<p>One thing that needs to be remembered in dealing with all LACS is that we are looking at very tiny numbers. Whether Swat had 1,200 applicants for its 221 places or 2,400, the difference is still only 1,200, a tiny, tiny swatch of the college-going public. But to Swat, who gets those places is crucial. The orchestra really can't play without a trombone player; the basketball team really does need 7 players (21-22% of Swatties play intercollegiate sports, a higher percentage than at Dartmouth), the engineering department really does need a core of students from day one (it is not a major one decides on the middle of sophomore year.) The class really has to be chosen carefully, and simply having high-stat applicants just doesn't cut it. Doesn't matter if they are "Ivy-qualified" if they don't help build the class.</p>
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So, from your summary, the conclusion I would take away is: don't bother to apply to Swat, if a white female & Ivy-qualified, unless you apply ED: you have at least a prayer then.
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<p>I think it's critically important that applicants understand the nature of elite college admissions circa 2005: you are not competing against the overall applicant pool. Instead, you are competing in your specific subgroup and the competition can be very different from group to group. </p>
<p>I felt like Ricky Ricardo when wife and daughter came home gushing about Swarthmore: "Awwww, Luuuucy. Aye, Aye, Aye....". Talk about a rough subgroup: average BWRK white female, Massachusetts. Yuk. I wouldn't go quite as far as you suggest, but it was certainly clear that ED would provide about the only postive boost in that subgroup. </p>
<p>The key is to identify, and press, "hot-buttons". Take a group of equally selective colleges. Some will favor stat kids. Some will favor buttoned-down MBA/I-bank kids. Some will favor "artsy" kids. Some will look positively on public school kids. Others seem to gravitate towards the traditional blue-blood schools. A good application de-emphasizes negative hot-buttons and reinforces postive hot-buttons at that particular school. At many of the LACs, stats are almost secondary. Within the range at Swarthmore, I see very little correlation between "stats" and acceptances/waitlist decisions. I do see a lot of correlation with two factors: Something that indicates high odds of being fully engaged in small-setting peer-driven classroom academics and something "else" that would clearly make the adcoms say, "hmmm...that's interesting..." I think a lot of waitlists among highly-qualified applicants result from a failure to identify the specific hotbuttons at a specific school. Either it's just a poor "fit" to begin with, or the app fails to communicate the "fit".</p>
<p>Interesteddad,</p>
<p>The college process is pretty intense at my daughter's HS, but only for about the top third of the class. The bottom third tend to go to a relatively non-selective college (admission probability > 75%), a community college (admission probabilty in the high 90's) or not go to college at all. They tend to apply to 2 or 3 schools and take whatever they can get. </p>
<p>The middle third wind up mostly at in-state publics and moderately selective private schools all over the place. They generally apply to 4-8 schools, including a few pretty selective reaches where any without hooks will be rejected, and then wind up selecting from a few solid choices.</p>
<p>A statistic that surprised me was that only 70 kids (about 20% of the graduating class) will be going to a college that has an overall acceptance rate of less than 50%.</p>
<p>Interestedad,
I've enjoyed and learned from your posts. You mentioned that your daughter had both W & M and UVA on her list as one time. Can you share any insight as to the differences between them?</p>
<p>Size.</p>
<p>UVa is a large research university with 13,800 undergrads with the TAs and class sizes inherent in the large research university setting.</p>
<p>W&M is a mid-size university with 5,700 undergrads. After visiting the three different sizes of schools, that was right at her upper-limit for size.</p>
<p>The pluses of large size were not sufficient to offset the academic disadvantages in her mind.</p>
<p>I disagree with mini and I'Dad somewhat in that supposedly LACs, & the various ones thereof, are so specifically niche-driven from both the applicant's end and the administration's end, to the extent that it's really such a subset. If it were as either of you suggested, the overlaps would not be there in such numbers. Students whose primary focus is academics (not the athletics of a particular Conference or consortium, not the political leanings of the profs or the students, not a "reputation" per se -- earned or not) tend to put 3 categories of institutions on their lists, whether those lists are short or long: one or several Ivies, one or several highly competitive LACs, one or more major public U's (usually the best U in their own State). </p>
<p>I'm going to take a wild guess that approx. 50% of the Ivy applicants select Ivies for what they perceive to be rigorous academics, & students in their intellectual peer group. That is the group that also often applies to the Swats of this country, for the same reason. I think the LACs definitely care about their academic reputations, for that very reason; they damn well want to attract qualified candidates FIRST: not 2nd, 3rd, or 4th after the trombone players & various quirky what-not needs. It seems that all the info provided recently about admissions & yield indicates that the LACs are driven primarily by academic quality, & yield projections esp. with respect to that.</p>
<p>However, I do not deny the data provided by interesteddad, & I would place much more belief in ethnicity as a reason for waitlisting than I would the obscure e.c. needs of the college. I just think that you both underestimate how vigorously competitive the LACs are with the Ivies, & how conscious the former are of the Ivy scene when it comes to their own admissions policies & trends. (Ethnicity, of course, being part of that.) It's not that there aren't variations among the upper-level pool: there certainly are style preferences. I just think there are far more similarities than differences, & it's the similarities that are shaping the game.</p>
<p>Of course the schools care about their academic reputations. Some even care about their USNWR rankings! (the two might or might not be the same thing.) But academically qualified students are a dime a dozen, and, as the admissions officer at Yale says, they reject entire classes of students as academically qualified as those they accept. Not "almost" as qualified, or "just a little less qualified", but "AS" qualified as those they accept. They could fill all the places with 1600/2400 students with 4.0s. They don't. Either they are accepting students who are "less academically qualified", or they define "academically qualified" as meaning neither top SATs or GPAs. And the same is true for every one of those other prestige institutions as well. </p>
<p>So what makes the difference is something besides academic qualifications (because if that were it, they couldn't reject those they do.) In no particular order, these include money or the future promise of it, legacies, athletics (both of the big and little variety), arts, making sure there are enough students in a small department or a new one, staying inside their financial aid budget, pleasing GCs, pleasing feeder schools, pleasing state senators, and ethnicity.</p>
<p>Overlaps tend to be very high among those coming from the top 5% (and even more, 3%) of the population economically speaking - yield management is about snaring them. Similarly from the feeder schools - the "Phillips" of the world. After that, it's basically "potluck".</p>
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</p>
<p>I don't know what point you are trying to make, but you should really have started by mentioning that the Swarthmore entering class had 366 students, of whom 41.3% were white, 16.4% Asian (which is generally NOT a URM category), and 19.2% race/ethicity unknown. So basically almost 77% of the enrolled class were likely to be white, US citizens -- since those who declined to provide racial data are most likely to be students who don't believe that information will help in any way. Since there were only 151 students who identified as white enrolled, if 99 of them were female, that's a 65% edge that females have over males. </p>
<p>I don't doubt that Swarthmore actively courts highly qualified URM's who are admitted, but there doesn't seem to me to be any evidence whatsoever that means they are waitlisting white females in disproportionate numbers. Overall, they enrolled 189 women in a class of 366 - 51% female - so if anything white females have a better chance, as compared to white males, than females of other races. </p>
<p>If, as you said, 99 of the 189 enrolled females self-identified as white, then that is 51% -- as opposed to 41.3% of the total enrollment -- again tending to show that a white female has a better chance of being admitted than a white male. </p>
<p>Now maybe you have access to better stats than I do - I'm just relying on the common data set, which does not break down the race/ethnicity figures by gender, does not distinguish between enrolled students who were admitted at the outset or taken in off of a waitlist, and does not give a racial breakdown of the applicant pool. It does tell us that 1564 men applied, and 2116 women applied, meaning that 57% of applicants were female, and that men had a 29% chance of admission as compared to 23% admission rate for women. They took 50 students - or 13.6% of their class - from the waitlist - but the CDS doesn't tell whether those students were male or female, black or green or purple - so at least that source of data doesn't prove anything about disparaties in admit rates. </p>
<p>In looking over your post again I see that you seem to have different numbers than what is on the CDS - you are working from an assumption that there were 221 identified white students, while the CDS reports 189. So maybe you just need to check your numbers more carefully. In any case, I don't see any tilt toward white males in the numbers reported via CDS.</p>
<p>I'm lumping the "unknown" and "white" categories together. </p>
<p>Here are the fall 2004 enrollment numbers broken down by ethnicity and gender:</p>
<p>The black and hispanic categories combined skew 73% female, 27% male in the enrolled freshmen class.</p>
<p>Asian/American (which is most definitely not a URM category at Swarthmore) is reasonably balanced at 53% female, 47% male.</p>
<p>The white and unknown categories skew 45% female, 55% male.</p>
<p>Interesteddad,</p>
<p>As a graduate of UVA, I would like to point out that while TA's do lead breakout sessions for a few very large lecture classes and teach certain lower-level lab courses there, nearly all of the lectures are handled by faculty members. It is not your typical large research university in that regard.</p>
<p>Class size can vary quite a bit. I had everything from 5 (a Communications Theory graduate-level class in the EE department) to 500 (Economics 101 with Mr. Elzinga - a great and memorable class despite the large numbers.)</p>
<p>As you point out, having nearly 14K students has its ups and downs.</p>
<p>BassDad:</p>
<p>I know. That's why we went to visit UVa. I think my poor D got more pressure from various family members to consider UVa than any other school she looked at. </p>
<p>She gave UNC-CH and UVa a fair shot and decided that 10,000+ undergrads would be too large. I felt that was a legitimate preference on her part, just like when she decided that she didn't want a school within an hour of home or one with even worse weather (if that's possible, he's says listening to 35 mph gusts on a rainy 43 degree late May evening!)</p>
<p>A friend of ours received a letter from Smith on 5/20 informing her that she was admitted. Her attendance depends on the financial aid package offered, which has yet to arrive.</p>
<p>interestdad, thanks for the stats -- but unless you know the composition of the applicant pool, you still can't draw any conclusions. There is no particular reason to assume that more white women apply to Swarthmore than white men, for example. Nor do you know the profiles of the applicants -- or other factors that come into play. Does Swarthmore recruit athletes? The low number of hispanic/black men suggests that a higher segment of the admitted white males might be recruited athletes than the admitted white females -- I'm just noting that based on the extremely small number of black & hispanic males as compared to the number of black & hispanic females. So in drawing conclusions about white females applying to Swat vs white males, maybe you need to add in a "not an athlete" qualifier. </p>
<p>How do the enrollment figures compare to the admitted student figures? For all you know, Swat may admit more white females, but have a lower yield. Women interested in an elite, east coast LAC have more choices than men - and the women's colleges often offer very attractive merit aid packages - enough to attract away many of the admittees. </p>
<p>My point is that you really can't draw conclusions based on enrollment figures without knowing what went in to them- you would need very specific data about the applicant pool and ethinic/gender breakdown of ED, waitlist, and yield figures as well. </p>
<p>Racial data may be useful for analyzing a class, but as among non-URM's it is an arbitrary classification that is not at all useful. I mean, what possible reason can there be to distinguish between the "chances" of a white female vs. an Asian female? You know full well that is not a factor that the admissions committee is or should be considering -- so the differential in admit rates for male/female in those categories can not possibly be from that factor. With URM's it is a little different, but only if you assume that the adcom is giving them a leg up in the admissions process. But it would make no sense for them to prefer female URM's to male URM's by a 3 to 1 margin -- they are most likely to strive for gender balance there as well. So those numbers again either reflect differences in the applicant pool -- or the yield rate.</p>
<p>"I think an easier way to understand the waitlisting of high-stat kids is to consider how few white U.S. citizen students Swarthmore actually enrolls -- just 221 in last fall's freshman class. Because of lower yields among the URMs, the overall accepted student pool has even less white/U.S. representation: under 50%. The numbers are even more sobering for white U.S. females. To offset the huge tilt towards females in the minority groups, the white group has to tilt male. As a result, only 99 white U.S. females were enrolled at Swarthmore last fall."</p>
<p>I think your case would have been stronger if you examined how many U.S. non-top 5%ers in family income - or, better, non-top 20%ers -actually enrolled - if it is like Harvard, bottom 80%ers are roughly a little less than 20% of the total student population. </p>
<p>And, yes, it is probably true that a higher percentage of white males at Swarthmore are athletes (as is true at Williams, where African-Americans participate in intercollegiate sports at a rate roughly half that of whites.)</p>
<p>But I can't figure out what this would have to do about the waitlist. Waitlists can be used for many purposes: to let legacies down gently, to give the impression of great selectivity (and hence "high quality") by keeping lots of folks waiting, "Tufts syndrome", to ensure there are enough full-paying customers, or, yes, to ensure there will be a third trombone. I think collectively we all know of examples of it being used this way.</p>
<p>But why one would go out of the way to waitlist white females is beyond me. ;) (I probably didn't get it, and it wouldn't be the first time.)</p>
<p>I can't give you exact racial breakdowns of yield because I'm missing a couple of key numbers. However, if we assume that the wait list ethnicity mirrored the original accepted class ethnicity (probably a bad assumption), then here are the yields in last fall's class:</p>
<p>Black: 24%
Latino: 28%
Asian-American: 32%
White, Other, Intl: 48%</p>
<p>The yield issues in the URM categories definitely impact white acceptance rates. They have to over-accept in the two URM categories relative to the non-URM categories. For example, 11% of the accepted class was black compared to only 7% of the enrolled class. You have to look at the accepted class to see how many slots are available for each ethnic group.</p>
<p>I have never seen a racial breakdown of the applicant pool, but there is no question that the acceptance rate for whites (and perhaps Asian-Americans) is the lowest of the groups. I mean, that's inherent in the definition of affirmative action. </p>
<p>I made no claim one way or the other about odds for Asian-Americans. Swarthmore has a very high and increasing percentage, so my assumption is that there is not a cap in place. I expect that acceptance rates for Asian-Americans and whites are very similar.</p>
<p>On recruited athletes: Swarthmore has a slightly larger number of women's teams and a few more women athletes than male athletes. With no football, ice hockey, or wrestling, the recruiting "slots" are distributed pretty evenly among all the teams.</p>
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But I can't figure out what this would have to do about the waitlist.
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<p>It started with Epiphany wondering about a very high-stat white female waitlisted at Swarthmore. I was just pointing out that white females compete in a statistically daunting pool at Swarthmore because of both racial and gender imbalance issues. </p>
<p>I probably should have just said, "Swarthmore gets more high-stat white female applicants than they need...."</p>
<p>Actually, I think that interesteddad is making a common mistake: equating racial or gender breakdown of admitted or enrolled students with "chances" of an individual student.... thereby concluding from statistics that a given white female has more of a chance of being waitlisted than a given hispanic male. </p>
<p>But the reality is that each individual application is viewed on its own merits. URM status is a factor that will favor admission of an otherwise qualified student, but a white female can just as easily have a hook or point that favors admission -- for example: geographic diversity, unusual accomplishment, etc. </p>
<p>So it is a fallacy to look at total numbers and conclude, as interesteddad has done, that Swat's waitlist must have a disproportionate number of white females. The waitlist is actually filled with strong candidates who didn't quite make the cut, either because they didn't quite have whatever quality the adcome was looking for in making the cut, or because their apps lacked indicia that the student had a serious desire to attend. </p>
<p>The reality is that that Swat probably waitlists or rejects a large number of highly qualified applicants who simply have nothing "special" that makes their application stand out from the rest. An analysis of geographic factors might be more relevant to establishing and understanding a pattern than racial factors - Swat probably gets a disproportionate number of applicants from east coast private college prep schools. </p>
<p>You can look at admissions figures from a single year and draw any conclusion you want, but unless you compare the data over several years you have merely an outcome, not a trend or a pattern. And even with comparative data, you have correlation, not causation.</p>
<p>mini,
I don't know who you're "quoting" when you put quotation marks around phrases like "a little less qualified," "almost qualified," etc., but they wouldn't be me. Or perhaps you're trying to infer something by my posts that are simply not there overtly or by implication. You've also just set forth in your first paragraph information that most people on CC already know, definitely including myself. I wonder why you would think it is news that there are too many students qualified at Ivies & LACs to fill the campuses. That's never been a point I've argued against. And by way of your last sentence, you admit that the LACs are motivated in admissions by the same kind of broad diversity in a class that the Ivies are, and both equally with an assumption of excellence as the basic standard. I never said otherwise. </p>
<p>My position -- it may not be yours or that of others here -- is that the top LACs, whose pool of applicants absolutely overlaps with Ivies, perceive themselves as losing esp. highly qualified students to Ivies, and FOR LARGELY THAT REASON, they routinely waitlist such students in the interest of yield. Certainly that wouldn't be the only reason they would waitlist, granted. Could be ethnic representation or other niches as <em>additional</em> reasons. However, I am not the first person to notice this trend, nor the first person on CC to talk about it. It's quite common to hear reports of students of ANY ethnicity getting multiple acceptances to Ivies while waitlisted at Swat and/or at another LAC. And while I'dad is closer to the data than I am, I question whether most of these waitlist decisions are based on such a vigorous AA policy. I think when they receive an "overlap" application that comes in as an ED, they jump for joy. I do not think the Ivies feel the same (about EA'ers & ED'ers), because the Ivies are generally not viewed as "second best," rightly or wrongly. There are plenty of CC'ers who have chosen an LAC acceptance over an Ivy acceptance, but that is against-trend. For a non-ED candidate, I think that Swat, for example, often assumes that it's "inevitable" that the candidate will be "lost" to an Ivy, when in reality --at least recently, due to Ivy pressures -- they may just be losing those candidates to another LAC, when Swat could have been that lucky college with such a prize student.</p>
<p>It (the tendency to rely on ED) is just one more trend or development I see that continues to lead me to view ED as quite flawed not just from the student's viewpoint, but increasingly from the colleges' (esp. LAC's) interest as well. Now, varying the ED options (I, II, choices between EA/ED, etc.) --> that's a different story. I like to see that kind of creative capitalism: I think that's pro-consumer & pro-business, & certainly gives the applicant a little more control in such an otherwise high-stakes endeavor.</p>
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It's quite common to hear reports of students of ANY ethnicity getting multiple acceptances to Ivies while waitlisted at Swat and/or at another LAC.
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<p>Note that I am being more precise with my terminology than "the Ivies" in the following:</p>
<p>I have never seen a single example of a student getting accepted to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton and getting waitlisted at Swarthmore. It would be very unusual for that to happen because those three schools have higher median SATs than Swarthmore and all three also require some kind of "hook". The exception is recruited athletes. Those three schools will take a lower stat kid than Swarthmore will. But, frankly, not many athletes good enough to be recruited by a Div. I school are going to be choosing Swarthmore in the first place. </p>
<p>Swat's median SATs are higher than Columbia, Brown, Penn, and Cornell, so seeing acceptances at those schools and waitlist at Swat isn't shocking news. Vice versa isn't shocking either. </p>
<p>Dartmouth has the same 75th percentile SATs, but attracts very different students. I suspect that it is quite common for a student to be accepted at Swarthmore and waitlisted or rejected at Dartmouth or vice versa. They are just looking for different kids. Swat doesn't appeal much to the "work hard/play hard", thriving Greek, rural outdoorsy clientele. </p>
<p>I understand "Tufts-syndrome". But, it is pretty difficult to waitlist candidates for being overqualified when your 75th percentile SAT is 1530. There are only eight universities and three colleges in the country with a 75th percentile at or above 1530 as listed in the fall 03 Common Data Sets(Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Dartmouth, Rice, Amherst, Swarthmore, Harvey Mudd)</p>
<p>To be honest, of all the Swat applicants I've chatted with here, I've only been surprised by one waitlist -- a solid-stat (50th percentile or so) legacy who had a decent class rank and OK ECs and was a Quaker to boot. I figure there must have been more to the story. In all of the other cases, I wasn't surprised. The high-stat waitlist kids are usually kids with cookie-cutter ECs.</p>
<p>The Swat adcoms absolutely use ED to lock in students they want. But, I have seen zero evidence that they waitlist kids they want just to increase yield. As you have pointed out, that would be stupid. I see no indication that Williams or Amherst uses the "Tufts Syndrome" technique, either.</p>
<p>"I have never seen a single example of a student getting accepted to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton and getting waitlisted at Swarthmore."</p>
<p>Sorry to burst your bubble; I'll have to PM you recent examples.</p>
<p>Other examples may be in the Archives of CC -- this yr, perhaps. I haven't yet figured out how to access the forum between about 2 months ago & last fall. I'll have to look at that. (When I go to archives, I get fall.) Also it might be on the Admissions forum rather than the Swat forum, dunno.</p>
<p>Anyway, your assumptions about the upper-Ivy admits vs. Swarthmore w/lists are incorrect.</p>
<p>I think Swat <em>is</em> guilty of "Tufts's Syndrome," based on my info, & yes, you said it, it's stupid & self-defeating on their part.</p>