I do think the explosion of applications over the past several decades makes it harder to figure all this out, for both applicants and admissions personnel.
Gallent- there is a significant flaw in your math.
The likelihood of being rejected at all 5 schools is not a statistical quirk. The teacher who wrote, “Janie works very hard and is quite diligent in completing all of her homework assignments; she is always the first to ask if there are extra credit opportunities for every project” has pretty much doomed poor Janie as a grind.
Getting rejected at Lehigh is independent on getting accepted at Brandeis, or Smith, or Conn College. These are not related events. But a misfire in any part of the application might doom the kid everywhere (or almost everywhere). Unlike flipping a coin where 10 heads in a row mean that at some point you are going to flip tails (unless the coin is tainted) it is quite possible for every single school to reject a kid because there is no “mean” to converge to. In a fair coin toss over time- you’ll hit 50%. College admissions don’t work that way!
However, the over all admission rates that year were 17.2% at UCB, 32.8% at UCSB, 57.4% at UCR, etc. according tohttp://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses/index.html . So it would not be accurate to say that a high stats student can only assume chances equal to the overall admission rate at every college. (But applicants to UCs should be aware of differences in selectivity between divisions and majors at the same campus.)
Perhaps the key difference is that the UCs do not use “level of applicant’s interest”, while Lehigh lists it as “important”. But also, Lehigh’s banding by standardized test scores misleads because standardized test scores at “important” are not as big a factor as rigor, academic GPA, recommendations, extracurriculars, and character, all listed as “very important”. https://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=794
@blossom. If I understand what you are saying, its even worse then I assumed.
This is like the coin toss. Unrelated events with a probability of say, 30%. However, a red flag in your application, one you might never even know about can make the chances significantly worse.
Now factor in early decision and the picture is even more bleak. Skidmore states on their page that they take about 50% of the class ED. That means that the chances for the RD group is far less than the 30% Naviance number. Am I missing something?
Different colleges’ admission decisions are not completely independent events, since colleges commonly consider many of the same criteria, although they may consider and weight them differently.
True. But most of the schools in this particular peer group list interest as important. Also, at least anecdotally, the kids being wait listed on the Lehigh thread seem to have excellent GPA and ECs as well. My point wasn’t really mathematical precision, but just a new awareness of how common it is for kids with high stats to be shut out of schools they had reason to believe would accept them.
It would be really interesting to see banded results from other places to see if this holds up elsewhere.
IMHO, if your kid isn’t going to apply ED, and ED applications / acceptances are published (some, but not all, school’s put them in the CDS), you absolutely should recalculate the RD acceptance rate when determining if it’s a reach (and how much of a reach).
One of the schools on my kid’s list has a 34% RD acceptance rate and a 76% non-binding EA acceptance rate. Demonstrated interest is considered important by them, too.
Just the opposite. A coin toss is a random event (assuming a fair coin). Admissions is anything but random. As you note, one bad rec can sink a 4.0/1500+ in all top schools.
@ucbalumnus Interesting! Of course, those schools are so selective, I doubt any student’s stats are significantly above their averages. I’d love to see Brandeis, Skidmore, Lafayette, kenyon, BU, NYU, Bucknell…schools like that.
This demonstrates why no school with, say, an acceptance rate below 40% should be viewed as a safety by anyone, regardless of stats. There are too many variables in holistic admissions. I have already seen several threads from perplexed students, wondering why they didn’t get into their “safeties.” These kids think Skidmore and Brandeis are safeties! They blindly throw out apps without any regard to acceptance rates AND the importance a college gives to various criteria. Instaed, they just hit the submit button more and more often, assuming that surely, at least one very selective school will work out. A “safety” with a “high” acceptance rate, such as Clark University, is no safety if the student doesn’t show interest, or have good recs, or a good essay. Students don’t do enough research and many parents don’t seem to limit numbers of apps submitted.
UT Austin had a 39.2% admission rate in 2015. But it was 100% for Texas students in the top 6% of their high school classes, so that those in this group who are not applying to competitive majors can consider it an admission safety.
Of course, that means that the admission rate was much lower for the other applicants who were not in the automatic admission group, so those applicants had to consider it a reach.
School-specific characteristics can be significant, and can go against conventional generalized wisdom.
I think this is such a valuable point. People wonder why kids with higher stats are not automatically admitted first. There is a point beyond which all of them are fully capable and a extra points no longer predicts better results. You also have the instances of kids who have spectacular results in their intended area of study and poor grades in other subjects. I can see why a school would want a student like that as well.
This is true, especially since the American standardized tests really aren’t that difficult.
Getting a 1500 instead of 1400 just means you are more careful and a better test taker.
Goes to show that many colleges don’t put a lot of stock in standardized tests as many kids can succeed without high test scores, hence more colleges moving to test optional admissions.
Lehigh is a little different than most and have never been shy about wanting to educate the students that think that Lehigh is a really good fit for them.
Their admit rate for ED is very high.
They’ve also tended to admit students whose GPA may not be that high, but whose class rigor and test scores are high. For the longest time, academic record was only “considered”. They were unique in this respect though I believe that they have changed that.
This used to be a destination for ambitious students who may have bit off more than they could chew in HS rigor. They want to build leaders, and like to see students take academic risks even if those risks don’t pan out.
As a result, the students they admit may not be the most highest GPA students, but Lehigh doesn’t think those highest GPA students need them as much as the smart hungry risk takers who may have some academic blemishes. Thus in the RD round, it IS logical for them to prefer these students to the blemish free students with tippy top scores who they assume will have lots of options.