<p>
It’s still a “safety”, but in the same way that a community college is a safety. That is, if a kid decides their heart is set on Harvard, but if that doesn’t work, they’ll just go to the local community college… then they simply have chosen a “safety” that doesn’t require the additional step of actually applying.</p>
<p>Indy, you should perhaps remember that the view of the world that you may pick up from this board is highly distorted. There are something like 3,500 colleges. The competitiveness of admissions drops rapidly after about the top 100 LAC’s and the top 200 universities…and that’s being a bit generous. </p>
<p>This board self-selects for both high-achieving students and slightly obsessive or greater parents. </p>
<p>There are tons of students that just trundle off to the nearest state school or small college with no angst whatsoever.</p>
<p>xiggi and TheDad,
I shouldn’t speak for indy, but for myself anyway I was not envisioning such a database & serial-ED style of system to be applied except for & within the highly competitive & selective private colleges & universities. (Publics, including reach publics, would never be able to be included anyway, due to their own requirements of eligibility & inclusion.) I don’t know that such a list (“The Frenzy League”) would even equal 100 institutions, but it certainly would not equal 437. So I apologize if I threw anybody off. I agree that for all the other institutions, where the application #'s the & yield results are much more predictable, the system does not need changing or controlling. And in those cases the percentage of students enrolling in their first choice would be unsurprisingly high.</p>
<p>Hmm. I’d have to think about that and I haven’t woken up yet but right away the “Frenzy League” would itself acquire a cachet…“if you’re not Ivy League, go at <em>least</em> Frenzy League!” “Upper or lower half?”</p>
<p>Haha. …Just as long as you understand that totally nobody will be merely “trundling off” to the Frenzy League.
(Like your phrases better.)</p>
<p>“It’s still a “safety”, but in the same way that a community college is a safety.”</p>
<p>True, but as I said, from her point of view, it was a “good school that would want her”, and in her case, already had experience of it.</p>
<p>I think there is a huge factor that is overlooked that people have mentioned: the fact that there is probably the same number of people applying to colleges, but simply those people are applying to more colleges</p>
<p>This is an important factor. Lets say that the average for a person used to be say, 5 colleges. When that person chooses their college, it will leave 4 spots open for those who were waitlisted.</p>
<p>Today, in retrospect, lets say that the average is 10 now. Now when a person who chooses his/her college, that makes 9 spots open for those who were waitlisted.</p>
<p>Honestly I think we have to wait until we get the number of those who were waitlisted and then accepted, and count that towards the true percentage and THEN compare</p>
<p>I can vouch for the random and probably oversaturated application process at Emory. I got waitlisted with 730 verbal 740 math, 4.0 GPA, tons of AP, tons of extracurriculars.</p>
<p>Ouch, ouch, ouch.</p>
<p>I get that the vast majority of kids are happy to hook up with State U or the local CC, and that skews the numbers to make it look like everyone is getting what they want, <em>but</em> based on the self-selection of this board, I’d say many are just a little wigged-out by the frustration of playing a lottery with our kid’s future.<br>
I do realize that my silly little plan was unimplementable in it’s proposed form. I threw it out there because encouraging kids applying to 15 colleges in hopes of 5-7 random acceptances is ridiculous. It wastes everyone’s time and causes distortions in the perceived value of an individual school’s education (see UChicago, Reed)</p>