We have friends who have gotten off waitlists at Washington and Lee, Davidson, and Boston College. I predict more will happen after today.
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This is so interesting! D24 is from a suburban feeder-y public high school in northeast. We havenāt heard of anyone getting off the waitlist.
We have had ucsb, Michigan, wash U, brown so far.
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Hearing the same. this year has been extremely difficult for high stats students in our Northeast area. Schools that would regularly place 10+ kids in HYPSM are down to 1-2. Hopefully the waitlist process plays out soon and everyone is happy with their choice at the end.
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I have a S23 and a S24 this year. This is all purely anecdotal, so I understand it could be very wrong. However, I feel like what Iām observing this year is:
- More kids applied to larger numbers of schools even than last year.
- Schools seem to be accepting all the same kids. What I mean is, I saw more kids who racked up 8 or 10 (or more!) acceptances to their ātop pickā schools. I donāt remember seeing anyone on here last year with over six acceptances to their top schools, whatever ātopā meant for their particular situation. This year I have seen a bunch.
- It also feels like kids who got waitlisted got waitlisted a lot of places. Again, I feel like last year I saw more kids who got into three or four schools, and were waitlisted at one or two. This year it feels like there are a bunch of kids who got into a lot of schools, and a bunch of other kids who were waitlisted at a lot.
I donāt think these (anecdotal!) observations have anything to do with the FAFSA debacle. But they also set up a situation where more schools will be turning to their waitlist, and will be having to go deeper into their waitlist than in the past.
I also donāt know if thereās any way to verify if these observations are actually accurate, or if it just feels that way to me this year.
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I know today is a very important day for many of you and congrats on your decisions. But I have an important announcement: itās National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. You can all go back your regularly scheduled programming.
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Agree with this observation! At S24 school the same kids got into Harvard, Stanford & MIT. The same ones all cross-admits. You can only pick one! And then other kids got WL at those schools and most and got into 1-2 schools, not their top choice.
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Any difference in cost?
same hereāwe are in a similar Northeast area and thatās what we are seeing.
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Forgot to add earlierā¦Learned some more of where some of the other seniors are going to college. 1 kid is going to Agnes Scott College. Another is going to study engineering at Univ of San Diego. Most are attending ASU, followed by some going to U of A. Nobody is headed to NAU, but Iām not surprised because NAU seems to fit best for the really outdoorsy type of student (plus you pretty much need a car there). Apparently the kid headed to UAH has relatives in Alabama.
D24 talked a lot last night about her classmates, especially the Mean Girl crew, 2 of which are rooming together next year at college. I mentioned some of Harlan Cohenās advice about college dorm roommates and D24 surprisingly was receptive to listening this time. 
She now likes how she wonāt be attending college with any of those mean girls from her graduating class, wonāt have to see them, be pressured to hang out with them, be pressured to be nice to them, etc.
I told D24 that college is a great time to reinvent yourself if you want. To try on new things, figure out what you like and donāt like, and to do that without having this construct or archetype following you around of āOh, sheās the __ type of person from high school.ā
All of our out of town friends & relatives who are joining us for tomorrowās graduation are arriving tonight. And I have some food prep & other stuff to do this evening in preparation for tomorrow!
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Same cost.
Flying out tomorrow to visit again. Heās pretty much decided he is choosing Brown. He sent a handful of emails and got a few quick replies from students and a phone call with a pre-med advisor. He has a lot of love for ND, but on paper Brown wins for what matters to him most. He knows a lavish admit weekend canāt compare to a finals week visit, but the student response has left a great impression and heās mature enough to not to get caught up in that. The AO is doing her best to make things happen for him to make it productive.
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1 ap exam down, 2 to go. D24 anticipates the physics 2 being the most difficult.
After joining the accepted students instagram page and getting a ton of reach outs from other incoming students, she has decided to take her chances and go random on a roommate, as she is not liking the frantic vibe, where it seems like ppl are are just looking for anyone to room with so they can take away some of the uncertainty.
She is, by nature, not an effusive person, but Iām seeing the signs that sheās confident in her choice of school and excited about the adventure ahead.
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I donāt know 100% of the outcomes but from what I have seen, it doesnāt seem like too crazy of a year overall for our feederish HS. It is a small enough HS with a wide enough range of colleges kids apply to that year to year results can vary for individual colleges. But roughly speaking we seem to have expected numbers of kids going to broadly-defined peer groups.
Iāll have to ask about waitlists, though. I have only heard of one kid so far switching to a waitlist offer, but that doesnāt really mean anything since I am not deeply plugged into the day-to-day. S24 might know more, though.
Yes! Typically a bunch of kids from our Northeast school get into one and ONLY ONE Ivy/Ivy+. This year is completely different. A handful of kids got in basically everywhere they applied and everyone else waitlisted almost everywhere. But those waitlisted kids are all getting off at at least one school.
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I was talking about my preference generally between LA and Philly having lived in both, I guess it was unclear.
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I think results this year were the ābestā Iāve seen from the privates my kids attend since 2021. Perhaps schools going back to schools they know now that the extent of grade inflation is known or back to caring more about testing. I was surprised.
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S24ās private school is having a strong year - certainly in line with the historical record, if not better. Last year was weaker but that class also had somewhat weaker statistics (test scores). I have not heard of any waitlist action yet. One interesting observation is that the pattern of schools appears to have shifted a fair bit. Schools that historically enroll several of our students each year (most of them SLACs) are taking/getting one or none this year. Other schools suddenly seem to be clamoring for our students. (I think Cornell and Tufts accepted everyone who applied.)
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Curious if you are in the NE? I think from our class of 150 or so, 30 or 40 applied to Cornell. I think 3 or 4 are going.
I am feeling it might be similar for us, and I am wondering the same thing about ātrustedā grades and test scores.
I also feel like this might be true for us as well. We definitely still have some going to SLACs, but to me it is looking relatively light. And for whatever reason we have an unusual number going to some specific universitiesāCMU, WUSTL (including my kid), Yale . . . sort of a random list, though, so maybe it is just normal variation.
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I canāt say how students this year did compared to past years. D24ās high school, while perfectly cromulent, isnāt exactly a feeder. Having tried to educate myself, I understood that admissions at colleges with sub-20% acceptance rates are difficult to predict and that high stats merely opened the door to the possibility of admission. Indeed, it was hard to read the actual results thread and not conclude, āWell, weāre probably hosed.ā This unpredictability and D24ās outright denial from Williams in ED led her to apply to 13 schools. We really had no idea how D24 would fare in admissions until March. Her ultimate results wildly exceeded expectations, but it seemed like it could have so easily gone the other way, with her only getting into our easy-admission flagship and one or two ālikelies.ā
I donāt know if any of this figures into admission and waitlist trends generally, but the increasing awareness of the difficulty and unpredictability of admissions (as well as the provision of financial and merit aid) certainly incentivizes students to apply to more schools. We would have been happy to have applied to fewer schools, but it didnāt seem wise at all at the time.
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