In the application, it literally asks you for 6 touchpoints to the school.
Meeting the dean of the business school on our visit probably met the criteria for us.
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They may have a lot of applicants but not a lot of enrollees.
Here is the WUSTL breakdown. Itâs also 39% private - if anyone wonders if they truly skew wealthy - hmmmmm - yes.
- 30% Midwest
- 18% Middle States
- 17% West
- 11% South
- 6% Southwest
- 5% New England
- 65% From more than 500 miles away
- 13% Other countries and territories
Do you mean their yield isnât good? Iâm not surprised such a small percent of students are from New England - as I mentioned above, very few kids apply from our HS and I think maybe 1 has attended in the past few years.
My D20 received a personalized note in her acceptance letter referencing the topic of her essay.
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Yes, Iâm in CA. I was referring to CA kids applying to CSUs and getting deniedâŠand not the top ones either.
Where we live, if youâre outside the top tier range, kids will typically go to Tufts, BU, BC, Northeastern, etc.
We also send a bunch of top kids to Brown and Cornell.
S24 goes to a private school that is generally considered a âfeederâ school. I have not seen any evidence of direct conversations between counselors and AOs. In fact, parents tend to be disappointed when they realize how little pull the counselors have with admissions offices. As one concrete example: recently, a kid was shut out from all colleges to which they applied - a highly unusual event at our school. The counselors could not fix that for the student once the die were cast.
Now, a couple of decades ago, the headmaster would travel around the country, visit with AOs, and âsellâ them on particular kids. Back then, more than a third of students ended up at Ivy League schools. But these days are long gone. I believe that some colleges (Swarthmore? I donât recall where I read this) have actually enacted policies against one-on-one calls with high school counselors because they realized that these calls went primarily to private schools with privileged student bodies.
However, I think that students at feeder schools still have a real advantage when it comes to college admissions. These schools have well-established reputations for educating students who succeed in college, and colleges like admitting the students for that reason. I think thatâs where strong students from more âtypicalâ schools sometimes donât realize how much the deck is stacked against them. They work incredibly hard to complete as many AP classes as they can, while top private schools have gotten rid of all or most AP classes because they donât consider them substantive enough. The students at âfeederâ schools benefit by getting both substantively strong coursework and less stress than if they had to achieve a certain score on an AP exam. And they can distinguish themselves by taking a variety of advanced classes with interesting titles, while other students are stuck competing by getting higher scores on more of the same APs that everyone else is taking.
Finally: While I do believe that students at âfeederâ schools have an advantage when it comes to college admissions, I have no idea how big that advantage really is. (And I suspect that itâs getting smaller.) Students at these schools also have many other advantages that are correlated with college admissions success: legacy status, parents who have made big donations, interesting but expensive extracurriculars, etc. So it is very hard to sort out how much the school versus the studentâs characteristics contribute to college placement success.
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Sorry - I misread do for donât.
I thought you said you do have a lot of applicants.
You said you donât.
Sorry - I missed that.
I do think certain schools - WUSTL and Rice among them - have a branding issue - not that it hurts them - it doesnât.
But my bad - I misread.
This describes our HS too 
A large portion goes to Umass A as well.
It seems that a lot of schools dont want to be the Ivy-league reject school so if you dont ED to BU, BC, Tufts your chances of getting in are extremely small but if you ED to those, your chances are quite good, even if youâre a good but not top student.
Aim high and you could potentially not get into any T40 school. Not that the rankings matter but for some kids, itâs probably an eye opener.
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And you are not a âtopâ student in these schools even with an almost perfect GPA and great ECs because you have not published papers and interned at NASA like everyone has
I agree, controlling for all the many factors and figuring out what is actually value added and what is just correlation is a nightmare. I do think the non-AP-based advanced curriculums, plethora of activity options including leadership roles, and highly personalized college counseling are real value-added. How much exactly, that I do not know.
By the way, with the lone exception of AP Comp Sci, my S24âs course schedule for senior year literally reads like a college scheduleâarguably more interesting than most first-year college schedules. I am actually most excited about that because I think these are cool classes from which he can learn a lot and be well-prepared for college classes. But it is surely not hurting for college admissions either.
But none of this is meant to say you need all this to be well-prepared for college. It is more a question of colleges knowing that is true, versus hoping that is true, and these sorts of high schools are good at making sure colleges know everything that can be known.
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I suspect most of these colleges would be OK if they were like #3 on your list after a couple higher-ranked reaches. I think the problem is these days they could be like #14, including after peers and not just such reaches.
So they go all the way to requiring you to commit to them being #1, which is nice for them but sucky for kids who actually would have them #3 if possible.
Which is why some sort of matching system would be so helpful. Or at least a UK-style limit to 5 schools.
But when kids can apply to 20, or indeed more if they want to get creative, that means these colleges might have to protect themselves from being #14.
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How would they know if theyâre #3 or 14 on your list? I assume they must have a ton of data that gives some probability the likelihood of enrolling?
If you have a 4.0 and 1570 SAT, the chances of going to BU is probably small?
I also noticed some quirkiness while browsing Cialfo. We are in CA and near Stanford.
I see tons of kids applying to Stanford. Most gets rejected but the school sends more to Stanford than to any Ivy schools every year. Itâs possible that legacy is playing the part.
Tons of kids go to BU/NE, but very few even apply to BC. Kids generally donât apply schools in southern states.
High stat asian boys are almost 99% applying to STEM specifically CS. They know itâs very difficult so they apply to a lot of schools - UC/CSU/privates.
Iâm just glad my kids are not STEM type⊠it would have added so much pressure and stress.
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Thatâs my understanding. They have been developing increasingly sophisticated yield models, and these days it is more than just your basic academic numbers. Factors could include all that demographic information they get from your application; not just the basics of where you are applying from but all the additional data they can get about your high school and residential location; your need status (if need aware, or maybe even if notâsee lawsuit); whatever you put as academic interests; demonstrated interest evidence if considered; and on and on.
None of that will be perfect, though, and you are in fact a unique individual. So maybe Tuftsâs model says that based on all these things it knows about you, there is like a 98% chance of you not yielding if admitted. But you are an exception, and Tufts is actually your #2, after that Ivy which deferred you and probably is only like a 10% shot now. So actually, there is like a 90% chance you will yield if Tufts admits you, they just donât know it.
That saidâI see a lot of people complaining about these schools yield protecting who realistically do seem to have them pretty buried on their depth charts. I get it, they feel entitled to be treated as if every school was their #1, and think it is unfair if colleges guess, even correctly, they are not.
But the cold reality is if Tufts passes up a 95-point admit for a 99-point admit, and then the 99-point admit typically says no thanks, and they have to pull a 93-point admit off the waitlist . . . that is not in Tuftsâ interest. And so they tell the 99-point kid, prove it, ED us, which from their perspective is a fair defense against that scenario.
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Iâve got a friend who works as a CC at a top 5 boarding school that is considered a major Ivy feeder. Her contention is that their unhooked students donât get an advantage in admissions at T20s. She told me that the bulk of Ivy+ admits are kids that are hooked - occasionally, unhooked kids are accepted, but not nearly in the same numbers. Where they excel (according to her) is at placing unhooked kids at schools like Tufts, NYU, BU, BC and New England LACs (and other schools like those). That has also been the experience of my friends with unhooked kids at private feeders.
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You probably know this but Iâm just posting to clarify. Each CSU has a local service area. Students who live in that service area receive priority over CA students who live outside of that service area.
https://www.calstate.edu/attend/impaction-at-the-csu
Applying to your local Cal State location is always a good idea since students who apply from areas nearest a university are given priority admission. This is especially true for the most sought after universities, or those that are designated as impacted.
This is correct - people are entitled. Like a restaurant, they can decide who to service. People shouldnât take offense - but they do. These are private - and it canât be stated enough - businesses.
BU yield is 31%. So double a similar in ârank/pedigreeâ but not location, etc. Case Western.
So while they still arenât at the level of the Ivies, etc., they do a pretty good job.
Of course, with all these high priced schools, money will play a factor because the CC isnât the norm - and a lot of people (if full pay), might be able to swing hit - but the U of ______ at $40K less sounds a lot better.
So they do very well relatively speaking (BU).
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I know you are just venting, but Iâll add that it isnât just what you have done but what motivated you to do it, what impact it had on others, what you learned from the experience, how it has influenced your thoughts about your future, etc. and how you conveyed that on your application. Two students could have published papers and have described the what and why very differently.
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