<p>We got a list from college counseling at the beginning of the year showing where the class of 2011 ended up with respect to difficulty of entry ranking for that kid. Turns out that a handful ended up going to “unlikelies”, so it can happen. I wouldn’t want my kid to use up too many slots on them, though. I would also want my kid to have a good talk with the college counselor about it.</p>
<p>Welcome to CC, the Junior College Weekend at second son’s school is approaching and unsure if we will receive a preliminary list then but if we do, that list will undoubtedly change a year from now. That list will be derived from a variety of current aspects but limited by his GPA, PSAT and pending SAT. Yeah, those freshmen grades count. I’ve seen it go both ways questioning the counselors but majority of the time, the counselors have been right, not all the time but most of the time. I’ve seen parents go off the charts and even drive to a school on a week day to confront a headmaster and demand he write a letter of recommendation. </p>
<p>Fast forward, my sister is a college professor and she put it rather bluntly to me (because I rarely listen to her), that nobody really cares where you went to college unless it was an Ivy, Williams, Davidson, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Amherst, U Chicago, ok UVA and a few others and that’s only for your first job. After that, don’t really care, I think she’s right. And that is one reason why I believe so strongly in the boarding school institutions. Just my opinion. To turn the screws a bit, the best producers in my office are the so called preps, none of which went to the ivies.</p>
<p>What is wrong if the D/S has several reach schools, if they also have a couple of safeties and " in range." It’s not a test where they are shooting for 100%, but rather shouldn’t the BS only be concerned that the D/S has one or more good options at the end of the process? (this is more of a question than a position, to those who have been through the process)</p>
<p>DS graduated last year. We were invited to two “College Nights” and had one meeting with college counselor during parents weekend. She was available by email, but the process was truly my son’s and she was there as his guide/supporter. At DS’s school, goal was about 8 -10 apps evenly split among high reach/ reach/likely and for the kids to have some choice at the end of it all. All worked out at the end - and it was fascinating to watch the process evolve as a schools that seemed to be favorites mid-junior year fell to the bottom of lists (or off) as new ones rose and the one DS is now attending and at which he is thriving and so very happy was a dark horse all along!</p>
<p>In our experience most kids end up applying to several reach/high reach schools. Early in the process the GCs push a focus on the safeties probably because it is easy to find high reach schools DC likes, finding the safeties takes more of an effort. It is also our experience that most students are very realistic about their chances at “lottery” schools - they have seen their older classmates be dissapointed. However, there are always some surprises, an there is no harm in applying as long as there are other more likely choices as well.</p>
<p>Thanks to all of you! I love the word “lottery” schools. Friend’s son won the lottery ticket - didn’t get into ivies, but got into Stanford instead. Miracle does happen.</p>
<p>It’s Jan. of D’s junior year and not a peep from the college office. I know the seniors come first, but if/when we have a question about SAT prep or summer options, etc. there’s no connection yet–is this normal? Should my D provoke?</p>
<p>Erlanger- I don’t remember which school your child attends, but at Choate, the juniors are started off with a bang at the end of January, or maybe beginning of Feb. with a big college weekend full of seminars for them and their parents. There is a keynote speaker- I think last year it was Fiske of “Fiske Guides” and panels of current college and university admissions people. Right before that weekend, the kids are given their college counselors.</p>
<p>The college counselors also make themselves available to younger students one night a week in a small dining room to answer any of their questions and get to know them. I’m guessing that if you search your parent part of the web site, your school will describe something similar. Good luck as you begin this journey!</p>
<p>You don’t necessarily need to have seen action at this point but you definitely should know what the school’s timetable is for juniors to begin interacting with college counselors. Are you sure that there’s no information on-line about this?</p>
<p>Example: [Delbarton</a> School: Academics » College Counseling<a href=“See%20the%20%22Calendar%20for%20College%20Planning%22%20.pdf%20for%20an%20explanation%20of%20the%20timeline.”>/url</a></p>
<p>Here’s a very useful link I found for Carnegie-Mellon University addressing what juniors can be doing at this point.</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“Home - Computing Services - Office of the CIO - Carnegie Mellon University”>Home - Computing Services - Office of the CIO - Carnegie Mellon University]Admission</a> > High School Juniors](<a href=“College Counseling - Delbarton School”>College Counseling - Delbarton School)</p>
<p>While I would expect that the process would have begun by now, I don’t think there’s any need to freak out (just yet).</p>
<p>Due to the fact that my son’s high school college counselor had never been to the U.S., we called on a friend in the U.S. to share tips and college suggestions with him and we otherwise had a D-I-Y college experience (relying heavily on links like the ones above, many of them – like the CMU link – from admission offices at colleges he didn’t even consider). His college search experience didn’t get underway until late February of his junior year, during a trip to the U.S. Well, I guess we started before then because my son had to identify some colleges to visit that were near relatives that we needed to visit. And it was in early March that he signed up for the ACT. From there on out, it seems like everything revolved around college admissions. I don’t think he suffered in any way from starting when he did. Remember: no matter how early you start, the process (generally) goes right up until the application deadlines (and then it resurrects itself when the acceptance letters arrive). Given that the end of the line is fixed, an earlier start simply lengthens the timeline. So, in my opinion, starting later has its benefits.</p>
<p>I’ve just seen this thread and for me, it’s quite topical. My daughter was recently accepted EA to a good university from a HADES school. I had little to do with the college counselor. I did receive regular mass emails however. I found there to be an implied reluctance (disdain?) on the part of the counselor regarding contact with parents. My daughter really handled everything. A few things came through, though.</p>
<p>First, I agree with an earlier post, that the top 10% of the classes at the top prep schools are likely to gain acceptance to some IVY, though also agree that HYPSM is somewhat of a crap shoot.</p>
<p>Second, I have carefully reviewed Naviance data versus the grade histograms at the prep school my daughter attends, at it appears that unless one is in the top 13% of the class, the odds of IVY attendance drops off dramatically.</p>
<p>Third, it would appear from my analysis, that the other 17-20% of IVY/S/M admissions are legacies/athletes/URMs. The Naviance scatterplots always have a few low GPAs that are clearly outliers from the clump of acceptances in the top right corner of the plot (high GPA/high SAT).</p>
<p>Fourth, I strongly suspect (based upon discussions my daughter had with her counselor) that the counselors try very hard for as high an IVY admit rate as possible. It’s good press for the prep school, and likely increases applications and donations. As a consequence of this, the advisors will strongly steer certain candidates away from Ivies, even if they may have a chance. There are undoubtedly candidates at such schools (families of significant donors?) for whom it is more important to the prep school to have a good/desired result, and I suspect this enters into the equation of whom to push for Ivy applications as well.</p>
<p>And finally, no… I am not Ivy crazy. I merely use it as a metric frequently tossed around as a basis for comparison.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, as I was reading your post, I suspected you were somewhat the opposite of “Ivy crazy” because you looked at it with such a sterile view and you did not entangle your observations with value judgments.</p>
<p>I came to appreciate the “Ivy crazy” people who are out there – both parents and applicants. That mindset pulled some very qualified and capable applicants from the schools my son targeted. He applied to two Ivies himself…but his focus was not in that direction but at other colleges that were also highly competitive, though probably a little less competitive on account of those who would brook nothing short of HYPSM.</p>
<p>HYPSM…I get the first 3…S for Stanford…M is ?
Sorry to be offtopic but curious.
Also curious if other parents feel that they need to do enough basic research to be sure they are willing to make whatever financial contribution will be forthcoming. I ve got a Sophmore and can easily imagine going through my son s list and letting him know which schools I’m willing to defer retirement over and which schools he ll have to figure out how to pay for himself. For me it is more about school size and that I won’t pay 40 or 50 K for school that are lower ranked than our state flagship than Ivy crazy. I went to a super large impersonal school and am planning to make the classic mistake of funelling my past resentment into the present and making the opposite mistake. Maybe planning is too strong a word. 
So I wonder about how hands off a parent can be if they (like me) have to go through their own process as well.
One advantage I have over my local friends is that I won’t have to deal with anxiety over the long distance parenting on top of everything else.
Smiles
Ps</p>
<p>“M” is for MIT.</p>
<p>Parent sparket–I don’t think there’s anything wrong with giving kids guidance along the lines of: you have a great state univ option. If you can get into any of a list of top schools (and define list) or can secure scholarships in the range of xx, you can go to another school–otherwise state u. is where we are willing to send you. My D has had that input from us since before high school and I think kids are pretty good with clear guidance, but if you are not transparent, then it will become a battle/sore spot.</p>
<p>I like the way you put it erlanger: transparent.
I think I can pull it off.<br>
At this point I think I’ve made my point often enough that the message is already drilled into DS’s head and my guess is that I won’t have to make it again.</p>
<p>Smiles,
PS</p>
<p><a href=“The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos”>The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos. Have people seen this? </p>
<p>Early Admission Applications Rise, as Do Rejections
Last Updated: 2:44 PM ET
Early admission to top colleges, once the almost-exclusive preserve of the East Coast elite, is now being pursued by a much broader and more diverse group of students, including foreigners and minorities. The democratization of the process and the overall explosion in applicants made the early-admissions game much tougher this year for the group that has long dominated it: prep schools in New York and beyond where the vast majority of seniors apply to their top choices in November in hopes of avoiding the springtime scrum.</p>
<p>Their odds have definitely decreased, said Christoph Guttentag, dean of admissions at Duke University. You can sort of envision the appeal of early decision radiating outward, from the most affluent to the middle class, and westward from the East Coast and then across the Pacific.</p>
<p>Duke, for example, received 400 early applications this year from California or overseas; in 2005, it was fewer than 100. Haverford College, outside Philadelphia, saw early applications from abroad double this year from last. And at the University of Chicago, there were double-digit rises in the percentage of early applications from black and Hispanic students.</p>
<p>You do not need a perfect score on the math SAT to know that if more people are applying many top-tier colleges say the number has doubled or tripled over the last five years competition is stiffer. So in certain precincts of Manhattan, parents of those who were deferred or rejected in December have been swapping stories ever since about the seemingly perfect senior at The Spence School who did not make the cut (If not her, who? lamented one parent) and the six Brearley School girls who were deferred from Yale (I thought Yale loved Brearley, cried another, pointing out that 20 Brearley graduates have gone to Yale in the last five years, more than any other university).</p>
<p>Was it the international students who pay full freight? The public schools who do more for diversity? Occupy Wall Street fomenting anger at the 1 percent?</p>
<p>Maybe its that they are tired of New York City private school kids, worried the mother of a senior who was deferred from Yale, echoing a common refrain. The juniors, she added, are flipping out.</p>
<p>Spence and Brearley, both girls schools on the Upper East Side, declined to comment on early-admissions data, and many parents spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearful that complaining publicly might hurt their childrens chances in the regular-admissions round now under way. Other schools, including Scarsdale High, in Westchester County, said they had not seen significant change, but declined to be specific.</p>
<p>And some places saw plenty of success this season. At the Trinity School, on the Upper West Side, more than half of the seniors who applied on the early track were accepted (the school would not say where while the admissions process continues). At Saint Anns in Brooklyn Heights, 61 of the schools 80 seniors applied early, and 52 were admitted including five to Yale, three to Harvard and two to Princeton.</p>
<p>But college counselors, teachers, tutors and parents in these rarefied circles said students had to digest a hefty dose of deferrals and outright rejections this December.</p>
<p>There was a lot of disappointment from kids who had prepped hard and got high scores on their tests, said Tim Levin, founder and chief executive of Bespoke Education, a tutoring and SAT prep company.</p>
<p>Grading early admissions can be a little like analyzing a baseball game after four innings, but it has grown in importance over the last decade, with many Ivy League and other prestige campuses filling 45 percent or more of their classes in December. Generally, students can apply early to only one college, and more and more are doing so, believing it gives them a leg up… (more)</p>
<p>It’s like filling an orchestra. The college admissions crew pull what they need as early as they can. Blame the Trustees.</p>
<p>I’ve heard a number of college admissions directors contend that it really doesn’t matter what round you apply in…if you’ve got what it takes to get in, your chances of getting in are the same and if you don’t, you’re not increasing your chances by applying in one round as opposed to another.</p>
<p>I believe them.</p>
<p>My son didn’t apply anywhere for early decision and only to one early action school…which, in retrospect, was both good and bad (I’ll explain later). He ended up doing just fine in the RD round – even though it seemed as if all of the colleges had gone a long way toward filling their freshman classes with early decision admits. (That bump in ED admits may have been a signal for this year’s applicants that their chances of admission improve during ED – which, in turn, prompted people to use ED to try to take a bridge too far which led to record rejections.)</p>
<p>I do think the economy has put the admission office matriculation algorithms through the sausage-maker, forcing them to do a little more open-field running and improvisation when it comes to putting together a class. I’ve seen quite a few take a cautious approach and intentionally underadmit – using the wait list to gradually bring the class up to the desired size. Of course this “conservative” approach is also risky in that you’re turning off students that you’d like to be embracing if you had the guts to admit more students and risk overenrollment if your matriculation projections were off kilter. And that, of course, is why they may lean a little heavier on early decisions, going straight for binding (and thus highly predictable) admits when they might have deferred some of those applicants before going ahead and giving them the green light in the RD round.</p>
<p>As for the Early Action application – I recommend it if, as in my son’s case, it’s not the first choice OR if the application is amazing and fine-tuned in time for the deadline (which was not my son’s case…although I think he believed it was). Once he sat down and really focused on his applications, they were pretty good. And that first one, by comparison, was like dog food. But without that first one, I don’t think the others would have been so good. They all might have been a little more like dog food. Knowing that he had submitted dog food to a college that was below the middle of the pack for him meant that I didn’t lose sleep worrying that he flubbed his big shot at his all-time favorite college. (You don’t get a mulligan on essays and such from the early round deferral to the regular decision round – although you can send in an update, if applicable, and they do get your mid-year grade report.)</p>
<p>I thought Bowdoin’s Admission Office was very transparent about the numbers game last year. You can follow the storyline as it played out from ED to ED2 to RD:</p>
<p>ED1 Results: [In</a> historically hard year, 189 students admitted via ED I - The Bowdoin Orient](<a href=“http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2011-01-21§ion=1&id=5]In”>http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2011-01-21§ion=1&id=5)</p>
<p>ED2 Results: [230</a> places taken in Class of 2015 after College accepts 45 in ED II - The Bowdoin Orient](<a href=“http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2011-02-25§ion=1&id=5]230”>http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2011-02-25§ion=1&id=5)</p>
<p>Regular Decision Results: [Regular</a> decision yields 15.6% acceptance rate - The Bowdoin Orient](<a href=“http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2011-04-01§ion=1&id=2]Regular”>http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2011-04-01§ion=1&id=2)</p>
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<p>I don’t believe them. Look at these statistics, from the NYT Choice blog:</p>
<p><a href=“https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0ArlRBr9Qvz0mdFNZOE9BM3gtRHFnaExVNnpBcVM4SEE&output=html[/url]”>Early Admission - Google Drive;
<p>Many of the schools have accepted anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the class in the early round. I can’t see why applying as part of a much larger pool for a much smaller supply of spots doesn’t matter. It’s only in the early rounds that applicants can assure a college, “You really are my first choice.” As colleges watch their yields, that has to make a difference.</p>
<p>Now, college admissions officers may want to believe their extra-special powers of perception would come to the same conclusions, under different circumstances.</p>
<p>Someone posted that same NYT Blog chart last year (with it being last year’s chart, of course) and it scared the heck out of me. In the end, it didn’t seem to make a difference – but who can really say without more data?</p>
<p>I think, at least historically, there’s a lot of self-selection that goes on for Early Decision. The applicant pools are simply that much more competitive and that the higher admit rates through Early Decision are explained largely due to the fact that there’s a richer pool of applicants. The Regular Decision round is deluged with people who are applying as “reach” applicants, people who are clearly throwing it over the transom without having any genuine interest, and even people who are “low-yield” and including it as a safety that some Admission Offices will shy away from admitting because it’s only going to diminish their yield number.</p>
<p>I don’t believe colleges break out the stats for their freshman classes by which round the applicants were admitted. I wish they did because then we wouldn’t have to take them at their word – or decline to do so.</p>
<p>Oh, and to the extent that you might look for merit aid – applying early is a bad idea. In theory, the financial aid (need-based) awards aren’t impacted at all by which round you apply in. Here, too, I believe them but still advise early applicants seeking need-based aid to get an “early read” before committing. But why would a college throw around merit money to early decision applicants who are bound to attend? I can only think they would do that for – perhaps – some middle class superstar who isn’t going to qualify for need-based aid and is very likely to tear up the early decision contract on account of not getting any (or enough), so they sweeten the kitty to keep that from happening.</p>