Despite a perfect SAT score, this student hasn’t been accepted anywhere yet. The Dean offers advice. https://insights.collegeconfidential.com/rejected-from-colleges
I hope students reading this realize that OOS public flagships, like Michigan, especially for engineering, shouldn’t be looked at as safeties no matter how perfect your stats.
It’s also probably too late for this student to quickly find a match school since many schools like Purdue, fill the majority of their class, as well as their honors college, in EA.
I can’t stress enough that all students need a real safety - a sure thing school with an over 75%+ acceptance rate that is also affordable for the family. Students have to look at acceptance rates, not just where their stats fall.
Echoing @momofsenior1’s comments to some extent, but this is the problem right there.
People have managed, for the most part, to get it through their collective heads that the Ivies and their near competitors are essentially a lottery for high-stats kids, but don’t seem to have recognized that the only guaranteed admissions are either an open-admissions college or one that admits purely by stats (assuming you have the stats, which this student would).
Mini-rant: Also worth remembering, there are plenty of Southern and “flyover” flagships that would have happily thrown piles of money at this student’s feet, and the education for comp sci would have been at least as good as most if not all of the schools listed as places the student is applying. But no, no, a place like West Virginia or Iowa State is somehow not worth discussing, because we all want a Big Name™…
He’ll see better results in RD but he should apply to a couple of real safeties (at least one with rolling admission for peace of mind and another one with acceptance rate above 50%) and instead of focusing on Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, look at similarly good schools like Vanderbilt, Rice, Hopkins, CMU, Williams etc.
He doesn’t have to get in all of “T 20”, just one of them so no loosing faith. Yes, some things in this process are against him but many things support him as well. He is clearly hard working, driven and intelligent, he just needs to spruce up his application and apply RD. Best of luck to him and everyone else in his position.
It doesn’t sound like any of the schools on the student’s list, including the new round of apps that are going out, are safeties. They’re all highly selective, so I wouldn’t count them as matches either. I hope the student follows the dean’s advice to add real matches and safeties to their list.
Wisconsin and MIchigan are not safeties, especially for an out of state resident. An Asian male applying for computer science faces long odds at just about any school, and certainly at the ones you have listed. Your residence in Maine might give you a geographical diversity bump at some schools further away from the northeast. You will stand out more at Rice than at Harvard or other Ivys. Send in an application to your in state flagship and places mentioned by the Dean to have a firewall. Some places like University of Alabama/Huntsville and UT Dallas might be true safeties for you and might offer you a full scholarship.
Northeastern and BU are not safeties for anyone. With this student’s stats, a last minute application, and no intersest shown they will see the student as someone looking for a safety and deny or waitlist them.
It’s December 30th. Unless this kid is planning on taking a PG year, it’s a little late in the day to be asking how he can improve his outcomes. As far as what happened, he made the classic mistake of overestimating his qualifications when it comes to getting into schools like Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. At that level, being ranked 28th in the class and “only” getting three B’s is nothing to brag about. He doesn’t say anything about EC’s either - so that could be a problem as well.
Agree with @TheBigChef - this process was a wake-up for me as a parent of two high stats kids. I was thinking “how could they not accept him?” Low and behold he was accepted to 2 out of 8 schools. If I had to guess, his essays were so-so and we have no hook (caucasian male, CS major, middle class family). As I have said many times, the ‘dream school’ is just that, a dream. It may turn out to be a nightmare. The other reality, undergrad school is not that important. If you want to go to grad school, that is where it can be more important.
On a side note, I had a high school classmate that scored 1600 on the SAT and was shocked when he was turned down at Stanford and Cal. Maybe it was that GPA of less than a 3.5 that showed them his level of motivation. Unfortunately for the student this thread is about, heavy dose of reality incoming. Without a strong hook, selective schools will choose other students. They will all turn down plenty of 4.0, high test score kids.
@usma87 With a sub 3.5 GPA she should never have expected to be admitted to Cal and Stanford.
@TomSrOfBoston - exactly my point. Even back in the 80’s, there was no way a perfect SAT would overcome the GPA. He just assumed that the SAT would open the doors to the highly selective schools. Even back then, that was a fantasy. While the subject of this post isn’t in the same predicament, there does appear to be surprise that a perfect SAT is not getting the interest/acceptance that the student expected.
I’ve never heard anyone define schools as “T-20” outside of these boards on College Confidential which attract status-obsessed applicants; and the “T-20” seems to be a definition mostly used by certain cultures.
Agree, classic mistake here. NO notable extracurriculars mentioned, only Ivy and “T-20” applications to the most competitive major (CS), by a student in a very competitive “bucket”. And, FYI to OP, Stanford is a dream school for lots of super-qualified kids; Stanford is known for taking unique kids that are “national/intl champions of something” and not necessarily 1600 scorers.
OP needs to come to senses and apply at other schools and not perceive them as “safeties”. Or, do a gap year and reapply…but do something in the gap year where he learns and progresses as a person, since that didn’t seem to happen in high school where he was likely grade and score obsessed and not balanced with extracurriculars and team oriented activities.
I highly doubt UWashington is a realistic option (for CS/Eng) – almost impossible to get into CS there OOS. They even send out a letter explaining this. Last year students with 1580 SAT/4+ GPA/great EC’s did not get into CS OOS because they prioritize these coveted, limited spots for in-state. UW will admit to another major, however, but it may not be in Engineering. In fact, all the Dean’s suggestions are highly competitive schools except for maybe UNH. OP needs to apply to second or third tier schools if he wants a choice come April. There is nothing wrong with these schools and OP may find he is more successful there.
High school GPA is a much better predictor of college success (including first year college GPA) than test scores, and colleges know it. Unless that 3.5 was a result of something unusual (say, truly bombing 9th grade but then recovering and being spectacular in 10th and 11th grades, or a high school with an average GPA of 2.2 or somesuch), for schools like Stanford and Cal that have an abundance of ≥3.8 applicants, a 3.5 isn’t just a red flag, it’s a wildly waving red flag.
In very much thanks to this board, we heard loud and clear that our high-stats S20 (For example: 1600, 36, 3.92 UW, 4.49 W, good recs, good ECs, internships, tough schedule with a PT job) needed a good mixture of schools to apply to. I can’t stress this enough. Our S20 is applying to CS programs and he has had a relatively typical experience so far. He’s had some acceptances from EA or rolling admissions schools (Iowa, U of Denver, Colorado School of Mines), some deferrals (CWRU) and rejections (CMU-expected, UIUC - a bit of a surprise especially because he’s in-state). We’re still waiting to hear from quite a few (PITT- rolling, Vanderbilt- ED2, Northeastern- EA, GT- EA, Northwestern- RD, washU- RD, Harvard- RD). For now, the front-runner is Mines. That was a bit of a spur of the moment application, but I’m SO glad he did that one! We’ll see what happens with the rest. But I encourage everyone in a similar situation to definitely do your research and have a wide net. Do NOT bank on the fact that just because there are high stats, it will result in acceptances, esp to top-tier schools.
This +1000. My son had much lower stats and is getting very nice merit aid from Arizona. This student would get free tuition there.
facts! He should apply to Tulane and UMiami (two well-ranked and private schools) who are on the uprise and looking for high stats students to make them look better.
Yall wrong though about “everyone having high stats”. Only 1% of students get 1500+ scores. 1% of the 2 million test-takers a year is merely 20,000 students.
The students problem isn’t the numbers. Top schools will find those numbers “acceptable” and check him off the academic box.
What the rest of his app needs to do is show potential, in college, his major, his field of interest, and career. This can be done a million ways, but its really essential
Actually, a SAT score of 1500 is top 2% of test takers, so 40k kids have that score. Add in the kids who only took the ACT but have a similar score, and you are well over 50k kids with strong scores competing for few slots.
To say that it is a lottery for high stakes kids is not quite true. It is true that at top schools unhooked high stats kids will be in a pool where maybe 5 or 10% or so will get admitted RD - this is a statistical fact. But here is where marketing, messaging, micro demographics, specific skills or qualities the school is looking for etc come into play. There are some kids who write an essay that’s so good that it will pull them in even when the rest of the profile doesn’t stand out in the pool. And sometimes the AO will, at the margin, just take a liking to a kid. So there is an element of luck, for sure. Sometimes it does come down to a bit of coin toss between equally qualified kids. But that doesn’t mean you should give up on writing an effective app - far from it.
The stats are what they are - it is difficult for kids (and parents of kids) to accept that even with perfect scores and grades they face really tough odds, esp since many of these kids would have gotten in just a decade ago. But some will get in - by spending a lot of time focussing on the your app you may be able to stand out among many kids with great stats and increase your odds, perhaps significantly.
Regarding the OP’s assertions that he had a perfect SAT score and is of Chinese-American heritage, I just saw a comment a Chinese-American mother made in response to an admissions related article in the WSJ where she said there is a cottage industry in the Chinese language world of surrepticiously obtaining the questions asked on the current SAT and posting them online. Chinese students then drill relentlessly to memorize the answers to potential questions. It appears the SAT may have been effectively “hacked” so to speak by this group, which could have the effect of making schools suspect the validity of perfect scores coming from Chinese-American applicants.