<p>TheDartmouth.com</a> | College receives record number of applications</p>
<p>^ Interesting point made by Dartmouth’s Dean of Admissions, however. She expects applications to increase (and selectivity to rise) at lower-cost public institutions and at the small number of privates, including the Ivies, that promise to meet 100% of financial need. Colleges “that have tuition similar to the Ivy League” but “don’t have the strength of our financial aid” might “be seen as risky choices” in the current economy.</p>
<p>That assessment seems to be broadly consistent with the smattering of reports on application data we’ve seen so far—up at publics, up at Ivies and similarly well-heeled privates with generous financial aid policies, mixed elsewhere.</p>
<p>I think that if the Ivy League schools’ admissions offices were intellectually honest they would offer students for $5 (or no cost) a prescreening of their credentials and tell them whether or not they should even bother to apply. I have to think at least 50% of the applicants have absolutely no chance of getting admitted.</p>
<p>Instead of soliciting applications from students that have no chance wouldn’t it be nice if they told students not to waste their time, energy and money with an application? But then they wouldn’t be able to boast that they received umpty gazillion applications and that their acceptance rate this year dropped to .04%</p>
<p>I agree NJers, especially seeing here who’s applying. But I think the common data sets are the screen, kids just don’t want to believe them.</p>
<p>When you look who was rejected ED at schools like Dartmouth (legacies with 2250’s!) you realize it has gotten really difficult and random for even the qualified.</p>
<p>I’m wondering if the bad aid privates will be accepting more this year expecting lower yields.</p>
<p>“The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the target class size of the Class of 2013 is 2,200 students. In fact, that number refers to the total number of students the College intends to accept, for a final class size of between 1,090 and 1,100 students.”</p>
<p>Even the Dartmouth kids have a hard time keeping accepted and enrolled stats straight.</p>
<p>hmom5, I’ve looked at common data sets but there seems to be so much more to it for the top colleges. Okay, so my kid looks like he has a chance. Except no one in our family attended and he’s not an athlete. And so on.</p>
<p>It makes sense to me that schools that promise to meet 100% of financial need are going to be getting a lot more applications.</p>
<p>What is interesting is that even at those schools which promise (and do) meet 100% of need, there has always been 50% of the class who are full-pay. I wonder if that number will go down…now that we are in these perilous times.</p>
<p>Harvard’s financial aid is a lot more generous than MIT, with today’s economy, I am guessing Harvard will have a much higher application volume than MIT…</p>
<p>Pug, when you look at the CDS of the highly selective schools, consider that 40% are in the groups you mention: recruited athletes (17%), URMs (20%), legacies and develoment (10ish%) and of course there’s some overlap.</p>
<p>So an unhooked kid with a good shot is probably pretty close to the 75th percentile stats unless they provide geographical diversity, are from under performing schools, are low income, etc.</p>
<p>When I look at it that way, the results seem much more predictable.</p>
<p>Ellem, if the percent on aid does not go up this year, can any of us believe these schools are truly need blind?</p>
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<p>Ohhhh, man. That’s probably the smartest, most insightful thing I’ve ever read on this site. Not a joke here; I mean that sincerely.</p>
<p>You are waaayyyy ahead of the curve.</p>
<p>Are you a student? A parent with a lot of experience? Just a very smart person?</p>
<p>hmom5: </p>
<p>Very few highly selective colleges have 20% URMs, 17% recruited athletes is waaay high, unless you’re talking about a tiny college like Amherst, “developmentals” are negligible as a percentage, 1-3 individuals/year, and legacies are probably more than 10% everywhere but also probably equal or better to the average in grades and scores. And, remember, the kids with the higher scores are the ones who are most likely to have other options (and thus less likely to enroll), so at a college like Dartmouth that admits 2x the number of kids they expect to enroll, the 75th percentile of the enrolled class in any particular metric is probably more like the 50th (or lower) percentile of the group admitted. I know from lots of experience, my own and others, that being well above the 75th percentile (in cases where that’s possible) in everything doesn’t equate to a 1-in-3chance of admission. For legacies. With geographical diversity. Grades and scores are important, but don’t tell you much about who is going to be admitted.</p>
<p>Someone speculated that Harvard would get more applications than MIT this year because MIT’s financial aid is not as good. Of course it will – Harvard has been running at about 200% of MIT’s applications for years. MIT’s applications seem to have gone up a lot this year – I think the EA applications were up over 20%. The University of Chicago, which claims to meet need but seems to do so in a less liberal manner than HYP, had a decrease in EA applications this year, but has reported a 17% increase in total applications. So, so much for that theory.</p>
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<p>I find this ‘developmental group’ fascinating. Is this just your hunch or do you base this on info? </p>
<p>I just look at my D’s classmates, and I can easily see several dozen families who could ‘develop’ their child into an Ivy if it’s how it works. You know, families that own whole islands, who retired at 40 when they sold their corporation in X country, whose work involves ‘running the foundation’, or whose own parents have a wing named after them at Harvard. And this is at a tiny school in a laid back city not even located in the US! So when I extrapolate from this little world, I can only imagine how many such families must reside in the NE or the US as a whole. And how much does it cost to buy your child into one’s favorite school? </p>
<p>I truly wonder.</p>
<p>JHS, I’m pretty confident of those percentages and they are cited in several books including those by Hernandez and The Price Of Admission by Golden. They are numbers for ivies.</p>
<p>Starbright, working on Wall Street I myself have known several every year at the mid tier ivies. I fundraise for Penn and know their number is WAY more than a few per year. Great wealth has been created in this Country in the past 2 decades and top colleges for your kids has been as much in demand as yachts and private planes. I do believe my 10% legacy/development was conservative, an indicative of thee lowest percentage at an ivy.</p>
<p>This is from the recent ‘dirty secrets’ article:</p>
<p>Michele Hernandez, nationally known private college admissions consultant located in Vermont. Author of the book A is Admissions: The Insider’s Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges and former admissions officer at Dartmouth College</p>
<p>“40 percent of every Ivy League school is filled up with special cases: athletes, minorities, low-income, legacies or development cases. They’re tagged, and schools lower the admissions standards a lot for those kids. So you got to know how to use those tags to your advantage. If you’re a legacy and you apply early to the school, you’ve got a 50 percent better chance of getting in.</p>
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<p>Class of 2012, first class admitted under Lakaris</p>
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<p>Final count according to the CDS</p>
<p><a href=“This Page Has Moved”>This Page Has Moved;
<p>1096 students</p>
<p>Black, non-Hispanic 103 (9.39%)
American Indian or Alaska Native 44 (4.014%)
Asian or Pacific Islander 163 (14.87%)
Hispanic 88 (8.029%)</p>
<p>Total minority enrollment - 398 (36.31%)</p>
<p>URM = 235 (21.44%)</p>
<p>If #s are pretty consistent year over year, athletes make up ~ 10% of the freshman class.</p>
<p>Another thing I note is that in recent years, the gap seems be narrowing between the level of students at ‘lower ivies’ and HPYS. I mean this to include they non ivies of the same stature. Cornell/Penn/Duke/Northwestern not nearly as different from the tipy top college populations. Lots of chance/subject factors between the 2 groups.</p>
<p>Sybbie, I’d like to get to the bottom of the athlete numbers, I’ve repeatedly seen 17%. Any guess how to break out the 40% number so often cited?</p>
<p>heyalb: I feel that most people who have been at CC regularly for a month know that the Ivies and Ivy clones admission rates are in inflated do to parents saying “what the heck, you should apply, its HARVARD” or something. I know that if only qualified applicants applied admission rates would be in the mid to upper 30s. Look at uChicago, a very self selective school in that people who apply, don’t apply because of the name (it is not a name brand school) but apply for the academics. Usually these people have higher stats, which is why uChicago has similar SAT/ACT ranges to the ivies, but a 30%+ admission rate. Same goes for most LACs (such as Reed, Grinnell, Carleton, Oberlin, etc) that don’t have much name recognition and therefore have much more qualified applicants, but have less of them. When you look at test scores at top schools, most of them are very similar, but one has a lower acceptance rate. So it goes to show that both are equally selective, but one has more applicants…</p>
<p>a few years ago, the D ran a series of articles about admissions.</p>
<p>Aricle # 5 in the series</p>
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<p>Link to the thread where I posted the rest of the articles from that series (post 19-24).</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/dartmouth-college/546318-research-d-2.html?highlight=recruited+athletes[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/dartmouth-college/546318-research-d-2.html?highlight=recruited+athletes</a>
Hope this helps</p>
<p>S</p>
<p>Very helpful Sybbie! Is it possible the other ivies have 7% more athletes than Dartmouth thanks to Mr. Furstenberg? Will Ms. Laskaris usher in a new era? The ED SAT scores look to have gone down and support Michele Hernandez’s claim that the non hooked applicants will need to bring them up during the RD round.</p>
<p>You nailed it, SmallCollegesFTW. I spoke tonight to a friend whose son attends the top private high school in my state. The son has a friend who hopes to attend a top LAC that many haven’t heard of. The ivy league will be left in the dust by this young man. (I should add that I have nothing against the ivy league schools, as my son will be attending one in the fall. His choice, however, was based on his experience during his visit, rather than the school’s athletic conference.)</p>
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<p>10characters</p>