Summer melt in admissions is very real.
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…and (according to a few people I know in enrollment management positions) increasing over time.
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@LighannML My son’s final two were Williams and Carleton. There were no visits allowed in 2021 so we just walked around both campus’ in April. If she loved Williams I can not imagine her feeling different about Carleton. Congrats on the acceptances!!
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Agreed, particularly if it was the sense of an engaged, academicky student community at Williams that appealed. Carleton definitely provides that as well.
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Thank you! She was a finalist for Quest Bridge, however, did not get matched. Carleton was one of the schools on her list, and while they didn’t match for a 4 year scholarship, they took her for RD and she was thrilled. Her academic career has been heavy and with every “no”, I could see the weight just push down. She was also accepted to a waitlist for Swarthmore College, which we did not know was a thing. However, we are not waiting to see if she would make it in since she has been accepted to 2 that she is happy to pick from. We are very excited to visit Carleton next week!
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Our two kids are Holy Cross. D23 currently a paralegal heading to law school. S25 about to graduate. He’ll head off a few days later to his Army officer leadership course. Wow the years move fast!
In any case, our kids looked at the same schools, chose HC and had great experiences. Fingers crossed for you and your daughter!
The admissions rate has decreased so it may now be a BC peer in terms of competitiveness. As you probably know, many years ago HC was considered the “better” institution. Current president Rougeau is doing a great job increasing the school’s profile. Interestingly he was previously the dean of BC Law.
Best wishes! It’s an exciting, emotional time for sure!
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I could not be more thrilled for your kid, and by extension you, that everything clicked at Washington. It was quite the journey but you had a really thoughtful process, and it paid off.
For the record, I agree Washington has a crazy-nice campus in a great setting in a great city. It has also long been one of the most important research universities in the US in a variety of fields. So I am honestly surprised it is not more flooded with applications. I mean, I guess it is for things like CS, but it seems like a reasonable target for a lot of other majors, even OOS.
Anyway, congratulations on a great process and great result.
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Yes, I tell my D26 that HC had the academic edge over BC back in the late 80s/early 90s when I was a student there… who knows if she believes me 
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My kid had the same reaction. UW was also unexpected and I am so glad that my kid applied.
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Just wanted to respond to this because S26 attended the same open house on Friday and left with a very different impression of their class sizes. He was with my husband, so I wasn’t there, but he heard the intro classes were large, but upper level classes are generally pretty small, with over 70% of them less than 20 or 30 ( he wasn’t sure). Perhaps it varies by major? S26 is mainly interested in bio/biochem.
This is the breakdown in the CDS section I3 although you don’t know the major or timing. But it skews larger than other like size schools overall.
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Mechanical and aerospace engineering. But as I stated, I couldve misheard because it was not part of the formal presentation and it was during the Q&A.
He definitely did say 77 students were in his aerospace class and the mech and aerospace engineering classes were large.
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I already had a long post on Boulder in the main thread so didn’t want to expand on this, but I have to say that I think they managed this aspect of it extremely well, and of all the tours I’ve been on (the others were all with D19 so far) by far the best organized. Actually everything about admissions seemed highly organized that day but this just worked out so well. They handed each prospective student a postcard of some Boulder scene when they checked in (my kid got one of the football stadium packed for a game under lights, which may have already sparked an interest they never had before haha) then they had maybe 10 guides, each held up their corresponding picture and we followed them out. Groups all looked about the same size. Every group congregated at a different spot and the choreography of getting groups to see everything in turn without bumping into each other (especially for the model dorm room) was pretty impressive. I definitely got the feeling they had practiced this well!! It seemed to be about 10 students per group, so 20-25 with parents which worked well. It was a fairly long tour, about 1.5 hours given the size of the campus and everything they wanted to show us, but it ended exactly when they said it would. It definitely left a good impression on us. (Is everything else there this well organized, who knows, but it’s a hopeful indicator.)
Also interesting was that 5 of our 10 (C26 included) were from the Bay Area. (I know CA is well represented there but that was still surprising. In one of the other groups we saw someone else from C26’s high school.) Of the remainder, one was from New York, one from Chicago area, one from Europe and only 2 from Colorado, but I think it’s much more flexible for residents to get there outside of spring break.
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There used to be a t-shirt at the CU bookstore (many many year ago) that said University of California at Boulder 
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One thing that I did not mention was that after the info session at Kenyon our name was not initially called for a tour group. They came and asked us which group we wanted to go on. We were confused not knowing what options were on the table and said, “the one that we signed up for.” They then assigned us to a large group. Others were affected in the same way. I suspect that they were pulling names off of lists manually and putting them on other lists and that they missed some folks.
While we really enjoyed both Kenyon and Denison…both schools could have done better here. It doesn’t feel right when you have tour groups with 10 families and others with 1 or 2 families.
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It wasn’t clear to me if the postcards were preassigned or if they were handing them out evenly as people checked in. There were a couple tours I went on with D19 where they just kind of took x number of people according to where they were sitting in the admissions presentation…
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We have seen it all.
We have had schools just divide the room into parts so that where you sat down determined what tour you go on. At the other extreme, we have seen micro-targeted approaches where, for example, the pre-med kids were pre-assigned to a pre-med tour guide. And everything in between.
Another painful approach is when the tour guides introduce themselves and then the families all go to the tour guides that they want. While this appears to maximise choice, it is so awkward when one tour guide (just a kid) gets 20 families and another tour guide gets 1 or 2.
I always feel bad for that kid who doesn’t get as much interest.
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One thing I’ve found is that when there are a lot of students with all sort of going on tours, that if we have an opportunity to pick, then we pick. At our UDel tour, there were 6 tour guides that all spoke about themselves. You were given a number when you checked-in that corresponded to one of the guides. My D26 and I switched tour guides because the one they had assigned to us didn’t seem as interesting as someone else who was majoring in something closer to my daughter’s major. It was worth the switch, so now we listen to see if the student tour guides intro themselves and then switch accordingly.
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I agree with you 100%.
My D26, however, would NEVER “break the rules” like that. I have tried to get her to switch and she won’t do it. Too much time in Catholic high school, perhaps.
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Please don’t tell my catholic school educated D26 this! 
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