In some cases, it’s better to have a grandmother who’s illiterate.
@am9799, the more-stressful-with-a-high-stats-kid thing was definitely our experience. One thing about thinking our eldest had at least a meaningful shot at the most selective schools in the land was the accompanying awareness of how darned hard it is, and the sense that the margin for error was really small. I remember really sweating things like whether she was studying enough for her subject tests, for example.
With our youngest, we managed to identify some cool schools where he had an excellent chance of getting in (he did), and then he took a flyer on a couple where we knew he had very little chance to get in (he didn’t). He wasn’t even disappointed when he didn’t get admitted to his reaches, because he never believed he would. It’s all been considerably more relaxed. And, of course, when you open your eyes to the universe of colleges that are not household names (even among folks who have heard of the best LACs, for instance), you realize there’s a lot of great schools out there that can provide your kid with a terrific college experience, and the entire process just becomes much less fraught.
“I think schools should post not only the middle 50% of accepted students but what percentage of students with those stats they accept.”
+1. Those numbers are eye popping. From Brown’s website:
Only 18.5% of HS valedictorians are admitted.
Only 14.3% of salutatorians are admitted.
Only 23.8% of ACT 36 kids are admitted.
Only 16.3% of SAT 800 Math kids are accepted.
Only 22.8% of SAT 800 Reading kids are accepted.
@northwesty I wonder how many ACT 36/Val-Sals get accepted. The optimist would say 40-45% 
AND, those admitted figures for Brown are probably all kids with a hook, a special something, some outstanding EC, a published book, maybe ED applicants, etc… Probably a tiny percentage of them are “average” excellent students.
@bookworm, your Aunt reminds me of an old Jewish joke (I am Jewish myself, and hopefully my joke doesn’t offend anyone): At a presidential inauguration for the first Jewish-American President, the President’s mother gets interviewed and asked “Are you proud of your son?” She replies - yes, yes, he did ok, but my other son is a doctor!
@typiCAmom LOL!!!
@Lindagaf , this has been an interesting thread! I’ve gone through the process twice. Oldest son had a lot of hooks, and middle son didn’t. In fact, middle son had some things that might be anti-hooks. We went into the process with very low expectations.
My white son was homeschooled, had three Bs in college classes, had pretty weak rigor, had good, but not top test scores (2230 SAT; 730 Math II, 710 Literature, 610 Physics SAT IIs). He was very focused on EC, doing a ton of things with cello, did church related and cello related service, bowled for four years, and did one year of robotics on a first place team. That was it for ECs.
He did have a few awards, but nothing too big (NM Commended, Winner of Special NM Corporate, Elks Fountation MVS Award at regional and local level, some minor music stuff, and his robotics team won a lot at the local level).
Where I think we did right: he submitted two arts supplements to a number of schools, a cello supplement (strong, but not strong enough for a school like Stanford) and a fine arts/animation supplement (very weak, but was submitted to schools where he was considering game design/animation/fine arts).
He has faced challenges: Type 1 diabetes, math disability, vision disability (had surgery) and a hearing loss (had surgery) in one ear. We talked about it (in my documentation as a homeschool parent) to explain weakness in transcripts, and he wrote about it in one of his two main essays. His essays weren’t over the top good, but they told compelling stories, and maybe they helped.
He also had strong LORs from two community college professors. I think those helped.
He applied to about 6 different majors since he wasn’t sure what he wanted. He was thinking engineering, but changed his mind after applications.
My dad paid for applications, and my son applied to 22 (!) schools. Admit rates of the schools ranged from 5% to 90%. The high reaches were on the list because they met 100% need, and we have a lot of need.
My son had no favorite school at all, and was looking for one affordable school.
Here’s the list with results:
Accepted to 4 Cal State schools including SDSU for Mech E, and was WL at SLO for Mechanical Engineering.
Accepted to two UC schools (UCSD for ICAM, UCI for Computer Game Science) and was WL at UCLA for Electrical Engineering.
Accepted to 5 “safeties” for engineering and game design: SDSMT, Missouri S&T, UAH, UCCS (Game Design), UT Dallas (ATEC)
Accepted to Purdue for Industrial Design and the honors college.
Accepted to WPI for Game Design.
Accepted to Northeastern for Game Design after being deferred because his SAT IIs were late.
Accepted to U Rochester for Digital Media Studies.
Rejected at MIT, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Dartmouth.
Waitlisted at WUSTL for Film Studies…
Accepted to University of Pennsylvania for Fine Arts.
We could not have been more pleasantly surprised by the good results.He got some good scholarships and need-based aid and a number of schools were affordable:
UCSD, UCI, Cal State Fullerton, UTD, UAH, Purdue, U Rochester, Northeastern and UPenn.
In the end, he was deciding among UAH (80% acceptance), UCI (35% acceptance) and UPenn (RD 7.5% acceptance). He chose UPenn sight unseen because they allowed him a gap year and were the most affordable.
I don’t recommend applying to 22 schools, but I do recommend a student have a good mix of safety, match and reach schools, and just hold loosely to all of them.
I agree with almost everything Lindagaf has posted as well. Our story was similar.
I think we did a decent job with my D13 but even though I knew admissions were competitive, I didn’t really internalize this fact. D was a strong student 3.8 UW/4.5 W, 32 ACT, with a rigorous but not most rigorous schedule (she had 6 APs but mostly honors math/science and she stopped after Latin IV instead of taking AP Latin as a senior). She had a really strong EC story all revolving around performance and all extending for many years (competitive figure skater, theatre/vocal music with leadership positions in her groups, finalist at some acting competitions, community services involving theatre with social issue message, etc.). Even after meeting one on one with Director of Admissions at Williams (offered to alum kids) who reviewed her resume and college list and pretty much told her the reaches were out of reach, I guess I thought that her essays, recs (which I am sure were great), arts supplement, and ECs would balance out the slightly weaker academic record. After all, she is exactly the type of involved student the LACs say they want. She ended up applying to three reach schools (Williams - legacy, rejected, Middlebury, Wesleyan - both waitlists). She ended up with 5 acceptances (Hamilton - maybe also a low reach, Conn College, Bucknell, Muhlenberg, Denison), some with very nice merit. Probably could have predicted those results from the outset. But she is happy and thriving where she is attending so it all worked out.
For my S16, I took a slightly different approach and didn’t even visit what we thought of as reaches. He is a slightly stronger student than D (3.9 ish UW/4.5 W GPA) who takes the highest level in all subjects (including 6 years of foreign language - 2 in one and 4 in another and will end up with 10 APs including Eng Lit, Calc BC, Bio, Chem, Physics C, Econ, Gov, US History, German, ACT of 32 (33 superscored) and two science SAT IIs at 730/720. But he doesn’t have very many ECs (really just marching band, a varsity sport, minimal volunteer coaching, and working as summer camp counselor). He is a really great kid, kind, hard working, affable, smart and, frankly, just coming into his own this year. But even he assesses himself as slightly below the top academic tier of students in his class (although he is certainly within the top 10% though our HS does not rank). When his GC and I talked about colleges to visit junior year (S was thinking about engineering and wanted somewhere small to midsize), she and I agreed that he likely wouldn’t be admitted to places like Tufts, Wash U, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon–especially since he didn’t want to keep retaking ACT and/or SAT II to get a high Math II score–so we didn’t even visit. Since he wasn’t begging to visit those colleges, I figured why set him up for disappointment. Instead, we visited our state flagship (too big but a great safety option), CWRU (local to us and he ended up really liking it), Bucknell, Lafayette, Lehigh, Union, University of Rochester…He ended up applying to 5 schools and we focused on making sure to visit and interview at the places that care about demonstrated interest. But he is not a kid who will initiate a bunch of email contact to admissions people, students, professors so he didn’t do any of that. His results were: 4 acceptances and 1 waitlist (Lehigh which surprised him). He is now deciding between University of Rochester and Lafayette College (which both offered him merit). Occasionally I feel twinges that maybe I sold him short but I don’t think so and I know he will thrive at any of the places he was accepted to. And, frankly, deciding between 4 options (really down to 2 at this point) is a heck of a lot easier than juggling 8 or 10 acceptances.
Basically, I hope others coming after us recognize that having stats within range even with a strong resume/ECs does not guarantee admission when acceptance rates are below 20-25%. It’s just so tough. But the good news is that there are many, many fine colleges and universities to suit any interest and/or type of kid.
I love U of Rochester. Sounds like you did well to guide him as you did. He has excellent choices.
Staying loose is good. Avoid the “dream school” trap.
RE: "“I think schools should post not only the middle 50% of accepted students but what percentage of students with those stats they accept.”
I have seen application % and acceptance % by SAT score ranges for some schools.
For instance, 20% of applicants had 750-800, and 15% were admitted. 20% had 700-750 and 12% were admitted.
Of course, I cannot locate that now, but do recall thinking it was interesting to look at. Causation? Correlation?
Adding to above, but I can’t figure out how to copy and paste the info.
http://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Profile2014-Freshmen-update.pdf
Figures were more stark than I guessed above. % of applicants with that score, then % admitted.
CR
750-800 18% 34%
700-750 21% 29%
650-700 23% 20%
Math
750-800 40% 52%
700-750 22% 24%
650-700 17% 14%
D2, an average excellent student, graduated from high school in 2011. 4.0 GPA, non-star athlete, non-star musician, 35 ACT, 2350 SAT, good LORs and essays. Accepted at Amherst, Beloit, Colby, Colgate, Scripps, Smith, Whitman, Grinnell, UW-Madison, University of Chicago, and Carleton. Rejected by Stanford, Brown, and Dartmouth. On the waiting lists for Middlebury and Pomona, which ended up offering a spot. We were a high-financial-need family at the time, and she got good FA offers from all the schools to which she was admitted. Not to downplay her high achievements, but I think the U of C offer might have been influenced a bit by her triple-legacy status: both maternal grandparents and her dad got degrees there. And I suspect that Amherst might have been influenced by our low income: for some reason, Amherst considered this suburban white girl with highly educated parents to be a contributor to diversity.
D1, with lower stats, applied to approximately the same number of schools as younger sis and had approximately the same distribution of acceptances, rejections, and waiting lists. They both did a great job of picking schools to apply to and to attend.
With regard to stats of those who applied and who were accepted, there should be a little bit of information on your high school’s Naviance system. I know there is on ours; it also breaks it out by ED and RD. I can look to see what was the lowest SAT of one of our HS kids accepted RD to University of Rochester over the past 10 years. That’s a small start. Of course Naviance is only as good as the data that is inputted. If your HS doesn’t keep it current, it’s useless.
The naviance data ranges from 2006-2016 at my son’s HS which is too much of a range in my opinion. I think that within the past 3 years the competition has gotten more and more fierce.
@momofzag- Sounds like your son has some great options for engineering programs. That is awesome that he got merit aid at two great schools. My son applied to similar schools as he plans to be a ME. He has some great choices too Lafayette, Northeastern, VT, Purdue and Lehigh. He however received no merit money at any of these schools. My husband and I have always planned to pay for our kids college and have been saving for years but " ouch" it stings.
@momofzag, ‘Just’ marching band and a varsity sport? I’m still stunned by what all these ‘super-kids’ manage to do in addition to academics - maybe they don’t sleep? D16 was in Marching Band and Drill Team (they are allowed to be in both at our school). At school at 6-6:30 am year-round. Tried to join the swim team and kept falling asleep over her homework every night. She also worked a few hours a week teaching figure skating/tutoring/babysitting. I don’t know how she could have done anything else and still managed to get any sleep. I think all the stress over the last 4 years has lead to the migraines and stomach issues that she still deals with.
for predicting elite school admissions, Naviance is only helpful for those (generally affluent) schools for which there is a history of elite applications in the first place. It continues to feel very “let them eat cake” to tell people to go to Naviance, as if everyone goes to schools where routinely dozens of kids apply to Harvard et al. Don’t such parents already know their schools are not the norm?
Naviance bascially shows that most kids, even the top students, get rejected from HYPS etc., even at high schools where numerous kids apply. The admits, however, vary. Not always the kid with the best stats. There is clearly a floor where, unless recruited athlete or a major donor, it makes little sense for a kid to apply.
Naviance helps with the next level of schools - is the kid competitive for Tufts or Hopkins - and further along the line.
Not sure I get your point, PG. For the most part, families want to know if their kid from their HS has a shot and really doesn’t care all that much about students who are from other places.