<p>I cannot comment on the social aspect of Northwestern, but academically, I doubt that it makes a difference for most students whether they are at Yale or Harvard or Northwestern. They all have wonderful profs and some not so wonderful ones. They all have great resources.
Just recently I talked to a prof at one of the schools on your list (not H, Y or Northwestern) who had had huge enrolments in one of his classes. He could not find enough TFs to lead sections for that class and so decided to drop the requirement for a research paper. The school charges as much as H, Y and Northwestern.</p>
<p>Roseland, I love your overall positive attitude about this college app process. Your comments about crying while at Harvard brought to mind my own love affair with MANY of the schools we visited with and for our son. This will sound bizarre but I see so many of the different schools we visited in the architecture of the school he is actually at… my guy is at Yale, and while a frosh on the Ole Campus, there are some buildings there that evoke Dartmouth the moment you see them, when you go to the Commons, it reminds me of MIT, the Beinecke Library makes me think of Berkeley…Saybrook College makes me think of Cambridge in England…the street where many of the math classes are held make me think of Williams…yes, my son won the lottery after EA deferral, but, for me, every visit to New Haven is a treat because the campus reminds me of the fun time we had exploring options before applying.</p>
<p>I think your post is quite helpful and thank you for sharing it. Lots of apt advice and I agree with a lot of it. </p>
<p>Being a little nitpicky here (cause in essence, I do agree with most that you wrote)…I think estimating a 50/50 chance at Brown and at Penn was not accurate/realistic. Your son sounds like an outstanding applicant. But I still would not have figured those odds at those two schools where a huge number in the applicant pool are just as outstanding. My D applied to both Brown and Penn and got into both but I never figured 50/50 odds at either. They were on the Reach part of her list, not the match part. </p>
<p>Another comment is that while you might not have actually said this, but your subject heading and all used the term “dream school” and I would NOT have a single dream school (not saying YOUR son did necessarily). I’d want my kid to like MANY schools on their list particularly when we are talking schools with difficult odds of admission. For kids who pine away for a certain dream school (again not saying YOUR son did this), it is a set up for disappointment. I can see having some schools on the list be more favored than others on the list but I think my kids kinda had “piles”…most favorite pile, medium favorite, least favorite but still like a lot and would be happy to attend pile. The piles were not necessarily the same as their reach, match, safety piles. In any case, all was not riding on one or two schools. The schools that weren’t the top schools, were not seen as consolations. So, I’d stay clear of the notion of a dream school and just pick schools you like with various odds of admission to create a balanced list. I think Northwestern is an excellent school and would have seemed like a wonderful acceptance or place to attend if not seen through the lens of “it’s not Yale or Harvard” which makes it more of a disappointment when in itself, it is mighty great. </p>
<p>I’m personally not into a kid applying to 16 schools though I understand your reasoning. I guess in your son’s case, the fact that you called what many think of as reach schools, “50/50” schools, the odds were more difficult as there were still a lot of high end schools on the list. I do agree that when you are dealing with the most selective schools, the list might need to be longer than a kid’s list going for mid range schools. But I don’t think you need to take it to 16 schools. My kid tried for very selective schools too but she applied to 8 colleges, not sixteen. The list was balanced. Just to give another kid’s picture here of the kind of list and the outcome:</p>
<p>Yale EA - deferred, then eventually rejected
Princeton - waitlist
Penn - accepted
Brown - accepted (attending)
Tufts - accepted
Smith - accepted
Conn College - accepted
Lehigh - accepted
UVM Honors College - accepted but tacked on because they offered a free ride to her but was not on her college list otherwise</p>
<p>Again, I do agree with your advice overall and am very glad you shared it.
Susan</p>
<p>I don’t get the 1 in 20 rule. Harvard, Princeton and Yale are more like 1 in 10…or 9. Penn, a school twice the size of those schools, is one in 20. </p>
<p>“He applied to four “at the top”: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale (which we estimated he had a 1 in 20 shot)”</p>
<p>Perhaps you are adjusting the standard stats because your son had some kind of hook or compelling situation. But, for most top students, it’s one in ten for these schools. If someone told me their kid had a one in twenty shot at these three, I would ask what the hook was. </p>
<p>16, IMHO, is too many. If you have some on the list where you feel 100% sure of acceptance, why apply to four of those? Was it becuase of finaicial reasons or because you thought your son might change his mind about the type of school to attend? </p>
<p>I think the approach will vary greatly, depending on the student. Some kids want to find the one school where they best find a fit and hope to be done after one app. - where “the dream” is not based on what USNWR dictates…rather, the place where the students develops the best sense of belonging. Those schools can be the 50/50s or the 100% sure bets. </p>
<p>And, after reading the original post twice, I still have no idea where this student really wanted to go. I’m not sure it would have mattered anyway.</p>
<p>To the OP,
I might add that I don’t agree with the “1 in 20” concept. At schools like Yale or Harvard, where the admit rate is around 9% or so, I’d say a kid has a one in ten chance. I don’t understand why you would increase the odds to be a longer chance than they are. Then you used the opposite reasoning on some schools like Brown, Penn, etc. where you called them a 50/50 chance which was making it a better odds than they might have been. If the admit rate is 16% at a school like Brown, then the chances are like one in six. What you CAN do, if you have stats like 1550 and val like your son had, is to BETTER the odds. For instance, while some schools are 1 in 10 chances based on the rate of admissions, if you have the stats as just quoted, then your chances become better but likely not 50/50. But they do get better than 1 in 10 (or whatever the admit rate is). Anyway, I don’t quite get the 1 in 20 odds you give at any school (unless their admit rate was 5% as was the case at several BFA programs my other D applied to but is NOT the admit rate at any Ivy), nor the 50/50 odds at an Ivy like Penn or Brown for anyone. </p>
<p>I think you have the percentages reversed. If Harvard had a 10% admission rate, it means that it had 1 in 10. If UPenn had a 20% admiition rate, it means it had a 2 in 10.
However, this does not mean that a student had a 1 in 10 chance at Harvard or a 2 in 10 chance at UPenn. First, one has to take out the hooked applicants from this base; then one has to look at applicants with different scores, and GPAs. In other words, a non-hooked student with 1450 SAT would not have the same chance of admission as one with 1550 SAT. Lastly, a non-hooked student with 1550 SAT who played, say a less desirable musical instrument would not have the same chance as one whose expertise happened to be in demand that year.</p>
<p>I agree with Marite. I didn’t correct Momsdream myself but agree that at Penn the chances don’t go to 1 in 20 but in fact get better than at Harvard. Like Marite says, if Penn has an admit rate of let’s say 20%, then the chances are more like 2 in 10. Momsdream, just cause Penn is bigger, doesn’t make the odds more difficult. The admit rate is what you have to go by, and in fact, the admit rate or chances at Penn are better than at Harvard/Yale/Princeton. </p>
<p>I also agree with Marite that these “chances” we are speaking of are just based on admit rate but many other factors come into play to assess those chances. So, a high end candidate might have better odds than a non hooked one, for instance, just like she says. But there is the element of how the kid fits a need in the class and you don’t know that end of it. So, the admit rate is a starting point in terms of odds. You can better the odds if you have something they want or if you are at the highest end of the admit pool (like vals have a better acceptance rate than their stated admit rate). </p>
<p>But I still maintain that 1 in 20 would not be the odds to go by for an Ivy for a typical well qualified applicant and that using 50/50 at ANY Ivy is the opposite extreme as not realistic in terms of the unpredictable nature of Ivy admissions. It is too good of an odds for my comfort level. I would call any Ivy a reach for anyone. I would not put it into Match category which is kinda what 50/50 implies. And then for a highly qualified kid like the OP’s son in terms of stats, I would not be saying 1 in 20. His chances at the top schools in the land were better than that.</p>
<p>For a very good but unhooked student applying to HYPSM, I think 5 percent–1 in 20–is indeed the “average” odds. They go up or down based on various factors. </p>
<p>“Walks on water” = 30 percent chance of acceptance.<br>
“Creates water first” = 50 percent chance of acceptance.<br>
“Invents water” = 70 percent chance of acceptance.<br>
“Only drinks water” = .0003 percent chance of acceptance.</p>
<p>Yes, I was fixated on 20%…not 1 in 20. I still don’t get 1 in 20 (or 5%) as an average, but I don’t know the factors that go into the equation. I’ll have to assume it was adjusted for his personal application, which would explain it. I don’t know why, but that post seemed compulsive and worrisome (worry-worthy?).</p>
<p>You also have to realize that when people share an individual story and give the basis stats like SAT, GPA and rank, we really do NOT know that much about the kid. Most applicants to elite schools have similar stats in that range. What sets them apart are things we really don’t know here as readers. We don’t know that much about this kid’s ECs or his role in them. We don’t know his teacher or GC recs. We have not read his essays. We don’t know his personality. We don’t know about his summers, his interests, his accomplishments outside of academic ones, his family and geographic background, etc. Not only are we missing many key pieces…even if we knew ALL of them (and we can’t), we don’t know the institutional needs for the class slots and we have not seen the other applicants they were deciding between. So, we can say all we want that this kid (or another) should have gotten into X or Y or not been closed out (like Andison is another example) when we really don’t truly know the ENTIRE profile or have not read the application, nor the others he was up against. </p>
<p>I still do not think this kid’s odds were one in 20 at elite schools with those stats. He was at least at the odds of the admit rate (1 in 10 at the top schools on his list) and likely better odds as a val as they were admitted at a higher rate of acceptance but not necessarily 50/50. One in 20 are long shot odds at an elite school if your stats and profile are not as reasonably in the ballpark. But for a kid well in the ballpark for those schools, his chances were AT LEAST the stated odds of admission (approx. 1 in 10). And the OP went to the opposite end to state the chances at schools like Brown or Penn as 50/50 which was being too optimistic for ANY Ivy league school, though granted his basic numbers looked excellent, but we know these schools are unpredictable and have low acceptance rates no matter how much you walk on water. GULP.</p>
<p>I had a chance to read the recs for my S. They made my S look like he “walks on water.” 30% chance of admission into HYPSM by your standards. I blinked at the prose. Was it really my S being described in those recs? How come I did not notice all these qualities in him? I don’t know how a letter for an “invented water in the first place” applicant would read like.</p>
<p>You mean the applicant’s qualities would be self-evident?
Well, my S’s “walk on water” qualities were not always evident to his fond mom’s eyes (only every other day; on alternate days, I wondered about his maturity).
Seriously, I reember reading on CC about perfect stats plus winners of prestigious national competitions getting rejected from HYPSM (maybe not all, but enough to sting). It really is a crapshoot.</p>
<p>As for the strategy of applying to many schools with 1/20 chance to boost likelihood of admission, I have my doubts.</p>
<p>In the past, the 1 in 20 number was an absolute mantra on this site, quoted and requoted, as the realistic chances for an RD unhooked applicant to HYPS. Truthfully, I never bought that as an absolute, but I was definitely in the minority. Now someone comes along who uses that oft-repeated ratio as a basis for her kid’s chances, and she’s been basically treated like an idiot. Everyone has a different way of picking apart what seemed to me a modest, thoughtful post.</p>
<p>Well, she’s not posting anymore. Way to go, folks.</p>
<p>Recently I PM’d with a really nice dad who had questions about a school I knew a lot about. He seemed intimitdated to be posting publicly. This is the kind of thread that leads to that.</p>
I don’t know how a letter for an “invented water in the first place” applicant would read like.</p>