@austimmshauri
The universities are clever about making you feel like you have a better chance than you probably have. I’ll share what it has been like to be in my son’s shoes (from my perspective), which is probably similar to thousands of others:
- From the time you are six years old you are labeled gifted and pulled out
- Every parent teacher conference when you are young the biggest concern is "keeping them challenged"
- As a parent,you never have to tell your kid to do their homework. All you hear is praise from teachers and coaches about how hard they work, good teammate, humble, bright, etc
- By end of your sophomore year, already completed 4 AP's and have 2 varsity letters, other leadership, all A's since you began taking high school credit classes in the 7th grade
- early junior year, crush the PSAT so you are a lock for NMF which puts you in a select group of 15k nationally
- letters start coming in: Stanford, Chicago, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, hundreds of others from lesser schools encouraging you to apply, full ride NMF marketing from Oklahoma, Alabama, etc
- end of Junior year, voted captain of a major varsity sport (ie. not tennis), have a great year, make All-State first team (but you are not D1) (in a major sport, a Venn diagram of NMF's and all state as a junior has to be pretty small)
- crush your ACT with a 35. Complete more AP's so you are up to 9 by the end of jr year.
- win the Yale Book Award as the top junior in your class (sponsored by local alumni encouraging you to apply)
- Dad says what the heck, let's visit New Haven, they send us mail, you won the award
- the admissions presenter says "there are a handful of apps that we get where the academics are so strong that we put them aside as pretty much an auto-admit" (I think, why wouldn't that be us?)
- presenter "we are competitive and have a low acceptance rate of ~6% but here are the stats of who is admitted - 75% 32-35ACT, etc"
- subtle misleading implication is that many rejects are either out of that range or at the low end (can easily be interpreted that way) (I think - what proportion of the rejects were marketed to, NMF's, won their book award, top of their class, etc)
- presenter "our process is "holistic" we don't want to see a ton of EC's but a passion and desire in what you care about"
- (I think - it's pretty hard and takes a ton of work to be highly decorated in a major sport as a junior, I would think my son's app would look pretty good from a "holistic" standpoint)
- have on-campus interview with a senior - also a book award winner in high school - highly encouraged to apply
- tour is great, class shopping, residential colleges, tales of meeting Meryl Streep, academics - everything top notch
- come back beginning of senior year, what to do? others in your class spending their ED at lesser ivies (and were successful, also NW, Duke, Vanderbilt - etc with success. )
- you're at the top of your class at one of the best schools in the state- had a great experience with Yale, were marketed to, interview, visit etc, let's shoot for the top and go SCEA at Yale (effectively blowing your chances anywhere else)
- as a parent the common app almost brings tears to my eyes, 35, 3.97, NMF, all-state athlete, leadership, solid essay, (if someone would have shown me a copy on the day he was born, I couldn't possibly have imagined that).
- I honestly gave it 50/50 on SCEA given his credentials. But since he could no longer ED anywhere else selective - it becomes pretty much an all or nothing shot Yale do you take it?
- we weren't totally naive and did apply to 3 other safety less selective big 10's.
- December 1st your senior year, you are deferred at Yale and Michigan. Up to this point, you have known only success in your life.
- Then in March you are also denied at Princeton, NW and Penn. All schools you visited. All schools that sent you letters and encouraged you to apply. All schools that although the publish the low admission rates - also publish the ranges of who they do accept (and you are at the top of those ranges) and stress well-rounded, holistic applicants - which you are.
- You are offered absolutely no feedback about where you fell short or why you were not selected at any of the schools.
At the end of the day as I said before, I think it came down to fit and I truly think he’ll end up where he should. Hopefully this illustrates why some may think they have a better chance than they do and why this process can be very disappointing to kids who have never known anything but success in their life.
At this point he says he doesn’t not regret applying to any of the schools he applied to either. So I guess that’s a good thing. Hopefully some people will find this helpful. You never know unless you apply…
@mwdad2018 I’m sorry your son had disappointing results. But you did not do your homework if you assessed his odds at 50/50. There are so many kids just like him applying to those schools. While he may be a superstar in his school, he’s pretty much average among the candidate pool and unhooked. Everything else you mentioned was mass marketing.
@mwdad2018, I think that is where a site like CC would have been very helpful.
A kid like your son would have discovered that being a recruited athlete even at the DivIII level could be a major hook (and there are academically top schools at that level) and that someone like him has a decent shot in ED at ED schools but in RD (and also SCEA at SCEA schools), I’ve been saying for years that, with half the class coming from ED and half or more of the class being hooked, someone without a major hook should expect to have almost no chance.
But the good thing is that he is happy at the honors college and it would be cheaper for you.
No one is owed admission to a top school. @mwdad2018 Your kid was perfectly qualified academically. But so were a large percentage of applicants to those schools. The top schools want ECs that “pop” — interested and interesting is important. When I read your post, that isn’t showing up to me. Your kid is going to college. He presumably will do very well. There is little he can’t accomplish going forward from a state flagship.
It seems like there is a lot more bitterness on CC this year about students not getting into top schools. I’m not convinced the numbers are any different, but the attitude is sure louder this year.
@mwdad2018 You have to have a hook. It’s our story too. Our student had some injuries her Junior year, up until then the coach at Stanford was communicating with her regularly. She ended up at OOS Berkeley as Regents Scholar, Stanford’s rival, but did not get into ivies, though I wouldn’t let her apply to Cornell because I was so unhappy there. She probably could have gotten in there.
My daughter who is currently a junior, took the SAT as a sophomore and got a very good score. She has received letters/e-mails from every top-tier school. This is marketing material. She, along with thousands of others, receive these letters. When I see chance me threads or what are my odds for selective, single digit admission schools, my immediate thought is 1 in 20 or lower.
@mwdad your story will hopefully be helpful to future kids who are planning to apply to top schools. Thank you for sharing it. I do want to point out a couple of clarifications on things that might be misunderstood by many parents going through the application process for the first time:
While I agree with your general point that the SCEA bullet is a very valuable one (and there are many threads discussing how and even whether to use it), there are many very highly selective schools that offer ED2 - off the top of my head, Chicago, Vanderbilt, Emory, Miami, NYU, Tufts, Wake Forest come to mind, plus many LACs (Pomona, Davidson, Swarthmore, Washington & Lee just for a few examples). So perhaps a well-thought out ED2 application and a willingness to pivot to it (if early results from the Yales and especially the Michigans of the world are disappointing) are advisable in a situation like your son’s.
Also,
I’m surprised that Yale said this. I think the group they are talking about are the kids who have achieved on a national scale (i.e., the top kids at RSI whose research is recognized at the end of the summer, or some of the TASP kids). Even the Princeton Creative Arts and Humanities Symposium attendees, who are selected by the Princeton admission office in the fall of their senior year, are not auto-admit.
I once saw a kid describe his Harvard Book award as an international award on his common app. It’s not. The local Harvard/Yale alumni who present the award generally ask the school administration to pick the student who fits the criteria that they or the school sets. The administration of Harvard/Yale have nothing to do with the selection and it has no greater significance in the admission process than a regular school award.
Your son sounds like a great kid and the traits that you describe will serve him very well in life. I’m sorry for the outcome but you seem to be modeling great dignity and maturity for your son and I bet while he may have lost the “battle” for an elite admit, with his hard work, perseverance, humility, maturity and intelligence he will most certainly be able to win the “war” of a great undergrad education and a great start to his career.
I have been doing the following Maths lately.
Minority admits: close to 30% for top schools
Legacy: at least 10%
recruited athletes: at least 10%
Non-minority low-income and/or first generation and/or rural/inner city high school: another 10-15%
women in engineering: 50% of engineering class, so can up be up to 10% of all admits
Under-represented states: some
Non-alumni development case (rich/famous) some
International: close to 10%
What does the above mean: number of US students admitted only because their academics and extra-curricular are extremely good is probably no more than 15-20% of the class.
For ED schools that fill around 50% of the class in ED, the fraction of RD slots going to students that are just very good is probably more like 5%.
@osuprof Great info!! What schools do these numbers belong to? Top25? 50?
The other thing admission committees are considering is balance for their incoming class. If your child is applying to a highly competitive major, i.e. CS or pre-med, admissions chances will be even slimmer. Schools also like representative from as many states as possible. If you are from N. Dakota and applying to a school in New England, your chances of admission will be higher than someone with similar “stats” from MA. And they are looking at yield trends. How many students from your child’s high school were accepted in the past but went elsewhere? There are so many moving parts to this process beyond grades, test scores, and ECs that are totally out of a student’s control so the best advice is to not take admissions decisions personally. They say nothing about a student’s intellect or work ethic, nor predictive of future success.
@bestmon888
These are guesstimates from around the top 15 schools. I think URM is more like 20-30%, whereas legacy can be well above 10%. Hard to get handle on number of recruited athletes. Similarly, no school publishes how many of the Pell grant awardees and/or first generation students are neither athletes nor minority.
But hopefully the added numbers provide an insight as to why so many highly qualified candidates get denied left and right …
Let me add a bit more to my theory above.
Legacy admissions have been challenged for a while, because they favor rich and white. In response, schools are trying to make a larger fraction of their class be from minority groups, and from low income/first generation groups. There is no evidence that number of legacy admits have gone down!
So, what it means now is that you are not legacy, not a minority, not from low-income family, not first generation, there are very few seats remaining for you. Now, I am not trying to argue against the value of serving under-privileged …
Similarly, getting more women in engineering/computer science is a good goal … but, Cornell reports a 8% admit rate for boys and 23% for women for their college of engineering … is it fair?
@momofsenior1 Good point … yep, it is tough to be an Asian or White male applying for computer science, without legacy status or some other hook at any of the top schools.
@osuprof, I would say that legacy isn’t much of a hook at these schools these days, especially in RD. Barely a tip.
@mwdad2018 A quick glance over at the Results thread for Yale over the past 2 years will truly humble anyone, high stats or otherwise.
I have to agree with @PurpleTitan. Legacy isn’t what it used to be. My dd got rejected ED from her legacy Ivy, but accepted at two other Ivies in RD.
Thanks @mwdad2018 for sharing your son’s story.
My son is a junior - white, full-pay computer science major from NJ interested in top northeast schools who is competitive on paper, like so many others. But I’m now completely spooked reading your story, and the story of so many others this year. Makes me realize that he needs to take another look at his “safeties.” He has two that he really likes, but I think he needs to add 1 or 2 more that are EA.
I’m so thankful for this site and the regulars who post on here. Such great advice!
PT and bestmom, anecdotally, that’s what we’re hearing and learning about as well with regard to legacy status. This cycle alone I know three legacy USC applicants, all 4+ GPA’s, 1400+ or higher (I realize, sadly, 1400+ SAT’s are not that impressive anymore), who were rejected.
@osuprof, there is some overlap in your pools. Plenty of URMs also have very high stats, some are athletes, some are legacies, some are low income. Most schools aren’t admitting 50% women in engineering (a few, but not most). I don’t believe enough income is available to come up with true statistics because of the overlap.
There is a lot of “grievance” complaining on CC this year. More than in the past, although all these admissions policies have been in place for many years. It feels like parents are starting to take in the “I worked hard so I deserve the best” attitude we see in students sometimes. (Are those students old enough to be parents now? Food for thought.). Or is it something in the air in the US now, influenced by current events?
@mjrube94 - And make sure your son’s safeties are truly safeties. CC is filled with stories of people thinking schools with acceptance rates under 30% were safeties. At this point everyone should have schools that accept nearly everyone, that they actually like, on their list as a fall back. If it can be rolling decision even better as that will take some of the stress off of waiting until the Spring for notifications 