I think CollegeVine is full of it.
It has Ivys as Hard Targets for D26 applying RD. I’m sorry, but I’m not buying it.
I do wonder if these generous chancing thresholds are part of the reason why these schools are getting inundated with applications, selling false hope, and driving admission rates further down?
College vine is like a bestie pumping you up! They are definitely overly optimistic!
When I looked a little more at their methodology, they seem to possibly imbalance test scores vs GPA. This could be why a college like UIUC comes in as a hard target for C26 when it surely is actually a reach. Though C26’s lopsided SAT/GPA makes chancing hard in general I think. I know schools are generally thought to give more weight to more recent GPAs, but .. not sure how many of them actually do.
D26 needs a reality check, not a hype man!
D26’s grades are so inflated that I don’t have much confidence in a 4.0 UW GPA standing out, even with her level of rigor.
I’ll let you know in December about CollegeVine’s accuracy.
Okay y’all are going to make me go use CollegeVine, lol. 
Oh! Apparently I consulted CollegeVine for my D22 years ago.
It told us Brown was a reach and her chances were 23%, and then these were targets – Tulane 41%, WashU 33% and Northwestern 28%.
Yeah, she was rejected from Brown and waitlisted at all three of those targets. (Kid was salutatorian with a 36 ACT and some high-level research and other strong ECs.)
CollegeVine is full of it, LOL – but here I go to put in D26’s schools. 
I actually started using it because some posters here said it was pretty accurate. Then others said it was way optimistic. So I’m not really sure what to think. I have played around with it a bit and example the probabilities do change when I change the major so I think it is detailed enough to not just base on broad admit rates. But I also think it’s much more common for students to have high GPAs with relatively low test scores, rather than the other way round which is C26.
Also, after the current project they are working on, C26 said they might also be open to doing an urban planning/design degree (still with intent to do MArch later, recognizing that it would require the extra year). Nothing decided yet and who knows if they will but it would certainly open some more options. Cal Poly Pomona, for example, would be a safety for urban design. (If they get into Boulder, urban planning/design would be part of the core curriculum too.)
Although it’s fun to have a web site guess at your student’s percentage chance at each college, I think it’s probably misleading, whether it’s conservative or optimistic.
But you don’t need percentages. The main purpose of “chancing” is to build a practical list. You need at least one or two likely schools. You don’t want to drive yourself crazy applying to a whole lot of unlikely high reaches. And it’s nice to have a bit of variety in the target and reach category, since admission in these categories is less predictable.
I like the College Kickstart method. CK is a pay service, but you can use their method yourself. (The below screenshot is just my google sheets sketch of their categorization system.)
For each institution, the row is determined by the school’s selectivity (admit rate). Be as precise as possible (for example if you know admit rate for the student’s major, use that one).
The column is determined by comparing the student’s stats to each institution’s publicly posted ranges for GPA and test scores. Again, be as precise as possible.
It’s a bit subjective when the GPA and test scores appear in different ranges for that institution. In that case I try to be more conservative.
C26’s list is heavily slanted towards likelies, so I don’t think that’s an issue for us really. I mean, maybe Boulder is 75% chance rather than the 94% collegevine says.. it’s not really material in changing the category.
Of course the ultimate outcome is binary, and therein lies the rub.
We have a few colleges on the list where GPA is below the 25th percentile and SAT above the 75th percentile… (all judged for school in which the major falls). So.. still tough. But there it also comes to whether they look at the trend in GPA. Sophomore year and especially junior year are all in the GPA range. And they will have explanation for poor freshman year.
Edit: interestingly enough if I look at that table and at the stats for the UIUC school C26 would be in, it also comes out as a target… so in line with the collegevine assessment. Unfortunately there is no breakdown by major so not sure if the school overall is representative.
It can also be harder to chance when you are looking at an OOS public, because admission might be easier or harder than it is for IS students (who are likely to be the majority of applicants and therefore dominate the stats), or they might be looking for something slightly different than they would for IS students. In this case my D is also looking at UIUC and I agree it’s confusing and I also don’t have a sense of how IS/OOS admissions work there. We have it as a reach for her though, because she’s applying for an engineering major.
They talked about UIUC a few months ago on the Your College Bound Kid podcast. At UIUC for specific majors if you’re applying as an OOS student, it is VERY competitive to be admitted. And for something like, I think, computer science, if you’re from OOS and you apply & get admitted under a different major, you cannot change majors later into computer science. You’d have to transfer to a different school.
Fortunately my D is extremely clear that she does not want to be a computer science or CS+ major!!!
Definitely considering it a reach regardless what the websites say!
I think that’s everyone, not just out of state (re transfer)
D26 is making good progress on winnowing her list and ranking the schools she has visited. Also says she’s working on essay, but won’t talk to us about it so not confident if she’s on track to finish before summer ends. On the list though, Agnes Scott College is her second favorite school, which I’m thrilled about. School counselor says she’s highly likely to get in, it is uber affordable for us given the money they give, and it has early action, which means she will know if she is in there by mid-December and can choose to only apply to other schools she’d rather go to (or decide to be done) if she gets in with the money we expect. There is a realistic scenario where she only applies to 1 or 2 schools in the end.
And her school does not have APs, so the whole AP discussion has been foreign stuff to me.
I played with CollegeVine, and I think it deserve some credit since it asked for all the ECs and awards, and category them for the levels and impact. Thus the results from CollegeVine is not just based GPA/SAT/ACT combo.
Although the chances generated may still be way off the real shot, but it does have some usefulness in my opinion.
D19 also knew by mid-December (she did ED) and that takes a huge amount of stress out of the process. Crossing fingers for you!
Hey everyone,
How much do your kids use AI on a regular basis?
My D was talking to me about what she is seeing at her summer program. She said most kids constantly have an AI window open on the side of their laptop screen, and each time they do anything, the first thing they do is ask the AI. She said it varies how much people use AI vs trying to think on their own, but she was struck by how one of the people in her project group seems to use AI exclusively for everything. D asked this person to talk about the part of the project she was working on, and the person silently went to the AI window, typed in some stuff, and then turned her laptop to D, pointing at the AI’s reply, without even saying a word.
She also said they were talking about some chemistry stuff that D easily remembered from AP Chem (she took it sophomore year), but the other kids in her group didn’t even try to remember what they had learned in chemistry class… they went straight to the AI. Then they didn’t understand what the AI said, and D had to explain it to them. “This is basic stuff we learned in first semester AP Chem,” D says.
D is concerned that such heavy use of AI will “turn everyone’s brain to mush.” She thinks it’s good to stretch your brain by trying to figure something out yourself before going to the AI. My instinct is to agree with her. But are my D and I just a couple of Luddites, and should I encourage her to figure out some way to use AI more, while still figuring out a way to get the brain stretching in?
Edited to add: This is a highly competitive program and these are some high-powered kids, typically targeting HYPSM + Johns Hopkins (it’s a bioengineering program so they see JHU as super elite as well). My D says they are really smart kids with a lot of accomplishments. Just adding this because my D thinks it is incredibly bizarre to see these kids using AI so much.
