100% it’s a yield protection tool for the school
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I am really happy about the AP macro/fin lit. Our high school ends up canceling AP classes or offered every other year due to very low enrollment in most of them but AP macro is offered every year and has a good turnout.
My impression after listening to a lot of podcasts is that there are absolutely some T20 schools that have a much higher admit rate in ED. I think UChicago might be the best example I’ve heard of that, which just happens to be one of my son’s top picks. 
We will have to think long and hard if we want to ED at a selective school to show interest and seriousness of application or play the EA/RD game. It sure is nice to do the ED and be done with it though. One of my son’s good friends did ED to Harvard and should hear back in a few weeks. His sister is there but got in via RD.
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It’s a public school, but both public and private schools operate on similar schedules here. The main difference is that private schools have spring break in March, and public schools have it in April.
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Harvard has restricted early action, not ED. And the Ivies absolutely give priority to hooked athletes for those spots. 4 athletes from D23’s high school class of 125 got into Princeton REA and she had better stats than all of them and was rejected. If we had known that she probably would have had a different strategy. She ended up at an 11% acceptance school regular decision as a last minute add. She was rejected by a safety (60% acceptance rate) with a perfect ACT, 4.0, great recs, high level EC and top Boarding School.
For high stats kids, some safety schools are not really safeties as yield protection works against them when the school thinks they would get in somewhere more competitive and not choose them. It was very difficult to create a list.
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Anyone else’s kiddo take the SAT yesterday? My son did and said it felt better than the August one . In August his English score was 100 points lower than his spring psat . He was not able to take the PSAT NMSQT due to a conflict. I wish they held it during the school day.
He is waiting to hear about selection for AFJROTC Flight Academy. Deadline was Friday. It is a full scholarship 8 week summer program where they can earn their private pilot’s license and get college credit. His SAI thinks he has a good shot. It required a written test, fitness test, application and recommendations. He scored a 98 on the fitness (recent average for accepted students was 67) He got a 76.5 on the academic (average was 62) He also has some flight experience, leadership and volunteering and a 3.9 UW. I think he has a great shot at it, fingers crossed!
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If you’re hell bent on seeing a school and can’t get an official tour, whether because they’re booked or simply not offered on the only dates you can be there, we had some great success reaching out to current students directly (here on CC but more so on reddit and via insta). In particular, kids who play the same sports or do the same activities as our kids.
In fact our very best, favorite college tour was given by two then-sophomores who spent hours walking with us all over one of the UCs. We got to see everything, and the direct connection made between our kids and these students made an enormous difference in perception and experience. The school itself went from “practically not interested” to “wow I love this place and I could totally see myself here.”
Anyway, point being that it may be worth a try even without an official tour. Of course if school is literally not in session when you’re there that may still be impossible.
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Interesting to hear about your D23, was she applying for the competitive majors (Business, Nursing, Comp Sci, Engineering, Math, Physics)? D25 is nowhere near those stats, but some of her friends are and are shooting high.
Have you looked into AE?
My D is mum about the SAT. She is over it, so I am not sure how focused she was, and that is usually her biggest struggle. She did well by most standards in Aug, but really needs to pick up another 30-40 pts IMO.
Princeton and the selective liberal arts colleges she was applying to do not have separate applications for majors and do not even let you pick your major as a Freshman.
That is true, but they still need to fill all their departments. They can usually tell if someone is heading in the bio and/or premed path vs someone who is probable to head towards English or History.
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I believe the question was asked because some schools may have a 20% acceptance rate for comp sci but list their overall acceptance rate at 60%. It is not so cut and dried in schools where the major is not selected ahead of time and they don’t apply to specific schools within the college.
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Oh no, I meant the safety that she was denied from. Did it not ask for a major?
I’m curious if there are known safeties that deny top tier students because they assume they are safeties for those kids. Just curious!
I don’t remember. But they did say they track demonstrated interest and we never visited.
Is anybody here familiar with Scoir? Our district does not use it, but I heard it can be useful for college selection research and wondered if anybody could recommend it.
Are you asking because you’d like to use it directly, or to lobby for your district to use it? (No need to directly answer that; thoughts on both, below.)
I believe that for both Scoir and Naviance, the real value comes from the network effect of your local school / district. Without info about applicants from your school, Scoir and Naviance still have profiles about different universities, but not much that’s different from any number of other websites (including College Confidential itself).
When Scoir or Naviance are used by your school, the portals give a more detailed picture of what grades and test scores are needed by students from your school to get in to various colleges. But unless your high school has a means of updating the data (that is, are paying someone) to enter the actual inputs (grades, scores, application cycle [ED, REA, ED2, RD]) and outputs (accepted, waitlisted, denied), I’m not sure that those platforms would be useful. I suspect that getting a school or district to adopt the platform would be a pretty involved process unless the school is already in the platform’s sales pipeline.
My kids’ school primarily uses Naviance to show the last 4 years’ worth of applications and outcomes, and I find the data to be helpful for calibrating my own expectations and thinking through which schools might be worth considering. Naviance hasn’t figured out how to handle test-optional data well, and since we’re in California, it’s hard to sometimes know how to parse the data in the system (lots of kids aren’t even taking the SAT/ACT; I’m not sure where their applications show up).
I gather that some high schools have current-year data in Scoir, where students and parents can see who else from the high school has applied from the current year … I feel like that might create some difficult social dynamics (both within the family and within the school body), and I’m glad we don’t have that.
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It is the same at our school (Scoir). Occasionally you can click on a dot and see that it was TO but I think that, as well as major applied, is student imputed (though I believe the CC could too) and most don’t bother. Final results are also not 100% accurate since few bother to updates a deferral or waitlist. We found it most useful for identifying “likelies,” schools that here would be deemed targets at best but historical data from the school told another story. It bares noting that what WE can see is determined by the school.
From the school perspective, it is a working tool/system. Our school submits and manages everything (LoRs, transcripts, profile) through Scoir, not CommonApp.
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The current year data is a composite. For instance, if you select UT Austin, you can see how many of the UT Austin applicants also applied to Rice, Texas A&M and other schools this year. You cannot identify who else (specifically) has applied and to what schools, unless you know someone who is the only applicant to a school.
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I would recommend any of these applicant clearinghouses. We have Naviance. It will show you granular data that is really helpful. Like, although our district boasts a whopping 12% acceptance rate to UVA, for instance, our high school has 0% admitted in the past 4 years. Not worth applying in my opinion.
Naviance has a scattergram feature that pulls the data from the past 4 years of our HS’s applicants . It looks like this for my kid for out of state U Washington for instance:
Much better odds here.
We are well aware my s23 (with lower stats than anon d23) was likely only accepted (to syra cuse) as he is a music major. Music and arts majors need to be accepted both academically and with music talent. Music really wanted him so we guess that may have pushed his academic acceptance.
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