I’ve lived in cities/suburbs in the Midwest where the competition for college is brutal-and cities/suburbs in the Northeast where most kids happily go off to the state flagship, a neighboring state (if that state has a specific program), or a local college. It’s really a myth that the midwest is more “chill”- there are places all over the country with feverish college application seasons.
And you’ve got parts of the country where the application season isn’t miserable- but Freshman year is. Your D HAS to get into the “right” sorority (even at a relatively non-competitive college)? Frenzy of spending on clothes, hair, etc. which rivals SAT prep. Your son HAS to get into one of the competitive “business” EC’s. Etc.
Oof! Thankfully that wasn’t D’s thing either. Wondering out loud if it’s just less a thing for engineering focused kids where the big flagships are in the T10 for their majors?
Good schools will have more graduates who go to college and will have more success with college apps than will schools that are less good. That isn’t the competitiveness I was talking about.
That’s in part because the SAT has gone through multiple iterations that have made it easier. Perfect scores were extremely rare before the 1994 change, and superscoring was unheard of. Today, many find that getting a perfect 800 on one section is easy, particularly given multiple attempts.
A student wanting to distinguish themselves on math isn’t doing it through the SAT, or even the (now discontinued?) SAT subject tests. Instead that is done through the AMC tests. The huge disadvantage of this is that the income distribution of people preparing for the AMC tests skews upwards because, unlike the SATs, it is not offered everywhere. Good preparation also costs money. The students that lose out are the unhooked bright students who come from poorer families, who are often unaware that such a test even exists.
To illustrate this imbalance, there are about 250 kids each year that reach what is known as USAMO, a qualifying exam that is used in the process to eventually find the top 6 students that will represent the USA in the International Math Olympiad. In any typical year, about 4-5% of them will come just from Lexington High School, located in a wealthy suburb of Boston. Another 4-5% of them will come from Phillips Exeter. My experience with USAMO qualifiers indicates that roughly 60% of them get accepted to at least one HYPSM.
I agree with what your saying about perfect scores years ago. I took the SATs decades ago, and a student with a perfect score usually featured in the nightly news or some other media because it was so extraordinary. Today, it doesn’t appear that’s the case at all.
I’m not sure I agree about superscoring being unheard of back then. I took the SAT at least twice and was able to put together a 1400 by superscoring, and this included Ivy League and other “top schools”. I am pretty sure the concept of superscoring was in place decades ago by certain schools.
And just to add to the first point, a 1400 on the SAT “back then” was the Holy Grail! I was really proud of myself. Today, my DD says that “kids are just smarter now then they were years ago”!
Thanks for the clarification. I had not heard of superscoring when I took the exam in the 1980s. Then again, I didn’t know anyone who took it more than once, but that probably had more to do with my high school.
I don’t think they the referred to it as “superscoring” per se. I distinctly remember the “top schools” or at least some of the ones I applied to, saying they would take your best score from Math and from Verbal. I was always good in Verbal, but Math was never my strong subject, so I got a great Verbal score in one sitting and worked to boost my Math score in the second sitting.
I was a bit dubious about how this ersatz superscoring was mechanically done, since SOMEONE in the Admissions Office sees all your scores. Some folks on CC have mentioned that support staff in the AO do it or that it’s done electronically. I hear other schools (e.g., Georgetown?) looks at all the scores, which, frankly, seems like a fairer way to do this.
But your point is well-taken: I thought I was really smart back then with my on the dot 1400…today, my DD mentions that kids are much smarter now, which may have accounted for my “low” SATs!
We did the same when we moved to our current area. First, we knew we couldn’t afford a private school so we were looking for good public schools. Second was the location in relation to our work. We wanted to be close enough that getting home for events, meals etc. was easily manageable. In the end we found what we were looking for. We never considered the possibility of our children attending an elite college though they both did well enough to consider it. I frankly don’t think most students or parents have that as a goal even if they might be qualified. CC was created as a site for those who are interested in elite schools so it should come as no surprise that it is more important to many on this site than the population in general.
One advantage we had is that there was far less stress in the process. There were disappointments for sure but in the end both kids ended up in excellent situations (not necessarily elite but excellent for them) and have since graduated and are successful.
There’s a logical explanation. Stanford is holistic and Cal Poly is not. Cal Poly uses a ranking algorithm. Dimes to doughnuts says he applied to CS. All admitted CS students at Cal Poly will have that profile OR some important non-academic algorithm adder (Hayden Partner School, live in the service area, veteran, or have one or both parents that didn’t finish HS). That candidate pool is so strong with so few spots, little differences in the algorithm score can make a difference, for example, having a job that is major related, especially in a no-test admissions cycle. CP rejected 15K 4.0+ students this cycle. I may be way off in this conjecture, but CP CS is one of the most competitive admits in the nation and unlike the others being complained about in this thread, they use a methodology that is 100% objective, with no readers. Congrats to your son!
The SAT has gotten easier, first in the late 90s and again in 2016. Rising scores are mostly a reflection of that. There is some truth though that there’s more test prep happening.
There’s a difference between intelligence (raw horsepower smarts if you will) and knowledge (command of facts). I don’t believe today’s students are any more intelligent but they have deeper and broader knowledge based on the speed and volume of instruction they now get.
Most “UC disappointment” posts over the years have generally been from students applying for engineering or CS majors, and who are picky about which UCs they are willing to attend (i.e. not applying to UCSC, UCR, and UCM).
A related issue is that of students basing their chances on an exaggerated weighted GPA from their high schools when admission stats at UCs refer to the lower weighted-capped recalculation (which is usually about 0.3 higher than unweighted 10th-11th grade academic course GPA for those who took a sufficient number of harder courses).
Here are the admission rates for frosh entering fall 2020 (i.e. last year):
These are for the whole campus. Different divisions or majors may have different levels selectivity (usually, engineering and computer science majors are more selective). What UC can and should do for more transparency in frosh admissions is publish admission rates by GPA range by division or major where that affects admission selectivity. UC is more transparent about admission selectivity by major for transfers: Transfers by major | University of California .
CPSLO uses a non-holistic point system. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be transparent about thresholds by major, although a past version (before test-blind) has been leaked or reverse-engineered: https://mca.netlify.app/ . Presumably, a student who got into Stanford but not CPSLO had something that Stanford valued highly but CPSLO did not, and applied for one of CPSLO’s more selective majors.
Population relative to university size has a lot to do with it.
School
Undergraduates
State or Province Population
Ratio
Nation Population
Ratio
McGill
27,484
~8,600,000
~1 in 312
~38,000,000
~1 in 1,382
Ottawa
70,677
~13,400,000
~1 in 189
~38,000,000
~1 in 537
Toronto
72,785
~13,400,000
~1 in 184
~38,000,000
~1 in 522
UCB
30,799
~39,500,000
~1 in 1,282
~328,000,000
~1 in 10,649
Michigan (Ann Arbor)
31,266
~10,000,000
~1 in 319
~328,000,000
~1 in 10,490
Texas (Austin)
40,804
~29,000,000
~1 in 710
~328,000,000
~1 in 8,038
Arizona State (Tempe)
44,461
~7,300,000
~ 1 in 164
~328,000,000
~1 in 7,377
Also, Canada seems to have more consistency in high school courses and grading than the US.
It is not that hard to get into “a UC”, but lots of students do not want to attend UCSC, UCR, or UCM and therefore do not apply there.
The most popular UCs (UCB and UCLA) have been more competitive for decades, so that (at least for popular majors), they were not really considered “safe” for anyone.
Our son had the exact qualifications as the poster’s son cited in the example, 4.0, 5s on APs including BC and Physics C, plus he has Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry. He applied to a competitive major at CP and got in, with scholarship. He also applied to Stanford. It was the only school he was rejected from. Why? Stanford is holistic and he didn’t have the thing they wanted. In his case, they took an equally qualified legacy. In fact in recent years only legacy students from his school have been admitted, sometimes far less qualified than other applicants. It’s a perfect example of holistic vs objective admissions criteria. It’s not that he wasn’t qualified. It’s that he didn’t have “the thing.”
Actually, it is not really about holistic versus non-holistic admissions process.
Two holistic process schools can have very different criteria, as can two non-holistic process schools.
Also, non-holistic process schools are not necessarily very transparent. Lack of transparency creates a more stressful competitive admissions environment.
Couldn’t tell you a thing about UCs and neighborhoods, but it is definitely a thing in North Carolina that people want to move for good elementary through high schools in the hopes that their kid will be able to get into a good college in North Carolina, such as UNC. There is a school of thought, though, that being in a neighborhood with “good schools” can actually backfire because in addition to the UNC system schools having a mandate to take 82% of students from North Carolina there is also a policy to take students from all areas of the state so the incoming class is diverse and not just from the suburbs of Raleigh or Charlotte or from Chapel Hill. I believe 36% of the class of 2020 are from rural counties. So it may actually be harder for a kid from a competitive school in Wake County (Raleigh) like Green Hope to get into UNC than a kid from a rural county with a non-competitive high school. That’s what people say at least. I couldn’t tell you from personal experience.
True. Better said, it’s an illustration between systems that do and don’t have human interaction.
The poster of that example though used a Stanford acceptance and a Cal Poly waitlist to infer something amiss at Cal Poly. In reality, as you alluded to, it’s really about Stanford’s discretion and Cal Poly’s lack thereof.
Eye- how do you know WHICH kid got into the college YOUR kid was rejected from? I find it hard to believe that two identical applications were in front of the Adcom-- one of which was your kid, one of which was an identical but legacy kid. Maybe your kid’s essay was a 5/10 and the other kid was a 9/10. Maybe your kid’s teacher said “Joey is a joy to teach”, and the other kid’s teacher said “In my 25 years as a teacher I have never taught a student with as much intellectual depth and enthusiasm as this kid”.
A non-holistic process still has human interaction at the beginning when the criteria are set. CPSLO chose to value some things more than others, and pre-set them into a point system. That some of the things that CPSLO values may not be valued as highly at Stanford, and that some of the things that CPSLO does not value are valued at Stanford, can result in occasional anomalies like getting into Stanford but not CPSLO.
Are you sure that’s right? This is straight from the UC system’s admission page about the “state guarantee” and the ELC (or Local Guarantee). The operative word in both is “Guarantee.”
That page says that “Additionally, ELC students not admitted to any of their campus choices are offered a spot at a UC campus that has space, if minimum UC requirements are met.”
In theory, if all UCs including UC Merced are completely full, they may not be able to admit such ELC students.
In practice, it appears that UC Merced is the campus which offers admission to such ELC students, since it is the campus that has the space to do so.