<p>My D was waitlisted at schools she visited & loved. She has since moved on and found a school not previously on her radar but where we believe she will be very happy this fall!</p>
<p>However, the whole college app process has left us both disillusioned. Frankly, based on stats the top tier schools where she applied could have been considered matches for her - those little online tests you take listed them as such. She felt wanted based on her contact with admissions reps, had successful interviews, and was genuinely shocked when she was waitlisted by her then top 3 picks.</p>
<p>Again, we have a happy ending, but I am feeling pretty cynical. Just looking at Duke’s numbers - 27,000 applicants at $75 a shot = $2.25m. I don’t know how many used fee waivers, but even so. . .It seems like everything works in favor of the schools. They can cherry pick first round and beyond, and at some point they have got to be profiting from the fees, right? I do not for a moment believe that every application received a full reading once they met their quota.</p>
<p>Timeflew - I totally agree with you. My D applied to 7 schools – aside from the 2 ivies which she certainly had the stats for but which we knew were ‘crapshoots’ the other 4 we pretty much considered locks. Well, she got into her really safe safety, her safety, and her perfect match but was waitlisted by her other perfect match and also waitlisted by what by their admission stats would have been probably considered a safety.</p>
<p>The annoying thing about waitlist at perfect match #2 (which was #1 in her heart) is that they called/emailed on 3 separate occasions and freely admitted that they had either lost or misplaced her transcripts or recommendations! First time was over Christmas break and required guidance counselor to send something – a few days lag time there. So of course, I’m thinking that her file is going back to the bottom of the pile every time! Ugh – </p>
<p>then after she gets waitlisted she gets call from admissions rep and they say well we hope you express your interest b/c we know you are more than qualified to come here!?!?! Huh - did you send her the wrong letter? or better yet, if she’s so qualified why didn’t you just admit her?</p>
<p>I am sooo glad this process is over and i have 5 years til the next one.!!</p>
<p>Wow, my above post sounds kinda sour-grapey. I should qualify it by noting that my D was NOT waitlisted at Duke. I just used them as an example since their numbers were thrown out at the beginning of this thread.</p>
<p>I like how people criticize students and parents for having their kids apply to 15 schools. </p>
<p>Have any of you ever paid for college? Either as a student or a parent?</p>
<p>I’m an independent student, and I want to kick myself for not applying to more than 5 schools in the fall last year. The bottom line is, the financial aid you’re offered even from schools in the same system (UC’s or State Universities) is different and varies greatly.</p>
<p>What are YOU personally going to tell the parents you command to only apply to 5 schools, when they get financial aid offers from those schools that put their child into a vicious cycle of debt? Are you going to apologize? Front the bill? What if applying to another 4 or 5 schools would’ve landed them an offer at a decent school fully paid?</p>
<p>I think in today’s age, with common applications and so much competition, students should absolutely apply to more than 5 schools. When schools are more transparent about their financial aid offers, and the process is more in the students’ hands as far as control, then we can safely say that students should cut down on the applications. But until then, with how mysterious and uncertain admissions AND financial aid is, applying to 5 schools is a death wish.</p>
<p>Floridamom and Timeflew, you guys hit it on the nose. I feel that this whole college thing had become one big scam like the government. Starting with the SAT exam (expensive) to the SAT courses (ridiculous for what you get), to the apps at each school… What a scam. I have a 4.0 but I cannot test well for long hours because of low blood pressure (refuse to take medication because the side effects are worse). No excuse but not getting into ANY school (I applied to 8) is ridiculous. USF & LMU waitlisted me (want to go to USF). I am bi-lingual, bi-cultural and have had a 4.0 avg u/w all through high school. President of student council, 200 community service hours, wrote my essay about my co-dependency because of my dad and his addiction. I understand not getting into Stanford but LMU or USF??? Maybe it’s because my family doesn’t make any money…??? I think this is all about the dough, ray, me… almighty dollar. Oh well, I applied to Cal Lutheran and should find out within a week or two, but menawhile, I sit and pray to get into USF…</p>
<p>BC waitlist is a joke. 2k people waitlisted for 0-300 spots. Probably even less this year since they admitted even more people than last year due to not reaching enrollment targets.</p>
<p>Someone way up the list on this asked if it would be legal to limit the number of colleges a student can apply to.</p>
<p>Limiting the number of schools to which a kid can apply would certainly be illegal. It would be a violation of antitrust laws, among other things (the schools would be forming a type of oligopoly if they were to somehow join together and limit the number of applications a kid can make).</p>
<p>In addition, since applicants are not guaranteed admission to any school to which they apply, there is no reason they should be barred from making numerous applications. This would be like limiting the number of companies a job hunter can apply to.</p>
<p>I helped a very smart kid from a very poor family with his college applications, and encouraged him to apply to ten schools. His financial aid offers varied from him having to pay $5,000 a year to $20,000. If he had been able to apply to only five schools, he might have skipped the one that gave him the best offer. There was absolutely no way he would have gone to college if he had had to pay $20,000 per year.</p>
<p>I think kids should apply to many schools, both because of financial aid variances and because of the unpredictability of the admissions process, especially at the most competitive schools. When I applied to college (several hundred years ago, when Ivy schools still accepted over 20%), I applied to eight schools, including five Ivies, and got into five schools, including two Ivies. A friend applied to a handful of schools, got into a top 10 engineering school, and wound up going to a community college and then transferring after two years because none of the schools that accepted him gave him the aid he needed. If he had applied to five more schools, he probably would have gotten a nice aid or scholarship package from one of them.</p>
<p>My son was deferred & then waitlisted at UMich … with a 33 ACT, 3.7 gpa from a great high school, tons of difficult AP classes & honors for the rest, great teacher recommendation … but I am guessing he didn’t score enough points in other areas (ECs, awards, alumni connections, etc). Kids in his class who are not nearly as strong academically were accepted right off the bat. Fortunately, he had other good options. But it’s not just the elites with big waiting lists. UM seems to have really gone to town on waitlisting in state students this year.</p>
<p>I definitely would support a program where you are able to list your top 3 college choices (unranked) for regular decision. I think people applying to 15 + colleges based on USNWR is harmful to them, the people that have to read all those applications and the people that get into duke but not uva, and really want to attend uva but not duke etc. (and reversed ofc.) No one wins. If you have a top 3 you encourage students to really think about the schools they are applying to. I really had my heart set on 3 schools and didn’t apply to a lot of others. Fortunately I was only waitlisted at one. </p>
<p>I can’t imagine someone wanting to really go to 10 colleges. Usually you see threads where people get into 6-8 and then say afterward that they’ve narrowed it down to 3 in a day or two. They still have to apply to all of those at the start because otherwise with only 3 applications you quite likely would be denied at every school. With the current system you’re sort of screwed if you don’t apply to a huge amount. 20-25 years ago MIT had an acceptance rate of 40+%. Admissions decisions only get unpredictable when ridiculously large number of applicants apply. </p>
<p>An example of a self-selecting system can be seen with Grinnell. They admit something like 50% of their applicants yet maintain a very high SAT/GPA average of admitted students. With colleges getting down to 5-9% acceptance rates you basically have to apply to 10 and hope you can learn to like the 1-3 schools you do get into instead of your dreamschool. The current system is really quite sickening to be honest…By far the worst product of this is that people pile on extracurriculars they do not enjoy, trying to hit 200 or 300 hours. It’s like people are forgetting this is life, not world of warcraft. Life goes on after college. They’ll miss what their highschool years could have been.</p>
<p>That said, I got waitlisted at “my #1” and I don’t see it as a bad thing. You consider it as a reject and look at other schools. If you get in that’s a bonus.</p>
<p>ESSENAR: You’re right that if you need lots of financial aid (including merit scholarships) it makes sense to apply to more than 5 colleges. But your strategy here is not the same as others. Your “reach” schools will be unlikely to offer you aid–if they offer you admission at all. It is the target and safety schools (based on the numbers) that are more likely to give you money. But each college figures aid differently, because (to be frank) some colleges will find you more desirable than others. And there is no way to tell in advance–beyond some educated guessing–which colleges will cough up the most dough .</p>
<p>Therefore DO apply to more than five schools, and let the schools compete for you!</p>
<p>D1 applied to more than 15 schools with perfect test score and excellent grades, EC’s, recs, etc. 10 schools rejected or waitlisted her. If she had only applied to 10 schools, probably at least 8 of them would have been among those 10 and she would have had only backups to choose from. Instead she has 6 choices (2 backups and 4 very good schools) and as May 1 approaches is still torn between a couple of schools which in different ways are very good fits for her. The momentary sting of rejection a month ago has faded as she sees up close how good her remaining options are.</p>
<p>I would advise her to take the same approach again. One caveat is that I don’t think applying to 15+ of the top 30 on the USNWR list is necessarily a great idea. I think, particularly if you aren’t sure what environment would be best for you, that it makes sense to mix in some larger research schools, smaller LA schools, even different geographies in some cases. I doubt D1’s list was identical to anyone else’s in the country – there were schools on both coasts, the Midwest, big and small, public and private. And one more thing: she was honest about who she was in her essays, and several schools that picked her were good fits in part because they are tailored to students like her.</p>
<p>BTW, she’s on Duke’s waitlist (and others), and while she kept her spot I very much doubt she would go there if they call in the middle of June. She realizes now more than she did when she applied a few months ago that it’s not a better fit (and not a better school either) than the place she’ll end up attending.</p>
<p>^Agree that kids can’t limit the # of apps for exactly the reason made above. </p>
<p>Now that kids ARE applying to so many schools, more schools are waitlisting more kids, and the cycle self-perpetuates.</p>
<p>Maybe someone’s suggested this before, but would having a “binding first-choice” in the REGULAR decision round help at all? A lot of schools do what’s called ED2, and it seems like a good way to tell a school they’re your first choice.</p>
<p>This would help schools who are concerned about their yields cherry-pick students.</p>
<p>Just read the NYT article – I’ve been philosophical about the process up til now but now I’m p*ssed.</p>
<p>So they found time and resources to deposit $2 million into the Universitys bank account, $75 at a time, but could not be bothered to carefully read the applications and arrive at a decision on more than 10 percent of them? What if someone brought a consumer fraud class action against them for falsely claiming in all of their promotional materials and roadshow presentations that they read every word and consider every aspect of the applications? The depositions and email document review would no doubt be highly embarrassing to the school (and to any number of similar schools who do the same thing but whose admissions officers arent foolish enough to admit to the NYT that they just couldnt get the job done.) </p>
<p>Id be willing to bet that Duke ran out of staff and that some of those applications either never got read or were read in less than five minutes a fact you could deduce by looking at (1) who the readers were for each application; (2) how many applications they purportedly read each day; (3) what notes they made on the applications; (4) how many hours they spend on committee meetings, roadshows, and the like that prevented them from reading; etc.</p>
<p>What really happened is they got 27,000 applications, rejected about 20,000 of them after what was probably a cursory read, and then when they got to the number of admits that their yield data told them would be enough to fill the class with the requisite diversity of feeder schools, ethnicity, extracurriculars, athletes, legacies, etc. they just stopped and dumped everyone else en masse into the waitlist queue. </p>
<p>I don’t think my 3 younger kids will consider applying to a school whose ethics are so low that they don’t think it’s a priority to give a decision to kids who have poured themselves into an application and paid good money to get fair consideration.</p>