“The original premise of this post is correct- no matter how strong your child’s “stats” and overall application, there are absolutely no guarantees at highly selective schools, Lehigh included.”
…if you apply to Lehigh RD.
But if you apply ED, Lehigh is a match/safety school. Even if your stats are not all that high. And the majority of Lehigh students come in this way.
@northwesty But do we know that without knowing the stats of admitted ED candidates? (I may have missed it earlier in the thread.) My perception is that colleges are using ED not just to protect yield but also to do so while maximizing their scores. So I think someone who scored a 1500, if they applied ED, has a very good shot at getting in – yes, I agree with you. I’m not so sure about the person with a 1300 (“even if your stats are not all that high”). Better than RD, sure, but not at a match level, and definitely not at a safety level at least as how I’m thinking about it. The ED bump won’t take that 25% shot and make it 75%, which is sort of where I think of “safety” at (I know, not 100%), and probably not even 50% (AKA match)…
I wonder how much help a student gets from raising a test score within a band. For example, Brown has ACT 33-35 as a single band. I wonder how much benefit a student gets from raising that ACT score from 33-35. Its possible that it makes no difference unless you actually move from one band to another. I’d love to really know how this process actually works.
I think for a school to approach “safety” status for high-stat kids, the school should have at least a 50% admit rate – in the round he or she is applying in.
Most schools’ RD rates are well below their EA and (especially) ED rates, so if the overall admit rate is 50%, it probably isn’t safe unless you apply early. And as we have seen, if you are applying RD – and even EA at schools that also offer ED – showing interest matters at a lot of schools, especially private schools.
I like to be conservative when evaluating kids’ chances – better to tell them it’ll be harder than it actually will be, than to make them overconfident. (of course i have little idea what the adcoms will think, but in my mind, anyway, i’m being conservative)
Penn’s ED/RD discrepancy is pretty common. Harvard is around 14% ED and 3.5% RD, Yale and Princeton are around 16-17% ED and 4% RD, etc. Stanford has less of a difference and MIT and Georgetown have little to no difference, but they seem to be the exceptions. RD is harder for almost everyone at almost every school.
Missed the edit deadline – of course HYP have SCEA, Stanford and MIT have REA – not ED.
HYPS have SCEA/REA (functionally similar, but may have differences in the details), but MIT has just plain EA without any restriction, other than to obey other schools’ restrictions.
I don’t think that parents, or kids, have any leverage in the admission or financial aid process. Even for the really high performing kids, there are plenty more in line when one moves on.
The important criteria is admission chance for the applicant, not overall admit rate. If you are basing the chance of admission on your stats, than you want schools that have an extremely high admit rate for applicants in that stat range. This is not the same as high overall admit rate.
For example, this thread has emphasized how Lehigh is big on demonstrated interest – mentioning “demonstrated interest” as one of the 8 admission criteria listed on the website, marking demonstrated interested at the same importance ranking as test scores in the CDS, talking about the importance of demonstrated interest in admissions decisions during information sessions, etc. Suppose Lehigh really does treat demonstrated interest as important as test scores in their admissions decisions, then it’s not going to be a RD safety based on having 75th percentile test scores, regardless of what the overall admit rate is. However, a less holistic college with a 20% admit that has near auto admission for top stat applicants might be an excellent choice for a stat-based safety.
“They are littered with people who don’t understand why they were rejected with high stats. There are just as many people with lower stats that were accepted by multiple schools at that level.”
That is just not true, the average ACT/SAT for the top schools are 33/1500, and given the 25-75 is 31-34, only 25% of the enrolled students have below a 31. The top colleges are actually littered with high stats kids, what adcoms decide is whether to take the 1500/national debater or the 1500/olympiad winner. Not the 1500/debater vs. the 1200/debater. Only a hook will get the 1200 in the discussion.
@theloniusmonk I think thats true when you are talking about the difference between 1500 and 1200. What is less clear is the difference between 1600 and 1500 or 35 and 32. The students with 1580 seem to be shocked that their peers with 1480 are getting offers. I believe they assumed, even if they were warned against such belief, that colleges would admit in order of scores. They are shocked when their lower stat classmates get offers that they don’t receive. Even though those classmates’ stats are just a bit lower. This is the mindset that I was warning against in my original post.
In other words, if a school like Lehigh has a range of 29-32, a student with a 34+ believes he is almost an auto-admit. Thats why kids think these schools are safeties for them. Its a dangerous fallacy.
“The students with 1580 seem to be shocked that their peers with 1480 are getting offers. I believe they assumed, even if they were warned against such belief, that colleges would admit in order of scores.”
I don’t think that’s the case in the bay area, most if not all the top high schools say that stats above a certain number are not highly correlated with admission. The unhooked kid with a 1580 may be disappointed, but not shocked. No one believes that Stanford, Pomona, Claremont, Cal Tech admit in order of scores. Even the top UCs which are more stat based reject over 50% of applicants with a 4.0 UW.
@theloniusmonk That may be true in your area, but here on the boards and in my town the attitude is different. Thats why you see so many people wonder how they were rejected when kids with lower scores were accepted. They are not referring to kids with 1200’s, they are referring to kids with 1450s and 32-33 act scores.
A kid with a 34+ (And commensurate gpa) should be auto admit at Lehigh.
Period. End of story.
Lehigh rejecting that kid is a joke.
Oh, and here in the NY burbs I find the same thing as you. There seems to be no rhyme or reason at times why fabulously qualified kids are denied to schools they would excel at.
I’ll admit I was a bit surprised my my D’s waitlist at Lehigh. Her stats put her at about the 75% range (according to the CDS), and there wasn’t much more to do to show interest - visited, interviewed, wrote to admissions officer, wrote to professors in her intended program. She has a friend going there and has been to campus 10+ times (and let admissions know about it). But we’re from NJ and I’ve heard they want to expand their geographical diversity, she was RD because no way could do ED due to financial unknowns… It was her top choice and I would have paid a decent amount for her to go there, but alas it was not meant to be. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have even visited and let her apply.
Why should Lehigh make offers to scores of 34+ kids who would in all probability rather go to Dartmouth or Princeton, when they can enroll 30-32 kids who are thrilled to be there? They have years of experience proving that the 32 kids can do the work. How many of those 34+ kids really had Lehigh as their first choice? Perhaps some of them did and chose not to apply early for financial or other reasons. Some of them showed the love and got in. Many did not. Some of those kids would be happy to attend Lehigh only because they were rejected by all the higher ranked schools. Some of them probably just got caught up in yield control after having done all of it right. But even so, its incorrect to assume that the 34+ kids somehow deserved admission more. That is the entire point of holistic admissions.
@Schadret I’m sorry about your D’s experience. I didn’t mean that all the high stats kids who were wait listed or denied failed to show enough interest. I certainly don’t mean to blame the kids or suggest that there was something they could have done differently. The whole point was to warn high stat kids and their families against assuming these schools are safeties for them.
Oh I wasn’t responding to anything anyone said - more just pointing out that going into the whole process I thought I knew how it worked, but was way off on a lot. In September I figured Lehigh was a given with my D’s stats, LoR’s, a LOT of demonstrated interest, female, etc. I had no idea how big a difference ED was and how low RD acceptance rates are at a lot of schools… had no idea being divorce affected aid (the only NPC that even took it into account was princeton’s). Learned a lot and will use that knowledge accordingly for the next kid!
Did she visit Lehigh’s admission web portal and read any emails from Lehigh with an email reader that displays images? These are ways that some colleges use to determine level of applicant’s interest (the first one was specifically mentioned in an article about Lehigh’s admissions process).
@ucbalumnus In that article, the NJ kid also never visited. @Schadret stated that they visited AND interviewed. I think its safe to say that some families do everything right and are still denied. If that were not true, then some of these schools would, indeed, be safeties. If there was a formula to follow to guarantee admission, everyone would do it.
Visiting and interviewing may be more than merely making an appearance or checking off the boxes. There is a difference between going through the motions vs. demonstrating enthusiasm – and it probably isn’t something that can be faked very well or ought to be. It’s not about doing “everything right”-- it’s about doing something important better than other applicants. And since there is no way for any student to really know or assess who their competition might be --then it does really require a maximal effort.
I mean the athletes who participate in olympic races and come in 4th are often excellent athletes who do their very best, but they don’t get medals. It doesn’t matter what their time was or how it compares to the winners in the last event or even where they ended up in qualifying heats – they still have been edged out by competitors who managed to get ahead of them in that particular race.