<p>It must have been a good year for some kids somewhere . . .</p>
<p>I will say that my senior class has seen a lot of surprises this year. I am from a California public school and we normally send around ten to Berkeley and ten to UCLA and a handful to Stanford. Then we normally send a two or three to Ivies. However, this year I have only heard of one acceptance to Stanford, none to Berkeley, two to UCLA, and one to Princeton. It is weird because this class has been more successful and has a higher gpa than previous classes, so I would say it is the year of the local state school.</p>
<p>I am sorry to interrupt the discussion 
I am a new member here and I can’t figure out how to post a discussion. Could someone helps me please?</p>
<p>My school has been uniformly mediocre since it opened like eight years ago. This year, though, me and two friends actually applied to schools not in the SUNY/CUNY/NYC/NJ/PA region. Both of them got rejected everywhere and I got into Georgetown. I’d say a banner year for my school.</p>
<p>However, it looks like the trend toward increasing frosh admissions selectivity has reversed at one mid-level state university in California. Compare the frosh admissions thresholds at San Jose State University for 2013 versus 2012:</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://info.sjsu.edu/static/admission/impaction.html]Info.sjsu.edu[/url”>http://info.sjsu.edu/static/admission/impaction.html]Info.sjsu.edu[/url</a>]</p>
<p>However, it is possible that the changes in state funding may be related, as the CSUs’ capacities are probably more sensitive to short term funding changes than the UCs’ capacities are.</p>
<p>I wish I could add some perspective from my S’s large public high school, but we have the most overworked and/or uninspired and/or uninformed guidance counselors imaginable. To be fair, ours is an odd district comprised of mostly very affluent and socially conservative families, a few middle class in the mix (that would be us), and a large number of very low income ESL students… so their hands are full, I guess. </p>
<p>Top students (8%) head to UT Austin, unless they’re legacy TAMU and/or Austin is just too liberal, followed by Texas Tech, Texas State, and the directionals in both the UT and TAMU systems. University of North Texas is a safety, OU, LSU and University of Arkansas always popular. </p>
<p>Privates tend to be regional: Baylor, TCU, SMU. Some LACs: Southwestern (Georgetown), Austin (Sherman) and Trinity (San Antonio). We have one breakaway student headed to NYU, some students accepted to Vandy.</p>
<p>S was considered odd for even wanting to leave TX/LA/OK/AR which is probably one of the reasons he wanted to :)</p>
<p>My D’s competitive public had a banner year for acceptances. Helped that they had 8 national merit finalists. Last year there were maybe 3. Top kids (out of class of 450) were accepted to Princeton(2), Yale(2), Stanford(2), Brown (3), MIT (1), Penn (1), Harvard(1). My D was not in that group, but did better than we expected with her acceptances. Her school just had a bumper crop of brilliant, accomplished kids this year.</p>
<p>Does anyone know how Naviance works? Does the school get notified when people get accepted or is it up to the students to update the system.</p>
<p>The reason I ask is that I am surprised at how few people are getting into the top schools (vs. previous years) and I am assuming it is because Naviance is not up to date.</p>
<p>It’s up to students to update, but your school’s GC can do it if they aren’t lazy. Mine does it if we forget, or she’ll remind us.</p>
<p>My junior D’s SoCal relatively affluent suburban school doesn’t publish college acceptances, but my daughter belong to a club (Academic League/Quiz Bowl) that most of the top students in their respective classes are member so she knows where most of the top seniors were accepted:</p>
<h1>1: Yale (likely), MIT, Stanford, Cal, UCLA</h1>
<h1>2: MIT (EA), Harvard, Cal, UCLA</h1>
<h1>3: Stanford, U Penn, Cal, UCLA</h1>
<h1>4: MIT, Cal, UCLA</h1>
<h1>5: U Penn, Cal, UCLA</h1>
<h1>6: Brown, Cal, UCLA</h1>
<p>The rest of the top ten were admitted to Cal, UCLA, UCSD or USC. There are some kids that are not even in the top 10 that are admitted to the lower Ivy’s.</p>
<p>The Ivy’s/S/M, for some reason, likes this HS, the top 5 consistently (well at least in recent years) admitted to these schools. Last year, the top five attended these schools: Stanford/Brown/Columbia/Cal/ClaremontMcKenna.</p>
<p>Our of a class of 139, students have chosen to attend.
4 Harvard, 4 Yale, 2 Brown, 3 Dartmouth, 1 Columbia, 1 MIT, 1 Duke, 1 Amherst, 1 Swarthmore, 1 Pomona, 2 Middlebury, 1 Stanford, 2 Penn, 3 UChicago, 2 Harvey Mudd</p>
<p>We were really surprised. This year was supposed to be a down year but it turned out to be almost comparable to last year (which was the best the school has ever had). So no, my school is not suffering but that may just be because we are up and coming.</p>
<p>Haha, now I know where all of our acceptances went! Yikes!</p>
<p>A real life example of a zero-sum game. </p>
<p>I learn something from every application season and this year’s lessons were:</p>
<p>1.) Appreciate the value of a quality safety school strategy. I know it’s been discussed to death on CC but there is nothing like seeing the carnage of a poor strategy in a down year to drive the point home.</p>
<p>2.) Don’t trust past results completely when putting a strategy together. The targets move. A safety last year might be a likely this year.</p>
<p>^You must go to a pretty successful school :P</p>
<p>My school is basically a cesspool with a decent IB program thrown in there that remains purely to make sure my high school doesn’t become a D school. Out of the 77 students in the IB Class of 2013, a vast majority of them have no intentions of getting out of there. </p>
<p>I have to say the acceptances have been more spread out this year. Last year, it was 3 girls in the STEM fields getting into the great colleges (Stanford, MIT, and Columbia), one guy getting into West Point, and one deity getting into ALL the HYPSM schools (oh and Williams). </p>
<p>This year, we have been able to spread the wealth a little more. Some of the students have:</p>
<ol>
<li>Columbia ED, MIT, CalTech</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Duke, and NYU full-tuition</li>
<li>(me) Dartmouth, Rice, USC full-tuition, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Bowdoin</li>
<li>Northwestern, Bowdoin</li>
<li>(best friend) UVA OOS, Vassar, and Williams!</li>
<li>Emory and ?</li>
<li>Emroy</li>
</ol>
<p>It’s has been a pretty okay year, but not anywhere close to a “banner year”</p>
<p>It was a mixed bag at my kids school this year according to my son. Some shut-outs and some surprises. For us, once again my kids were shut-out of colleges east of Ohio with either waitlists or rejections and had some surprise acceptances at college higher/better ranked than the shutouts/waitlists in the west and midwest . I won’t know where all of S3’s classmates are all going until senior honors night in about a month. Prices are rising however. Our assets are depleted after putting 2 through and my income has been relatively the same for several years, but our expected costs have risen year after year.</p>
<p>I think that whatever small increase there is in the number of US HS grads will be far outweighted by foreign students looking to come here, so number of applicants will consider to rise.</p>
<p>Honestly, a lot of my friends got admitted into great schools but not Ivies. But we got into some top tier schools; however, a lot of us can’t attend due to financial issues and have had to go to equally great state schools. (Thank goodness we live in California.) Overall, I’m happy with how my peers and I did. Our hard work definitely paid off. We are impressive in our own way!</p>
<p>I tend to agree that this year more than any previous years, total out of pocket will be a big tipping factor. There just isn’t enough value attached for most people to paying a ton of money for the first (or only) degree and with continuing rates of 50% of less completing the degree and the “masters” degree the new differentiator – cost for a BA or BS could be even more of a consideration.</p>
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<p>What kids say they’re going to major in and what they actually major in are two different things. The Brown CDS shows almost 60% of of the degrees awarded were in non-STEM fields.</p>
<p>Agree with qialah, if you want better info on majors look at the senior graduates not the incoming freshman! Freshman say one thing and quite often do another thing since they aren’t really exposed to college curriculum in high school.</p>
<p>Our local high school had a typical distribution of acceptances to top tier schools. LAC’s predominated as usual. However, actual attendance leaned towards financial safeties and matches over reach schools even when accepted. In the absence of large merit awards, middle class families are being priced out of the most competitive tiers of colleges and unversities. Even the less prestigious schools now have total cost of attendance of more than $35K annually with some over $50K. This pricing is now making instate flagships more competitive as more students are applying (and attending) in their home states. In some cases the insttae student is even at a disadvantage as their home flagships compete for out of state and international student dollars.</p>