Yep. The interesting thing is that a place like UW-Madison has a greater number of alums evenasapercentageofgrads_ on various lists of renown Americans than some schools that are harder to get in to. That’s also true with a decent number of LAC’s that are far less well-known than the elite universities.
This is the second time U Wisconsin has been mentioned. I never would’ve considered it an elite school.
What are elite schools @Agentninetynine?
You are right. At many schools, you have to look deeper than the range for the school. At many U’s, engineering is harder to get into than business, and business is harder to get into than arts and sciences. Within schools, the difficulty of getting into specific majors varies significantly too.
Note: For this purpose, harder is defined as higher grades and test scores.
@Agentninetynine, UW-Madison isn’t seen as elite by most because it’s not extremely difficult to get in to (in part because it is absolutely massive). So there would be a wide variation in its student body. But it also has a lot of strong departments which offers opportunities to strong students. Which means that there are a lot of very strong students at the top; more than at some other unis that are harder to get in to).
@clarinetDad16: An elite school in this case would be defined as the most selective. I got this thread confused with another that was discussing an article written by a woman who considered U Wisconsin an elite school vs. Rutgers here: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1889901-time-article-title-says-it-all-my-son-was-accepted-to-a-college-he-cant-afford-now-what-p1.html
@Agentninetynine, most people would consider UW-Madison more elite than Rutgers because by most output-based measures, it is. Probably most input-based ones as well.
Thanks @PurpleTitan. I don’t live in the east and neither kid has expressed interest in UW or Rutgers so I was at a loss here.
@Agentninetynine - so by rejecting more students a college becomes elite?
Not to diminish many of the well-considered and thoughtful threads on here, but if I were to answer the OP’s question, I think you can boil it down to two pretty basic points:
- The top 20 schools reject EIGHTY-FIVE percent of applicants, and the top ten (including most of the the Ivies and MIT and Stanford) reject NINETY-FIVE percent of applicants. The VAST majority of applicants have similar stats (4.0, 2300+). There are simply not enough spots to accommodate all these students. OP - if you have all these outstanding students at your high school, imagine how many there are nationwide.
- There are too many people who are trying to get into those 8, 10, or 20 schools and view anything else as "settling." The OP was admitted to Carnegie Mellon, for heaven's sake. The OP got into a very selective college. Because it is ranked #23 by USNWR and is not in the top 20, is this supposed to mean that this is a disappointment? If that is your attitude going into the college admissions game, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
These points have been made by many posters, so I realize I’m not adding anything new here - I just think it’s a little funny that we are onto 8 pages of answers for something that seems fairly obvious.
My guess is that you have the best chance getting into a top school if you are full pay. Maybe the very top schools want to give financial aid to those who will add to diversity or bring something other than high stats. I’m just guessing here.
Friend last year applied to some schools with and without FA (long story). Surprisingly was rejected at full pay schools and accepted at full need schools with an EFC of 30k of the same caliber. White middle class kid.
Perhaps showed more interest and wanted the full needs schools so just anecdotal but it seems it may not matter as much as most people think. Still better off paying than not.
Most of the schools are officially need-blind in admissions. However, while being full pay per se is not a factor, characteristics associated with being full pay are often strongly selected for. In particular, attending a high performing high school with a strong high-school-to-highly-selective college pipeline, with appropriate attention to college admissions by counselors and teachers (who know how to write good recommendations, will inform students of all of the admission requirements like SAT subject tests and such), while adopting the social habits of the upper and upper middle classes (so that interviews with alumni will easily go well), and being on the favored list of high schools by these college, is likely something that is of substantial advantage, even if one is a financial aid student there.
I appreciate the UW-Madison love: it’s my alma mater. I’m pink-faced after reading some of the recent posts.
I believe it is a great school. It offers a wonderful campus, a plethora of ranked (well, grad school rankings, but still…) programs, great social and sports atmosphere, a slew of Nobels in the cupboard, outstanding faculty and the third-largest research budget in the US, behind JHU and Michigan. Not bad. If you want to be a Badger, just come along with me…
When I say “elite” in this thread, the context in which I mean it includes (mostly) the elite private schools. Because, for the purposes of being able to pay for school, so often we find that the top private schools are more affordable – often far more affordable – than the average OOS public school. In other words, what good would it be to get into UW-Madison or Cal or UIUC or UCLA or Michigan or Georgua Tech or Washington or Texas if it’s going to cost the full $40k-$50k per annum and you’d have to take out huge loans to pay for it?
That’s where, for most families, the elite privates – arbitrarily, the top 50-60 private U’s and LACs – have all top public universities, except UVA and UNC, beat: they actually are more affordable, often far more affordable, because the FA is so much better at those private schools.
So I do know that there are elite public schools. They are different than the privates in multiple ways, but elite in the education and the experience they offer. But to most OOS students, they require taking on a good deal of debt. And that’s not an “elite” idea for a prospective student if he or she can help it, in my opinion.
Being accepted to a wonderful school is great, regardless of whether it is a LAC or a private U or a public U. It just seems that the privates, the ones we mention most on this site anyway and with which we’ve become familiar from a billing standpoint, end up being more affordable than OOS publics for most students. So to me, they – in the OOS context at least – have to take a bit of a back seat to the privates that do offer strong FA.
Is it elite if you can’t afford it? That question is a very practical one.
wouldn’t you have to include UC-Berkeley and UMich with those two, maybe even UT-Austin?
I’m also confused as to what we consider “elite”. Do we use selectivity as the metric?
Selectivity would certainly fit the bill as far as “elite” goes but maybe colleges aren’t more selective because not as many students feel they would fit there, even though academically they are on par with much more selective colleges?
I’ll use my D’s college, RPI, as an example. The admit rate is ~37.5%, which isn’t particularly selective compared to “elite” colleges. CMU’s is 23.5%. But CMU on their website consider RPI a peer institution and they will match FA. So why isn’t RPI’s acceptance rate lower? For one, a lot of people don’t want a 70-30 m/f ratio. They’d also prefer, quite understandably, to be living in Ann Arbor, Austin, Santa Barbara, or Pittsburgh than Troy. They want to be able to take classes in top humanities departments as well as engineering. They maybe feel they don’t fit in “nerdville”. I’m not trying to argue that RPI is “elite”, but rather that I’m not sure selectivity should be the measure.
Reed College is another school with a fairly high admit rate but yet delivering what many people consider a very high level of education, because it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
Perhaps the SAT scores of incoming freshmen would be a better metric (the “smartest” students and therefore the “elite”) – though SAT is truly a narrow and imperfect measure.
I guess there’s “elite” in the sense that “you can’t get in”, and then there’s “elite” as in “the best students”. Now we automatically assume the schools you can’t get into are also the schools with the best students (because why would a best student go anywhere else?) but I’m just not sure that’s always true.
I actually think selectivity has become – maybe always was – a measure of popularity.
And popularity, while it might help to improve quality over time, is not quality per se.
I think that whether a school is “elite” has much more to do with the quality of the faculty, the research impact and opportunities available, the quality of dorms and food, the number of majors/programs available, the ease of declaring a major or changing to a different one, class size, access to professors, graduation rate (though that is partly reliant upon the quality of the students), etc.
@insanedreamer, UMich is moving towards meeting full need for OOS. The UC’s don’t. Don’t think Texas does either.
@citymama9, if you’re talking about the very tip-top, being full-pay or not doesn’t matter.
Full pay? Didn’t help my S at all.
CMU is not elite? To me that shows a lack of understanding. Unless rankings are all that matter.
The title of this thread is :
Why don’t students with high stats get into selective colleges?
Well this is non sense because high stat students get to a plenty selective colleges.
I assume the OP wanted to ask
Why don’t ALL students with high stats get into THE TOP 8 (or 12) colleges ?
OP got in to CMU and NYU and I am sure his hard working friends that “did not get accepted anywhere” still got in selective schools. That is non sense because of the extreme narrow definition of “selective”.
My son is not even a top student and we can not meet our EFC. Yet, we found 5-6 colleges that we could afford and they were academically rigorous. He had choices. I absolutely do not believe that a better student would have less choices. I am now starting the college search with my daughter (a much better student) and things look just fine. Lots of choices.