Totally agree with @burghdad about casting a wide net. We too were quite naive about both acceptances and scholarships the first time around. I’m hoping D21 will use the access to the virtual tours available to help her find more options.
@burghdad Princeton and Brown are rough admits but I do wonder if your older D would have been accepted to Vandy if she had gone ED. UVA didn’t have ED that year but now does. High stat S19 also was waitlisted at Vandy. His GC thinks he was likely to get in had he gone ED.
I know ED doesn’t work for many families but, if the student is ready and the net price calculator gives a good number, it can be worth it. I get not using it. S19 was against it and felt like he needed time to decide so went RD everywhere. I don’t know if I can stomach that again. It was so stressful opening decisions every other day for a couple of weeks in March. I talk a lot about using ED for D21 but, without a real life visit, I just don’t know if she’ll be able to pull that trigger either. I do think it’s a bump at a lot of
T20 schools.
There are 70,000 plus vals and sals each year in the USA. 280 or so unhooked spots per gender, per year at Harvard. That’s a lot of unhappy vals. If you take the top 10 of each class that’s 360,000 accomplished applicants.
That’s why I always am so confused when someone gets into any of the top 50 schools on the combined Forbes list and doesn’t fathom what accomplishment that is for the student. The “tiers of eliteness” conversations are just creating so much unnecessary anxiety for everyone. That entire group of schools may have 50,000 freshman seats. Half per gender. That’s some tough math to overcome with 3mm grads each year.
If a certain public high school school gets one unhooked kid into H per year, that’s actually a statistical marvel.
@homerdog we never even looked at Vandy until late in the game. We actually never toured it until the middle of December. Vandy is big on showing interest so her late entry in the game probably hurt her as well. She could have gone ED2 and she probably would have gotten in. However, the full pay aspect of it was troublesome for us since she wants to go grad school. We decided to stay regular admission and see what happened. Once she got waitlisted the thinking was maybe she can go to grad school there using some of the money we saved by her going to Clemson. With AP credits and her OOS scholarship her undergrad degree is only going to cost $110,000. “Only” really…but that does give us money to pay for her grad school that wouldn’t have been there if we spent $250,000 to $300,000 for 4 years at Vandy.
It’s all good. She is happy and thriving. I just wanted to put all this out there to show that at some of top tier state schools admission can be tough for OOS students even those with top stats.
I think your comments that in the 2021 covid admission cycle ED may be the way to go for those who can afford to do so are spot on. Colleges like the Bowdin, Tulane, Vandy, Tufts even schools like Lehigh and Lafayette are even more than In past years going to want to guarantee yield. They are going to take as much risk out of the process as possible.
Someone once positioned it this way to me: for the super selective schools, a kid not only needs to be the best in their school, but among the very best in their state and possibly in their entire region. Not just grades and scores, but impact and achievement.
Princeton has an interesting graphic that shows how many students from each state matriculated in the Class of 2023:
https://admission.princeton.edu/how-apply/admission-statistics
Let’s look at one state, take Virginia for example. 34 students from Virginia. Assume about 46 were admitted based on typical yield. So a kid would really have to be pretty stand out to be among the top 46 kids in the applicant pool from Virginia.
@Faulkner1897 and then how many of those 46 kids from Virginia were hooked in some way? That leaves even fewer spots.
DS attends a very competitive high school where about 20% of each class ends up at “top 20” schools. It was both fascinating and concerning to see where this years graduates were admitted/denied. DS knows many of the seniors very well and there were incredibly accomplished kids that were denied to schools where not so incredibly accomplished kids were accepted. After seeing this, I am of the opinion that it is more of a crap shoot than anything else.
Overall, everyone did pretty well and tended to get at least one admittance into a reach but there seemed to be little about the admittances/rejections that made much sense. DS is certainly apprehensive about upcoming admissions…luckily we have a very good instate public where a huge % go each year.
Tks for sharing your story @burghdad. 2018 and 2019 were brutal admissions years. The tide is finally turning, albeit not for good reasons, but your D’s situation is really important to keep in mind. I remember a lot of kids on these boards in 2018 with high stats who were also really surprised by their admissions outcomes.
I’m glad your D is thriving – she’s the poster child for being a big fish in a small pond – and there’s a lot to be said for that!
I wonder how predictive Naviance will be this year given the fact that students will, by and large, have fewer standardized tests under their belt and therefore likely lower scores.
So far, I do not see publics jumping on the test optional bandwagon as much as privates, as least the ones on my D21’s list. Virginia Tech is the only one. Wisconsin has language saying the “are reviewing” for class of 21. I think our instate (NC State) is going to keep the test. My S’s current ACT (he’s only taken it once) would not get him in there into engineering there under normal circumstances, at least from our school district, but there’s nothing normal about this upcoming cycle.
I’m watching Rice to see what they do. I think they’d be a great small engineering school for him and their financial aid is great. It’d be a big reach, but if they go TO I’m going to encourage him to look into it.
He’s not been great about signing up for the virtual tours and pushes back when I suggest. I know this will hurt his chances at privates, but he’s pretty thick-skulled about the whole thing. Ultimately, its his future and I can only push so far.
Btw, still no word on June 13th ACT here in NC I called them earlier this week and they said it would happen “if the site continues to host.” So I called our district office and got bounced around a lot. They did say the buildings are closed until Aug. so I asked if they’d notified ACT, and was referred back to the testing office and now I’m waiting. . .
Final update – he’s been very lax about AP prep. Impressed by your kids who are so on top of things!
I’m new here. Does being a coauthor on a scientific paper count as a hook?
Likely not a hook, but a good EC. Is it peer reviewed and published? In what publication?
@birdbear No. A hook is being a recruited athlete or a legacy and sometimes a first generation college student or an underrepresented minority.
@burghdad Your post is really helpful, thanks for sharing! I’m going to have my S21 read it because I think his expectations regarding college admissions are much higher than they should be. He’s used to always being one of top kids in his class and has some top stats with GPA, class rank, APs, etc…but so do thousands of other kids across the country. He would for sure be one of those kids who is baffled by certain college rejections based on what he sees on Naviance and other college match sites!
@AlmostThere2018 My kid sounds just like yours with the push back any time I suggest signing up for a virtual tour or info session. I’m backing off for now since APs are coming up but he’s going to have to do something after that. He was excited about touring in person over spring break in April and I think he was counting on that to help him find the right type of college - big/small, contained campus, etc. Since that couldn’t happen he’s just sort of overwhelmed by it all and this “new normal” of virtual everything.
Welcome! That is not a hook, but it is an impressive accomplishment. Not many high school students get published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Congrats to your D/S21!
I had a chuckle over an advertisement in our area (community ed?) for virtual fencing classes!! My kids and I had visions of the foil through the computer screen–curious how well the virtual class will be received. We have no experience with fencing/did not sign up for the class…but thought it was a bit humorous, although also the new normal…
@Mwfan1921 It has been accepted for publication by the American Chemical society journal of physical chemistry C. It is peer reviewed.
D21 attends a small, very competitive private high school. They use Naviance, but it’s pretty useless with such a small data pool. Every year is fairly random in terms of acceptances. Looks like this year’s class has done reasonably well in terms of HPY/Stanford (which is local for us) and T-20 LACs.
D had a great Zoom meeting with her college counselor yesterday and came away really energized. They did some work playing around with her list and have another meeting at the end of the month to hopefully come up with a fairly final list. She also did an essay writing workshop over the weekend. Hoping she keeps up the enthusiasm, despite the challenges of doing everything virtually for the time being.
@AlmostThere2018 very interesting about many public schools not going test optional, or at least not yet. We’re in CA–the vast UC system announced test optional for this admissions cycle and it’s been a hot topic of discussion. D21 has zero plans to apply to any UCs (much to my wallet’s chagrin :-)), but the vast majority of kids here do apply to at least a few, so things will be very interesting.
@homerdog My secret wish all along has been that D finds a school that she’s really excited about to shoot for ED. But now, unless we can take some trips at the end of the summer or early fall, I think that’s not a realistic option. It’s really challenging being on the opposite coast from most of the schools she’s looking at, since we can’t just hop into the car whenever travel restrictions are lifted and go see a bunch of schools. I’m sure we will drive down to Claremont this summer and look at Pomona, but that’s just one school, and obviously a reach at that. That’s the only California school on her list, sigh. (Also, replying to a much earlier post from you–my D has also been primarily a ballet dancer. She’s in a prepro program but never was very interested in trying to make a career of it. She also dances in her school’s dance company and is really starting to love contemporary. I halfway think she’ll drop ballet next year and transition to a contemporary studio for her final year of high school. We’ll see. And @Rue4 – we love Irish dance! D21 and I watched “Jig” on Netflix and were in awe, haha (I know that’s hardly representative, but the dancing is still amazing!)).
@burghdad
You are spot on. Both parents and kids overestimate their chances. They look at their stats and think they have a chance, when in reality, they do not. As @homerdog has said, unless you are a hooked candidate, your chances the most elite colleges are very small no matter how high your stats are.
I’ve posted this before, but it needs to sink in. Daniel Golden was a Wall Street Journal writer who won the Pulitzer Prize. If you really want to understand what is happening behind the scenes, read his book “The Price of Admissions”.
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL9818415M/The_Price_of_Admission
He also opined about recent college events.
https://www.propublica.org/article/jared-kushner-isnt-alone-universities-give-rich-applicants-a-leg-up
"Ten years ago, as I noted in “The Price of Admission,” alumni children were “overwhelmingly white and rich.” At the time, though, admissions deans assured me that the legacy ranks would become more diverse as the children of minorities who gained access to elite universities with the advent of affirmative action reached college age. That doesn’t seem to have happened. Based on a Harvard Crimson survey of freshmen entering Harvard in 2015, alumni children remain a homogeneous group. Legacies constituted 16 percent of the class — but one-fourth of white freshmen, and more than 40 percent of those with household incomes of $500,000 or more…
(…)
Today, the prospects for these unconnected applicants, who are predominantly middle-class whites and Asian-Americans, are even bleaker. The poor schmucks have to walk on water — during a tsunami. Without significantly increasing enrollments, most top universities accept an even smaller percentage of applicants than they did a decade ago, while making room for more international and first-generation college students. Saracino, now a higher education consultant, switched metaphors in a recent conversation. “The pie isn’t getting any bigger, but the pieces all want to grow a little bit,” he said. “It’ll come at the cost of the everyday kid.”
The tough thing is these kids do every thing right. Perfect to near perfect test scores, straight A’s with the most rigorous course load, Sports, volunteering and yet they basically have no chance unless they started a company or something crazy like that.
I know someone who works with one Ivy Admissions (with, not for). They told me there are only 200-300 spots in the freshman class that are available to the “general public”. The remaining spots are for the athletes, legacies, children of politicians/business leaders, other hooks and those who “found a cure for cancer”, etc.
Not only that but it sometimes seems to me that most of the kids who do the extraordinary things like starting a company or doing prestigious internships, or whatever else are from fairly well-off families that have enough money, resources and/or connections to provide their kids with the opportunities to do all those awesome things. For some reason, kids who have regular summer jobs don’t seem to get as much acknowledgement for their hard work. The system just seems to favor the wealthy in general, unfortunately, and to perpetuate more and more wealth disparity.