I, however, am posting as a moderator as indicated by the glorious yellow background.
So in that vein, might I remind members of the forum rules: “Our forum is expected to be a friendly and welcoming place, and one in which members can post without their motives, intelligence, or other personal characteristics being questioned by others."
and
“College Confidential forums exist to discuss college admission and other topics of interest. It is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else… If a thread starts to get heated, it might be closed or heavily moderated.”
People have said schools need more transparency in admissions and in pricing. Were you really surprised at your/your child’s admission or FA package? I wasn’t. I had two average (for CC standards) kids. I knew they weren’t getting into Stanford or Yale, even the athlete (who was a very good athlete, but just not at the levels for those schools). Good grades, not so great ACT scores, and a poor parent who had a decent job at the time (but that was new, so there wasn’t a lot of savings and the good job was ending). They applied where they had a good chance of being accepted and where I could afford.
A school like Yale posts a 6% acceptance rate, but people are shocked that 94% of applicants don’t get acceptance. Does that make the system broken? How could they be any clearer?
There are also kids who get into a lot of schools because they have the academic chops but then the families are shocked at the price. The prices are posted and there is even the NPC to estimate what you should expect to pay (but the info is only as good as the info put into the NPC). I knew I couldn’t afford $40k for each kid, they knew it, we didn’t expect to be able to afford schools where the posted price was $40k and there was little hope of merit. Same reason I drive a Honda and not a Volvo, it’s what I can afford.
So I don’t think the system is broken, and I don’t think FA is unfair. My kids searched for schools we could afford (okay, I searched) because finances were an issue. They didn’t expect to get anything, and we had community colleges and other options I could pay for OOP. They wouldn’t have liked those options, but they were there and I can’t say the system is broken because I hadn’t saved enough for them to go to any college they wanted to and because they couldn’t get into Yale. Even if they’d had 4.0s, 1600s, and 8000 hours of EC and community service they couldn’t be guaranteed admission to Harvard because there just isn’t enough room at the top colleges for all the top kids. Doesn’t make the system broken or the application process unclear. There just isn’t enough room for everyone.
Good points but a massive chunk of the spots at top colleges are taken by hooked kids—legacies, recruited athletes, and the extremely wealthy who can afford full pay. These are not always the absolute top students by any means. This is especially true when waitlists at schools suddenly turn to “need aware” from previously being need blind during the regular cycle. Colleges—every single one of them—are ultimately businesses who will always prioritize their institutional needs over everything else while positively spinning their brand. There seems to be much semantic debate about the word “broken” on this thread. A system that is broken doesn’t work at all and needs to be overhauled. It’s ludicrous to believe that the American college process is not in need of improvement or is as equitable as it could be. It is not by a long shot. Demographics play an outsized role in the admissions game, where the colleges call all the shots and determine the marketplace as the capitalist institutions they are. But we do still have opportunities for the vast majority, however uneven the process and distribution. Some will struggle more than others, which is never fair, but a fact of life. So, broken? Ok, fine not exactly. Overpriced? Opaque? Classist? Bewildering? Reactive? Maybe.
What I know is NOT broken is the method/system that our high school’s college counselor taught all of the seniors for how to find and apply to colleges.
We followed all of the counselor’s suggestions and recommendations and it worked. Our 3.2 unweighted GPA kid applying test optional almost everywhere (1200 SAT) got accepted everywhere she applied, got merit scholarships at the awesome CTCL colleges she applied to, and will be attending one of those CTCL schools this fall…and the college has better pre-health opportunities than either of the 2 in-state public universities that she applied to.
Would you be willing to share what that method/system was? As the method was successful for your family, it may be helpful for families who currently think that the admissions process is broken.
Long-time follower of this thread, first time poster.
I don’t think the system is broken. I think parent have completely unrealistic expectations and fantasies about college application experience.
People can have fulfilling lives if they don’t go to a top 25 school. IMHO-- the experience of those schools is overratated compared to what happens at CTCL schools. If parents stopped obsessing about rankings and focused on fit, then the world would be a better place.
The role and competence of school college counselors is massive in the process. Some kids are fine without it and can go through the process without too much help but, some are just totally overwhelmed. Ideally, a student should be able to go through the process on their own, after all they are adults or close to it. However, whether broken, or just rusting, or creaking, the process is fairly convoluted.
Not making matters any easier is the number of kids now using the shotgun approach and applying to 100+ schools. Can you imagine how much how much strain this puts on the system?
The 100+ applications stories typically include using a particular application shared by 66 colleges, where the application is made visible to all 66 colleges, regardless of how many the applicant is initially interested in. Since the 66 colleges are not the highly selective ones typically mentioned in these forums, applications to them are unlikely to affect forum posters.
So is this forum only for those interested in select colleges? The common app is being used to shotgun and that includes 700 colleges that use the common app. It is not that hard to apply to 100+ colleges.
How many people shotgun 100+ colleges with The Common Application? The application fee for each college can be a deterrent (unlike the application that goes to 66 colleges for one $20 fee), as can the unique essays that many of The Common Application colleges want.
Students who used the common app applied to an average of 5.74 colleges via the common app for 2023-24 cycle (max 20 schools via common app). See p7 of the latest update. Note that students who used the common app may have also applied to schools using other application platforms and/or they may have received offers of admission from common app schools that they didn’t apply to via CA’s direct admission initiative.
Some students might be ‘shotgunning’ but the number of students applying to 100s of schools isn’t significant. If anyone has any data I’d love to see it.
Really, this thread is only for those interested in highly selective colleges.
Just a few posts back, someone said:
People can have fulfilling lives if they don’t go to a top 25 school…If parents stopped obsessing about rankings and focused on fit, then the world would be a better place.
For people who think there is no value in going to a highly selective college, and it is all about the individual, then it is impossible to have a problem with college admissions, because most schools admit just about everyone.
Trying to figure out the enigma that is holistic admissions, and the personal opinions, preferences and biases of unknown admissions officers, only comes into play when dealing with a selective institution.
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. True, the vast majority of the engagement and interest by most posters has been about highly selective colleges. But there is a (seemingly small) group of people who think there are issues with college admissions that extends well beyond Top X schools. Some of the issues that could be discussed include:
Why nearly 40% of students who attend college leave school with college loans but no degree
How student outcome data is quite poor, leading to poor decisions in the college admissions process. What I mean by this is that families choose certain colleges/degree programs (such as at for-profits or in fields that don’t require degrees) believing that it will be a big boost in employment prospects when attending a trade school or a different option would have been more economically wise (or a non-$90k/year option when something more affordable for the family would have worked equally as well). Additionally/alternatively, the number of students who do get a degree but then end up underemployed in fields that don’t require a college degree.
How to improve financial transparency and knowledge with respect to the costs of college and options for a lower-cost education.
I have suggested this several times in the past, what can be easily done to address a lot of the points you just made, is to require each school to produce a standard disclosure so that an easy comparison can be made by the “consumer” as they choose schools. A $20k to $350k investment is deserving of the type of standard disclosure requirements we make of many other consumer products and investments. I would include:
Outcomes information by major:
Students within major (and if you have to separately get accepted, either on
matriculation or after some period of attendance)
Percent graduated within 4 and 6 years
Percent employed full time within 1 year and median starting salary
Percent employed full time within their field within 1 year and median starting salary
Top 5 employers/location
Percent in graduate studies
Costs
Table showing varying income levels with typical net cost, with link to NPC
Average debt of graduates
Average debt of all students that matriculated
Demographic breakdown by sex, race/ethnicity, income level, geography, legacies if there is a preference
Accepted Students
Admissions rate
Early admissions rate, excluding athletic recruits
Admissions rates by AI groupings (standard formula based on GPA and tests scores)
Admissions rates of TO students who did not submit scores, if applicable
Others may chime in with other “must have” disclosures.
You can certainly pull a lot of this data from schools’ CDS’s and websites, but why make families hunt for this when it can be in a simple standard easily comparable format?
Obtaining outcome information would be ideal, but gathering accurate post-graduate data is challenging or impossible. Some of the largest universities graduate 8,000 to 15,000 students each year, who then disperse widely. Graduates are not obligated to complete surveys, often lose access to or stop checking their school emails, and may simply not respond. Given these obstacles, collecting comprehensive post-graduation information isn’t feasible.
For colleges that admit by formula, disclose the formula and either pre-set thresholds or the previous cycle’s competitively-determined thresholds (including thresholds by major, state residency, etc. if applicable). For such colleges, this type of disclosure would be more useful than admission rates.
The most comparable-across-colleges information that is stratified by major available is from College Scorecard, but that is limited to graduates who used federal financial aid as students.
