Because curing cancer, taking lead on a research paper with a Stanford Professor, starting a charity that provided meals to 100,000 families and developing the next AI tool that will impact hundreds of millions is more important than any A or B in Multi Variable Calculus.
So everyone is doing “better” - and expects a pay off from doing so.
I know for certain Michigan State does this. There was an article in their student paper at one point about it–they can preduct what your Michigan State GPA will be based on your profile coming out of high school. Obviously this only works at high schools that send a lot of kids there.
Also one of the Michican St admissions people spoke at our school pre-covid and he stated something along the lines of we keep going lower in your class (at first we only took top x% and then top 50% and then …) and as we go lower we are still seeing great success on our campus. We are a large public in Illinois. So they are tracking!
I am under the impression that many large publics have this sort of info and can easily crunch these numbers. Part of it is that they are required to compile and report a lot of this information as a public institution. It depends on the school whether it is hidden behind a password or available to nosey parents (like me). I was searching this data to see whether certain demographics are returning for sophomore year and graduating in certain majors. (I have a D22 in CS so we were always looking for programs that had a cohort of women.) Somethimes I could get that info and sometimes I couldn’t. But I’m sure the universities know!
Yes, but for clarification, what I am trying to say is that kids with 3.3/1300 (or whatever; even 3.7/1400) shouldn’t spend a single second worrying about ECs for the colleges they will be aiming for because normal activities will be fine. Seems like a lot of wasted energy, teens posting with long lists of activities that will have no impact on admissions whatsoever because the appropriate colleges for their stats do not require extensive ECs.
Same for high stat kids who know they will be headed for their state flagship for cost purposes. I know a kid in this position, in multiple time-consuming ECs, and i worry they are stretching themselves crazy thin for little benefit just because they think they need to.
That doesn’t seem to be the conclusion so much as that they found that for discrepant students, their stronger measure over predicted college GPA, and their weaker measure under predicted college GPA.
However, for highly selective colleges that require both, having top end measures in both is typically necessary but not sufficient for admission – i.e. discrepant applicants are very unlikely to get admitted.
It’s an interesting school to bring up.
It’s not a hard admit at all (over 80% acceptance) so you’d think - they’d have low retention - but yet they have very good retention.
thx
Yeah, I think it is always worth remembering highly selective holistic review colleges are not about being the ultimate judge of each kids’ individual merit as a kid. They are just trying to efficiently enroll classes that meet their institution’s various competing priorities. And when they talk about these sorts of issues, almost inevitably their attitude is some form of, “Great kids don’t need our college in particular, so I am sure they will be fine somewhere else.”
Which is undoubtedly true.
Speaking of which . . .
I think to the extent such a person can be identified through their application materials, they may well be very competitive for admissions at a variety of places. I think the main way that would be possible would be through their teacher and counselor recommendations, but possibly also their essays and interview reports.
But they need SOME sort of evidence as to how this applicant is going to contribute to the college community beyond their own self-advancement.
The AOs I have seen discuss these things make it pretty clear that they have a mental category that is something like “mere participant”, and you do not in fact get much value from being a mere participant. At the core, what they are really looking for is kids who will do things at their college. And mere participants are unlikely to persist.
This is why running around trying to check a bunch of boxes is likely wasted effort–if you are just racking up a bunch of “mere participant” activities, none are likely doing much if anything for you.
I picked two random highly rejective schools to see if the trend holds true at D26’s high school. Possibly for School 2, not sure about School 1…
All she can do is put forth her best application and represent herself accurately and honestly as possible. She’s done the work, now she just needs to sell herself.
And there’s so many questions not answered in this data - from rigor to wealth to ECs or athletics and more… but it’s an interesting story and I can see how people think what they do.
At the end of the day, the kids just have to do the work, be true to themselves, sell it the best they can, and, maybe, just maybe, if they fit the institutional priorities, they might have a slight leg up.
I wish everyone was this…they are bending over backward for something that…assures nothing…and many are stressing and stressing and wrecking themselves mentally - and for what - so they go to UNC instead of U of SC or UMass instead of UNH or Swarthmore instead of Sewanee or Tennessee Tech instead of UTK.
Craziness…
It is hard to not give into the crazy when it seems like everyone else is trying to one up one another. The FOMO is real.
Many aspects of society and economy are more competitive now than they were a generation or few ago – the likelihood of being upward mobile compared to one’s parents is lower now compared to what the parents saw compared to their parents. This includes college admissions for “desirable” colleges, driven in part by the perception that the job market is more competitive now for college graduates (which may be true or not depending on what type of job is being sought), increasing the desire to go to (what they believe is) a “prestigious” college.
(percentage of children born in each year who eventually earn more than their parents)
Of course, the bar for earning higher than parents has probably increased over time too.
It’s too bad your version doesn’t show application type (ED/EA/RD). That makes it a little easier to pick out some athletes/institutional priorities. Your counselor can see that data.
When we met with the school counselor, we asked, “what can you see for applicants to the business school (looking at large universities)”, and she was able to see a different pattern than one that just showed everybody. For example, at our state flagship, it looks like tons of people get in, but then some of the highest score/gpa kids are rejected. Oten they are CS, which has an admit rate of 4%.
Some highly rejectives also admit by major or school. Getting in to either the business program or the film program at NYU, for example, is very tough, but the scatterplots for NYU’s ideal candidates will likely look very different. I grew up in NY, and back in the day a lot of kids applied into Cornell through the Ag program. So not only do we not know the back story (beyond grades and tests) for the applicant, we don’t know exactly where the student is slotted at the school on arrival. (This does not apply to most LACs, of course.)
I work in higher ed, and one point I’ll add is that colleges may not be so much protecting their yield for rankings purposes as trying to avoid admitting students whose chances of actually enrolling are highly uncertain. It’s obviously bad for colleges to underenroll. It’s not quite as bad for them to overenroll, but it is still very bad (crowded dorms and classrooms, students can’t get classes they want, etc.). I would guess that, because students with top stats apply to more colleges and apply to rejective colleges that are very unpredictable, it is really tough to figure out how likely they are to attend any given college in, say, the 20-40 range, and that makes them less desirable admits for those colleges, especially relative to waitlisting them, which gives the college a lot more control. This may not be a determinative consideration most of the time, but I’d be surprised if colleges in that range did not take it into account.
It seemed when DS was applying that this data was more helpful in determining where it probably didn’t make sense to apply. At almost none would we have assumed that he would be admitted. In this regard, trying to figure out why someone with high stats wasn’t admitted is a bit of a futile exercise.
I agree.
There are plenty of colleges with low RD yields that don’t appear to do this. They just admit a lot of people, and then apparently yields are predictable enough that they only need to make modest use of their waitlist. To the extent they get unusually high-numbers applicants, rather than waitlist or reject them, they admit them, and then maybe offer them merit, honors, or so on. Obviously it doesn’t always work, but apparently that contributes to making their yields predictable enough.
So I agree it is likely it is not just a lot of low, but a lot of low and difficult to predict, RD yield cases that would lead to a lot of this happening at a given college. And it may be a contributing factor if they have little or no merit.
Thanks!
Both of my kids went to fairly unique high schools so I was hoping their college experience would help future students from their schools.
When I think of ECs on a application for a highly rejective college, my eye (untrained and not an AO) tends to immediately sort them into 3 buckets.
For some people “excellent ECs” means a long list. But often that list is no different than 80-90% of the other applicants unless they have a #3 and can show their passion for it.
If those graphs are taken from Naviance, one of the things that threw it off for us was that it showed test scores of all students admitted, even if they went test optional.
