Understood- was just responding to your comment that ED was affected by "all of the… (fill in the blank). It might be some… not all. Perhaps you meant that differently than it read.
Daughter was admitted for first year transfer in September 2019 after ED deferral, I believe intended major was politcal economics. This may have been an option since she had a full 4 year tuition scholarship to ECU honors, which would have covered her first year. Paying for 3 years at Tulane is still over budget. She applied to 11 schools but only visted NCSU and ECU. She has a 5.0 weighted GPA from a North Carolina public Wake County school and is ranked 11 of 463. She declined Tulane’s Transfer Interest and will be attending UNC in state. She never visited Tulane but did have a local alumni interview and submitted a Dean’s Honors video. She is waiting on one last decision from NC State engineering her only other deferral. She got into 10 schools with Virginia Tech as a second choice major, she was not accepted into engineering at Tech. Good Luck and I start again soon son is a sophmore. He will not apply to 11 schools!
@rphx2nc
Just curious, are eleven schools too many or too few? I also have a sophomore and and wondering what this process will be like in a couple of years.
My senior has one ED denial, one waitlist, and five decent acceptances-including Tulane-(probably too expensive, though) so far for a total of eight applications. That seems like enough but some of her friends applied to more than twenty and have a some random reach acceptances.
Wow, who knows, right?
@dragonmom3 rphx2nc may have a different answer, but as a senior who is just wrapping up the admissions process, to me, 8-10 should be near the max, and anything above 10-12 is too many. I applied to 8 schools and trying to write all the essays for just that many schools was almost too much for me. If you are applying to many schools for which you can easily recycle essays or that don’t have essays at all, applying to that many schools might not be too bad, but I see kids on CC talking about applying to 15+ schools that require their own essays and I can’t comprehend how they did all that and stayed sane. I think generally, if you’ve done your research well enough you won’t need to apply to that many schools because you will have figured out a solid set of safeties, reaches, and targets.
Some people use the shotgunning strategy with selective/Ivy schools, meaning they apply to as many schools as possible to increase their odds of getting accepted SOMEWHERE. Imo, the top 10 schools / Ivies are all very different and if you just want to get in somewhere selective, you probably are focusing on the wrong thing in terms of what’s important in a school. But that’s just my two cents.
@dragonmom3 As a senior who applied to 20 colleges (7 acceptances, 2 WL, waiting on 11 more), I’d recommend applying to as many places as possible. College admissions are so unpredictable and absolutely nobody can be certain that they can get into a T20, especially because at that point all the applicants have solid stats and amazing ECs. I personally did not think filling out 20 apps were that hard, because most of the Ivy supplements are extremely similar. I would say I only wrote about 6 original essays, and I just tweaked them a little for each school.
@WiscoRunner’s advice is spot on (though shotgunning doesn’t really increase the odds of getting in anywhere). 20 schools, IMO, can sometimes mean either a student hasn’t done their due diligence to truly find the schools that offer what they are looking for… or perhaps in some cases a student may be trophy hunting and applying for the prized window decal goal. Sorry if that sounds blunt, but the top schools are very different. A student, for example, who loves Cornell might not like Columbia. They are quite different. Now yes, maybe a student is open to many different opportunities so dont care if the school is NOrth, South, urban, rural, large or small. But still, there should be a reason. to explain in the “Why…” essays as to what about the school makes the student right for them.
Sometimes students claim they throw applications at 20+ schools because they are looking for the best FA. That can be done with 12 or so applications as well. The college application process has gone off the rails, and IMO, its due in part to students applying to so many schools. I will get out of the line of fire now, but stand by my opinion.
Quick q- you mentioned elsewhere that your parents are immigrants. Did they go to college in their home country or do they have no college education?
I think that it’s pretty evident college admissions has gotten more unpredictable than ever before so unfortunately it’s likely that the average number of applications will continue to grow. Some people hunt for trophy schools, but we applied to a lot of “financial safety” schools this year hunting for merit money since we knew we would receive no need based aid. Had we known which schools would offer the big money we could have applied to a lot less schools, but there was really no way of being sure. It’s comforting to just double down on the applications.
The schools’ NPCs and common data set are helpful in estimating cost.
I was recently rejected from Tulane (deferred EA applicant, rejected RD) and actually had a great experience with Tulane! I have lived in Spain the last 4 years and as such have not been able to tour Tulane. I expressed this along with my interest in the school in a LOCI after my deferral to my admissions officer (Jeff Schiffman, the director of admissions) and he could not have been nicer about it! He sent a personal reply to me the very next day and was very helpful with offering resources for learning more about the school. In the end, however, I do think my supposed “lack of DI” hurt me as an applicant.
@jym626 Agreed that the NPC’s were useful in deciding whether to even bother to apply to a school or not, but the offers my son actually received did stray from the NPC’s quite a bit…sometimes in a good way and sometimes in a bad way.
The schools’ common data sets give an idea of the average amount of aid. Of course average doesn’t give you individual info.
@Pastpower Were you admitted into Vanderbilt ED?
@ambkeegan No, I got into the MOSAIC program which included an offer of admission for RD applicants.
@Pastpower Thank you. My son applied there also
@ambkeegan Best of luck to your son!! Shouldn’t be long now.
Hey everyone got accepted
My stats:
SAT: 1300
GPA: 2.9W
APs: None
Lot of ECs though.
Acceptances: BU, Northeastern, Denver. Waitlisted: Wisconsin, UVM, U Miami. Rejected: Colby
Ummmm, really?? It’s not April fools day yet.
You are a spring admit? Are you a Louisiana resident?
@CCRailers Congrats! You earned it.
Does anyone know when they’ll start moving people from the waitlist? I know it will be next month but is there a ballpark time to look out for?
Didn’t I see that they haven’t taken anyone from the waitlist in a few years? Are they doing it differently now? US News says they offered 3,881 people a spot in 2016, 1,168 accepted and none were actually accepted to Tulane off of the waitlist. I heard similar stats for 2017. Is everyone expecting something drastically different for this year?