I call it lying when CDS info is not used. Or if the school does not use the parameters that are prescribed when they release data. I don’t think Reed or other schools that simply refused to provide that info but give snippets of such info as lying because they have made it clear they are not using those standards.
Yes, some schools have been caught lying, and shame on them. GW, F&M, Emory, to name a few. I wish they had been penalized for doing so. I guess it doesn’t matter to applicants.
What anyone does with the data is irrelevant. In a business where so much emphasis is placed on integrity on the students to accurately submit their information, I sure do expect the schools to do the same. In fact, I expect more
It should be obvious I believe there are ways to improve one’s chances. And things that are just a silly hamster wheel.
No one needs to go data-deep to figure it out. Eg, worry if matriculant stats add up. Or just what % of English majors got admitted vs engineering. If YOU don’t match, you don’t.
This is your kid’s app. Not someone else’s.
Again, the CDS is not policed. It’s a best available reporting. Don’t get so deep into fretting about it that you miss where your energy should go.
Definitely take admissions rates with some personal thought.
Even a top student at a school can’t consider the big name Us matches or safeties, yet Liberty might claim a 25% acceptance rate, but I’ve yet to see a student rejected and it’s not just our top students applying.
Personally, specific acceptance rates - the small variances - never entered our list of things to worry about with applications. We just needed wide ranges to look for safeties and matches.
Money isn’t the only currency here. The applicant’s time matters, too. And in the case of applicants like my son, who is limited to only 10 applications per his high school, each college is being carefully chosen and he has a goal of not wasting any application. He would consider an application with less than a 1% chance of a favorable outcome a waste; likewise with at least a 10% acceptance rate initially moved into his ‘learn more about this school’ bucket. He honed his list by eventually ignoring the acceptance rate which is literally the first statistic shown by naviance for a school listing and instead carefully examined the scattergrams. Since he has many friends in other schools he had them check their school’s scatterplots too to ensure his HS wasn’t a weird outlier for any school. That’s quite a lot of effort, for albeit a semi-nerdy kid, to go through just to understand how long of a shot any school is for him.
Some of the colleges are long shots; some are not. And he has much work to do yet in learning more about each school in terms of fit. But at least he is doing so with full knowledge of what his chance are if he does present a solid application to each. He isn’t out of the game instantly because of his numbers.
Even our state flagship, which has a 50%ish acceptance rate needed closer examination. Now a school like that which is HUGE and known by every single high school senior in the state will be thought to have a ton of kids who have little chance of acceptance. Two-thirds of the senior class in his HS school applied there this year. But on closer examination of the data, it is clear that if my son does not get accepted by that school he will be the single outlier, among hundreds of applicants over the past five years by a margin of .5 GPA points and SAT composite of 150 points. HIGHLY unlikely that he won’t get accepted. Based on that empirical info, he shouldn’t waste either his time or my money on searching for another safety since he is already in love with that university and I am more in love with its price tag.
Even if an applicant’s only effort is a few clicks, he/she should have all important information if we wish to deem that decision as a fully informed one. It isn’t for lots of reasons (often because the applicants fail to absorb readily available information) but also because the schools fail to provide key information which they do have. By the way, sellers always have more information than buyers do. But let’s not pretend that the colleges are doing everything they can to engender well-informed application decisions. They are not. They benefit too much from the ability to foster a brand of exclusivity. It obviously works extremely well.
It is lying,looking forward. Just call it like it is. I’m fine with saying stats don’t matter much in holistic review or whatever, but obviously the colleges feel they live or die by the stats so they fudge them by counting incomplete apps, not counting spring or deferred admits, etc. The hypocrisy is so blatant.
The fingerprint of unreliable figures can, it seems, be found in application totals. As students withdraw their applications after, say, ED2 acceptances elsewhere, the original press release application totals should, properly, be revised downward for an accurate acceptance rate calculation. Since colleges do not seem to do this, I’m not sure how the official figures could be accurate under common circumstances.
Really, the only data about colleges you can trust in this process is Moody’s financial rating of the college. They have a financial incentive to get it right, backed up by SEC enforcement for inaccurate data submitted. The rest of the info colleges put out is largely just marketing material, like all advertising, lots of fluff little content. Maybe some of it is aspirational for how the colleges would like to see themselves or hope to be.
@airway1 When the student hits submit (and pays the fee, in most cases) then the school really does have an obligation to give them a decision. Even if incomplete (and in my experience many schools send updates notifying of missing items.) Nothing wrong with the school counting this app in their totals.
Fortunately USNWR has stopped considering admission rate and yield rate in their rankings. So the incentive for schools to game the rankings with creative admissions counts has been reduced.
The incentive is still there. Lower acceptance rate make the college appear more selective, and therefore more “prestigious”. Take UChicago, for example, they don’t release official acceptance rate, but they would “whisper” some vague number to their selected groups, hoping the “news” of how selective the college is would spread.
Lol, wasted energy, imo, to so worry about these bullets and not be able to write a good Why Us or figure what truly shows leadership thinking, and more.
“Why do so many kids think their chances rest on Naviance (not) or stats or hs glory?”
You keep making these huge incorrect generalizations on how kids, parents and GCs use Naviance and hs stats. They use it to get a general idea of colleges to apply. If a college accepts 100% of kids with 4.0/1550, and rejects everyone below a 1200/3.0, that is good information. If you have a 1100/2.5, you’re not applying and that’s good for everyone around. It doesn’t mean you get in with a 4.0/1600, people know that. Alsothere a lot of kids that use Naviance and get in to the Yale’s of the world. In fact, that’s where there journey started - their h.s. Naviance scattergram, imagine that!
“Look at how many on CC say not to take classes because the college expects it. You get kids way off the rails.”
You must be living in a different CC than I am. Almost every thread on say foreign language has posters that advise the kids to take four years of f/l because that’s what selective colleges want, that you could be hurt if you don’t show a progression all four years. And minimum of Calculus, AP science for stem, APUSH APLAC for non-stem.
“Posters need to stop promoting “just be you””
That is advice from the colleges themselves, just be you, we want to know who you are. Who exactly should a person be on their app, someone else?
I want to thank all of you who responded to my initial post. I learned so much from your insight, especially how important it is for small LAC’s to get an accurate yield. It seems that there are numerous factors that have created the current culture, including the combination of the common app and technology, which make it incredibly easy to apply to schools. My initial post was intended to question the validity of a college’s posted acceptance rate - the one that pops up when you do an internet search. Based on your responses, there clearly doesn’t appear to be set criteria governing the acceptance rate statistic. But there should be, especially in our digital age where this information travels at lightening speed and students are using that statistic in their application decisions. Students are the consumers and they should be protected from false or misleading information.
One can be perfectly capable of writing a good “Why me” essay and still be concerned about the glaring problems in the current admissions system. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Just remember, OP, that in holistic, acceptance rates are not what gets an individual in.
And theloniusmonk, too many posts do rest on stats comparisons, concerns about “padding” and forget that the “you” they look for is the one who matches their wants and needs.
If this is about an admit, focus on what it takes. Covering one’s bases is worth it.
Or we could be happy that at least some applicants and families can look beyond their own personal chance for success to the extraordinary systemic problems. For those colleges which actually care about engaged citizens.
Interesting that even those holistic admit colleges year upon year announce that this was the strongest applicant pool ever with an average SAT/ACT of ____ and __. Fill in scores higher than the previous years scores. But we’re not stats driven. Even the ones that no longer require standardized test scores. Sometimes, it’s all as clear as mud.
That’s a fair point. However, they do usually in the same breath announce the % of the class that is first gen, minority, pell grant, international, and occasionally athletes too, all non-stats score factors.
Most adcoms and the colleges they represent want to have the cake and eat it too. They want to be able to make their decisions behind closed doors without anyone questioning their decisions. So they make their processes opaque enough that no one has any factual basis to question their decisions. No one outside knows how rigorous their processes are, or whether, and to what degree, any arbitrariness or favoritism is present. They also want to be able to say their processes produce the “strongest”, the “best” classes year after year by selectively releasing certain statistics that they hope to shed positive light on their processes, but insufficient for outsiders to question their processes.