<p>^ ick, public ivy. What a stupid term.</p>
<p>Friend of mine had a 28 ACT, 3.85+ GPA, and decent extracurriculars (though nothing state or national wide).
Accepted into NYU-Stern (second best program in the nation for his field), UIUC out of state with $48,000 scholarship, and Emory University.
Rejected from Boston College.</p>
<p>True story:</p>
<p>My best friend’s brother. Valedictorian of his school. Accepted at Columbia. Rejected at UConn.</p>
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I agree. But the term has nothing to do with the point I’m trying to make.</p>
<p>How about “top public”? That’s what they are.</p>
<p>When I applied to college many years ago, the colleges looked at your record and decided if they thought you could be successful at their school. Ivy leagues were very difficult to get into and I had a friend from school who got into Yale but didn’t get into Harvard and didn’t understand why. Today, selective colleges receive applicants from many students who are likely to be successful at their school and have trouble picking who to let in and who to reject. There is no bar for stats that if you are above, you will get into certain schools. Each school gets a different applicant pool for different majors and tries to select the best candidates from their pool. There are always the hooked students also who throw this off. From everything I’ve read lately about college admissions lately, it’s totally different today than it was when I applied to college and there really are no real “safe” schools or at least very few. Every year the applicant pool changes too. One year the average SAT is posted and it encourages more students at that average to apply the next year which could change the average. It’s really insane how crazy college admissions have become and the pressure it’s placed on all the high schoolers.</p>
<p>Actually, there is remarkably little change in test score range from year to year at most of the schools. There has been a fairly slow upward creep, but not the change you would expect if the colleges simply looked for the students with the highest scores.</p>
<p>The top colleges are looking at the big picture with every student applicant. They don’t use test scores in the granular, linear way that most CC’ers believe. That’s why you get the seemingly odd results – because the “stats” you are looking at are only the starting point of the evaluation. </p>
<p>@CMUmechEalumna It’s partially because of the growing dominance of Common App. With 500+ schools involved right now, they’ve reached a large enough participation rate to affect all colleges. Thanks to CA4 (and other common application forms, like ApplyTexas and the UC application), students (with the financial means) now have a much easier time applying to a ton of schools- with 10+ being a common number for many applicants.</p>
<p>This means that, even without an increase in the number of real applicants, there would’ve been massive growth in the number of applications each college receives- leading to the phenomenon you just described and thus a lower acceptance rate for most colleges simply due to an expanding number of applicants. It’s also tougher to get into all Ivies/etc. now, because when there’s so many applicants, it’s even less of a linear-looking process- in the past, you could expect to get into Berkeley if you got into Stanford, but this year there’s a ton of people who get into Stanford and Brown and Yale getting straight-up rejected by Berkeley and CMU and UCLA and other match/“safety” level schools simply because the admissions departments are having a tougher and tougher time each year and it’s looking more like a “lottery” (on the outside; I’m pretty sure there’s new criteria on the inside or that they’re being evaluated more stringently). There’s a lot more of a “holistic” process, too- it seems. Test scores definitely have less of an influence now than they did in the past, although there’s been a slight upward climb.</p>
<p>When looking at yield rate, this gets even more interesting- for “top schools” like Harvard/Stanford/the Ivies, the yield rate seems to be increasing while for schools that aren’t as prestigious, there seems to be a decline. This can be explained again by CommonApp’s influence in getting students to apply to more schools. On that list of 20 schools being applied to, Harvard/Stanford/Yale, etc., stay near the top. And now that it’s tougher to get into any one of them- let alone all 8- you’re less likely to get into Yale if you get into Harvard/etc., so their individual yield rates are increasing as the number of cross-admits seems to decline. Meanwhile, as applying to many Ivy+ schools is more feasible now than it ever was before, schools in the “match” range keep getting pushed further down applicants’ lists and end up with a lower yield rate as a result.</p>
<p>I live in an expensive state where real estate and taxes are high. My Husband and I have worked consistently except for short breaks of unemployment or illness/pregnancy. We are both professionals but clearly not rich but definitely better off than many people. However, I’m baffled by how much money people are spending to get their children into college (SAT prep, multiple SAT sittings, applications, tutoring, etc.). What really baffles me is how much people are willing to spend to send their kids to any college of their choice. One of my friends (who is in her 30s) said her parents would sell their home to pay for her to go to Stanford if she could get in. I really want all the kids to go to a great college and have a great experience. I know I did and I’m better off for it and wouldn’t trade it in for something else. But I struggle with how much I may need to spend to get our youngest into college and through college. I know some people make a lot more money than us and live in lower priced areas than us. I know many make less. But given how high it’s gotten and how those in need are stating that they are not getting enough financial aid, I struggle with (given the supply and demand curve) why the sky seems to be the limit for everyone and its gotten harder rather than easier to get into college. I hope I’m not changing this discussion too much…</p>
<p>Fortunately for them, top colleges tend to have solid FA packages. I don’t know anyone from Stanford having to go into huge debt. That’s more of a problem for Duke-tier schools</p>
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<p>It is more of a problem for families with high incomes but high spending habits that leave little to contribute to the kid’s college, but there is familial pressure for the kid to attend a “prestigious” college even with unreasonable debt levels.</p>
<p>dividerofzero, I had no idea that Duke wasn’t a top school. Thanks for enlightening me. I was under the impression that never being ranked outside the top 10 was a pretty good indicator that Duke is a top school. How wrong I was. </p>
<p>I have nothing but sympathy for the Devils, but that’s not the way I read that. It’s hard to argue that HYPS aren’t in their own league in terms of endowment size, and that allows them to offer generous FA packages well into what normal Americans would consider upper-middle-class income brackets. While Duke’s endowment is healthy and growing fast, it is not yet in the eleven-digit club, so it probably does not offer as much FA in, say, the $100,000 to $150,000 income bracket. We can debate how much that matters to most people, but that’s a different story, I guess. </p>
<p>^ Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that Duke isn’t a top school. It just means that Duke isn’t one of the 5 best schools in the country. I thought the poster came off as being a little derisive. Specially considering the fact that Duke’s per capita endowment is actually quite high (better than Columbia’s for instance). </p>
<p>@picklechicken37 USC (University of Southern California?) in that case, it’s just a question of who she is as a person as both universities are similar in their admits’ qualifications. University of South Carolina is a different story…</p>
<p>It is also possible that some of those high stat rejections involved some serious behavior problems in high school. I’ve heard of guidance counselors calling up admissions officers on the phone to discuss things they didn’t want to write down. </p>
<p>By the way, the supposed “Tufts Syndrome” typically involves a waiting list offer, not a rejection. Under conventional wisdom, the high stats student would be quickly accepted if they agreed to be on the wait list and showed strong interest.</p>
<p>Let’s also remember that at a number of private universities, it is much much easier to be accepted through binding early admission than in the regular applicant pool. Therefore an applicant in the regular pool may get upset when less qualified ED students were accepted and he was not. </p>
<p>I really really hate binding early decisions - it provides a big admissions advantage to students who don’t need to compare financial aid offers.</p>
<p>My brother: salutatorian at competitive Staten Island private high school, 4.0+ UW GPA, decent EC’s</p>
<p>Waitlisted at Harvard, Georgetown
Accepted at Columbia, Cornell, Boston College, Holy Cross, Duke, and UNC Chapel Hill (oos)
Rejected Notre Dame, w/ alumni sponsorship and lots of interest in school. I know ND is tough to get into but with the amount of connections and interest he showed in the school, plus being qualified, we were all surprised he got rejected; not even waitlisted. </p>
<p>@Misanthrope1 Haha I knew someone would bring that up. No, I’m not challenging Duke- they’re definitely one of the best in the country. However, when it comes to FinAid, they’re (as @SomeOldGuy pointed out) not in the same league as HYPS and (at least apocryphally) there’s many more complaints about Duke graduates coming out with debt they can’t pay. I just picked Duke as a good illustration of an amazing college that doesn’t have the HYPMS endowment- so people pick it at the risk of debt.</p>
<p>If you thought I was insinuating that Duke wasn’t a “top school,” I meant the exact opposite- that Duke’s a top school without a massive FA package/endowment which puts it in a sort of risky squeeze. My apologies for any offense that might’ve caused.</p>
<p>One of my acquaintances is an ad com at the University of Oklahoma which accepts around 80% of applicants and throws money at NMFs. She claims to have accidentally rejected a NMF applicant who later emailed the school to find out why he was rejected. She got a bit of flak from her boss about that one. </p>
<p>When I applied to San Diego State, I accidentally put that I got a 210 on my critical reading portion of the SAT (in reality I got a 770). Couldn’t figure out why I was rejected until an acceptance letter came a few months later. </p>
<p>@ocomea15, from everything I’ve read alumni sponsorship s doesn’t mean a thing. </p>