A new Jeff Selingo article on college admissions in NYMag

An article I read indicates Landscape breaks down demographics by neighborhood areas that are smaller than zip codes or even school districts. Based on Census data, I believe.

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Probably not in terms of overall college enrollment, since most colleges that are selective are only moderately or minimally selective (and may be purely stats-based for admissions), unlike the small subset of colleges that posters on these forums focus on. Of course, many college students attend open admission community colleges.

But individual colleges could be affected significantly.

Note that SES diversity is often constrained by the college’s financial aid budget. A college may be need-aware for individual applicants, need-blind for individual applicants but calibrating use of need-correlates to get an overall resulting class that will not overrun the financial aid budget, or not give good financial aid and therefore get low yield of low SES admits who cannot afford the college.

Here’s the info on Landscape: https://highered.collegeboard.org/recruitment-admissions/management/landscape

And the detailed data and methodology overview. https://highered.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/comprehensive-data-methodology-overview.pdf

An applicant’s census tract informs their neighborhood data. CB’s info says 50% of census tracts have between 2,900 and 5,500 people. Census.gov says the full range is 1,200 to 8,000.

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Posters on these forums do not have access to applicant’s recommendations and essays, or high school record in context of what is available to them, so they go mainly on stats (GPA, rank, test scores) without context, which makes more of the applicants posting here look top-end than when they are compared by admissions readers looking at the full applications and comparing them to the rest of the applicant pool to the college.

Most applicants themselves and those advising them (parents, counselors, teachers, etc.) are similar to posters on these forums in this respect of not seeing much beyond stats and not being able to compare with the rest of the college’s applicant pool. Dedicated well connected college counselors at academically elite high schools may be the exception in having greater knowledge from which to give more useful chance estimates to applicants from their high schools.

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Our small private school has notoriously hard grading, no academic awards, doesnt weight honors until 11th grade but is in an affluent area. This year only 15% of kids received acceptances to UCs (all for odd ball humanities majors) and more tham half the class does not have an acceptance yet. The situation is heartbreaking. The school is over 1/4 scholarship but maybe the fact that the school is in an affluent neighborhood is hurting kids. The UC acceptances were crazy. The top 10% of the class got in no where…

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Did they apply to all-reach lists?

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Many reaches are not out yet for RD so maybe there will be a lot of acceptances. Did the school typically get top 10% kids accepted to top schools in recent past years? Do you mean the top 10% literally have ZERO acceptances so far? That seems very odd.

Usually, when someone says NO acceptances, they mean no acceptances to the schools they want to attend.

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Most private schools near me have zero APs.

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thanks for this!!

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Was just coming here to post this. :grin:

For those interested in what Landscape might have to say about your neighborhood, one place I looked was https://censusreporter.org which shows information from the census and American Community Survey at both the census tract level, and block group level (slightly smaller granularity than census tract).

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That is a great link that I hadn’t seen before. Thanks for sharing!

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Then they need to take the AP classes online. Go above and beyond, and don’t settle for what your school offers…

This is interesting but our zip code demographics don’t accurately represent the people that attend our public schools. Our schools are majority Latino but the community at large is predominately white. (We are a rural Title One school.)

Landscape gives information for both your HS (the actual demographics of your HS), and for your residential census tract. (Census tract is a slightly different granularity from zip code.)

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That is not at all what college counselors recommend (external or internal) for people in top private schools (which is mainly what is near me).

The school’s curriculum doesn’t align and self-studying takes away from more productive and reportable activities. AOs know the schools and what is on offer and understand rigor.

And proof is in results: My kid’s school (w/o any APs and virtually nobody taking them as extra) has about 20-25% go to an Ivy+ school.

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No most applied to all UCs and all Cal States. The problem is what is a safety school anymore? My kid didnt get in to any of her ā€œsafeties.ā€ Most students have gone back and applied to more schools…asu, college of mines…and gotten some acceptances but typically 40% of kids go to a state school so the low in state acceptances were insane. The average sat of the class is 1410 so its not like these are unqualified kids…(i know thats not considered but just a data point)

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If you are talking about not-rigorous or mediocre private schools, this all may be different.

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I did not realize this was possible. I only just discovered you can register for an AP test w/o having a class. Also learned that some students take harder classes at a community college for no credit, so they can repeat them in our high school and get a high grade. All this to say, most kids and families can’t navigate all these hidden routes.

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A non-impacted CSU campus (16 out of 23) will be a safety for a student with 2.5 recalculated HS GPA in a-g course work if the student applies for a non-impacted major at that campus (most majors including CS and engineering majors are non-impacted at non-impacted CSU campuses, with the exception of nursing or pre-nursing which is impacted everywhere). So a student who applied to all 23 CSUs other than for nursing or pre-nursing who meets the minimum CSU requirements should be admitted to some or many of them.

If the school participates in the ELC program, then students whose recalculated GPA exceeds the ā€œtop 9%ā€ benchmark GPA set by a recent previous class will likely get offers from UC Merced if they get shut out of UCs that they applied to. UC Merced’s CS and engineering majors are not overloaded, unlike most other UC campuses.

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