@dadofthreeny , there are many different reasons a college doesn’t meet yield. Maybe the college only missed it’s yield by 3 students. Well, why not try to fill those seats by putting your college on the NACAC list? Sometimes it’s because they simply miscalculated yield. Sometimes it’s because they built new buildings and expanded, so they have room for more students. There are a number of threads out there about the topic. There can be indirectly related events that can ultimately impact the numbers of kids who deposit, including big news stories which scare away students for one particular cycle, and schools taking kids from waitlists early. The number of colleges that are filled to capacity is actually pretty small, and those are generally very selective. Most kids aren’t going to USNWR top 20 schools.
Why would a kid want to attend a college that doesn’t meet its yield? For reasons I listed above. These colleges are not necessarily going out of business. Many of them have HUGE endowments (Iowa State’s endowment is $838 million. Not going bankrupt.). By all means, research a college to see what it’s financial rating is. It is simply wrong to assume that all colleges appearing on the NACAC list are going out of business. There are literally thousands of colleges that might be on the list, and it can change every year.
This a partial list from last year, and there are a lot of very good schools on it, such as Whitman, Beloit and Lawrence. Some are big and well known, like U of Oregon and Iowa State. You can just google and you should find an official NACAC list, but the new one will not be out yet. This one from Princeton review is notable because some of the colleges here make the PR list from student rankings. https://www.princetonreview.com/college-advice/college-openings-fall-2017
@PurpleTitan My D17 had amazing stats and was shut out of her top 10 choices. That’s the bad news, the good news is that she earned acceptances at UVA, BC, U of Rochester and the Valedictorian award (no cost to attend) at UCONN. All good choices, with great money. The top schools are lotteries. My D17 did not do any of the crazy stuff that is now required to get in to the super selective schools - you know aside from being top three in her sport in our state and being a National Science Olympian, LOL. Her summers consisted of tutoring kids at a local nonprofit - for years. My daughter chose BC and will graduate debt free. I think she’s pretty lucky (although I am still ragey at her denials.)
The bottom line is you have to either have a hook or you have to play the game. The game starts young, is very expensive and is a full time job for the parents. I think whoever said it was like the crazy sports parents is right, and at this time I have one foot in the crazy sports parents world too. So if you decide to play the game and you are successful, many of your peers will be game players too. If you played the game reluctantly, I imagine that would get tiresome.
Playing the game may help your odds but I don’t think it’s a necessity. I think the schools find quite of number of kids that didn’t ‘play the game’ and nonetheless these kids still end up at a great school and many in better shape for future success then if they were to burn out trying to be something they aren’t.
I once described getting into the Ivies as a “lifestyle” to someone and they were genuinely shocked. They thought a smart, likable high schooler could just decide to go to Harvard, Yale, whatever. Nope.
@Dolemite, depends on what level you’re looking at and other stuff.
In the ED round (not SCEA to HYPS), “average excellent” applicants do get in to Ivies/equivalents, though it is no guarantee.
But with those schools filling up half a class through ED and roughly half being hooked, if you’re applying in RD, your baseline assumption if you are average excellent should be that you don’t stand a chance. You may still get in to some of those schools, but you should consider that serendipitous.
You’d have a much better shot at the next level down; the near-Ivies and good schools that offer terrific opportunities that @cleoforshort’s D got in to (that level includes a TON of LACs, BTW).
This is not addressed to only one poster, but it’s a myth or a distortion that I think gets perpetuated by the danger of “outside” perceptions: Acceptances at top schools are not evidence that the acceptees “played a game.” There are people whose well-endowed brains drove them, from early childhood, to seek both intellectual satisfaction for those insatiable brains and to produce in other ways that their mental energy encouraged them to, almost “compelled” them to. There’s a real temptation to condemn or at least devalue high-achievers as being afflicted with a mild form of narcissism, hypocrisy, or some other character flaw, in contrast to one’s own (and similar “rejectees”’) supposedly more genuine, more sincere (and “healthier”) journey. Those latter three adjectives are all subjective assessments.
As a counselor and parent at competitive schools with high proportions of achievers, it’s quite clear to me which families are “engineering” a profile with specific intent to impress and without regard to inner drive, but even then, this tendency has often more to do with misunderstandings about “what’s needed.” Even some parents I’ve met quite recently – I mean some of them are parents of 7th and 8th graders – assume that there are fixed, objective “qualifications” in the area of leadership (a VERY misunderstood category) and in, for example, which activities in STEM categories are and are not (supposedly) valued. They are not bad parents – not manipulative or a caricature of a tiger parent. They simply want to make sure that they are doing all they can to make their S or D competitive for a very fine university. The problem is, what defines a very fine university, and who defines it. And a very fine university is relative to the student, of course.
Please understand that I also appreciate the tendency to cynicism. If I feel cynical at all, it is not with respect to supposedly over-the-top achievers or which parents (I wouldn’t know, most people outside the family wouldn’t know) “pushed” their children. My cynicism lies with the political bent of certain popular elite universities, and how taking a particular political stand in one’s application essays can be an advantage. I won’t name the particular contemporary situation I’m thinking of; people can use their imaginations. But I will tell you that I counsel my own students to be politically neutral – i.e., if they cannot be “inflamed” and hyper-opinionated about a very controversial, very divisive issue, they should choose a topic, or a thoughtful position on a topic, that will be less likely to offend or alienate. And I don’t counsel that for expediency reasons but out of good manners. I’ve actually never gone wrong with that advice, because the colleges that appreciate such a respectful tone are colleges that are (naturally) a better fit for that student anyway.
@epiphany I agree with the first half of your post and what I was hinting at with mine. There are kids that are naturally like that and in the past these kids got into highly selective schools so parents started trying to replicate it. I think these schools recognize authenticity especially from the LORs and Essays.
In http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21419290/#Comment_21419290 I describe what appear to be reasons that applicants overreach with respect to UC applications and end up disappointed. There are probably similar situations at other schools where applicants overreach because of assumptions about admissions that are not true at those other schools.
I’d add one more thing to these good lists: Maybe you just weren’t lucky. Sometimes a kid (and his parents) do literally everything right…with just the right stats…but the universe just didn’t tip your way for that moment…like most things in life, luck (with the right stats behind it) goes a long way…
Expanding on the stuff in the post linked from #131, the notion of weighted GPA may be significant in deceiving applicants to overreach at schools other than UCs. How many times have you seen a college search or chance post where the student or parent mentions only a weighted GPA, with no context about the weighting method which can be different at each high school (and some, when asked, do not know how to calculated unweighted GPA)? Perhaps exaggerated weighting methods that produce impressive looking weighted GPAs like 4.4 out of more ordinary unweighted GPAs like 3.4 may be deceiving applicants into overreaching, leading to disappointment.
Of course, the more competitive major issue exists at many schools beyond the UCs.
Expanding on the stuff in the post linked from #131, the notion of weighted GPA may be significant in deceiving applicants to overreach at schools other than UCs. How many times have you seen a college search or chance post where the student or parent mentions only a weighted GPA, with no context about the weighting method which can be different at each high school (and some, when asked, do not know how to calculated unweighted GPA)? Perhaps exaggerated weighting methods that produce impressive looking weighted GPAs like 4.4 out of more ordinary unweighted GPAs like 3.4 may be deceiving applicants into overreaching, leading to disappointment.
Of course, the more competitive major issue exists at many schools beyond the UCs.
I’m glad luck was reintroduced to this conversation, along with the notion of “understandable cynicism” a few posts above. Both assertions seem fully justified. Even when you account for the applications that might have had one of those so-called egregious mistakes alluded to early in the thread, that still leaves a majority of applicants to top 30 (top 50?) schools who are fully capable and qualified, but ultimately denied. Especially in the RD pool, with so few available places, it comes down to pure luck. What else could it be? The admissions people are comparing thousands of apples and oranges in what at that point is neither an art nor a science. So, what is it?
This is where the lottery analogy springs to mind, for obvious reasons; admissions might as well be picking names out of a hat. Someone said that the U.Chicago AD claimed they could replace the entire freshman class with the waitlist and no one would notice. And given the urgency of sorting applicants as efficiently (i.e., quickly) as possible, the combination of superficial glances at a student’s record of toil and aspirations, combined with the seeming randomness of acceptances, well, that’s where cynicism is hard to avoid, even if you understood going in that this is how it was going to be.
The comment by @kalons is correct: “basically what this thread is saying: only one thing has to go wrong for you to be rejected, but a ton of things have to go correctly for you to be accepted.” It’s like what editors and agents say about reading manuscripts; they pick it up with intention of finding a reason to reject it-- just to get through the pile. If that is true of student applications, it is fundamentally at odds with the courtship nature of the school-applicant relationship prior to submitting the application. The school seems to care about you until it doesn’t.
Yes, of course, you know 85 out 100 will be in the same boat. But the circumstances do encourage more than a bit of cynicism. There’s got to be a better way, for all concerned.
@cleoforshort Did your daughter get BC’s Presidential Scholarship. I know there is very little other way to get a merit scholarship for BC and there are a very limited number of those. I’d be curious about the process if you wouldn’t mind sharing. I have been to the dinner in April in NYC that helps fund those scholarships along with Gabelli.
@penandink, that’s not luck, but that does leave little room for error and possibly little to differentiate them in the RD round as there are so few spots for them in that round.
On this thread, it is clear that there are many, many awesome and amazing kids who got shut out of their top schools. So I have a question: would you put your your family thru the “rat race” again, knowing what you know now? I’m asking b/c I’m about to go through this with my 17 year old daughter (a junior). She’s got amazing stats, is an athlete, volunteers, loves to bakes, and is an all-around nice kid. But we haven’t been grooming her since middle school. She hasn’t gone to any special camps or anything like that. Is it even worth it to try? I’m serious, too, guys. She’s not my only child and I don’t want to spend hours and hours helping her with this if the odds are stacked against her getting into an Ivy or ultra elite LAC.
@LakeAlto I have a similar situation with my son - he is a great student and passionate about his theatre ECs and on paper he looks like a top 20 college contender.
He is planning to apply to a couple of top schools, but we are treating this as a lottery ticket. Very nice if you get it, but far more likely that he will get in to one of the other fine colleges on our list. We are planning one Ivy, one top LAC, the rest are solid schools.
A lot of disappointed kids only applied to the Ivies + MIT + Stanford. And it’s ridiculous to apply to all of the Ivies. They are very different schools in very different places and nobody would fit in at every one of them. A kid who would be happy at Dartmouth is very different from the kid who would be happy at UPenn.
So a junior with big statistics who wants to try for the top colleges should research all of them and pick the two or three that fit them the best. If you enjoy trees and nature don’t apply to Harvard and Columbia. If you love the big city, don’t apply to Cornell.
@LakeAlto - good question. My daughter got accepted to 8 schools, waitlisted at 5 and rejected by 8. At the schools that accepted her she has been offered everything from a FULL merit scholarship (literally everything), to 30,000 a year, 25,000 a year (x3 schools), 10,000 a year, to nothing (x2 schools).
She had great stats, great grades - a typical “average excellent” here on CC.
I DO wish we had limited her reach applications - but not sure how we would have chosen which ones to say no to. Maybe say “take one bite at the super reach apple” and be done with it.
However, i think we all went into it the best possible way - we all expected those super reaches to be rejections…and were not including them in our conversations about possible outcomes. Not saying the rejections didn’t sting - but she was able to avoid having a “dream” school and keep a good attitude about it.
We also did our tours AFTER acceptences came out so we were able to avoid having seen a school, falling in love with it and getting rejected.
It helped that each day she got a rejection she seemed to get an acceptance with great merit aid.
I don’t know how many people attended one of those “what colleges are looking for” sessions given by a college admissions officer" I attended one given by Tufts called “who gets in and why”. They took 5 applicants and walked the audience through GPA, Test Scores, EC’s, Recommendations, Essays… What I was left with is the sheer randomness in the end. All 5 were equal in my eyes, It was like comparing apples, oranges, bananas, grapes and berries. In the end, it seems like some pretty minor factors like "the teacher praised the student said she was very serious, quiet, and focused, the student said she was very active and engaged… the reviewer saw that as a disconnect. Judging at the end whether living a year oversees, being an eagle scout or president of the debate team was more desirable seems very random. In the end, it does seem like a heck of a lot of luck and who the reader of the application is. That is probably why it might be best to increase the number of applications you fill out, as long as you can do it well, as hard as receiving those rejections are. It just takes one…
@LakeAlto, I’d let her take her shot, but in a precise way and not shotgun. I’d have her thoroughly research the schools she is interested in, and let her apply to one or two ivies, one or two top LACs, and the the rest match and safety. I agree with another poster that those should be treated as a lottery ticket by all of you. (This also assumes that all of those would be affordable.)