@green678 So an ISEF finalist who also is a bestselling author and app developer can be a top applicant at two of the top Ivies, but not at WashU? I find that fascinating. Because that is what happened.
Also, I don’t know much about Caltech (didn’t apply) but I believe they have pretty good supplement which helps differentiate applicants?
This thread wasn’t made to denigrate students - merely to bring to light an admissions practice that many would consider unethical.
@Madeon Perhaps Wash U felt there was nothing you could learn from them.
@dddcupcake Oh that was describing one of my friends that I met at one of the events - not me haha…WashU is still a great university with tons of great resources available to its students, there’s no denying that.
@Madeon Such an applicant certainly is academically qualified, but that doesn’t mean that he or she will be valued by every school. Adcoms are human beings and have their own preferences. Perhaps the WashU adcom picked up a vibe from the essay or one of the recs that was not what he was looking for as compared to what someone else wrote. Maybe if a different adcom had viewed the file, the applicant would have been admitted. Admissions is not a science.
I remember reading a few years back about a girl who was the only female to make it onto the US team for the International Math Olympiad for the past several years. She really wanted to go to Yale but was rejected. She did get into Harvard and MIT, I believe, but she wanted Yale. And she certainly was more academically qualified than most all of Yale’s other female STEM applicants, and most all of their male STEM applicants as well. But college admissions is subject to human preference of the adcoms and the institutional needs (another oboe player? a classics major?) of universities.
If you are the ISEF finalist whom you mention, I congratulate you on your admission to those other schools, and I hope that you will celebrate those acceptances rather than focusing on any schools to which you haven’t been accepted. Life is full of random outcomes. Make the most of what comes your way.
If you weren’t trying to denigrate, then you were doing a poor job of it by 1) calling WashU a safety school (safety schools happen to be schools that you can be guaranteed to get into), 2) saying it waitlists qualified students. That does a disservice to all the students who are going there or have been admitted.
It also doesn’t seem the students at WU can be any more qualified, if you go by average test scores (yes, test scores are a relatively silly method of measuring qualification, but it might surprise you to know which business school had the highest average SAT score in the country).
With thousands of applications, there are bound to be far more students who are qualified than the school can possibly accept- that’s true of any selective university. Thus, you might hear about the ISEF finalists and the award-winning skaters who don’t get accepted. You may not have heard about the students admitted who created their own start-ups or the students who founded their own nonprofits.
People also seem to forget that all the highly selective schools are actually different schools with different admissions offices. Each office has different criteria and different fit. Some schools may prioritize certain kinds of qualities in people. There are students who get into WashU and not into X highly selective school and vice versa. Be happy with your acceptances and move on.
@green678 Yeah I’m definitely not the ISEF finalist/author/developer - science was never my passion haha. I agree, there are certain cases where that does happen - but they aren’t common occurrences. Again, as I mentioned in my first post, this happened to the vast majority (around 90%) of the recruited candidates that I met at these weekends. This is why it was noticed very fast at one of the the events I was at (especially because WashU decisions came out right before it). It was unexpected, and raised many eyebrows.
@kROCK91 I said WashU was a safety school for MY PARTICULAR SCHOOL, which is a major feeder to WashU - over 70% acceptance rate historically. Even my guidance counselors listed WashU as a safety on my list. By no means is it a safety for everyone.
The people who were accepted to WashU were undoubtedly qualified to go there - they have a great student body. What I am saying is that WashU might be waitlisting/rejecting students that they consider to be overqualified because they feel that they would never go to WashU. In other words, instead of accepting a larger number of students which could possibly include some who don’t consider WashU a top choice, they accept a smaller number of students who they feel all will go to WashU.
Again, I’m not talking about qualified students - I’m talking about exceptional students: the students who get accepted to just about every school they apply to (except for WashU).
Well apparently your GC was wrong. Wash U wasn’t a safety for you and in fact it isn’t a safety for anyone. All these top 20 schools turn away thousands of perfect applicants. My D private counselor couldn’t even guarantee my D admittance to Wash U even if she had a 4.0 or a 2400 SAT score. You were misinformed so that’s why you are upset. You had bad advice that’s all. Simply any school with admittance rates under 25% is automatically a far reach no matter what your stats are. It’s simply because there are way too many applicants and not enough spots.
Let me give you an example… The Dean of Admissions at ND said that out of 17,000 applicants,6,000 of them had at least a 1500 CR and Math score and were the top 1% of their class. They only have 2000 spots! So they have to turn away 4k perfect tippy top students. He did go one step further… He said how do they choose? The essays! He refused to accept anyone that is arrogant or greedy. Instead they want students that show that they GIVE back such as volunteering. So the essays were very important.
My D helped a classmate with his essay because he needed advice before submitting his essay to Harvard. His essay was all wrong. My D even told him you cannot send that. You cannot gloat and show that you are the best. That is a huge turn off. Instead she showed him how to write an essay where he could use his gifts to help others, such as tutoring.
It’s simple. These colleges look for what students fit their culture just like you look for schools that fit you.
@Madeon
There are a couple of problems with your theory and assertions.
But that is, in fact, exactly the point! Those students are probably really wanting other schools more, and will be disappointed if they have to “settle” for WUSTL, as ridiculous as those of us that know WUSTL understand that to be. They are often dead set on HYPS and anything “less” won’t do. If you really think about what you are saying, you are asserting that these students have a “right” to be accepted to a school like WUSTL simply because they have been accepted by schools that are even more competitive for admission. This “right” is being violated, ergo WUSTL is doing something underhanded, or selfish, or shady, or some version of these things. I know you know it really isn’t a right, but that is shorthand for your contention that they should have been accepted if they can get in to schools with more competitive admissions.
A hole in your argument is that WUSTL, in fact, offers admission to hundreds if not a thousands of students that have stats equal to those you know that got denied/wait listed. So clearly something else is at work here. What can it be?
All schools, and especially schools like WUSTL and Vanderbilt and Tulane, etc. that are not Ivy or Stanford or MIT but get applications from a lot of students that aspire to those schools, want students that really want to be at their school. Surely that makes sense to you. And if you don’t think that these experienced admissions people at these schools have a pretty good eye for figuring out who those people are that are using WUSTL as a “backup”, if that is more descriptive for those people than the term “safety”, then I think you are kidding yourself. Can they get that 100% right? No, but they are amazingly accurate. They have learned numerous “tells” over the years. Most people rave about the cohesiveness and welcoming atmosphere at schools like WUSTL and Tulane, two that I am very familiar with. You think this is an accident? By not offering admission to those students, they avoid getting the ones that get shut out of HYPS et. al. and spend their first year or two at WUSTL depressed and grumbling, hoping to transfer into HYPS the first chance they get. Kind of the opposite of the atmosphere admissions is trying to foster.
Is there a secondary effect that by being selective in this way WUSTL and these other schools have lower admission rates and higher yields, which look better for them? Sure, but that is hardly the motivation since it really doesn’t affect the rankings at all. I think everyone would agree that USNWR is the ranking that matters most, and certainly is the one that universities “game to”, to the extent they do. Which also makes your theory less than credible. USNWR doesn’t use yield at all as a factor, and admission rate is only 1.25% of the current formula, and has been between 1-1.5% for years. Hardly enough to move the needle.
So it really leaves your discussion of nefarious or immoral or whatever negative adjectives you want to use for their “motives” in denying/wait listing these students somewhat wanting. Rather the simpler explanation, that they are in fact looking to offer admission to students with excellent credentials that they have judged really want WUSTL, seems best.
If there were yield padding at Wustl you would see evidence of it in the admissions scatterplot. There would be a drop off in acceptances at the highest sat/gpa level. Do we see that?
Whose admissions? Does WUSTL publish such a graph for all their applicants?
Regardless, there is an alternative explanation other than yield protection, as I thought I laid out pretty clearly. Even if a scatterplot showed such a drop off, it doesn’t prove motive. And just to repeat, if yield protection were the motive, why not just deny every Ivy level applicant?
@fallenchemist: As usual, you have very clearly and accurately responded to this “yield padding” discussion. I totally agree with you. I am a parent of a WUSTL alum so I am commenting a bit from that perspective. I believe that some applicants who receive acceptances from the Ivy League feel entitled to receive acceptances from all universities. “If Harvard thinks I’m great, then there is something wrong with WUSTL for not accepting me”. It becomes deeply personal. I find these discussions ridiculous and show a total lack of maturity. Here is an important article for students and parents alike to read.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, @fallenchemist. I haven’t followed Wash U admissions recently (my kid didn’t apply) but as an alum from over 20 years ago I totally relate to this:
When I was there I felt that there were 2 populations at the school… (mostly) midwestern kids for whom Wash U was absolutely their first choice… they might have had high enough stats to get into HYP but didn’t want to go that far from home… and then East coast kids who didn’t get into Harvard and were, let’s face it, somewhat down on the fact that they were stuck in St. Louis for 4 years.
Now that it’s gotten easier to apply to multiple schools, if Wash U or any other school can figure out somewhat how to weed out the kids that aren’t going to accept an offer anyway, that actually benefits everyone in the end as schools will end up having more places available for the kids who really want to be there.
I don’t know if it is nefarious or coming out of a sense of bitterness from being rejected but sometimes things do happen in college admissions that seem outside of the norm. Anecdotally I heard that a lot of kids were deferred at Michigan this year and then low and behold, articles started appearing to explain this phenomenon. http://www.examiner.com/article/why-thousands-were-deferred-this-year-by-the-university-of-michigan Before I read the OP’s post here, I had been hearing similar anecdotes about kids getting waitlisted at or rejected by WUSTL this year who were getting multiple admissions to other schools that are ranked higher on most lists. It may just be anecdotes and yes, holistic admissions means that not every kid will be admitted, but if something real is going on, I suspect we will see an article about it.
@cg123 and @washugrad
Thanks. I agree totally that as WUSTL has attracted more attention from the coasts due to the nature of communication these days as well as its ranking in USNWR, it increased the number of applicants from the Northeast without decreasing the fact that many, if not most of those students still really want to get into an Ivy. After all, that is what they grow up hearing about more so than Midwestern kids, who hear about WUSTL, Northwestern and U Chicago a lot as the elite schools. Not that they don’t understand the elite nature of the Ivies, but their perspective is usually more balanced, that going to one of those three Midwestern schools will provide the college experience they desire just as well as Harvard or Yale.
@cg123
Great article, thanks for pointing it out. It strikes me as one of the most sensible articles I have seen regarding college admissions in a long time.
@usemomof2
I can’t speak to the Michigan situation, but this has been going on at WUSTL for years now. This thread is essentially repeated every year.
@cg123
Now I am going to show a little sympathy for the other side. We talk about holistic admissions and how all of these schools are practicing it. Think about what that means. They are taking into account the student’s scholastic performance, their EC’s which includes their talents in many cases, their service record, and by way of the essays their personal thoughts and lives even apart from these other things. In other words, at 17 or 18 years old pretty much everything they see themselves to be. Their entire identity or nearly so. Therefore if they don’t understand the admissions process it can be pretty crushing to get turned down. Even if you get accepted by Harvard and turned down by WUSTL or Tulane. It still says to many of them, “What is wrong with me that these schools didn’t like me or want me”? They may even understand the process intellectually but have trouble internalizing that into a real belief, that somewhere there is a truth about the process that is negative regarding them. As adults more removed from the process we know that is not what they should be taking away as the message, but many do and some much more than others. So of course they try to rationalize, like we all do when faced with something deeply disturbing that is hard to understand.
The best way the admission process at selective schools has been explained to me by several sources is that it it takes very high credentials to get into the “pool” of applicants being seriously considered who are very qualified to attend, but once you get into that pool acceptance is fairly random so will differ from school to school. An admissions officer may have 100 very qualified applicants in a pile and be told they can only admit 50. All deserve to get it but 50 won’t. Unless applicants are accepted purely on standardized tests and GPAs there will naturally be those with higher credentials who are denied when an applicant with lower credentials is accepted. An applicant with a perfect 2400 SAT may think he should be favored over an applicant with a 2300, but a school may not see that as a meaningful difference. The school could always favor the 2400 applicant but that would be making test scores be more determinative than they arguably should be. If the school cannot accept everyone with a 2300 through a 2400, then it either has to decide purely on scores or reject some 2400 applicants. Of course the same analysis applies even with scores lower than a perfect 2400 (or 1500 if writing is not considered). The same analysis can apply with class rank. A school may not think that being #1 in a high school class is meaningfully different from being #15; unless that is a black and white distinction, some valedictorians will be rejected.
@2135ar Agreed. Again, I am talking about the applicants that get accepted to just about every school they apply to (and then get waitlisted/rejected at WashU). These are the applicants who are ISEF/Siemens finalists, best selling authors, successful entrepreneurs etc.
It’s just weird to see quite often someone who gets into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Duke and then gets waitlisted/rejected at WashU.
@fallenchemist @washugrad I 100% agree with you. It is just that some of these “super qualified” students they waitlist/reject actually want to go there. It doesn’t help that WashU doesn’t even have a supplement which would help them gauge interest in the school.
In my opinion WashU should do one of two things:
But both options would hurt their acceptance rate so they won’t do it.
@madeon Simply put you shouldn’t have applied to Wash U as a safety. It isn’t a safety to anyone.
Wash U wants to accept the students that want them. I would too if I were in their shoes! That’s why they have ED. They care about interest.
Do you realize that over 80%-90% were rejected/waitlisted. That’s huge! I wouldn’t be surprised if there were over 10,000 tippy top students that applied to Wash U (just like ND said they had 6k tippy top applicants) and there are only 1700 spots. It’s unfortunate but they just cannot accept everyone.
There is no padding. It seems like you just aren’t aware of how the college process works.