Anyone notice WashU rejecting what some may consider to be “overqualified” applicants? I have already gone to a number of events at top tier universities for recipients of full ride scholarships/highly coveted applicants. These participants were all amazing applicants and many had already received LLs from multiple Ivies etc.
This is what I found surprising. Out of these top tier students, I have found that around 10% were accepted, and the rest were waitlisted/rejected - and many of these applicants DID show demonstrated interest.
Anyone else think that WashU is harming itself in the long run by not accepting these applicants in an attempt to game the rankings?
Oh my god STOP. WashU is not rejecting “overqualified” candidates. There’s no such thing as an overqualified candidate. I met so many people when I was still at WashU who had beyond amazing stats. And who had gotten into just about every other school out there. Hell, I myself was accepted to literally every school I applied to and chose WashU.
The idea that washu is protecting yield through the waitlist is absurd. Every other year or so they accept ZERO people off of the waitlist for crying out loud.
Look. I get that you’re burned that you were rejected from Olin. You must not have fit what they were looking for for whatever reason. Stop taking it so personally though. Because all you’re doing right now is coming across like someone who is trying to tear down others and prop yourself up.
Edit: the number of people who feel the need to trash WashU every year around this point in march (because they were rejected or waitlisted) is obnoxious. And it’s the passive aggressive (“well ha I was waitlisted so I must be better than everyone who was accepted”) posts like this that are the worst.
@Johnson181 Who said I was feeling burned? WashU was a safety for me - I had already gotten into my top choices and honestly didn’t care about the decision.
I literally just pointed out some facts - some of the most heavily recruited students at the Ivies and schools of similar caliber were outright rejected. And it’s not like these were isolated occurrences - it was the VAST MAJORITY. Look, its no secret there are schools that try to game the system - whether that be through mass-emailing under-qualified students to boost applicant numbers (U Chicago), falsifying student faculty ratio (USC) or test scores (Claremont McKenna), overly favoring applicants with high test scores (Vanderbilt), and yield padding (most notably Tufts and WashU).
Look, I get that you’re trying to defend your university. WashU is a great school - I wouldn’t have applied if it wasn’t, and all my friends love it there. Stop taking my post so personally - WashU is not the only university that does yield padding. In the end though, I feel that this policy does more harm than good to WashU in the long run. The boost they have received in the rankings has also come at the cost of losing some very talented students.
Second, most schools try to game the rankings. The beloved ivies included. Off the top of my head the only schools I’d consider as not gaming the rankings would be Reed, which took itself off US News and World Report, and the UCs, which only consider highest sitting of the SAT or ACT.
Likely letters are also a way to game the system, as is not requiring subject tests (ahem Harvard), going test optional, and requiring a short supplement, if one at all.
I know I’m going to be hated for this, but I was accepted to WUSTL. I also attended a scholarship weekend for a top college. And I noticed the same thing as madeon. He brings up a fair point tbh.
@slights32 Yes, I agree, schools should not be sending out massive waves of emails to unqualified applicants, but in the end it doesn’t harm the applicant other than costing them the application fee (if there is one). Yield padding actually costs students acceptances. Also, likely letters don’t really game the rankings - they just attempt to sway the top applicants. They really don’t affect the college rankings at all. Yes, all colleges “game the rankings” to some extent - but some try and game the system far more than others. In my opinion, its all fun and games until a college’s admissions policies start to hurt the students who want to attend.
As far as WashU not being a safety school - my school has over a 70% acceptance rate historically at WashU (feeder school) and 8/9 were accepted this year (so everyone except for yours truly). In other words, it WAS a safety school.
Wow! 8 out of 9 accepted. I only know of 2 from my sons school who applied. Him and one of the other co-validictorian. Both 4.0 with 35 ACT and waitlisted. I guess we are the non-feeder school.
Erm, doesn’t harm the applicant? What about crushing their dreams??
Likely letters are a way of attracting the best applicants. These are often the ones that have great test scores, grades, ECs, or some other desirable quality. So, schools know that other schools want these applicants too, and with the likely letter they have a much better chance of getting the student.
Take for example a school that, on average, accepted students with an SAT math score of 750. But the average SAT math score of enrolled students is 700. By recruiting the best math students they accepted (with likely letters!), this school could boost up its enrolled student math SAT mean. That is gaming the rankings.
And no offense but I really do not have all that much sympathy. You’re in at Yale, why does wustl matter?
@slights32 Most people don’t expect that they will get accepted into a school like Harvard - if they do, they’re most likely fools. I know an Olympian (who won a gold medal) with a 3.8 gpa who got rejected from Harvard (ended up at Princeton). Likely letters affect such a small proportion of the student body that it really doesn’t raise the average SAT score, GPA, etc.
I don’t understand why you guys think I care about my WashU rejection (I really don’t - I would never have even mentioned that I was rejected if someone hadn’t brought it up) - I was only raising a point. I would have raised it even if I had gotten in. I just frankly find it ridiculous that WashU rejects so many top applicants for no visible reason other than the probability that they will choose to go to another school.
Subject Header: “Find Your Home at Harvard”
"Dear xxx,
While you may have heard about Harvard’s classrooms, labs and libraries, you may not have heard about our residential house system, which is truly the heart of the Harvard College experience.
Whether you are living in historic Harvard Yard as a freshman or in one of the twelve residential Houses as an upperclassman, your residence becomes much more than simply a place to rest your head at night.
As part of our mission to educate global citizens, we take great pride in creating a residential learning community that fosters personal, social, and intellectual transformation. We hope you will explore our residential system and consider applying to Harvard."
– part of email from Harvard to moi
With recruitment like this some may very well assume Harvard wants to accept them which can start or fuel these sort of “incredibly deeply-held dreams of one particular school [which] are the wrong kind of dreams to have.”
—dfbdfb
I just checked out this article: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/2/15/admissions-letters-letter-fitzsimmons/
It’s from 2011 but I’d assume the numbers are about the same. 300 likely letters. Overall about 1660 enrolled. Assuming the likely letters are successful in their bid to woo the students, thats 300/1660 or approx 18% of the class. We can bring this number down a little because the student may choose a different school, but I’d assume most students would choose Harvard.
That’s a a pretty large proportion of the class.
@slights32 Yes, the numbers are the same. Also, you’re assuming that every person of the “18%” would not have gone to Harvard if they did not receive a LL (quite improbable?) Even so, 18% isn’t enough to really sway the statistics of a whole class, as the difference in scores etc. between those receiving likely letters and those that don’t is minimal. GPAs are the same, and I would be shocked if the difference in test scores was more than 100pts (100pts on the SAT *.18 = 18 pt increase). From my experience, the people who receive LLs have extremely high caliber ECs (like being an ISEF finalist). In addition, likely letters don’t drastically sway that many top students (there’s a thread discussing this topic pinned somewhere on CollegeConfidential) - for example, my #1 school is still Stanford. The LLs that I’ve received haven’t changed my opinion of the schools at all (although they are nice to have).
Even so, it’s not like any students suffer from the LL policy.
That is an entirely different conversation for sure.
Bahahahaha no students suffer from the LL policy? What about the 99.125% of applicants who do not get them?
Alright this thread has veered off topic too much. Good night.
Edit to your edit: I did not assume that those 18% would not go to Harvard without the likely letters, but that they do help in terms of recruitment (why else would schools send them out?) And an 18 point increase is huge. But we are likely not talking about that huge of a jump due to the large number of recruited athletes, etc. But still, any jump is huge when it comes to SAT points. Just look at the Claremont McKenna incident.
If you didn’t care, you most likely wouldn’t have started this topic and you would have moved on with your other acceptances. Also, no school with a below 40% acceptance rate should really be considered a safety, particularly one where the middle 50% of students have between a 32 and a 34 on the ACT.
@Madeon You are stretching the truth. Every college games the rankings to some extent, but the top schools are considered top notch for reasons beyond yield percentage. At some point, once you consider the top schools, it’s almost random which ones might accept you and which might reject you.
The thing is, if a college wants you, it’ll accept you. Since you were rejected (not even waitlisted, and Wash U waitlists a lot of people), you should accept that Wash U doesn’t want you as a student. If you were waitlisted, I might take your argument a tad more seriously, but as is, you have no standing and no proof. Furthermore, while Wash U’s waitlisting many applicants could be considered padding the acceptance rate, Wash U accepts very, very few students off the waitlist, to the point that being waitlisted is more or less a “soft rejection.”
All in all, Wash U accepts top students, and while you were rejected, someone else with similar stats and achievements was accepted. That’s just how it works. At a certain point, small things set individual students apart–maybe you just didn’t fit into the overall class profile.
Don’t let this one rejection weigh so heavily, and good luck wherever you end up.
@kROCK91 All you guys do is change the subject back to me. I brought up a legitimate point and all you guys can say is that I was just unhappy I didn’t get in to WashU. Again, I’ve already been accepted at some amazing schools and have absolutely no reason to care about one decision.
@sungoose That is true, however, no one I know considers WashU to be a “top notch” school - it’s more of a second tier school (top tier being HYPSM). I find it hard to believe if students are so heavily recruited at HYPS that WashU wouldn’t want them. I believe that WashU feels that those top tier students would never choose WashU over the others and thus don’t accept them.
I think there may be something to @Madeon’s theory. Today I heard about a few kids who were accepted at Ivy League and top 5 SLAs who were waitlisted from Wash U. They had visited the school so “demonstrated interest.”
Holistic admissions means that there is no set definition of what a “top applicant” is. And that what one school deems a top applicant another school doesn’t. Having a likely letter from one uber-selective school doesn’t mean that a student has a golden ticket to every other school. It is pure ego for any individual student to feel that he or she is entitled to an acceptance at any school that practices holistic admissions.
Using Caltech as an example, there were 4 applicants EA from my D’s school. (She was not one of them). The two with better science accomplishments were deferred, while the two who had lesser accomplishments were accepted. Was Caltech worrying about yield? I doubt it. The adcoms saw something in the two “lesser accomplished” students that appealed to them.
I find this thread mean-spirited, in that it is denigrating the students who have been accepted, by claiming that their acceptances are based on their being inferior to what OP calls “top tier” students. As a college professor myself, I find this attitude silly.
@madeon. I’m sorry you didn’t get into Wash U. Obviously not everyone can and I believe Wash U has done a great job of finding the students that fit their culture. Also congrats in getting into another top 20 school. That’s quite an achievement after all they are all tippy top schools in America and they are all extremely hard to get into (if not impossible). All you can do is try.
