Congratulations and glad it worked out! I am glad you did not post this list before any acceptances came in… :-SS but it no longer matters. Congrats!
Congrats on the 2 acceptances!!!
Which schools were considered the 7 “match/safety” schools? As others said, this is a very top-heavy list and don’t really see any safeties there. Any school with admission rates of about 25% or lower is, IMO, a reach for anyone. Tulane over-enrolled the past few years, so this year is accepting 800 fewer students and has an acceptance rate of 17% this year. They took zero off their WL last year. They initiated ED this year and took about 35% of their class ED. Would not count on any movement from the WL this year, though don’t know yet other than the probable 560 or so ED students how many will accept their admission, so don’t know if they will go to their WL this year, but I wouldn’t count on it.
If a school (one school) is TRULY your top choice and you will attend if accepted no matter what (even if you are full pay) then yes, it may be helpful for your student and/or school counselor to reach out to admissions. But unless those criteria are true, don’t call and say it, especially to more than one school.
And in one evening, the shoe is on the other foot! Congratulations!
Jumping in again, but now that I’ve seen the list, it’s easy to understand the waitlists, deferments, and denials. No safeties. But she has two great schools to,choose from, which is the biggest relief. I suspect she will get into Wake also.
It’s great that you posted here, because your daughter’s story can serve as a wake up for others in a similar situation. In a nutshell, high stats do not guarantee anything, except at auto-admit schools. I created a thread a couple of years ago about the “average” excellent student, and I will post it here becasue I think others reading this thread will benefit from both of our experiences. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1878059-truthful-advice-about-getting-into-top-colleges-for-your-average-excellent-student-p1.html
I’m not judging the OP but the kids at our high school with lists like this made them with one thing in mind -prestige. In my mind, this list is a little all over the place in terms of what each of these schools offers. One thing in common? High USNWR ranking. Our S19 came home yesterday and was saying that it seems like all of the top 30 kids in his class (out of 700) seem to have the same list. He said they must just walk into their GC’s office and ask for “the list”. :))
Duke, Vanderbilt, NU, Wash U, Emory, Chicago, then throw in a few Ivies and either Michigan or Virginia. They were all bullied into applying to Illinois by the GCs. I don’t know yet what’s happened to this year’s class, but last year’s class had a whole lot of kids end up at the one “safety” they got into - Illinois. They were all so bitter and are not happy there. Love your safeties, people! And actually have some!
I can see how the gc may think Villanova was safe or low match. At our school it used to be viewed that way, and would be rare for a kid with those stats to not get in, though we do have a nice relationship with them. But this year, because they added ED to the EA option, all bets were off and gc wasn’t sure what would happen. For years, Tulane was the go to safety at our school for high stats kids. That changed about 3 years ago with yield protection taking over, and now Tulane takes the solid stats kids from our school and wls the super high ones.
Is anyone annoyed that the OP said that the list was made “per Naviance and GC recommendations”?
Ugh! 15 schools, no super safety and the GC approved of this list?
I am so happy @3littlebirds that your D has 2 acceptances. And I feel bad for these kids and the “guidance” they got.
Our GC told one of S19’s friends that Grinnell was a safety for him based on our Naviance. According to our Naviance, we only have ten kids who have applied in the last three years. Were this student’s stats with those green dots on the Naviance chart? Yes. But more nuance is needed than reading a chart. Two of those kids were recruited athletes. A few others showed tons of interest - visited and interviewed. Schools with low acceptance rates just aren’t safeties.
GCs should know the trends (like what’s happened at places like Tulane and Northeastern), not just glance at a high school’s Naviance chart. We are having our junior planning meeting soon and I’ve requested class of 2018 info for the school’s on S19’s list. I want to know what just happened to kids from our school. Things can change very quickly and schools that were taking lots of kids from our high school sometimes turn on a dime. Northwestern took 22/98 in 2016 and only 8/111 (!!!) for 2017. NU had jumped on the demonstrated interest bus and the kids hadn’t been applying ED or making much of an effort to visit and write strong essays. I hear this year was a blood bath for ED at NU. Haven’t heard yet about RD.
@3littlebirds YAHOO!!! My heart leapt when I saw your post about her first acceptance – the second one is icing on the cake! You must be so relieved and proud.
Congrats! Your GC did your student a disservice by not insisting on applying to a school with a 50% admit rate. The highest admit rate I see on that list is Villanova, which in years past had ~39% acceptance rate but dropped to mid 30s last year and 29% this year. BU was apparently the other “safety” at 28% acceptance.
The hardest part of the college search is finding a safety school that your child loves. Future applicants - keep that in mind
Congrats to your daughter. As a parent of a 2017 high stat(same sats) kid, I think your GC did a terrible job with true safety schools. Your list was great, but they were all match/reach schools for your child as well as anyone else with similar stats. I am so glad it worked out in the end for your daughter.
I’m starting to feel like a homerdog groupie! This is an excellent point. D1 showed lots of love and interest to her safety. We took it every bit as seriously as every other school. This ended up having two benefits. D1 was as comfortable with the safety as with the other schools. Further, although I think she would have been accepted without doing any of it, I believe it made a difference in the amount of merit aid she was offered. Their awards are holistic and the school has latitude within categories. D1 visited and wrote thank you letters to the admissions officer who set up special tours for her. I know she went to bat for us. Even if a safety is completely auto admit, it makes sense to research it as conscientiously as you would any other school. How else can a student know that its a place he or she would be happy attending? Moreover, I think treating a school with respect from the beginning engenders a good feeling all around.
With D2 we started with schools that should be safeties or at least likely matches. Luckily, she has fallen in love with two of them so far. We will do all we can to let them know how much she is interested and not take anything for granted. I’m too well aware that last year’s safety can turn on a dime and become this years reach.
I am in no way suggesting that OP didn’t do these things. Just trying to distill some lessons for future generations.
I have to give props to our GC. She made it clear to my son that he needed to love his safety school - and could see himself there for 4 years. She also asked what he thought his safeties were. She told him that the ones he chose were “hopefuls” and that if he didn’t get in EA he should consider adding a couple of schools that were definite safeties (even tough he was at the top or over the middle 50th for both). I think when kids look at these scattergrams, they think they are in if they are in a particular quadrant. They forget they are looking at history and not at real time data, which can dramatically change from one year to the next. VT and FSU saw large jumps in applications this year and received a lot of apps from really high stat kids. I realize schools get “hot” from time to time, but I think the increases were probably driven by kids applying to 15 colleges, which is excessive IMO. As a result, VT had to drop its acceptance rate from ~70% to 56% this year and a lot of kids that would have been accepted over the last 5 years were stunned when they got rejected.
Yeah, glad she got in. My daughter had similar stats, and is a competitive dancer. I learned form Lindagaf post about the average excellent student.
Now that she is in, I will tell you two differences we did with our list, last year.
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She applied to a state school, for us, U-Mass. It was also a financial safety for us, she had a 97% - 99% chance to get in. Our guidance department ( not great ) strongly suggested each student to apply to one state school. We have pretty good state schools, so students from different regions may not have the same option.
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She applied to a true safety, where she would be happy. This is where parents may need to step in. Most students have no problem finding reaches and matches. For us it was Saint Michael’s in Vermont, early action (not early decision), she had an acceptance in hand before Thanksgiving.
Not sure if someone pointed this out, but Villanova won the NCAA basketball championship in 2106, and this can have a big impact on applications going up the next few years after.
Thanks for sharing.
I completely understand why the OP started to feel panic after the BU and Tulane waitlists, and a deferral by Michigan. Back in the day, I had BU pegged as a possible safety for my kids, because the Naviance data I saw showed the clearest pattern of stats-based admission at any private college I looked at. Tulane was everyone’s favorite safety-you-could-love for high stats students. And Michigan, while never a safety, offered a good prospect of early admission for high-stats. Michigan became my son’s safety when it accepted him in early December. I can’t imagine how tense he and his parents would have felt as the end of March approached if he hadn’t had that acceptance in hand.
But that was 11 years ago, and obviously things have changed a lot. Maybe even since last year, or two years ago.The GCs will probably give better guidance to next year’s class.
"I’m not judging the OP but the kids at our high school with lists like this made them with one thing in mind -prestige. In my mind, this list is a little all over the place in terms of what each of these schools offers. One thing in common? High USNWR ranking. Our S19 came home yesterday and was saying that it seems like all of the top 30 kids in his class (out of 700) seem to have the same list. He said they must just walk into their GC’s office and ask for “the list”. "
It was the same at the small boarding school my kids attended. The vast majority of kids applied to the same 20 or thirty schools. It seems to me to reflect the desire for prestige/status rather than any distinguishing objective criteria of the schools to be attended, at least at the undergraduate level.
This is actually a fortunate situation for those willing to look beyond institutional popularity and to do the research/digging. Since so many of the students apply to the same small pool of schools, opportunities for admission and merit awards are opened up at colleges that are less popular but have a high quality undergraduate experience.
With 3.0 GPA and 99.9% SAT score at a VA school long time ago, my safety then was UMD where I got in, and then Cornell, Harvard. Asians were treated as URMs back then so . . . I did have good athletic ECs though. Two out of three acceptances was not bad. My parents who graduated from elementary school and high school and I didn’t know about Cornell or Ivy League. I only applied to Cornell because some kid two years ahead of me I knew was attending Cornell and told me to apply thinking my GPA must have been high.
Regarding having schools that aren’t exactly alike. My kid left Vassar on his list even though everything else was a midsize university in case come April he changed his mind about it being too small.
I get that list - it would have been a fine list in 2007, now not so much. My older son’s safeties were RPI and WPI. He heard from RPI in November, through a priority application program they had. If it hadn’t been good news - we probably would have been more cautious.
OP so happy to hear the good news.
I don’t think it would have been a fine list in 2007- I had a kid that year, very high stats, some very cool EC/interests, great relationships with teachers. GC INSISTED on Rutgers, or U Conn, or U Mass or Binghamton- at least one auto-admit type school which was not holistic and did not practice yield protection. Based on Naviance, no kid with those stats at ever been rejected from Northwestern or Tufts or BU… GC said “there’s always a first time”.
I get the variety in the list - students can find one aspect of a school appealing enough to make up for its differences from what they’re over all looking for. The variety doesn’t have to mean she was just looking at prestige. I do agree that the GC should have given better guidance on adding a true safety, particularly if the EA decisions came out before the regular deadline (and if they came out afterwards, that’s more reason for the GC to make sure the students have a rolling admit and/or a very safe admit school).
My S18 had both William and Mary and Michigan on his list, two very different schools - they were somewhat outliers from the rest of his schools, which were mid-sized (other than his safety, which was big) schools in or near cities. But like the rest, W&M and Michigan had a strong program in his likely major, and strong academics with a feel that was more cooperative than super high pressure/competitive (he didn’t want the intensity of, say, Chicago/Swarthmore/Carnegie Mellon/some Ivies). There were so many things he liked about both W&M and Michigan, but the schools he liked best combined the things he liked in both and also had easy access to a city and weren’t gigantic. That didn’t mean he would drop these two from his list, particularly in such a tough year. It just meant they weren’t quite as good a fit for him as several others on his list, but he could potentially see himself at either place.