SATHater
why dont you read this from another thread you also posted on- hopefully it will help you get over your anger at USC.
This student who posted this works in the admissions office.
"Whether or not an applicant mentions National Merit on their application makes no difference. Especially because USC receives lists of NM semi-finalists and finalists every year, so has that information in their databases, often (in the case of semi-finalists) before those people’s applications are even read by the adcom. It doesn’t matter if it’s explicity mentioned or not because every file is already flagged by the time the committee reads it. 2,000 semi-finalists were in USC’s applicant pool this year alone. About 40% of them were named finalists by National Merit. Oh, and one other thing, there are three times as many applicants in the high end of USC’s applicant pool who are not National Merit students than are.
This year’s fall admission rate for finalists is 48%, 3x the overall admission rate. Also, more than 40 finalists were offered spring admission and they’ll get presidential scholarships too, even if they don’t get moved to fall.The ones that were turned down had average SATs within 5-10 points of those accepted.
Seems to me that all this conjecture of an applicant’s National Merit status somehow working against them in USC’s process is just that: conjecture. I’ve seen no evidence from the actual data that leads me to believe that anything of like that is going on here. If USC were so worried about the money, they wouldn’t make a promise in the first place. If they just had this as a way to pad their stats, as some have suggested on CC, seems to me that they could still market it in similar ways without actually making a promise. It’s not hard to dangle stuff out their to get kids excited. Lots of colleges do this.
In the end, believe whatever you want. As so many others have pointed out. Anyone thinking that a sub-20% admission rate school is somehow going to have easily predictable outcomes really doesn’t understand the intricacies of selective college admissions. Schools like USC could fill their freshman classes three or four times over with completely different pools of students and have roughly the same average GPA and SAT scores."