<p>I guess I am stating the obvious - college Admissions are such a crapshoot. This is my 2nd time through and the experience has been very different from 7 years ago. She gets into "reaches" and deferred from "targets". Frustrating to see kids with similar or lower profiles get into schools where she was deferred but am sure there are other parents/students saying that about her profile in schools where she was accepted. There has to a better (and hopefully a more transparent) way to this process. We can heave a sigh of relief as we wait for the Next round of craziness in March.</p>
<p>Do the “targets” consider “level of applicant’s interest”?</p>
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<p>Many moderately selective schools admit at least a portion of their frosh by numbers, so it may be possible to determine whether an applicant will be admitted even before applying. Even if that is not the case, many of these schools notify early or have rolling admissions.</p>
<p>Yep: "deferred from “targets”. " Even mid tier schools want to protect their ‘ranking’ now. So now mid tier schools eliminate top students. So what happens to these schools in ten or so years?</p>
<p>Targets are not safeties, you can’t count on getting in. With the reaches, maybe she made an extra effort on the essays or there was just someone reading the application who found her appealing. Deferral is not a rejection in any event. I have seen no evidence that mid tier schools are really eliminating top students. I’ve seen lots of top students blow off applications to mid tier schools, by not visiting or writing very generic “Why ___ college essays.”</p>
<p>Its not really a crapshoot unless it has changed. Both my kids got into all their schools approx ten & five years ago.
We screened schools mainly by affordability, location, chemistry & academics.
Only applied to schools they would attend & we visited most of them
Of course, only one applied to a reach & the rest were good fits.</p>
<p>It sounds like OPs daughter has some good choices if she was admitted to her reaches.
Not sure I see the problem. Not having two or three schools to choose from, that, would be a problem!</p>
<p>Crapshoot and obvious do not belong in the same sentence. Hard to judge the outcome in December with a mix of EA, rolling and perhaps other applications.</p>
<p>I am not complaining about the net result. It is the whole process that is incredibly frustrating. We did not visit the targets - maybe that played into it - who knows</p>
<p>Some ‘target’ schools where students are well within (or slightly above) middle-50 %iles will defer students when they sense they are being used as a “safety” school. If the school takes interest into consideration, the school may defer a stellar student who has never emailed/visited/applied for extra scholarships and just filled out a ‘quick’ application and accept an okay student who has demonstrated that the school is their first choice.</p>
<p>This unpredictability continues to the graduate level. </p>
<p>Both of my kids have applied to graduate programs (each of a different kind) and “crapshoot” was a good description of the results. In one instance, for example, applications to two similar programs with almost identical levels of selectivity produced a large merit scholarship from one and a rejection from the other. </p>
<p>You just never know.</p>
<p>And on another note – Don’t you get a shiver up your spine this week when you see the word “target” in any context?</p>
<p>It would help to have some more detail about the colleges involved and reasons for the expected decisions, but in other threads I’ve seen, “crapshoot” comments usually stem from much of the admissions criteria being holistic and in some cases non-intuitive, rather than random. For example, if a college rejects student A with a 2300 and 4.0 (and typical ECs/essays…) and accepts student B with a 2100 and 3.8 (and strong ECs/essays/…), then admission decisions at that college are called “random” or “crapshoot.”</p>
<p>I don’t think it is fair to say it is completely a crapshoot. This says to those hard working students that got into top schools that they were just lucky. I know so many parents that exhaust the " it isn’t fair" line until they’re blue in the face. Many don’t take the time to really look into the competitiveness of the universities their children are applying to nor do they completely understand what a particular university may be looking for.</p>
<p>Where I live ALL top students apply to Stanford. When I say ALL, I mean those who have very good academics but not necessarily the highest, nor are their SAT’s close to anything " distinguished." They also have very standard EC’s. Probably 95% shouldn’t really waiste their time applying. Their parents, on the other hand, are not aware of many of the achievements of those that are accepted and instead feel their child was jilted.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, I think these are wonderful students that will be very successful. I just hate that the college they do get into is seen as a compromise because of their unlucky roll of the dice.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is a crapshoot at all, and I think it is an insult to highly trained, extremely hardworking admissions officers, tasked with a specific institutional mission, to even suggest that it is. How it works out for each individual applicant is another thing. But there is no roll of the dice.</p>
<p>It’s a crapshoot from the perspective of the applicant, because it “seems” he/she would be accepted, based on anecdotal evidence. It is not a crapshoot from the point of view of the admissions officers, who struggle to put together a certain type of class - which can mean excluding students who probably should be admitted (and may well have been in another year). The process is frustrating in that it is an art, rather than a science … and the applicant has no control over the outcome.</p>
<p>I understand the vent. It’s not so much a complaint as an observation.</p>
<p>I think it’s not so much of a crapshoot but a dilemma for admissions and kids. Kids apply to schools these days they really have no intention of attending. The admissions folks have to figure out who is really going to attend and who might just be lobbing one in. The kids that get hurt are the ones that really want to attend, but might get rejected or wait listed and it’s difficult to “show the love” with standard admissions forms like the common app and recycled essays. Fortunately for the schools that defer, students do get a chance to “show the love” as there is nothing more powerful than good senior grades and a note that says “I will attend if admitted”, if the student can’t honestly do that then the deferral doesn’t really matter does it?</p>
<p>Being statistically admissible and being admitted are two different things. For many schools with more selective admissions they want ‘something more’. What that ‘something more’ is is a moving target for any given school on any given year. If school A is not looking that year for the brand of something more that your student offers but schools B, C, E & G are, it may seem very random when it really isn’t.</p>
<p>I think it’s also important to realize that admissions officers are also trained to evaluate if the applicant is a good fit for the school. It’s hard to accept but I think that sometimes a candidate who may seem perfect for a school on paper (grades, SAT, EC’s, etc) may not be a “right fit” for the school.</p>