Does getting into a reach college mean you have a good shot at other reaches

I’m just wondering. Everything I got is great. My reach was 14%. Thx.

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Depends just how similar the colleges happen to be.

Admissions to Pomona doesn’t mean that you have a good shot at MIT. However, it may mean that you have a good shot at Williams. In a very general way, being accepted to a reach indicates that you are competitive for other similar reaches.

On the other hand, you may have been accepted to that particular reach because of something specific in your application stood out to that particular AO in that college, but is unlikely to stand out to any other AO.

In any case, reaches are still reaches, no matter what. However, being admitted to one or two similar reaches means that it is less of a reach for you than you would think, based only on its acceptance rates.

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I was accepted to GT for CS OOS. I was wondering about cornell rd or CMU Tepper

The answer to your question depends on something called admissions correlation (not even other kinds of correlation between colleges). However, we need large amount of data on cross-admits to infer these correlations and such data are simply unavailable, particularly in aggregate form.

As @MWolf pointed out, in the absence of such data, we can make some reasonable assumptions. Some schools are likely to be more correlated than others. However, no two schools with holistic admissions are likely to be near-perfectly correlated. One school may view certain aspect of your application more highly than the other, even if that particluar aspect can be measured objectively (which is often not the case).

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Cornell and CMU are very different colleges from GTech and each other. So admissions to GTech doesn’t add any more information except to validate something you likely already know - that you are a competitive applicant overall.

Congratulations and good luck!

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what schools are similar by chance. Thx

IMO, GTech would be more similar to Purdue engineering. Cornell is somewhat similar to CMU, but I think that Cornell would be more like UMichigan, maybe UNC. In many ways Cornell is similar to the top flagship universities than to private universities. CMU, in my opinion, would be like Northwestern and MIT.

Others may have different opinions.

isn’t Georgia tech cs as selective as cornell A&S? I might be wrong…

I would say this is correct, yes.

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One example of where different reach colleges may be less correlated is if you are admitted to one college where you have a “hook” or preference factor that is not applicable at the other college (e.g. you are a legacy or development relation at a college that considers that, but not at the other college; or you are a recruited athlete at one but not the other).

For transfers, there may also be other factors. For example, Stanford and Princeton are probably more correlated to each other for transfer admission (both appear to emphasize non-traditional student transfers) than either is to Harvard (which apparently shows no particular interest in non-traditional student transfers).

In terms of % admitted, maybe. But all the places at GT CS are going to CS. At Cornell A&S, even if it does not admit by major, only a certain percentage of them are. So it’s not exactly equivalent.

You mentioned your reach was 14%. Do you mean a website said you had a 14% chance of being admitted based on your stats? Or was 14% the overall admit rate for the college in a previous year?

As others have mentioned, there is some degree of a correlation between decisions at different schools. Students who are admitted to “reach” schools for which they believe they had little chance may have underestimated the strength of their application, particularly in areas that are less visible to the student (non-stats), resulting in a better chance than expected at other reaches. However, the degree of that correlation varies from school to school, depending on whether they emphasize whatever factors the school that admitted you emphasized, along with differences in general selectivity.

I’m not familiar with that level of detail about the criteria emphasized for out of state GT CS admission, other than knowing that is very selective and an excellent school. Congratulations on your admission.

Similar selectivities don’t imply higher correlation. Placing comparable weights on each and every admissions criterion would. None of us knows how much Georgia Tech weighs its admissions criteria for OOS CS applicants, but it is likely different from Cornell A&S in some significant ways, because many students were accepted by one of them and rejected by the other.

GTech is a public school, and, despite what they say about holistic admissions, as a rule, public schools weight heavier towards stats than private schools do. There are some exception, though. I think that W&M reviews students more like private colleges, and perhaps UVA.

Public colleges also often have a mission of focusing in in-state admissions, so that weighs heavily in admissions. This is true of GTech, UVA, UNC, W&M, UMich, and a few other low-admission colleges.

This is also true for the UCs, but the number of applications that they get from in-state applicants is high enough that they can accept in state applicants at an even lower rate than OOS and internationals, and they still have never dropped below 2/3 of the students being in-state - even at Berkeley and UCLA.

No, since admissions priorities can vary from school to school (and even from year to year) at the most selective schools, but congrats! :slight_smile:

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The overall admit to GT EA II was 14%, rumor has it for GT its 8% for CS.

Getting accepted at ANY college is not an indicator of whether you will be accepted at any other college.

Sample of one. One of my kids is a Boston University graduate with scholarship who did not get accepted at University of Maryland. Go figure.

Correlations can still be meaningful when the correlation coefficient is less than 1.0 (less than absolute certainty that decisions will match between 2 colleges). As an extreme example, suppose you have 2 students – student A and student B. Both students apply to Harvard and Yale during RD. Student A is accepted to Harvard, and student B is rejected from Harvard. If that is the only information you have about the 2 students, I’d expect that student A has a higher probability of being accepted to Yale than student B. It’s obviously not 100% certainty. There are countless reasons why a student might be accepted to Harvard and not Yale. However, among the thousands of students who apply to both HY, I think it’s safe to assume that those who are admitted to H have a higher rate of Y acceptances than those who are rejected to H since there is a lot of overlap between the criteria that H and Y value in applicants.

Along the same lines, suppose you have 2 students who apply to Cornell A&S CS. Student A is known to have been accepted to GT CS out of state, and student B is randomly selected from the admit pool. If that is the only information you know about the 2 students, I’d expect student A has the greater probability of admission. It’s obviously not 100% certainty. Cornell RD is probably going to have an admit rate well in to the single digits this year, and there a countless reasons why a student might be accepted to GT and not Cornell, with their differing admission systems. However, I expect kids who are accepted to GT CS out of state have a higher admit rate to Cornell CS than the overall average for the applicant pool. How much higher is unclear. There is also going to be huge variation between individual students, depending on the specific details of their application and how that fits with what the 2 colleges are looking for in applicants.

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Why would you equate CMU to Northwestern? Not even close. CMU is one of the best CS schools out there and hardest to get into. It’s also a tiny tiny school. NU is neither known for CS nor is it tiny. It may not be a huge Big 10 school like Michigan but for CS it is no CMU.

UIUC, Cornell, and GA Tech are all highly ranked CS schools equally ranked all with a different type of campus. Getting into one doesn’t necessarily mean you have a greater chance of getting into another because they all look at different things. Also at Cornell CS is in both Arts and Sciences or Engineering and at GT it’s in its own school so that plays a role in admissions too since you don’t enter Cornell as a CS major, but only in the College of Engineering or Arts&Sciences. UIUC getting into CS is tough and you go in as a freshman. CMU is a tiny program impossible to transfer into because no one leaves.

Back to NU though, you can change your major at any time among any school there whenever. Which is nice but it’s not comparable for CS to any of those mentioned by OP.

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I’m talking about the way students are selected, not the ranking of the CS program. UIUC is similar to OSU in how it selects students, not to Princeton which is similarly ranked in CS.

Northwestern has 8,300 or so undergraduates, CMU has 7,000 or so. Hardly a stark difference in size. Both are private, relying heavily on holistic admissions. CMU may be very different as a college, but when it comes to what they are looking for in a student, their selection process likely has more in common with NU than with GTech.

Maybe somebody who has worked with or for CMU’s admissions will come forward and say that their admissions process is different from other private research universities because CMU does things differently in everything. But those differences are unlikely to be due to size or ranking in CS.