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<p>It is surprising how many top schools like to recruit twins (I am assuming you have twins). 3 years ago Yale made history by not only admitting quadruplets but getting all 4 to show up.</p>
<p>amiable wrote: “They pushed him to apply to only top schools. He applied to–and was rejected by–Harvard, MIT, Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia and Brown.”</p>
<p>I really think amiable’s nephew is THE case study for the shut out. He’s likely a bright, ambitious kid, but was woefully misguided.</p>
<p>His top choice was likely Harvard or Princeton because those are the ‘top’ schools and he saw himself as a top student. He likely couldn’t give you specifics as to why he wants to go there, except he wants to attend the ‘best’ school with the other ‘top’ students and ‘best’ professors. He may have never even visited, sat in on a class or spoken with a professor at Harvard. He probably applied SCEA, not really thinking too much about the applicant pool which likely included Olympic qualifiers, professional actors, published writers and kids elected to their local school boards and town councils. </p>
<p>After his early deferral or rejection, he’s hoping for maybe a ‘lower Ivy’. And perhaps he would have been more competitive at say Cornell or Duke in the early round. But guess what? Half their beds are now taken and their applications will increase tenfold from the early round. All the other kids rejected or deferred early from HYP and Stanford are now flooding those schools with their applications. Those schools probably now have already signed up several good all-a-rounders from his region and many more are now in the pipeline.</p>
<p>He thinks - Thank God I appllied to UNC where my stats are solidly in the upper quartile. But maybe he didn’t know or give much thought to the fact that because of state imposed quotas, the out-of-state profile is radically different from what is listed on UNC’s website. UNC has room to offer places to only about 13% of their OOS applicants so they can be damn particular.</p>
<p>So, he’s shut-out. Maybe he reluctantly enrolls at one of his State colleges, where he likely gets a perfectly fine education.</p>
<p>@twoinanddone I love your post. We have those conversations at our house - not specifically related to the Bronte sisters. But, older son, who is intellectual though was a B student and younger daughter, who is all about math/science and an A student, have a hard time conversing. Husband I have a lot of laughs listening to them. She wants nothing to do with analyzing poetry or art, and she has opinions on current events but has no desire to have philosophical discussions about them. And she loves anything to do with numbers. </p>
<p>Back to the original topic - how does a student get shut out. Daughter is a junior and we just had our one and only “junior meeting” with the GC. We discussed the preliminary list of schools she is interested in, which consists of the usual list of tech schools. Daughter’s grades are excellent, but she hasn’t take SAT’s/ACT’s yet. I expect she will come out in the middle of the schools admissions stats - I am pretty sure we won’t be seeing near perfect scores. GC said she is sure to get into some, if not all, the schools. I reminded him that these are very competitive schools, and yes she is an excellent student but there are a lot of excellent students. I suggested we need to expand the list to include a few that are easier to get into (even our state school isn’t that easy anymore). He really didn’t get it. If I didn’t know any better, I would do as the GC says, assume he is right and that she is a shoe-in, and not bother exploring other options. That would be an example of how a good student could get shut out.</p>
<p>Unless your D is at a private school with top-notch guidance counselors, the guidance counseling that she’ll get is likely next to useless if she has her sights on anything other than the state schools where most kids go. Use CC as a resource. I am SOOOOO glad I did. </p>
<p>LanaHere, thanks but I was quoting someone else!</p>
<p>PG, I know you and I had different experiences at the same school. I would counter the criticism of “same people, same flagships, same suburbs” (at state flagships) with my personal observation that many, many students at our prestigious university brought their “sameness” from home with them, and their cliquishness and status-consciousness and sense of superiority were quickly recreated in the new environment. By the end of my first month I knew pretty much all the upscale suburbs of cities around the country–Menlo Park, Shaker Heights, Edina, Buckhead, Greenwich, etc. I knew whose daddies ran which companies and which girls were judged to be “prettiest” and “most popular” by what sorority they got into. There were plenty of kids who just wanted to cut class, watch soap operas, hook up, get drunk, do expensive drugs…the same things that happen at more ordinary schools. I think a lot of our classmates worked less hard in college than they did in high school (and I would bet that’s the case at any elite university). I still felt nerdy compared to a lot of my peers, and it took me till junior year to find a core group of like-minded friends and to not feel the same social anxiety I had felt in high school. I am glad you had a better experience, but for the sake of impressionable young people (or their parents) who might be reading this, I think it’s useful to present an alternative point of view.</p>
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<p>arwarw, this is EXACTLY what has happened in the cases I am personally familiar with. You can’t blame these kids for feeling this way after they have been told their whole lives how exceptional they are. I do blame their parents, counselors, etc. for not helping them focus on reality.</p>
<p>^^ I have no doubt this was what happened in 80s. However, I doubt this is the case 30 years later where many of the top colleges claim at least 50-60% being on some level of financial aid and also show 60% or more coming from public schools.</p>
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<p>The ones who did not care about academics in high school would not have gone to any four year college, so you would not have been with them at a state flagship university, even a not-very-selective one. Even at not-very-selective state flagship, those from your high school would have been a small minority, and the students from the various high schools would be (at worst, depending on the college) be at least from the top third or top half of the high school students academically. Given your previously stated major in math, you would have quickly found your tribe by taking more advanced math courses than the vast majority of the fellow students you would have disdained (weaker college students likely start in remedial math courses and may at most get to calculus for business majors).</p>
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<p>Even the local community college draws students who previously attended several high schools in the area, so it would not be “same old same old”. The state directional/regional university tends to cover a bigger region than the local community college, and the state flagship gathers students from the whole state, so there is more than just the “same old same old”.</p>
<p>"By the end of my first month I knew pretty much all the upscale suburbs of cities around the country–Menlo Park, Shaker Heights, Edina, Buckhead, Greenwich, etc. I knew whose daddies ran which companies and which girls were judged to be “prettiest” and “most popular” by what sorority they got into. "</p>
<p>I think that’s 'cause you were in a snobbier sorority :-). Just kidding. Yeah, I met girls from Shaker Heights, Edina, New Canaan, etc. but also plenty of girls from just general middle-class backgrounds. Plenty on financial aid and working jobs in addition to taking classes. Yes, there were girls whose daddies ran companies but there were girls whose fathers were just average Joes. A guy in my major who went on to have phenomenal success was the son of a janitor and was from Back of the Yards (=a very bad neighborhood in Chicago). I really did find all types, though it was certainly more Midwestern than it is today. </p>
<p>Here in PA. many students do report that students at Penn State do in fact hang out with others from their high school (quite a few send dozens each year) and more than a few of these do not seem to have much interest in making new friends. This is a complaint I have heard for decades. </p>
<p>And that is one reason why prospective students often ask about honors dorms.</p>
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<p>Waving…:)</p>
<p>There are 8000 freshman at penn state main and 31% are from out of state. </p>
<p>“Unless your D is at a private school with top-notch guidance counselors, the guidance counseling that she’ll get is likely next to useless if she has her sights on anything other than the state schools where most kids go.” Ain’t that the truth.</p>
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<p>I know this happens at UW too, since so many local kids end up there. But that doesn’t mean students can’t make friends with new kids, join clubs focusing on new interests, or otherwise expand their horizons. Some kids want to get away from high school, while others don’t. I don’t think that makes them intellectual or social dullards. Another thing that contributes to maintaining old friendships is that students have to start planning their sophomore year housing arrangements during the fall semester of freshman year. I think it’s ridiculous, and it leads to many kids defaulting to their HS classmates simply because they know them well enough to feel comfortable committing to live together.</p>
<p>Is being shut out more common at the PhD level or at the undergraduate level?</p>
<p>A recently came across a study with some numbers for shut outs at <a href=“http://people.bu.edu/jonsmith/Enrollment.pdf”>http://people.bu.edu/jonsmith/Enrollment.pdf</a> . Of the 6,000 students in the ELS data (from ~10 years ago) who did not use early applications, 11% had no acceptances. ~54% of the shut outs applied to only one 4-year college, ~28% applied to 2 colleges, ~10% applied to 3 colleges, and under 5% applied to 4 colleges. Among students who applied to 2 or more colleges, the rate of students who were accepted to at least one college and chose not to enroll in a 4-year college was higher than the shut out rate, which may partially relate to financial issues. I’d expect the overall shut out rate to be lower since this data does not include students who had early applications. Students who only plan to apply to 1 school and do so via EA/ED get a 2nd chance to try again and apply to more schools during the RD round. </p>
<p>The earlier HS data ucbalumnus posted had a surprisingly similar percentage of shut outs by number of applications. The HS data showed 55% of shutouts had 1 application, nearly matching the ~54% in the study. 27% of the shutouts in the HS data had 2 applications, again nearly matching the ~28% in the study. However, the overall rate of shut outs was considerably higher in the study, more than just the increase that would be expected from not including early applications. This is not unreasonable considering that the shut out rate is expected to vary significantly from one high school to the next due to things like differences in HS/GC quality, differences in the percentage of students/parents who are especially concerned with attending a 4-year college, differences in the early action/early decision/auto admit policies for state schools in different states, differences in selectivity of nearby states schools in different areas, and differences in how easy it is to apply to nearby schools in the common application (both number of schools and states like CA supporting applying to multiple state schools at once). </p>
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<li>No one said it was completely rational, but I have certainly observed, on CC and in real life, that some people who were good students in high school feel like it is a personal defeat and an invalidation of their hard work if they wind up at the same college as high school classmates who didn’t do as well or work as hard. That’s silly, because they live in the same biosphere, breathe the same air, and will wind up living and working cheek by jowl with those people and others just like them, and if distinctions get drawn it will be on the basis of post-high-school performance, not how they did in APUSH. But it’s there. At the very least, it’s an emotional fact.<br></li>
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<p>In some cases, it reflects an unattractive contempt for lesser mortals, a desire to have their greater worth certified by membership in a fancier club. In other cases, however, I think it can represent a less unattractive desire not to stand out, not to be the best all the time, to feel what it’s like to be normal. I had a conversation like that with my son once. We talked about all the stress he was feeling because he was a top student at his school, and how cautious and tense he had become because he was afraid of losing status if he stumbled. Part of his reticence about his public university option was the belief that he would feel the same way there, that there would be the same dynamic of a huge gap in outcomes between the winners and the not-winners, and that he would have to continue to stand out to be successful. He wanted out of that. I thought that was overblown, but it reflected real feelings he had.</p>
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<li><p>I loved my high school and my high school classmates. I had no desire whatsoever never to see them again. Still, when I got to my prestigious private college, there’s no question that there was a rush of exhilaration as I experienced just how smart and engaged everyone was, how different the atmosphere was from even my excellent high school. I was on Cloud 9 for awhile. I fully understand that I could have found my people at any decent public university, but it would have taken some work, and we would have been a kind of subculture, not the mainstream. It wouldn’t have been the crack high I got at Elite U. Now, of course, that crack high isn’t worth $100,000+, especially if you don’t have it, and I don’t think it has a permanent effect on anyone’s life. But I do think there is a different quality to the experience.</p></li>
<li><p>All that said, there is no possible definition of “shut out” that includes having to go to a state flagship honors program. </p></li>
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<p>Among my kids’ friends, there was a common (not universal) pattern of applying to 1-3 Ivy-type universities and one public (usually Pitt or Temple, less often Penn State) where they were assured of some merit money. Some “won,” some didn’t. The ones that didn’t were disappointed, of course, but they didn’t feel their lives were invalidated. They knew what they had to do at Pitt or Temple to be successful, and they went and did it. </p>
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<li><p>The stuff about kids from your high school hanging together at State U. made me giggle a little bit, because it sounded just like the Andover kids at my college. And where my daughter went to college (not State U.), there were six kids from her 4-5 grade class at a private school 800 miles away. She shared an apartment with one of them for two years, and hung out plenty with a girl she had known since kindergarten. One of her best friends there had grown up three blocks away from us. She had never met him before college, but they figured out pretty quickly that she had sold him the corsage he gave his prom date. There’s nowhere to hide for the kids from fancy private schools.</p></li>
<li><p>Periodically, I put in a little ad for the University of Toronto and McGill University. They are world-class public universities in vibrant, exciting cities. From their standpoint, they overcharge U.S. students shamelessly, which means that effectively they charge about the same as many in-state public universities. They have very predictable, numbers-based admissions. They love U.S. students because we pay so much, and there are lots of U.S. students at each. They (and UBC on the West Coast) are an option more people should think about.</p></li>
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<p>Re: <a href=“http://people.bu.edu/jonsmith/Enrollment.pdf”>http://people.bu.edu/jonsmith/Enrollment.pdf</a></p>
<p>At the end of the paper are some figures and tables.</p>
<p>Figure 2 indicates that a majority of the applicants applied to 3 or fewer four year colleges, far fewer than the typical number listed by students on these forums. Table 2 indicates that the mean number of applications was 3.16, but with 3.70 for the top SES quartile versus 2.67, 2.62, and 2.89 for the lower three SES quartiles.</p>
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<p>This captures exactly my feelings of liberation at attending my in-state flagship.</p>
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<p>I think we’re in agreement here. Unlike Pizzagirl, I had the opportunity to attend an exceptional in-state flagship. The point I’ve tried to make here (and elsewhere on CC) is that not all state flagships are cut from the same cloth, and it’s a huge mistake to lump them all together. The middle 50% ACT scores at my public flagship alma mater, Michigan, are 28-32, figures that are much closer to those at Pizzagirl’s private alma mater, Northwestern (middle 50% ACT 30-35) than they are to the in-state public flagship Pizzagirl rejected, the University of Missouri (middle 50% ACT 23-28). A student with a 30 ACT would be in the 85th percentile of her class at Mizzou, in the 37th percentile at Michigan, and in the 15th percentile at Northwestern. A student with a 32+ ACT would be a rarity at Mizzou (probably fewer than 400 out of an entering class of 6,000), in roughly the top half of the class at Northwestern, and in the top quartile at Michigan–but with Michigan’s larger class, there would actually be more such students at Michigan (about 1,500 per entering class) than at Northwestern (about 1,000). Bottom line, a top student could find students of like ability at Mizzou but it would take a lot of effort and they’d all be outliers. At Michigan they’d be common enough and numerous enough to be nothing out of the ordinary, and easy to find. At Northwestern they’d be tripping over each other. I’m not convinced the difference between “nothing out of the ordinary and easy to find” and “tripping over each other” is of great significance, but in any event it’s a smaller difference than that between either of those categories and “a rarity and an outlier.” </p>
<p>Exactly. Very well said. I make no apologies for feeling that my own state flagship wouldn’t have suited me. My current state flagship (Illinois) is another story, and Michigan is yet another story. </p>