How is this not admission based on stats?
US colleges publish score ranges too. The difference is that if your scores are in the lower ranges you may stand a chance of being admitted. I don’t believe that’s true in the UK. Admissions are conditional based on projected A-level grades. If you don’t meet the cutoff you have, as you say, no chance of admission. That’s not holistic.
Well, I am glad at least someone likes the current system here. With its stress, expense and confusion, at least somebody likes it-I know a whole lot of people who don’t, but YMMV.
I don’t think I misunderstood at all. You started by saying it was not stressful, then listed how your D was an auto admit to a school she really liked. Then came competing full ride offers. I think many kids would be ecstatic with such choices, as would their parents. I just don’t find it comparable to most situations. Most can “hunt” all day and never find anything near a full ride offer. Not sure why people take issue with others finding the process stressful and disliking how the system works.
“This had me LOLing though. Really, that is pretty funny.”
I don’t understand what’s funny about it. I’m acknowledging that they might have presumed from our application that, since we were full pay and also applying for financial aid, we might have been merit shopping. We did do some of that, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t also considering full pay schools. We were. But each school was to be judged on its value proposition. What I’m saying is that I think we could have come to the decision that Colgate was worth full freight. But they apparently didn’t want my son when other schools did. OK. He’s loving the schools that love him. It just would have been nice had they decided they didn’t want my kid before making us jump through a million hoops. The farm/business form was a major pain - far and above the level of detail any other school required.
Yes, he ended up with many other and better choices - that’s what responsible college hunters do, don’t they?
@lookingforward - I don’t know what other people think or assume about anything. I find it terribly arrogant and borderline abusive to make assumptions about people’s motives, especially people I only know through short tidbits that they share publicly. All I see are families trying to navigate an unfamiliar and complicated process they best they can.
Leigh, what I see are the complaints and positing the colleges as the big bad guy. It’s the nature of the competition that one must lean in, to be informed. I’ve done a lot of research into many Top 20 colleges and don’t find it stunningly opaque. I also accept that, in holistic, no one has perfect chances. Best you get is 50-50 odds (in or not.)That’s not arrogance, it’s accepting the process of trying. Many kids can do the research, when it’s suggested.
None of this is simple rack and stack, in holistic.
Of course the college application process is stressful. Lots of things in life are, but when your kid applies for a dozen jobs and only gets one callback from one of her less-favored jobs are you going to rail against how unfair it is that companies don’t tell you exactly what would have gotten her the job? For that matter did you hope the coach or director of the play ill will when your kid was called back but didn’t eventually get a spot?
It would be nice if colleges could tell us exactly what would get our kid in, and of course a few do, but if your kid wants to attend a school that practices holistic admissions the price you pay for that is a certain amount of uncertainty and inconvenience.
One of my kids just went through the process. The school she loved didn’t love her. She spent an evening sobbing in her room, a couple more feeling sad, then picked herself up, bought the t-shirt and moved on. She will bloom where planted.
With that I think I’ll back out of this thread.
Sorry, said Leigh but meant trixy.
I fully appreciate that the colleges are businesses are free to fill the class any way they want. I do look at this the other way around, too, though. We, as potential customers, do not have all of the information we need to make a ‘rational’ purchase decision. We all want to spend our money and time on an event which has the highest likelihood of a pay off. And we really can’t do that well, because while we might know the scores of those accepted, we don’t know much about the applicant pool. URMs have only slightly lower numbers than the majority pool, and athletes a tad lower than that, so the range of scores for those accepted is not gigantic. We know that schools automatically boot a certain number of applicants based on numbers alone. We consumers need to know the qualifications (not just the size) of the whole applicant pool. Without that info, we cannot accurately determine our expected ROI for our spent resources (money and time).
And, let’s not forget the lost opportunity costs. Most can only apply to so many schools. Applying to one means a potentially better one is not applied to. Without full disclosure of what we can expect to get for our time and money, consumers will continue to apply to more and more schools, trying to compensate for the perceived and perhaps artificially low odds of obtaining a ‘win.’
^ What research are you doing? I don’t mean stats or CDS or taking more AP. Can you answer a Why Us (or are they supposed to share that advice, too?)
I don’t mean asking on CC or looking at pro counselor blogs or Naviance or anecdotes. For elites, interest is not just visiting or reading emails. You want to buy properly, but the top U’s are the buyers here.
@cypresspat - agree 100%. We’re not allowed to post links here, but Sara Harberson has written an op-ed in the la times about transparency. "Colleges need to start disclosing all their admissions data to the public"is the title.
I don’t disagree that college admissions is stressful. Try doing it with a kid with 3 learning disorders on a Pell eligible salary.
I fully disagree with relishing the thought that somebody could lose their job over the results.
See! Sara Harbersin, self declared, " America’s College Counselor." Another pro who wants your business.
The logic doesn’t seem to make sense. If college admission were more transparent, there would be less of a need for college consulting services by applicants and their families.
Slight digression, but many (most?) schools seem to be a combo of stats and use a holistic building of a class (speaking of those that say they are holistic) and may be less than transparent about this. Besides the minimum requirements they tell you on their CDS that is necessary, they understandably want to see if the student can handle the academics, and some schools may be also wanting their admitted students stats to be high for the rankings. So they may use a baseline threshold for some aspects of admissions.
I spoke to a student recently who knew that his weakness was his grades (UW GPA in an IB program was, IIRC, in the low 90s). His app. was otherwise VERY strong (ACT a 33 or 34, I can’t quite recall off the top of my head), lots of awards at local and national science fairs, lots of volunteer work in a meaningful way, very strong essays. He applied EA to an instate school that he should at the very least have been deferred- but nope, he was flat out denied. Oh, and did I mention he WORKED in a lab for the past year at this school? First as a volunteer, and then as a paid employee. In a faculty research lab. From my understanding the faculty member with whom he worked was VERY pleased with his work and wrote a strong LOR for his application. Nope- DENIED. His school, his advisor, the professor all went to bat for him to ask for a review and to see if at the very least his denial could be converted to a deferral. Nope. No luck. Then, after the. app season was finished, the HS did a spread sheet with all the applicants to that school. No one with a GPA under 94 was accepted. No one. Hmmm…
Just finished our family’s fourth and final college application season. I don’t feel the hostility toward the colleges that OP and others apparently do. In fact I was feeling kind of bad as DD clicked the ‘decline acceptance’ box for several colleges that one year ago we were hoping upon hope she’d be accepted to. Our experience with Admissions offices and even a Department Chair has been very friendly and helpful.
As others have stated, if we want the kid’s musical talent etc. to be considered, we get holistic admissions with its degree of variability. We know that going in. But I do agree there are aspects to the process that could be improved (particularly financial aid forms/predictability and maybe capping # of apps to reduce use of waitlists.)
Haven’t read all the posts, but to play devil’s advocate, no one made your child apply to really selective colleges. Students can often apply EA, and get merit aid, and get decisions back we’ll before the end of March.
Yes, Sara Harberson makes money as a college admissions consultant. She also has a tremendous amount of valuable information on her blog - for free. I have not used her services, but I am an acquaintance and I find her to be a very genuine, honest person.
This thread is not about selective schools, although obviously people try to steer it that way. It’s just about how the process can be stressful for some and how there are aspects of the process, sometimes school specific, that bother people. Every experience is different. I think jym626 gives a great example of someone who had a less than positive experience- I’m sure someone will come along to somehow blame the student.
Great. But the presumption here is that one cant learn on their own. Look at the confusion about what interest or demonstrated interest is. Or advice here to write about your lackings. Or win national awards. Or to up the APs, that more increase your worth.
Or the certainty yield is a major factor in your chances. Simple issues talked about all the time on CC, but often misinterpreted. So sure, you get the idea youll.never figure it out. But your sources matter. Your own look-see.
Jym, of course. In the end, among all the great finalists, they can cherry pick and that may mean the higher stats. Doesn’t mean high stats is the major bullet, from the start.
In this student’s case, there had to (I suspect) be something in his app (something in a LOR, something in the school counselor form… dunno), SOMETHING that sent his app to the dogpile. He was invited to several campus events (he made one choice I would not have recommended, but I don’t think it was a dealbreaker) which typically would have intimated he was a strong candidate.