I thought that I would post some “parent takeaways” based on observing and assisting in D26’s college admissions experience.
As background, D26 applied to 33 schools and was admitted to 18. She was in the top 10% of her high school class (this is estimated–her school does not rank) with strong but not elite ECs. She had very good test scores, but mostly applied test optional.
Admissions were Richmond (attending), Wellesley, Haverford, Vassar (legacy), Carleton, Bates, Holy Cross, Wake Forest, Mount Holyoke, Furman, Baylor, Gonzaga, Trinity U., Utah, Rhodes, St. Olaf, Denison and Bucknell.
Waitlists were Villanova, UC Davis, Cal Poly, Bowdoin, Case Western, Colby, and Washington & Lee.
Rejections were Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Cal Poly SLO, Emory, Swarthmore, Williams, Rice, and Middlebury.
Some observations:
- College visits are important for demonstrating interest. D26 had a 60% admit rate at schools where she visited vs 42.9% at schools that she did not visit. By accident, reaches, targets and safeties were equally distributed among visited schools and unvisited schools. Also, many schools that claim in their CDS that they do not care about demonstrated interest actually DO care about it. If they offer you, they WANT to yield you.
1A) College visits were the single best way that we had to learn about schools. Some of the schools D26 thought would be her favorites…….she hated and did not even apply to after visiting. Some schools that she visited as an afterthought……she loved. Visiting schools was the single best thing that we did. D26 visited 30+ schools.
1B) We realize that some people do not have the time or money to visit this many schools. In this case, attending webinars is very helpful to learn about schools and to demonstrate interest. But (again) our experience was that schools REALLY ARE more likely to admit you if you visit–especially if you travel a long way to visit.
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D26 applied to too many schools. Here, I will talk out of both sides of my mouth. Once your student has applied to 20 or so schools, they will have an arsenal of essays that make it very easy to apply to 30 or even 40 schools with minimal incremental effort. HOWEVER, your student has to ask themselves if they would REALISITICALLY attend some of the schools that they are applying to. In our case, many of her applications were “throw aways.” D26 could have achieved the same effects with 15 applications.
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Be prepared for your student’s preferences to change wildly over time. D26 initially wanted to go to an all-women’s LAC. But with visits, life experiences, ongoing learning, and the influence of friends……her interests shifted dramatically over time. By the time admissions season started……D26 had all but ruled out women’s colleges and the schools that were interesting to her were getting bigger and bigger. This evolution helps explains how she wound up putting out 33 college applications.
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Interviews were interesting. Our final conclusion is that interviews are generally NOT evaluative for most schools. They are really assessing demonstrated interest and making sure that your application is factually correct. D26 had interviews that she thought she did really poorly on (she argued with an AO from Wake Forest about a movie–the AO was dead wrong and D26 was right but their debate got heated) and she still got admitted. D26 did not interview with one school (they only gave her a 2 day window to interview and she was busy playing volleyball) and she was promptly rejected. This was her only rejection when invited to interview. In interviews, D26 always could tell the schools specifically why she was interested in them and she could speak clearly about all of the things in her application. She did notice some probing questions that seemed to test whether or not she really did some of the things in her application. But if you tell the truth in your applications, you have nothing to worry about. If you lie or are a chronic exaggerator…..beware.
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Schools are increasingly using the waitlist as a yield management tool. D26 was waitlisted at 9 schools. 3 of these schools came back to her within a week of waitlisting her and posed the question “would you attend if we made you an offer?” But these WERE NOT official offers. D26 said “no” to this question all 3 times that she was asked and never received official offers.
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Your student will be pressured by friends, teachers, family members, counselors, and others to make certain college decisions. You must constantly remind your student to make their OWN decision to the greatest extent possible (assuming that they ARE allowed to make their own decision–I understand that this is not always the case). Your student has to live with their decisions and the advice-givers do not. In our case, D26 was pressured by people who wanted her to attend either Wellesley or Vassar. I am proud of her for standing her ground and making her own choice.
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You can use your geography to your advantage. D26 was a CA student mostly applying to Eastern schools. She had a much easier time than equally qualified CA classmates who applied only to Western schools. Schools are trying to build diverse classes and they value kids who are different from the norm. Claremont McKenna would probably prefer a kid from Maine over a similar kid from CA and Bowdoin would probably prefer a kid from CA over a similar kid from New England.
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Maia Learning and Scoir are your friends. If you want to find out how you will fare in the college admissions sweepstakes, you can generally look at how colleges treat your high school (and applicants similar to you) in Maia Learning and Scoir. Every time D26 applied to a school, I looked at Maia Learning and made my own prediction. I correctly guessed the final outcome 80% of the time.
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If you apply pre-med to a larger U (like D26 did), do some work to figure out the admit rate for your specific major. In our experience, applying to the Biology Program at both Cal Poly SLO and UC Davis was a terrible idea as admit rates in Biology are FAR, FAR lower than the general admit rates at the schools. In many cases, you may still be able to pursue certain career goals WITHOUT applying to highly competitive majors.
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This is perhaps controversial. Many schools say that they don’t care if you apply with the Common App vs the Coalition App. Our experience was that admissions were harder to come by when D26 used the Coalition App. I wanted D26 to use 2 different Common App accounts, but her HS counselor would not let her do this. D26 had about a 55% admit rate for Common App applications vs a 40% admit rate for Coalition Applications and that is with Coalition Applications having more safeties/targets vs reaches.
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We are an affluent family and I believe that being full pay helped D26 in a big way. While need blind schools are not looking at your Financial Aid docs…….your application is full of information (zip code, parent’s occupation, etc..) that tell them exactly where you are coming from socioeconomically. And I think that it matters unless we are talking about the richest of the rich colleges. I could be wrong, but I believe that this helped us because some of my daughter’s less wealthy peers who had similar stats struggled significantly more than D26 did. YMMV.
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The Common Data Set is also your friend. It is FULL of useful info. My favorite thing to do was to look at the Out of State Admit rate (we were almost always out of state) for each school D26 applied to. Did you know, for example, that Carleton College admits 36.6% of out of state students? Who would have guessed? This is just one example of the CDS allowing you to use numbers to “go a little deeper” in understanding the admissions dynamics of a school vs just looking at high-level USNWR data.
As with all things…..YMMV. Good luck class of 2027!