<p>I found this 2009 article from the Daily Beast fascinating (and somewhat disturbing). By the way, these are not my words below!</p>
<p>Dirty Secrets of College Admissions
In a Daily Beast exclusive, college admissions officers reveal the shameful truth about the selection process. Rich kids from New York, boring Asian math geniuses, and oboe-playing poets need not apply.</p>
<p>Like other people are saying, although your SAT and GPA are high, they want to make sure that you aren’t, as you are saying using them as a Safety school. Colleges and Universities can only let in a certain amount of people and they don’t want to reserve a spot for you unless they know you will most likely go there when they could reserve a spot for a very likely going to enroll student.</p>
<p>@TomSrOfBoston @Oregongirl14 How do colleges know if you’ve opened their emails or just deleted them? I ha no idea email senders had this capability, and this is all sounding very NSA-y.</p>
<p>S applied to Lehigh. West Coast kid, not in a position to visit. The invitation to the local event arrived in our USPS mailbox THE DAY OF THE EVENT…which was 70 miles away…in rush hour traffic. We pinged asked his HS guidance counselor for advice…the response …don’t stress, the GC would let Lehigh know about the late arrival of the invite.</p>
<p>S was in theater during senior year and in the middle of ‘heck’ week during several college visits. He could not (without leaving an entire cast in the lurch) attend the Lehigh campus session. </p>
<p>From all published data, this was a ‘low match’. He was wait listed. The same scenario played out in the case of another university. It was certainly a learning experience. S and D were both advised to establish an email specifically for the college application process. This eliminated the problem of a HS email account disappearing after graduation or a current email spamming or trashing important correspondences. In retrospect, all an applicant needs to do is assign someone (mom, dad, bored sibling, local college student in need of supplemental income etc) to submit the appropriate ‘pings’ to those universities who would like their backsides massaged.</p>
<p>If a HS student, with an aggressive class schedule, proven record of performance and supportive letters of recommendation (how may of those asked to write the recs really want to be doing this for applicants just trolling?) takes the time required to fill out the application, write the X number of very school specific essays, pays the application fee and gets it all in on time…chances are they are interested. Chances are they did not run a random college selection generator and then decide where to apply after a roll of the dice.</p>
<p>If a university want to be schmoozed, the end result is a class of schmoozers.</p>
<p>The (Daily Beast) article mentions two different admissions officers who got food poisoning in Buffalo and thereafter rejected applicants from Buffalo. That sounds like an urban legend going the rounds.</p>
<p>This is presumably done by embedding URL images (which are not necessarily visible-to-human images) in HTML email, so if you open the email in a plain text email reader or one which does not open embedded URLs (typically for security purposes), the opening of the email will not be noticed.</p>
<p>So this means, after reading the email from the college in an email reader that does not open embedded URLs, do so with opening of embedded URLs once you have verified that it is legitimate, so that the “has read the email” counter gets triggered.</p>
<p>Of course, if there is a link to the college’s web site that you are supposed to explicitly click to, it would be a good idea to go there and browse, since that may be a more explicit way of tracking interest from the email.</p>
<p>A pretty common software it just tells them if the person opened the email how soon and if it was forwarded. I no some college sports coaches and they’ve shown me the program. They said they use it to see how serious prospects are but that admissions uses them too.</p>
<p>You act like its spying. They send an email and see what happens to it. Do you think it’s spying that you can see that a text message was delivered/opened? It’s not even like its a secret lots of people know about it. I mean some schools (Yale ^) even let people know if they don’t use those soft wares. </p>
<p>Point is (see post above), depending on your email reader and its security settings, reading the email may not trigger the action that causes the software to know that you read the email, so you may have to take specific action to ensure that you “show interest” by “showing that you read the email”.</p>
<p>Specialized email software. Schmoozing of regional admissions officers. The keeping of “demonstrated interest” files on prospective applicants.</p>
<p>If this really is the current game in college admissions, I’m surprised so many kids/parents choose to play.</p>
<p>The energy an applicant spends feigning interest (to check the “I’m-interested” box) would be better spent on any number of other pursuits.</p>
<p>Don’t even get me started on the games that sleazy college coaches play during the athletic recruitment process. I’ve heard so many stories from scholar-athletes over the years…</p>
<p>Use of “level of applicant’s interest” as a frosh admissions criterion is gaining in popularity, particularly among private schools that see themselves being used as “safeties” but do not want to be used as “safeties” by students who are unlikely to matriculate.</p>
<p>similar to @terminatorp 's experience: ~4-5 years ago, a family friend wanting to major in mech. engineering was accepted by Stanford and Rice (his reach schools) and was rejected by UT-Austin (one of his two safety schools). We have no idea why. (The possible explanations given by Ms. Rubenstone do not seem to apply.)</p>
<p>@bartleby007
What are people supposed to do not get the education required for most good jobs? Also, watch what you say about college coaches. You’re generalizing. I was being recruited as were most of my teammates. Some coaches are great people. I know people who have had bad experiences in this, but both of those were high school administrators or high school coaches/club coaches at fault. Don’t talk about things you don’t know about or haven’t heard straight from someone. Remember the coach is only a small part of the equation.</p>
<p>UT Austin is a safety for some (those eligible for automatic admission by being in the top 7% or whatever class rank threshold in a Texas high school), but probably a reach for all others, since all others (including out-of-state students, international students, just-missed-the-top-7% students, and students at non-ranking schools) must compete for only a quarter of the admission slots. Note that UT Austin’s engineering and business divisions are said to be more popular and more selective than its other divisions.</p>
<p>Overall frosh class stats and admission rates at UT Austin can therefore be very misleading if one is trying to make a reach/match/safety assessment based on them.</p>
<p>I was told by an interviewer that one of my son’s reach schools was tired of being used as a safety for HYPS students, so they wouldn’t accept anyone RD from his high school. My son had to email admissions for an unrelated reason, so I told him to include that it was his top school and he was still excited to attend (it genuinely was at the time, but I’m not sure if it still is). We will see soon enough whether that worked or not.</p>
<p>The root problem in the college admissions process is that yield is taken into account in ranking schools. Honestly, unless you are HYPS, there is always a bigger fish, and someone is going to use you as a safety.</p>
<p>Not to play devils advocate here, but it does make sense to me why some schools would waitlist students with much higher stats. And I think the reasoning is completely justified too.</p>
<p>Schools can only admit so many students, since admittance guarantees the option to enroll. If you have, say, 10 kids applying, 7 of whom are serious about going (since they have few other options due to GPA/scores), and 3 who completely surpass the typical applicant in terms of GPA/scores, it makes sense to guarantee admittance to the students you know who are serious about attending.</p>
<p>In the end, it’s just a numbers game… schools see overly qualified students as less likely to attend.</p>
I do not believe that yield figures into the USNews rankings. </p>
<p>Some schools may be hesitant to admit a student with superior stats who may not get admitted to his drean schools. Such a student may try to “transfer up”. thus hurting the retention and graduation rates which are factored in by USNews. </p>
<p>However, they can account for yield at different stat ranges. For example, they may know from recent past experience that admitting 2 students for whom the school is a reach will yield 1 matriculant, while admitting 4 match students will yield 1 matriculant, and admitting 10 reach students will yield 1 matriculant. I.e. each reach admit gives 0.5 matriculants, while each match admit gives 0.25 matriculants, while each safety admit gives 0.1 matriculants.</p>
<p>So rejecting or waitlisting the safety applicants only makes sense if the school wants to raise its yield rate, or is concerned about such students transferring out later.</p>
<p>Wow, this is really eye-opening…and disturbing.</p>
<p>I think making assessments about “level of interest” based on the email open/pass-along rate is downright creepy. What if a kid has limited email access, and learned about the college from a Fiske guide at the local library? What if he works a lot and doesn’t have time to obsess over his application the way more fortunate kids with more time on their hands do?</p>
<p>I also agree completely with what dietz said: “If a university want to be schmoozed, the end result is a class of schmoozers.”</p>
<p>The only kids I know who reached out to their most-desired universities were exactly that type: schmoozers. Ick.</p>
<p>I always thought that calling schools to ask them questions was in a way incompetent because really how many questions are really out there about a college that you can’t find on the web? So those who call all the time are the ones who can’t figure things out themselves IMO.</p>
<p>I’d encourage that kid to walk around the corner to the bank of library computers.</p>
<p>Perhaps I’m in the minority here, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask students to display some basic interest in the schools to which they apply. In one hour a kid could request information from a dozen schools. In another hour that same kid could email a dozen admissions officer explaining that he doesn’t have the wherewithal to visit campus but asking when a representative of the school will visit his school or be in the area for a college fair.</p>
<p>Colleges have good reason to turn down students they don’t think will attend if admitted. They’re trying to craft a community, and the higher the yield the easier this is to do. The Common App has made it very easy for kids to apply to multiple colleges. A kid who has displayed a low level of interest is less likely to attend, not just because it may be his backup school, but because a student who hasn’t done much research on a school is unlikely to be able to assess whether the school is a good fit. Admissions officers would like to know that an applicant has a concrete reason for being interested in a college, even if that reason is just that the school “felt right” when he walked around campus.</p>