<p>Jay Matthews on Six reasons why colleges should keep early admissions (xiggi, no need to chime in on his article :-)</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/19/AR2006091900601.html[/url]”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/19/AR2006091900601.html</a></p>
<p>Matthews gave 6 good reasons why colleges OTHER THAN HYP and a couple of others should keep early admissions. He left out the best reason of all: it helps keep them solvent.</p>
<p>In other words, save for a few clues, an applicant cannot predict where s/he has the best chance of getting in. Different athletic needs, different orchestral needs, how is an applicant to know?</p>
<p>FYI:
Percentage of public school students admitted to:
Harvard, class of 2009: 64% 48% male, 52% female.
Yale, class of 2009, 55%. 50% male, 50% female.</p>
<p>All applicants CAN’T. But that doesn’t mean the admissions office doesn’t. Except that - for the 25-30% athletes, one can be in touch with the coaches. Legacies know where they are legacies. Developmental admits know where their families gave (or are giving money.) One knows one’s Pell Grant status. The GC knows who in the school is applying where. One can be in contact with the head of Egyptology. The mayor of Cambridge knows where his pull is likely to be. And on and on. When you add these all together, you quickly discover that the rest of the admits, those that rely primarily on GPAs and SAT scores are so much “admissions dust”.</p>
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<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>When taken with the percentage of financial aid the the diversity percentages, the public school rates contribute to VERY different admissions profiles for Harvard and Yale.</p>
<p>If anyone really wants to “game the system” or understand their potential odds, these are the kinds of statistics that provide much more useful information that median SAT scores.</p>
<p>BTW, based on my knowledge of Harvard’s student body, I am not at all surprised by those differences.</p>
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<p>It’s not just Harvard and Yale. The same kinds of distinctions occur at closely matched pairs of schools up and down the list. For example, Williams and Swarthmore are nearly identical in terms of admissions stats like SAT scores. But, the real admissions profiles are very different. Understanding those differences can provide useful information in trying to decipher what might press an adcom’s button.</p>
<p>Can we not be so veiled. Which one is more diverse? Which one more wealthy? Inquiring minds want to…</p>
<p>Admissions dust? Are those the ones that get in or are denied?</p>
<p>Both. It hardly matters, provided they can pay the bill. Statistcally, it isn’t a very large number, though it is a HUGE number if you are one of them! Their high SAT scores can help bring up the averages, balancing out those of athletes or URMs or diplomats’ kids or developmental admits accepted with lower ones, and yes, the orchestra does need violinists, too. </p>
<p>Let me be clear: if I were them, and recognizing the same institutional needs, I’d run it in exactly the same way (though I’d make the list price significantly higher, as folks would be happy to pay it.) But just because we don’t get to see “the man behind the curtain” shouldn’t lead us to believe that he isn’t there.</p>
<p>What makes you think that they can pay the bill?</p>
<p>Again, do the numbers. 58% of Yalies (and 50% of Harvardians?) pay full-freight. Each school has approximately 10% Pell Grantees (H. a little less.) Some athletes, especially in the “specialty” sports (equestrian teams, squash, etc.) are more likely to be among the full-freighters (when I was in school in the Dark Ages, I never met one who wasn’t, but I’m sure there are exceptions), but I’d be willing to bet that the bulk of the big sports folks are in that middle/upper middle income zone ($40-$90k). So that leaves at Yale, for example, only 38% of the student body outside of the Pell grantees who receive any aid at all. If the Princeton pattern holds (I don’t have Yale data), a significant majority of those will be in the $100k-$160k income range. Will they find it easy to pay the bill? I wouldn’t know. But can they? Well, they’re there, and I don’t here of many non-Pell Grant students leaving these schools for financial reasons.</p>
<p>Mini:</p>
<p>I sure wish more applicants would pay attention when you start slicing the pie.</p>
<p>People just don’t understand that, after you have subtracted Pell Grantees, recruited athletes, legacies, development admits, children of the rich and famous, plus a big slug of “diversity” admits, there are precious few slots for your basic suburban white valedictorian. There a blue million of these applicants, few slots, and the bar is very high.</p>
<p>You can tell that applicants don’t get it from the number of “chances” posts on College Confidential that make no mention whatsoever about ethnicity, soc-ec, type of high school, etc. The first thing an applicant needs to understand is what pile his or her application will go into.</p>
<p>My daughter doesn’t fall into any of those categories and does not add to their “diversity” numbers, which, I might add, were higher than ever this year. She was not a val. Or a sal.<br>
My daughter had a great application. (At least I think so; I’m her mom.) She was not a musician or an athlete or a legacy or rich. She does not come from a famous family. We don’t qualify for a Pell Grant. We do not live in the inner city. We believe in public education through 12th grade.
She had good ECs. She worked hard, both at her grades and her ECs, like most high achieving kids. We always made sure that she had low-stress fun during the summers.
All I am saying is that it does happen, but it can’t happen if you’re not willing to gamble and follow your dreams. Obviously it won’t happen for everyone or everywhere.
I truly discouraged her from applying to schools like HY because of all the negativity I’ve read on CC over the past three years. She wanted to give it a shot. Who was I to blow into the wind?<br>
Whether it’s a lottery or not (I don’t think so) the old saying rings true: You cannot win if you do not play.
And although Mini told me way back last year to repeat over and over to myself, “She is not going to the Ivy League…” we didn’t take the advice of a message board (with no disregard to those who have offered a great deal of great advice to me and others.) You still have to make your own decisions and take your own chances.
There’s a lot of great information shared here. I’ve learned a lot …about resume styles, safeties, all kinds of things. However, none of us have the final answers. You just never know.</p>
<p>There is an awful lot of overlap in that pie formula. Still a lottery with the leftovers, though.</p>
<p>… and it probably gets murkier still for the group of kids the schools a notch down are considering for ED and RD. Which, as Marian pointed out, is where this really matters. I have to believe that, once the true supermen are skimmed off, a huge number of these applicants look essentially the same.</p>
<p>We met with our kid’s GC last week. He said that, prior to the last couple years, he had a good sense of who would get in where. Over the last two years, as applications have gone through the roof, he no longer has the same level of confidence. The process is indeed not completely random, but we don’t have acess to what the colleges are looking at. If he can’t predict how can we? </p>
<p>One must just assess the odds as best one can, based on all available information and make a judgement call. Which might lead reasonable people to take differing actions, depending on their exact situation and risk preferences. Which is different than ignoring the odds, or “damn the torpedoes” in every case. </p>
<p>IN NY, where we now live, the National Merit cutoff has jumped from 218 to 221 this year. I don’t think things will be less murky for this year’s college applicants to the top colleges.</p>
<p>Chiming in a bit on the stuff from last night:</p>
<p>I agree with mini’s analysis of the various subgroups and the spots they take (although there is certainly some overlap there), but I think interesteddad is way off base if he thinks that private school and public school apps go into different piles at Harvard and Yale, or anywhere else for that matter. (Actually, all the information I have is that there is a slight bias at all those schools in favor of public school kids, all other things being equal.) The Harvard-Yale difference on public/private and full pay has a potential innocent explanation (which corresponds to my observations): The less sophisticated people are, the stronger Harvard’s brand is relative to Yale’s. I would guess that Harvard gets meaningfully more applications from public school kids than Yale, and that public school kids with a choice choose Harvard over Yale in greater proportion than private school kids. </p>
<p>By the way, the whole subgroup analysis probably explains most of the difference between Williams and Swarthmore: (a) Williams is much more serious about athletics than Swarthmore, and is going to take a lot more kids for athletic reasons. (b) Williams has always been preppier than Swarthmore, and so its legacies are going to be preppier than Swarthmore’s (and it’s going to appeal to preppier kids). It’s tough for me to get a real sense of this from what I see, because of the distortion that Swarthmore is so close. But I know that Williams isn’t even on the radar screen at the city public schools here, and Swarthmore is. It also may matter to some people that Swarthmore is completely accessible by public transportation from anywhere along the Northeast Corridor.</p>
<p>I met a charming kid a month ago who is going to Harvard this fall. Bright, well-rounded kid with great grades, scores, etc., but not yet a world-conqueror, and not even really a discernible leader. Private school. Two-generation Princeton legacy deferred ED and then rejected at Princeton, and also rejected at Yale and Columbia. Obviously, one anecdote does not a principle prove, but no one would look at her and predict that she would be going to Harvard after Princeton rejected her.</p>
<p>As for it being insulting to the admissions people to call it a lottery, the standard Yale admissions stump speech is approximately as follows: “We get about 20,000 applications. At least 15,000 of those are perfectly qualified, and the kids could take great advantage of what we offer and give a lot back. On the basis of our experience and attention, we think we can identify about 5,000 super-qualified kids, who have meaningfully more potential as scholars and leaders. But we can only accept less than a third of them, and we have absolutely no confidence in our ability to make meaningful distinctions within that group of applicants. We keep trying and do our best, because we don’t have a choice, and sometimes we have specific needs we’re trying to fill, and that helps make some decisions. In the end, though, none of us believes there is any real difference between the applicants we have accepted and the applicants on our waitlist, and in many cases we have sharp differences of opinion internally about which applicants should be on which list.” </p>
<p>I don’t really believe that 100%, but I believe that it reflects something real in the process.</p>
<p>I mostly agree with JHS’ recent assessment here. That corresponds to what I have heard From the Horse’s Mouth, too. </p>
<p>But I wanted to emphasize a couple of things. </p>
<p>Mini and Int-Dad make it sound as if hooks are the first cut. And further, what’s insulting about that is that it also implies that academic excellence is the last thing being considered (the “leftovers” in the pie). That is not the way the process works, as I have been told. With the exception of the big-name apps that come through the pile (“Oh, look, Sarah Hughes: Oh, look, Frist’s son”), the weeding happens first in the excellence department, then regionality, then hooks within that region and within particular schools. </p>
<p>Second, it also means that an athlete can win out over a development admit, and vice-versa. So, the elites don’t have their “fill” necessarily of all the possible (or historic) development admits their hearts desire, nor the maximum number of greatest athletes, and every single qualified Pell Grantee. They pick and choose among hooks, just as they pick and choose among outstanding candidates from the same region. Whenever possible, they seek & get both: hooked and excellent. If they can’t get both, they have to choose one over the other, but the choice doesn’t always go to the hook.</p>
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<p>Sounds about right.</p>
<p>I should have clarified in my “overlap” comment that most of the hooked kids are also excellent. The “leftovers” are also excellent. Didn’t mean to sound pejorative.</p>
<p>Oh, my comments weren’t directed at you, SS. 
They were directed at mini & interesteddad. (Sorry, I thought one of them said “leftovers.”) I think they both make some important points about what’s “left.” (After college “needs” are considered.) It’s just that the way they wrote their posts, it kind of sounded as if the admissions committees first sit there and say, “Gee, what do we need this year – athletically, Pell-grant-wise, etc.” – & then go hunt for those people – whether or not such needed students are actually excellent. And then “fill” a certain number of slots and say, “Gee, we should look for excellence now.”</p>
<p>I agree on the issue of excellence.</p>
<p>I want to modify somewhat JHS explanation of why Harvard gets more apps from public school students. He is right that nationally, Harvard is more of a draw to public school students. But it is also a draw locally. The Boston suburbs have a wealth of excellent public schools whose students aspire to Harvard and MIT, like other public school students in the country and who qualify for admission. The same does not apply to the New Haven area. Visting schools in the Northeast, we kept tripping against graduates of these suburban public schools.</p>
<p>It’s occurred to me that private schools get disproportionate attention overall in admissions for one particular reason: they’ve got a much larger proportion of qualified applicants who have demonstrated the willingness and ability to pay full-freight for a fancy-branded education.</p>