USC National Merit Finalist Presidential

@menloparkmom I am glad to hear the Dean of Admissions at USC has clarified on the NMF and scholarships. Makes sense to me. You should post his message on the other thread - “USC Class of 2021”. Several parents have assumed that their child was rejected because of the NMF status.

@menloparkmom @PrimeNumber2
I’m sorry, but if you look at the stats of some of the NMF applicants this year who got rejected… I don’t think you can possibly come to the conclusion that there’s not a higher admission standard for NMFs.

Yes, I know I sound like a bitter rejectee (which I am lol), but I would never have come to this conclusion from my results alone. In fact, the only people I know who have been rejected from USC Dornsife with stats above something like a 3.9 unweighted and a 1500+ SAT have been NMFs, and the majority of NMFs I know with those stats have been rejected. Yeah, I know, “holistic” etc. etc., but come on, you can’t pretend there’s no correlation here.

College admission is the last place I would ever think to discount the possibility of an ulterior motive for a selection procedure. In this case, the potential motive is practically obvious - after all, if applicants were told they were less likely to be admitted with NMF on their app, why wouldn’t NMF applicants just not write their NMF status on their app and just tell USC after being admitted?

There is NO intent on USC’s part to target NMF’s for denial.
to suggest so is just pure sour grapes…

Your post shows immaturity and a sense of entitlement that you think NMF’S SHOULD have a “finger on the scale” AT at USC, and gotten in, based on the results of ONE test taken in your Jr year…
Like I said above in post #19, you could make the same ridiculous case regarding NMF’s who are rejected by Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, MIT, etc etc…

"why wouldn’t NMF applicants just not write their NMF status on their app and just tell USC after being admitted? "

The ONLY National Merit information that the USC admissions office pays attention to is NOT what a student puts on their application, because applicants can EASILY change their minds about which college is their “first choice”, it is the OFFICIAL LISTS of NMF’s sent from NMSC , [starting in late March and continuing until mid May ] who have declared USC their first choice college. By the time the first list is received, the admissions decisions are done, and ARENT changed because a student is a NMF! . Students who happen to be NMF’s AND are LUCKY enough to be accepted by USC and then decide to enroll there, will receive 1/2 tuition scholarships.
your conspiracy theory is for the birds.

Well I have to weigh in here… lots of conjecture based on really small (read: not statistically significant) sample sizes. We don’t know what % of NMF were accepted. We don’t even know what % of perfect ACT or SAT we’re rejected. We don’t know what everyone’s essays looked like compared to their peer group applying for the same major. And then add on top of it the desire for diversity. Lots of unknowns here.

We do know that there are many wonderful students who were rejected. And that is the truth for all top 20 schools.
If this were a school with a high admit rate, I might be inclined to follow this “NMF theory.” But it’s not, it’s a school that rejected 84% of its applicants. Some of those rejected will be NMF. Some will have perfect test scores. Some will have what seems like perfect everything. There’s no conspiracy, just more demand than supply.

well said^^

@menloparkmom Nothing I said suggested I was expecting NMFs to “have a finger on the scale at USC”. My expectation would be for NMF to play zero role in the admission process.

Also, I think we had a misunderstanding about “writing national merit status on the app”; I was referring not to the National Merit app, but to writing down NMSF/NMF in the awards section of the Common App. Which, of course, is done by pretty much everyone who gets NMF, because every counselor and everything tells you, “how could it possibly hurt to tell colleges about finalist status in a national competition?” So you write national merit on the common app, and it isn’t exactly a stretch that say USC will end up reading that and proceed accordingly. Like you said, they don’t look for NMF anywhere else so all one would need to do to avoid their NMSF status being known would be to not write it on the common app; it’s just that nobody would think to not write NMSF on the common app. That’s why I said I understood why USC wouldn’t want to publicize NMF admission being even the slightest bit more rigorous, because applicants would just start using that loophole and their status wouldn’t be acknowledged during the admission process.

Regardless, the result is a litany of high stat NMF students who look at overall admission statistics and justifiably peg USC as a fair match or slight reach school (without taking into account any influence of NMF status in either direction) and, upon applying under said assumptions, end up seemingly disproportionately finding that the trends shown in said stats - which, of course, they rely on to make educated assessments of where else they should realistically apply - don’t apply to them. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with holding higher standards for NMFs, but when everyone is led to assume that isn’t the case rather than USC simply stating that reality, a lot of people end up understandably feeling misled.

I’m not even one of the ones with perfect everything. I can think of plenty of other reasons why I personally wouldn’t have been admitted. But it just seems maybe a bit noteworthy that pretty much everyone who seems to actually be getting legitimately shafted happens to also be NMF.

Interesting read!!!

I can totally see the dilemma here. Basically if an applicant has outstanding stats, should that applicant wave a BIG RED FLAG at USC and say, If you accept me, please also be aware that you will pay half my tuition, because I am NMSF?
I can see why a counselor would recommend stating it in the application, but after thinking about it carefully, if applicants are top 1% in stats and have everything else going for them, I think they will be better off “omitting” the information as it will actually add to “diversity” rather than potentially being compared to other NMSFs.

Human nature is strange, and I can’t help thinking that there may be a scenario in which an application reader may not be 100% sold on an applicant - discover that USC will pay half the tuition if accepted - use that knowledge to turn the applicant down. In other words, the decision to accept the applicant here also includes giving the applicant more than $100,000 over 4 years. I really think additional scrutiny is warranted here.

Conclusion: Risk is not worth the reward in this case. Don’t put NMSF in your applications.

Again, @nac7890, I’m sure you understand statistics so I’m not sure I understand how your conjecture is based on any meaningful data set. There are about 16,000 NMSF. Let’s say 1/4 of them apply to USC. I might be inclined to say more apply because they are, to my knowledge, the only top 25 school that offers an automatic, generous scholarship, but let’s go with 1/4. So that would be 4,000 NMSF applying to USC vying for one of the 8900 offers. Of the 4,000 estimated NMSF applicants, how many have posted their results here? Your sample size is just too small and so is the sample size of the general pool that posts here. What we would need to know is if the results of the total NMSF applicants are any different from the results of the rest of the pool to determine a true bias.

Although I understand the concept you are trying to defend, I still don’t think you have ANY basis for the conclusion. What would you think if a higher % of NMSF were admitted versus the rest of the pool? See, you don’t have that data so you really don’t know.

Full disclosure here… I have 2 Ds at USC who were NMFs and awarded admittance the same year. They applied to many of the top schools. They won some, they lost some. No rhyme or reason. Some schools thought they were standouts, others apparently didn’t. There are 37,000 valedictorians in the US which means that USC could make offers for their freshman class 4 times over with just the valedictorians alone. There are 16,000 NMSF. Although it’s a small % of the overall population of kids applying to all Universities (hence the top 1/2% of the nation), you have to realize all those kids are applying to the same types of high caliber schools. Now, expand the data and look at the number of kids in the top 5% of their class. There are just so many qualified students vying for limited spots at each University. Thankfully, there are so many great schools, enough for every high stat kid to find a home. Fact still remains that USC rejects 84%ish of their applicants.

I still don’t think your hypothesis is backed by any meaningful data. But hey, if you believe the risk is not worth the reward, then do as you wish. Show me the full set of data and until then, I still maintain that an applicant who puts their best foot forward on the application gives them the best chance possible. At this point, I would advise to any applicant to state NMSF on their application. I’m an engineer; show me the data.

Whether or not an applicant mentions National Merit on their application makes no difference. Especially because USC receives lists of NM semi-finalists and finalists every year, so has that information in their databases, often (in the case of semi-finalists) before those people’s applications are even read by the adcom. It doesn’t matter if it’s explicity mentioned or not because every file is already flagged by the time the committee reads it. 2,000 semi-finalists were in USC’s applicant pool this year alone. About 40% of them were named finalists by National Merit. Oh, and one other thing, there are three times as many applicants in the high end of USC’s applicant pool who are not National Merit students than are.

This year’s fall admission rate for finalists is 48%, 3x the overall admission rate. Also, more than 40 finalists were offered spring admission and they’ll get presidential scholarships too, even if they don’t get moved to fall.The ones that were turned down had average SATs within 5-10 points of those accepted.

Seems to me that all this conjecture of an applicant’s National Merit status somehow working against them in USC’s process is just that: conjecture. I’ve seen no evidence from the actual data that leads me to believe that anything of like that is going on here. If USC were so worried about the money, they wouldn’t make a promise in the first place. If they just had this as a way to pad their stats, as some have suggested on CC, seems to me that they could still market it in similar ways without actually making a promise. It’s not hard to dangle stuff out their to get kids excited. Lots of colleges do this.

In the end, believe whatever you want. As so many others have pointed out. Anyone thinking that a sub-20% admission rate school is somehow going to have easily predictable outcomes really doesn’t understand the intricacies of selective college admissions. Schools like USC could fill their freshman classes three or four times over with completely different pools of students and have roughly the same average GPA and SAT scores.

what he/she said ^^^^^ Lol. Where did you get the 48% admission rate for finalists, and the 3X the overall admission rate? Interesting.

@3tallblonds I work in an office at USC that has access to admission data. The information I shared comes from looking at that data.

@s0meUSCkid95 – I thought that 90+% of NMSF became NMF.

@s0meUSCkid95 Thanks for sharing the data.

Of course, your numbers don’t make any sense. From 16,000 NMSF, 15,000 become NMF. A total of 1000 is lost.

Using your numbers that 40% become finalists leaving 60% out of the running: 60% of 2000 = 1200 lost, so the pool you describe is 20% bigger than the total pool of those who don’t become finalist.

You say 48% of 40% get accepted. So about 400 students of the original 2000 applicants (20%), which is only slightly better than the overall 16% admission rate. The question is, what is the acceptance rate for those with similar stats who are not NMSF?

Thanks for explaining that applicants get flagged for it regardless if they put in on the application or not. If you want to dive deeper into the stats, what percentage of Asians NMF get declined versus “All other NMF” I would love to know the stats for that.

Hmmm, yea, confusing on that 2,000 semi-finalists and only 40% named finalists.

@3tallblonds Yeah, if indeed USC got 2000 NMSF like the OP stated, and using the normal 93.75% of that number becoming NMF, then USC gets 1875 NMF applications of which according to the OP approximately 384 got accepted (48% of 40%), so a total acceptance rate of about 20%.

The question is, what is the acceptance rate for those who have similar stats and aren’t NMF. With an overall acceptance rate of 16%, I would assume that acceptance rate for the absolute top students lies in the mid 30s- to mid 40s percentile range, as it does at UCLA and UCB. Consequently, and this is just an assumption, NMF seem to indeed have to clear an additional hurdle. Some of it might have to do with overall diversity as I read somewhere on CC that Asians make three fifths of the NMF in California.

Ah, but you are assuming that all NMF are in the absolute top of the pool… not sure you can assume that. And, you also can’t assume that the top at USC is a 30-40% acceptance rate as USC is really focused on a diverse class. So I still maintain that we don’t have the data to say that NMF has any negative consequences in USC admissions.

I only based the information I posted on what has been reported to USC. Yes, many more semi-finalists will likely be named finalists, but National Merit Scholarship Corp hasn’t reported them yet to USC, thus I have no way of counting them.

@uciparent I’m afraid that you’re continuing to chase shadows. At worst, an applicant’s NM status at USC will have no effect on admission, at best, it helps. The idea of them advertising something, only as a way to get more students to turn down is ludicrous and particularly cynical. Then again, perhaps I take admission professionals at their word too much.

I get that it’s really tempting to try to reverse engineer college admission processes and express angst about why someone might not have been offered admission. However, it probably makes more sense for people to move forward and focus on schools where students were accepted. If USC turned down a fantastic student, then it’s USC’s loss, not the student’s.

@s0meUSCkid95 I completely agree that it makes sense for people to move on and focus on schools where they are admitted. I apologize if I came across like I was chasing shadows. This was not my intention, I respect USC, and I was trying to make sense of the numbers you reported and from some of the conspiracy theories that were brought up. I suspect that diversity does play a role though, with “only” 20% of the Fall 2016 enrolled freshman students being Asians, and with almost 50% of the enrolled US students being from California, and with the report that 60% of the NMF in California are Asians, it is hard to ignore the likelihood that in order to ensure diversity, being Asian could be a contributing factor to the rejection.

Does USC actually use affirmative action though? I’m a little unsure. Not claiming they do or don’t, but of the 2 people from my school that I know of who were admitted to USC (there may be more), we are both asian and NMF from California, which I found really interesting.

@3tallblonds Good points. I agree that I don’t have enough data to make the assumptions I made. Too bad USC does not give a total number breakdown like UC does. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/freshman-admissions-summary On this website, you can see admit rate by GPA, by ethnicity, at All UCs, at a specific UC, etc. Really good stuff. For instance, for Fall 2015, the admit rate for students with 4.2+ GPA at UCB was 46%.