Honestly- what kid with a 1510 (absent an accomplishment like playing with the philaharmonic) thinks they are getting in to Yale? I dreamt of dancing with the Bolshoi… not happening.
It’s a little delusional to think that your 1510 scoring good student is getting plucked out of the pile for a college which is rejecting 95% (or whatever the number is) of strong, academically talented kids. On the basis of what- their love for tennis and their volunteer hours at an animal shelter? Their 8 AP exams? Their “oh so original” essay about how they want to become a neurologist because grandpa has Alzheimer’s and they love grandpa so much???
My takeaway is that this year was tough. Last year was tough. Next year will be tough, lather rinse repeat. It’s a good time to fall in love with a WIDE range of fantastic colleges where the tippy top stats kid will stand out. Tippy top stats do not stand out at Yale.
The one type of school that seems to have done well in the top band are the Manhattan upper private schools. I know someone that works in one and he said it was a typical year as did a friend whose kids graduated but still has friends there. My understanding is many did not submit scores but the students were pleased with their admissions to T20s and HYP. If your NJ private school is equivalent to a Manhattan prep school then there may be no difference
The random suburban public schools that I have friends at or friends of friends, in the top band (1500+) did not do well. Although my understanding is certain hardship districts have done exceedingly well even in areas like Long Island and not necessarily kids that are URM. However that is a non traditional district for elite schools. The kids in neighboring very competitive districts have not done as well based on what I am hearing but again anecdotal.
Everyone in the 1400 band did fine that I know and even did a little better than they expected. Faith based non elite private schools outside of Manhattan did not do well in the top group either as far as I know although they also in my very limited experience did fine for the 1400 kids.
This is of course completely anecdotal based on my experience and the people I have spoken to, every school and situation is different. Part of my motivation in posting this is to find out if this was universally true or only in certain regions and schools. It sounds like it is not, and for whatever reason the districts and students I am hearing about did not do as well as others who had a good year
As @blossom mentioned above, I don’t consider 1500+ as the top band. My 3.3 gpa son had a 1530. And I think he was lucky to have 4 state flagship CS admits. In my opinion, to be considered to be at the top of the pool, you need to show a lot more that has nothing to do with gpa and test scores, after maxing out on those two. This has been the case for at least the past 10 years, and is not new. The marginal extra squeeze you find top kids in these days is because of the incremental creep of hooks target set-asides year after year. But this is only incremental. There aren’t large year-to-year movements in sub buckets.
For the unhooked top kids /top band they have to have more than just 1500 +scores and grades, and that isn’t new. Yale for one, as it is recently mentioned on the thread, has language on their website that has been there pre-covid: they reject 5000 kids a year who have scores above their 75th%ile scores. Most of these kids probably have high gpas, some dont. Some also do not have top rigor/impressive transcripts. Some don’t have “best in many years” LOR , or truly impactful ECs, or compelling essays. All of those things are likely needed for admission, having ALL of those is actually not that common, and yet it still isn’t anywhere near a guarantee.
From local anecdotal info here, admissions was similar to last yr, but both yrs are slightly less successful than pre-covid yrs—yet not significantly so. Over the recent 7-8 yrs Vals and Sals and similar, with near-perfect scores , commonly get into top choices—but when they miss out on many top choices and go to their “safeties” there are usually reasons, more often than not.
So my takeaway for the next cycle is it remains hard, it does not always work out, but do the best you can with your app and apply to many matches .
Intended major is religious studies. Unlike many kids who have interest in that area, she preferred not to go to a religiously-affiliated institution - she already understands her own faith from the “inside” perspective and now wants to see where it fits in the context of other religious and non-religious belief systems. I get the sense that this makes her an unusual applicant - I’ve been a regular reader of CC threads for a couple of years now and haven’t come across anyone else with a similar profile and intention, nor have I heard of anything like this in real life (acknowledging that this is a very small sample size).
Re: history, I think that’s a less unusual path than the story above, but it could help in certain cases. Choosing a core-curriculum humanities major like history or English probably won’t be a differentiator at large public schools (just too many kids to really be concerned about enrollment numbers in core subjects) or most LACs (they already attract lots of humanities types). But if a particular school is well-known for STEM and yet offers a wide range of majors, an applicant with a demonstrated passion for a less-popular major could get a slight boost, though probably more of a tiebreaker among similar apps than a real hook. As long as universities are housing and funding faculty members in art history and philosophy and classics and Portuguese, someone needs to take those classes. Most universities will say they do not admit by major, and surely that’s true in the sense that they don’t strictly limit themselves to only X engineering majors or CS majors based upon stated intent in applications. But they also don’t want 90% of a given entering class fighting over limited seats in CS while sections of humanities classes are cancelled for lack of interest.
I would try to find out what you can about how many students are in a given program at a given school. There’s a website called College Factual that offers a breakdown of students by general academic area at various schools, though I can’t vouch for the accuracy and would try to confirm on the school’s website if possible. Also, if there’s a connection that your student can make to a certain professor or course of study at a school, that can only help. I’d rather be the applicant who “made a presentation to a local historical society based on Prof. Klineborfer’s recent book and published an article in XYZ Journal engaging with her thesis” than the applicant who “intends to major in history.”
Most of these kids had 1570 - 1590 and were top 10 in their class and were in districts that send unhooked kids to these elite schools every year.
You made me laugh! It is a perfect caricature. I know a few kids that got into HYP or MIT or Chicago or Duke and the other Ivies (I have never met anyone from S!) in prior years. In all honesty the MIT kids were and still are extraordinary (two students, siblings not twins). The others were exactly as you described, average excellent kids although closer to 1600 than 1500. In one case the kid decided that Harvard was too pretentious for them and ended up at another T10 school that looked more fun.
Really I was not talking about Yale, that was the only one who got in this year. I am talking about kids who were waitlisted at NYU this year, rejected from Emory, rejected from Tufts unless they were a legacy, rejected from Geogetown and Boston College. That with nearly perfect scores were not accepted into a SUNY honors program. They thought they had realistic chances because their peers from the preceding years had gotten in to those places with equivalent or lower grades and accomplishments. Many of the Tulane, UMiami, NEU were yield protecting so did not take them either
Your comment implies that the average academic suburban NY/NJ/Philly public or parochial school never sends kids to T10 schools unless they are hooked or extraordinary. That is simply not true. Most schools send a handful or more depending on the school such as what @DadOfJerseyGirl mentioned every year. It may not be my kid, but the top 10 or 20 kids in each grade have a reasonable shot as long as the essay about grandpa and the animal shetler is well written
CS is an extremely competitive admission, and is pretty unique. A friend’s son who was class of 2019 who was top of his class also with 800 math scores including in SATs ended up at a top 5 program at an OOS CS program. His dream was CMU but never got off the waitlist. He loves his program.
I really mean the 1500+ as a shorthand for top scores and top ranking with ECs and essays to match. Is getting a 750V and 750M that different than getting a 780V and 790M? What is it that 2 questions per section?! As I mentioned, most of the really crazy rejection stories I have heard were kids who got over a 1570 and in one case was the Val and his only option is an OOS where he did not get much if any merit money
All I am saying is that the focus should not be on the score and the gpa. Nobody going to a T5 thinks in these terms. The score and gpa are taken for granted. The variables that matter are a) how stellar are your reccs, b) did you get into a selective summer program, c) quality of research in the high school. Several of the kids that worked on the CS research topic my son started 4 years ago (he matriculated 3 years ago to a T5 CS program) went to either MIT or Stanford in the past 3 years from our school. By the way, all these kids will also have leadership positions in 2-4 school clubs such as the main journalistic publication, or a sports team etc. These are also necessary, but not sufficient, and not worth bringing up in a conversation when I am talking to my son wondering who went where and why…
We care about – is the person top 5 in the class, did she make it to gov school? Did she place at the ISEF? etc … All this discussion is for non legacy, unhooked kids. Otherwise it is not an interesting discussion :-).
@neela1, I completely agree with you that it’s much more than GPA and SAT that gets one into a T10. But our GCs have been surprised that many unhooked kids with very similar level of high accomplishments (going beyond mere stats) to those who used to get into HYPMS 2-3 years ago didn’t get in this year. I can only speak for our high school - YMMV at other schools and regions.
SOMEONE is getting into these schools. Either the schools decided there were also 1570/4.0+ kids from other schools who were just as good as the ones in NYC and NJ and MA in other areas of the country, or they decided the SATs and GPAs weren’t as important as another factor and went for a different set of students. I don’t think schools are dropping their admissions statistics just to keep out the top students who ‘used to get admitted’ but just changing what they are looking for. Maybe they really did want more students from Tennessee or Utah and those students are now applying because of the ease of the common app. Maybe they want to be even more exclusive and admit more students of politicians or actors or millionaires? SOMEONE is getting in so if student who used to get in are shut out, there will be statistics to show who those newcomers are.
All the time you read on CC that the students are looking for a very diverse student body, want lots of POC, different SES make up, international students, don’t want college to be just like high school so don’t want anyone else from their hs getting in to ‘their’ school…maybe the colleges are starting to listen! They are no longer taking the top 10% from the same high schools, year after year. They are accepting more students from the south, from AZ, from Kansas. There are lots of students with high SAT scores, especially since the schools now superscore. There are high schools with 20 vals. They aren’t all getting into Yale, not all headed to MIT.
I’m just curious, how do people know so much about other’s test scores, grades, EC’s etc? I know that info for my 3 kids but I certainly don’t know it for anyone else at their high school. Is this something people talk about at cocktail parties or PTA meetings? Seems so weird to me. I have some idea of how smart my son’s friends are based on where they applied/got accepted but I have no intimate details about their scores, grades, etc, nor would I want to.
My D’s HS published the names of all the commended and NMF students. They also published honor roll, in GPA order, every quarter (they’ve since changed that practice but it was true every year my D was in HS), and there were special awards for seniors who scored 98th percentile or higher on SAT/ACT and made highest honor role every quarter. ECs outside of school were harder to parse out but if a student received an award, that was published in the school newsletter and shared on social media. Honestly it was TMI!
Some kids ask other kids and go around collecting data. They make big spreadsheets of this data, and also which kids are applying where. Data is not that important. Even knowing who is applying where is sort of unimportant. Because the pool is not local to your school. Most pools are at least regional. Unless you are coming from TJ or Stuy or schools of that kind. The really important stuff is fairly transparent anyway-- who are in the hardest classes? who won external awards, who are leading what clubs? who is doing research in school? who is legacy? who is a urm? etc.
It may be understandable that high school students “don’t want college to be just like high school”, but do they really want their college to be as diverse as possible? From their perspective, the lack of diversity is bad, but is more diversity necessarily always better? Wouldn’t the incremental benefits of greater diversity diminish after a certain degree of diversity has been achieved (like in a stock portfolio)?
Oh I don’t think students actually WANT a diverse campus, they just think they do, and say they do, and then head to a school where the majority of kids are just like them - white, higher SES, same religion, maybe even the same high school. If 3-4 kids from the same hs are all offered spots at Yale, suddenly it is not a problem and won’t be ‘just like hs.’