OP, I did pretty much what you’re doing now. I was more clueless than you though, haha. As I mentioned earlier, my D had an initial very long list with a lot of the same colleges you’ve been considering. A helpful parent is an invaluable resource. If I did it all again, I would be a little more hands off. You might find this thread useful, if you have some spare time: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/2188340-the-original-average-excellent-student-graduates-today-p1.html
Re the potential to get into Williams, but not Mac or Conn, it wouldn’t be surprising to many of us. That would most likely be where yield protection comes into play. Mac and Conn might well waitlist or deny students who they think are using their schools as safeties, or who don’t have genuine interest. So if she really wants to have solid choices come next March, treat those schools just as she would the high reaches.
Part of me wanting to get this down to a workable size now is so I can track her contacts and make sure everyone is getting the love from her. One upside from the COVID mess is that lots of schools we couldn’t or wouldn’t visit are having online sessions. That’s helpful both for her to decide and also takes away the stigma of not visiting.
FYI @Lindagaf I’ve read a couple of your monster threads start to finish, probably a year ago. Lots of good background info in there to help me get started figuring things out. Congrats to your daughter! It shows that even though things don’t always go as planned if you stick to it you can still get a great ending.
@dadof4kids The colleges would do families a great favor if they would publish the percentage of athletes and legacies in their ED admit figures, but since that’s unlikely to happen, we can only rely on anecdotal evidence that ED works for unhooked admits too.
I’m a supporter of ED. It worked for my son who was neither an athlete nor a legacy though his profile was a good fit for the culture of the school he applied to.
As long as the finances appear to work for your family (and of course as long as your daughter’s grades/scores are “in the range”) then I would encourage her to identify a #1 and go with it for ED, even if the numbers look somewhat more encouraging elsewhere. Of course there’s always a risk of disappointment in applying ED to a super reach, but there’s risk in not applying ED too, not the least of which is the “coudda-been-a-contender” syndrome.
I think it’s possible to do both: to have a number #1 favorite and if #1 doesn’t pan out, to end up perfectly happy at #2, 3, 4 etc. Over analyzing admissions statistics can result in a tangle of contradictory figures that disregard the intangible aspects of admissions, which are mostly random, exponentially so in these uncertain times.
Just remember that colleges are not just admitting individuals, they are also building a balanced class, and there is no way for you to know whom your daughter will end up competing with for her spot.
I think you are right by casting a wide net. The next step will be to help your daughter present her strengths (i.e., what she can contribute to the campus community) in the application’s limited window.
I don’t know about weighting the geography thing very much.
When D1 applied to colleges, from a very underrepresented state, there were no real surprises in her admissions decisions. She did not get into her ED school.
IIRC when I read the “A is for Admissions” book years ago, the author (who had been an admissions officer at Dartmouth) said that the geography thing wasn’t worth anything there, essentially.
But perhaps it might be different at some schools that get fewer applicants from afar and care about this form of “bragging rights”.
The Ivies and others in the T20 get apps from all over so might not be a lift. However, outside the T20 I think it can be. Best offer my S20 got this year was from a school 1,500 miles away. It’s a T50ish school but the business school is rated higher.
Another very nice offer came from a Cali school. Again, it’s T50ish. After Covid hit we used the “parent’s choice” and said he has to go closer to home. Anything within a day’s drive which still left many very good options.
When I was at NYU Law, they cared. After I was there I even talked to someone in admissions about it. It was important to them at least at the time to say they had students from xx countries and all 50 states. I knew the guy I replaced (he graduated law school the same time I graduated undergrad). No one in the class below me, but I knew the girl who was a 1L my 3L year. I’m 95% sure there were no other students from my state there during my tenure.
Of course that is an example of 1, from a professional school, in the 90’s. So not exactly something to rely on.
I’m kind of operating under the assumption that it is more likely to help at a school that shows a map where everyone is from, or has marketing materials that say things like “students from 47 states”. Ones that just break down by things like Midwest, Northeast, etc. I’m guessing that even if she is the smallest group (which she usually is) it doesn’t help as much.
I’m also hoping that her background is different enough that even if they don’t care about the state specifically she will be seen as adding more color and variety to the class as an FFA kid from a school they don’t usually see, rather than the 14th girl from the same school in Westchester with the same activities.
But who knows. Now it’s 283 days to March 31. Getting closer to stopping worrying!
If you haven’t seen it yet, the University of Richmond offers a nice, expandable map of geographical representation. The home town for every student in the class of 2023 appears to be included. You will note a dearth of students from a few states in the Midwest.
If one is planning to go further away to school for the main purpose of getting the experience of a student body that has somewhat different cultural and political attitudes to an extent, might want to explore whether that is what you would be getting. If a school draws heavily from a surrounding area whose predominant viewpoint is not much different from where D was raised, maybe not much point in going so far away to get the same thing ?? Or at least it might be worth checking on.
@monydad that’s a really good point, and one I need to not forget as schools may go on or off of the list.
I assume you are taking about Richmond, or at least suggesting that I doublecheck that it isn’t the case. I guess the other one on the potential list is Rhodes, which will probably not make the final list largely for that reason. I think the rest of them are all either in liberal areas or skew pretty hard that direction despite their location. Grinnell for example in Iowa. My understanding is that it is more on the liberal extreme, plus IIRC only about 10% of the students come from Iowa. Although if she got off campus everything woudl seem extremely familiar.
Richmond will probably have more kids from conservative areas than most (maybe any) of the other schools on the list. It sounds like they don’t dominate the culture though. I guess in 30 years things may have changed a bit, but when I went to State U College Republicans pretty much controlled student government, and I was a bit careful where I voiced my political opinions, because sometimes it just wasn’t worth it. My guess is that as polarized as things have become in our country, that problem is much worse.
Even though the younger generation skews more liberal, the kids in her HS are pretty good at repeating what they heard from their parents, which is what they heard from Fox News. When D25’s class did a class vote for president in 2016, she was literally the only vote for Clinton in a room of about 25 kids. One of her fellow 4th graders told her she was a bad person because she liked Hillary and Hillary was a murderer. This is the kind of crap I’m trying to get away from.
I wish more people would follow the advice I occasionally give my kids when they do something stupid. “That thing sitting on your shoulders is not just a hat holder.” That applies to both sides btw. Sometimes I hear things and just think that if the person saying it would stop for a second and think about what they are saying they would realize it makes no sense. Definitely seeing a lot of that the past couple of months, and the stupid season will be in full force at least until November.
I think that as 1/350 from an underrepresented state, your D will stand out a bit. The test scores, in that company, will not move the needle.
AGREE with the above statements 100%.
Brown’s app pool is very skewed. It admitted 1,597 (8%) of 19,518 female applicants and 1,417 (11%) of 12,872 male applicants in its last reported data. So Brown gets 50% more applications from females than males. My D19 really loved Brown but it was easy for her take it off her potential ED list once she saw this stat. Just something to consider when it comes time to get down to one ED school. You can see the male/female app info easily on a site like collegedata.com under admissions info.
As for attending schools with geographic diversity among its population…yes, absolutely makes a difference as to where the student body is coming from. Not sure if you are familiar with Jon Boeckenstedt’s Higher Ed Data Stories blog but he does a great job analyzing IPEDS data, including providing a way to view the states/regions of the freshman class of any college, compare two schools, etc. This data is only reported every two years but you can search 2018 data here. Definitely helped my daughters rule in/rule out certain schools!
@2ndthreekids yikes, you shouldn’t have shown me that. I have a bad feeling my productivity will go out the window this afternoon because I now have a new toy to play with.
In the 10 minutes I’ve messed around with it so far, most things have seemed as expected.
A couple random nuggets:
About 30% of Wyoming students, frequently considered the Holy Grail of geographic diversity, leave the region. There are just so few of them it seems like nobody ever leaves.
Hamilton had 4 students from the Plains region in 2018, Colgate had 26. I wonder what the story is there. I would have guessed they would be pretty similar, maybe even skewed slightly towards Hamilton.
LOL, I bet you are right. When you look at the whole picture on the college by college report, they aren’t that different except for the plains area. Which got me thinking. Doesn’t Colgate have a really good hockey team? I’ll give you one guess which state is very overrepresented.
Minnesota. I wonder how many of them play hockey?
Good God, I need to close that website for a while. This is a blackhole of “interesting to a college admissions nerd like me but probably useless” info.
My own alma mater has a longstanding hockey tradition, and, through that, it has always amazed me how many Canadians have a burning desire to study agricultural economics and hotel administration in the United States.
At one point its hockey arch-rival was BU. which recruited pretty much all of its team from the US. The difference was very stark during the team introductions a the start of a match.
@monydad I’m guessing this generation has shifted from an interest in Agricultural Economics to one in Development Sociology. My understanding that the “major of last resort” for the athletes has shifted now that Dyson is so ridiculous to get into.
And yes, @gotham_mom you are being an enabler. Fortunately I have a meeting in 40 minutes I can’t blow off and need to prepare for, so something productive can still happen today.
It would still stand to reason that hockey fans (i.e. people from MN) would be more familiar with Colgate than the average Plains state student. The same way that if you ask a midwest wrestling fan who is in the Ivy League they will probably say “definitely Cornell, maybe Harvard, and I think some other good schools.”
ya back then there was no “Dyson”, no fanfare/reverence surrounding business among college students in general, and no glory for agricultural economics in particular. Notwithstanding that, it was actually a really good program. They had some great profs studying resource economics, for one thing.
