You took my sentence out of context: I was only referring to Val/top scores at 3 specific HS. It is absolutely true for the specifics I was discussing: it is based on facts at the schools for which I have data. This isn’t a “chance me”: I would never tell an unknown candidate that those chances apply to them. I stand by the concept HS context does matter in determining reach /match/safety.
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Not really. Your point was that shotgunning the top 20 should get you into at least one of them. Admissions to the UCs, especially for an instate kid, are completely different to those for the other 19 privates on that list. For a start the UCs can’t consider race.
All these misleading calculations of probability are not helpful. It’s certainly possible for a Californian ORM to have a reasonably strong chance of admission to UCLA or Berkeley and virtually no chance elsewhere, especially if they attend a high school that is unknown on the east coast. So shotgunning additional T20 schools wouldn’t be much use.
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Again, I am not aware of anyone writing anything remotely close to this. Likewise I am unaware of anyone writing that a perfect stat kid who “successfully petitioned Congress, wrote an award winning novel, and personally raised $2 million for charity” has less than a 30% chance of admission. I’m not sure why keep returning to hyperbolic anecdotes.
Perhaps it would be helpful to look at an actual, non-hyperbolic example drawn from a recent thread here: No hooks, overrepresented demographic, 1560 SAT, 3.95 unweighted GPA, 10 APs, impressive but not extraordinary ECs, extremely thoughtful and thorough approach to the admissions process. Advised here that while they were qualified for every school, they faced long odds at the most selective schools simply because there was a over-surplus of similarly situated applicants.
Fortunately for this family, they didn’t overestimate their chances or get caught up chasing lists. They researched carefully and applied to schools with wide range of selectivity, including excellent schools not listed in USNews top 20. Ultimately they ended up with some great options and I believe they are satisfied with the results, even though they were shut out at the schools on the top of the USNews list. They applied to 10 schools listed in the USNews Top 30/ Top15 LACs, and were not accepted to a single one. It may be hard for you to believe, but this sort of experience is fairly commonplace among unhooked, high stat kids from overrepresented demographics who lack an extraordinary “spark.”
I agree that HW context matters. Unfortunately, when it comes to understanding HS context, Naviance and similar scattergrams often create the false impression that admission chances for unhooked students are much better than they really are. The scattergrams do not filter out hooks such as legacy, recruited athlete, URM, etc. and oftentimes these types of students are drastically overrepresented in the admissions numbers, especially for high performing high schools.
For example, during a recent 3 year period, a nearby high school had 78 acceptances to HYP and S, and if you looked at the scattergrams you’d think that unhooked high stats kids from this school had a relatively good chance of admission at these schools. But reality is that almost 2/3’s (50/78) of the students accepted to these four schools had an admissions hook. Correct for hooks, and the scattergrams are much less encouraging.
As for your estimates of admissions rates at schools from the 3 schools you watch, my guess is that if you were able to correct for hooked kids (many of whom my also be high stats kids) you would be much less optimistic about the admission chances for unhooked kids. For example, looking further down the list, the schools tied for 9th on the USN list are Duke, Johns Hopkins and Northwestern. Looking only at unhooked kids with the highest GPAs from the high performing HS I mentioned, the acceptance rate for these three schools is 12%.
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I actually did correct for hooked kids. This is a smallish community and the cluster of parents who share info also know all the hooks or at least almost all. But your point is well taken—naviance without correcting for hooks is not as helpful, for sure.
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Also, admission by major or division can be a big factor. Maybe there is a patch of green in the CMU plot. But if none applied to SCS, that may not be helpful to someone who does wants to apply to SCS.
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That aspect is very true. Acceptance rate by program can vary wildly, but it is something one that is knowledgeable can account for.
I’m not sure we can estimate likelihood of admissions to highly selective colleges with highly holistic processes for most students unless they have strong hooks and/or some highly sought-after attributes. The colleges’ published acceptance rates (if they publish at all) are averages over applicant pools that are highly variable (and more variable for colleges that are less self-selective). Within each pool, some have near certainty of admission while some others have zero chance. Naviance data are also problematic because they’re based on very small sets of data that are easily distorted by a few admits due to special circumstances that’re generally unknown to most users.
In other words, we should classify all such colleges as high reaches for most students.
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What obscures a lot of these numbers is that many high performing non-hooked kids who were not national award winners, did not invent a cure for cancer or feed and clothe 1,000 poor children somewhere were cross admitted to multiple T20s, often more than 50% of the schools they applied to. In hindsight, we can reasonably assume some or a combination of LoR’s, essays and EC quality resonated across AO’s so that for those individuals, their chances well exceeded the published admissions rate. For others with the same stat’s (and maybe similar list of EC’s), they were shut out. The problem with “chancing” is that without being able to view these aspects of the apps across a wide sample size, you have no way of knowing where the kid falls before decisions come out.
I don’t have published stats to refer to but just these reference points.
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Almost all the kids that get into Yale from my region were cross admitted to at least 1 other T20. We spend some time answering why Yale over XYZ.
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In on our periodic briefings with Yale AO’s, a statistic that they keep close tabs on is cross admit competition. Not surprisingly, the top competitors are consistently HPMS. There must be enough of those kids who are cross admitted to represent a valid sample size.
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Almost all the kids that my S met at Bulldog Days were deciding between more than 1 T20. All of his suitemates had other T20 choices, and like him were “well rounded excellent”, no national award winners. Sure, very few kids make a clean sweep of HYPMS if they apply to more than 1 because it is so competitive and the “bucket” for unhooked is so small, but my guess is that any unhooked kid who gets into HYPMS probably has multiple T20 choices if they applied.
Every “average excellent” kid/family that I informally advise, I tell them to pick their LoR writers early and carefully, and make sure they list out factual anecdotes connected to that writer when they ask for an LoR. More importantly, apply to EA/rolling of 1 or more state flagships (especially honors programs) and either other EA’s of competitive schools without restrictions or an REA/ED school. The results of the earlier decisions (note, getting deferred from S not = deferred from H; rejected from S also not = to rejected from H) will give you an indication of how your application is being received and will suggest whether you can go reach heavy or focus more on safety/matches in the RD round.
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Generally true for forum posts. Those who may have an idea that some highly rejective college is anything less than a reach probably know already without having to post on these forums:
- Recruited athlete.
- Major hook (e.g. major development, not a minor hook like legacy or URM).
- Attends prep school with well-connected college counselors who have a good idea beyond basic stats what subjective qualities each highly rejective college feels it needs.
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What are the major hooks besides recruited athlete, offspring of a major honor? Most of us probably agree legacy is a minor hook. But is URM a minor hook? Even for applicants with a major hook, they still need to meet some minimum academic threshold. Is the threshold variable, depending on the strength of the hook?
Major hooks would be winning national or international awards. This thread would be helpful: List of Top, Prestigious Awards. This is taken from the most recent listing of awards that would range from a big boost to a virtually automatic admission, assuming that students’ applications are otherwise strong/worthy.
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I’m not sure there’s universal agreement on what “hooks” mean. Some may consider some of these awards “hooks”, but others would exclude academic achievements from the category of “hooks”.
BTW, that list needs some revisions:
A Putnam Fellow is, by definition, already in college. And no high school student has ever even been close to be considered for a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize in any academic categories.
I’ll assume we’re done with the off topic debate on the definition of a hook.
I have generally agreed with your point on this, especially on being encouraging to students, however UCLA is a big outlier, one is they don’t consider race so it’s more straightforward to figure out your chances. Their admit rate for gpas over 4.39 is 36%, which if you’re unhooked, you take any day of the week. I’m assuming your 1560 has the rigor to get the 4.4, so I think getting shut out of all those colleges especially if you to apply one the colleges ED is unlikely. However the flipside is that 64% are rejected with a 4.4 weighted, so you have to look at how your high school has done.
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Here are ways that UCLA differs from the mentioned private colleges in admissions:
- SAT/ACT not used.
- Recommendations not used.
- Legacy not considered.
- Race / ethnicity not considered.
- Large size means that recruited athletes do not consume much of the space.
- No ED or EA.
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I don’t think there is such a thing as a “safety” anymore, at least not in the way we thought of the term when I applied to schools in the dark ages. Back then, “safety” meant a school where a student was guaranteed acceptance based on their GPA, test scores, ECs, recommendations, etc. If a school’s mean SAT for the humanities college was 1350 and the applicant had a 1450, they got in (SAT is just a proxy for the strength of a student to keep it simple). Today, schools are so concerned about protecting their yield rates that they are likely to defer or even reject an overqualified student if they think they are being used as a safety and the student is unlikely to attend if accepted. (There was quite a bit of discussion on the Case Western forum about this.) This is why demonstrated interest and applying ED is so important today.
When my son made his school application list, he defined “safeties” - better defined as likely, but not guaranteed, acceptances - as schools where he had over an 80% chance of acceptance, based on USNWR and Niche “Will I get in?” tools using GPA and SAT. “Targets” were between 50% and 79%, and “reaches” were below 50%. This rule of thumb largely proved accurate. He was accepted by all is “safeties” and “targets”. Surprisingly, he was accepted by his long “reach”, but deferred/waitlisted/rejected by his slight “reach”.
The obvious and logical conclusion is that students who did not submit SATs chose not to because their scores were not competitive. If you have two students with similar GPAs, APs, ECs, etc. and one provides a strong SAT score, and the other goes test optional, who would you accept?
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There are still many moderately or less selective colleges with guaranteed admission based on GPA, rank, and/or test scores (without depending on the uncertainty of subjectively evaluated essays and recommendations).
However, on these forums, many students consider such colleges to be “beneath” them.
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I agree that there is probably self selection on CC, and students here are likely applying to highly ranked schools. I am not sure if they think lower ranked schools are “beneath them”, but given how expensive schools have become it is hard to justify attending a second or third tier school, especially in the humanities where graduates’ salaries are relatively low.
Agree with everything you just said.
And it is important to look in the context of that particular High School’s performance, which we don’t generally have much information about when chancing people on this forum.
Even an unweighted 4.0 can mean very different things in different schools.
Available rigor varies from school to school.
And I do believe AOs do see some schools (public and private) as feeders.
UCLA is more straightforward than most – But every school considers GPA and rigor first and foremost. At least in terms of their own claims, things like race and first generation receive the same level of consideration as letters of recommendation and extra curriculars.