I know you said you’re not looking for other suggestions but…Brown has upgraded their financial aid formula and is now quite generous (plus will often meet the packages provided by other Ivies and perhaps other peer institutions like MIT. They no longer consider home equity and they are a no-loan institution. They provide a grant for full tuition for families earning $125k of less, with typical assets.
If your son might be interested, here is a link to Brown’s course catalog. If he types in APMA in the keyword search, he will see the APMA offerings for this semester. (or MATH for math or CSCI for computer science or PHIL for philosophy, etc).
Not sure about their math department, but their Applied Math (APMA) is extremely well regarded. No GEs, so a student who wants to explore widely as well as deeply can do so.
An AO at an info session we attended recently pointed out something very similar. She said please don’t tell me some basic facts and then ask me to assess your chances. I can’t know that until I actually read your full application.
And I think that is the right way of thinking about it from at least a certain perspective. Everyone’s chance are either 100% or 0% in the end, it is a process of discovery for the college to figure out which.
Of course it is still helpful to divide schools into categories of selectivity for the purpose of guiding application mixes. But we should avoid the illusion of precision. It is fine to observe that MIT is generally harder to get into than CMU. But if you try to turn that into an assessment you have an individual 4% chance at MIT, 10% chance at CMU, you are already way out on a conceptual limb.
And for that matter, if you assume those are independent probabilities, you are sawing off that limb. But that is a whole other subject.
Respectfully, Williams doesn’t sound like a fit for OP in terms of large urban school. Would also say that if one has an academic interest in math (i.e. planning for PhD), math is one of the few areas where an LAC, even a very top one, puts you at a disadvantage. If one wants to do math ug to pursue another field or career after, a top LAC would be great. But students competitive for math PhDs at top programs generally have several grad courses under their belt in their desired area (analysis, geometry, number theory etc.) from ug when they apply for grad school. LAC’s do not offer the range or level of math courses that universities with big math grad programs do. They also do not generally have the breadth of connections, and in math PhD admissions connections between the ug letter writers and supervisors at top programs play a significant role.
And truly top ones publish a few papers. This may still be doable at a LAC, I presume, but the flip side of LAC professors putative focus on teaching vs research is there may also be fewer opportunities to become involved in cutting edge research leading to publications.
Would a school like Wesleyan, a liberal arts college that offers a PhD in math, be an exception to the liberal arts college rule because of its grad program? Or because its grad program is not a HUGE one (compared to something presumably like a big state college), would it still be at a disadvantage?
Are these connections assumed based on continuing research? My impression is that due to the tightness of the academic job market, people earning doctorates from top programs are ending up at all kinds of schools and thus would have connections with those programs and the people they studied with who ended up elsewhere. Is that incorrect?
And as we don’t know what other colleges OP’s son is considering, in general, how would you sort the factors below in terms of importance for a student wanting to study math and eventually earn a PhD?
Prestige of university’s overall name
Prestige in math
Depth of math study offered (doctorate/master’s/bachelor’s)
Prestige of overall name is less important than prestige of the math program. Many state flagships have large active math departments with great reputations. Top math programs include Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago, UToronto etc… But Rutgers, SUNY Stonybrook, Ohio State, Michigan, Texas A&M have terrific math programs that place their top ugs at top schools.
Universities with prestigious math programs have a lot of professors and students, multiple seminar series, prestigious post-doc positions and named lecture series that are constantly bringing people to the department for exchange of ideas. You want that culture of inquiry, excitement, collaboration, rigour. There will be a lot of options for math fields to pursue and Honours math students will take grad courses and be part of that culture.
For effective letters, ongoing research collaborations, and continued connections through speaking at conferences allow the diaspora of top PhD math programs to send their top students back to top programs from excellent mid-level programs. There are more good mathematicians than good programs so many excellent faculty are not in good places for math. Top LAC’s do send a rare math student to top programs, but Wesleyan, because it has a math grad program, has a better track record.
These are my thoughts for an 18 y.o. with academic ambitions in math. But many students talented in math ultimately pursue consulting, finance, or other sciences, all areas where LAC’s have better placement records than they do in math.
Update: My son ended up applying and was deferred. He had a wonderful interview that made him really excited about the school. Hopefully he will have some other good EA options by March so he won’t be too down if he is in in the 96% of applicants who are rejected. It does sound like a fun school though!
I may be biased since my S24 was also deferred by his REA school, but I would interpret that to mean that MIT also recognized your son as a good match, it just gets far too many such people applying EA to admit more than a fraction. So it was already at least a good idea to apply, meaning you figured out the right answer to the question you asked above.
And generally, there are in fact lots of kids who have the right spirit and abilities for an MIT-style education, just way too many for MIT itself to take them all. But those kids then end up being in other programs, and they will then help each other have an MIT-style education wherever they may be.
So even if MIT does not work out in the end (and of course it still might), if I was your son I would be feeling very confident about my ability to go to a range of good colleges, find my people, and have a great college experience.
MIT defers two thirds of EA applicants (Harvard and other Ivies defer even more, about 80%).
Last year, MIT admitted 1.8% of those deferred EA in the RD round (vs 5.7% in EA).
Stanford, on the other hand, defers only a small number of EA applicants (about 10%). Not sure if that means there are far fewer kids who are right for Stanford than for MIT and Harvard, or if it’s just a difference in approaches to admissions, as Stanford itself says here, but the end result is that those deferred by Stanford have a higher than average chance of getting admitted in RD (about 10%).
I do suspect MIT gets a more self-selected pool to begin with. Just some numbers from the 2022-23 CDS round:
Stanford got 56,378 total applications. Of course they are test optional, 49% submitted an SAT, 23% an ACT, and there was likely overlap, so probably around 1/3rd were test optional.
MIT got 33,767 total applications. Of course they are test required, and 78% submitted an SAT, 32% an ACT (note that is 110%, confirming the overlap).
I doubt self-selection entirely explains the difference in deferral rates, I believe Stanford does have an additional policy of deferring relatively few people. But I believe the applicant pools are in fact significantly different, in both size and composition.
I think this is right. S24 never considered MIT despite being very strong in STEM and having an excellent SAT (including 800 math). He doesn’t consider himself the right fit, nor did he think his profile was strong enough to merit consideration (and I think he is right). I think fewer kids think they’d fit at MIT than think that way about other top schools.
These days many of the Ivies are starting to defer fewer applicants - at Brown it was 16% and I think Yale was in that neighborhood as well. I think that is a positive trend. Harvard deferring 83% is waste of everyone’s time.
Yep, Yale was at 20% this year, a big change from a few cycles ago when it had a more Harvard-like approach.
Incidentally, I would say the same things about Yale and Brown and such as I did about Stanford. I think the combination of being a less niche school and test optional means they likely get a somewhat less carefully self-selected group of students.
In fact, my S24, deferred at Yale and applying RD to Brown, similarly will not apply to MIT at all despite having a STEM interest. He just did not want that sort of experience and rightly concluded it was a far less plausible admit anyway. And not that our S24s are necessarily weak candidates in some overall sense, but for sure mine was not specifically right for MIT, and therefore was not in that EA pool.
That is all anecdotal, but I do think together with the actual numbers it supports the view that MIT really does get a different applicant pool to begin with, a more carefully self-selected one. Indeed, I would guess the only similarly self-selected pools would be to other “tech” colleges like Caltech or Harvey Mudd.
Returning a bit to the original question (I understand the OP’s son already applied EA and was deferred), but how do people define a good fit for MIT? Who is happy there? What type of kid thrives? My question is less about the academic experience and more about the campus culture and “vibe.”
The answer, in my opinion, is that, as with any other school, MIT’s “vibe” is in the eye of the beholder, and all different types of kids can thrive there. There isn’t one single culture there that one should match in order to fit the mold.
That said, for kids that don’t have a deep inner conviction that it is the academic rigor and a peer group to look up to that they seek first and foremost (you are more likely to meet IMO/IOI champions there than anywhere else in the US, including Caltech), there are many other great schools out there.
And for those kids that do, there is no other place like it.