How do you think about acceptance rate?

NiceUnparticularMan
Mon, 28 Oct 2024 21:26:14 +0000

circuitrider:

you have to admit there is a lot of sunlight, not to mention snow and black ice, between Wesleyan and St. Olaf.

Sure, but as I said from the outset:

If you don’t have a super strong locational preference (or can talk yourself into that state of affairs), you can often find otherwise comparable colleges in less generally popular locations where the admit rates are significantly higher.

So if you have a strong preference for the state of Connecticut over the state of Minnesota, and cannot talk yourself into a different attitude, then you obviously won’t be willing to consider St Olaf as an arbitrage opportunity with Connecticut College.

This was part of what I was referring to later when I said:

But if you feel like it, maybe you also add St Olaf as potentially a Likely

If you have a sufficiently strong location preference, you may not feel like it. And that is fine.

circuitrider:

Well, just to be clear, cross-admits (Parchment) are not the same as Targets vs. Reaches.

Correct, and I did not suggest otherwise.

The categorizations I was hypothesizing were based on the framework here:

https://support.collegekickstart.com/hc/en-us/articles/217485088-Differences-Between-Likely-Target-Reach-and-Unlikely-Schools

The first part of the hypothesis was that Wesleyan was a Reach. That is automatically satisfied if the college in question has less than a 25% admit rate, and Wesleyan does, so that one is easy.

The second part of the hypothesis is that Connecticut College was a Target. It first needs an admit rate over 25% (it does), and then second your academic profile has to put you in their middle 50th or higher.

The third part of the hypothesis was that St Olaf was potentially a Likely (depending your qualifications). For that to be true, it needs an admit rate over 50% (which it does, albeit barely), and your academic profile would have to put you in their top quartile. That could or could not be true–we know by hypothesis your profile put you into Connecticut’s middle 50th or higher, and if it is high enough that would make St Olaf a Likely, but it might not be high enough in which case it would likely be another Target instead (although there is a narrow slice where your qualifications would be mid-50th for Connecticut and not for St Olaf–see above).

circuitrider:

are you saying Connecticut College was your S24’s dream school?

Oh no.

I discouraged him from having a “dream school”, but from the beginning his stated favorite was Yale, to which he applied SCEA, and then got deferred.

I was fine with him liking Yale (again, not a fan of calling that a dream school though), but both his college counselor and I encouraged him to think broadly about why he liked Yale, and what other colleges might make sense for him.

And initially he thought of some of the other “usual suspects” among the Ivies and NESCACs (both popular in his HS), but again both his counselor and I encouraged him to think broader than that. And once I adopted this working hypothesis about locational arbitrage, I encouraged him to think specifically about colleges he might like in other regions. Some regions he was not willing to consider, but he was willing to look down the East Coast to North Carolina, and out into the Midwest.

So we visited a bunch of colleges, some he liked, some he didn’t. And eventually he applied to colleges in all the regions he looked at.

And then he got into colleges in all the regions he looked at. But as it happens (and admittedly this is a bit too perfect for this story), he got into exactly none of his Ivy or NESCAC colleges. To be fair, his NESCACs were Amherst, Williams, and Middlebury, and he did get waitlisted by Amherst and Middlebury. So maybe if he had dug deeper into the NESCAC lineup one would have admitted him. Same with Ivies–he only applied to three (Yale, Penn, and Brown) so didn’t fully test what could have happened.

But in any event, outside of those colleges, he was admitted everywhere else he applied. I mentioned WashU, Carleton, Vassar, and St Andrews, and he was also admitted to Haverford, got offered the Monroe Scholarship at William & Mary, got merit offers from Rochester and Pitt, and got admitted to Wake (no merit, though).

Frankly that was overkill, but point being he had lots of great offers to consider in different areas. And WashU had really emerged as his favorite after a visit, and he revisited with an offer and that confirmed it, so he is at WashU.

OK, so my point when I said this “did seem to work out well for my S24” is that by not just sticking to his original preferred region, by being willing to consider, visit, and apply to other colleges outside that region, he ultimately got great offers and ended up at a college he really likes.

But again, this is just one anecdote. Still, I consider it a successful implementation of my locational arbitrage strategy.