Dear Wash U...STOP LYING about your admissions statistics!

davida1
Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:27:33 +0000

I applied early to an Ivy and got in. I would never apply to school as pathetic as WUSTL. Anecdotes about roommates or friends is irrelevant. I’m talking about the overall numbers. They don’t make sense. Obviously there is no way to prove that WUSTL is lying because the school itself reports its numbers and there is no independent auditor. I think there needs to be an independent organization that verifies these numbers because they appear to be suspect and that has been the case for WUSTL for a long time now. What they are doing is simply not ethical if in fact there numbers are false. The reality is that the admissions people could make up any numbers they want and publish them, so there is no reason to trust them especially if they seem ridiculous. I was in my college counseling office in high school senior year just before graduation and the file for every student that applied to college was left out from the previous year. I glanced at a few of the files and the one girl who went to WUSTL (no legacy, non-URM, no hook, not a large donor) had a 1210 SAT score and a 3.2 GPA. If you are going to provide anecdotes, I’ll provide that one (I am still in college FYI so this was not that long ago).

It is really embarrassingly stupid for people to attack me personally. I am talking about institutional dishonesty…If you go to WUSTL, great. I hope you enjoy your school. This isn’t personal.

I would add though that there are many other schools that don’t require supplements and offer the common app that get far fewer applications than WUSTL. The mass mailing campaign shouldn’t have too much of an impact because people receive lots of mail from many, many institutions. Why they would choose WUSTL out of the many other schools that mass mail is unclear. Lay prestige I think encourages apps more than mass mailing does and certainly the schools I listed that receive fewer apps like Northwestern or Georgetown, for example, have more lay prestige.

Last, if it is truly stealing students with outstanding aid packages, why is its yield rate so much lower than its peer institutions?