SCEA vs National Match

Metrical
Sat, 24 Sep 2011 15:13:25 +0000

Are you a permanent resident? If not, there are only 4 schools that you can apply to.

Yes, I am.



As far as who has got in where and their ethnicities as pertain to certain schools, the only thing you can do is go through the student profiles for the past few years and click on every student and compile your own data.



That’s actually a good idea, thanks. I’ll take a look. :)



Of course diversity is a plus; the question is whether your particular diversity is scarce relative to the demand for it. I would say the supply of Europeans educated well enough to succeed at an Ivy League school is much greater than the supply of well-educated URMs who grew up attending poor inner-city American schools.



That is true, but my country is very small and suffered a lot after the soviet union collapse. I only point this out to say that there’s a huge difference between well-educated wealthy Europeans and where I come from, and it’s a part of my QB story.



In any case, any advantage you would have as a European would apply equally whether you chose Harvard SCEA or the first Questbridge Match round. Why not go with your first choice first? SCEA at Harvard should give you an edge. By contrast, the vast majority of QB candidates get placed during the regular decision round – if you were to get into MIT/Yale/Princeton/Stanford during the match round, you would certainly also get in during the RD round.

And at these schools, the RD financial aid package would be pretty much the same. My son’s out-of-pocket cost was $3000 a year, based on some work-study and a summer job. Effectively, this amounts to free tuition and free room and board, with the $3000 covering books, travel expenses, and minor personal out-of-pocket costs.



Congrats to your son, he is very lucky, and I appreciate you sharing from personal experience. The reason behind ranking schools instead of applying to Harvard was that I would have a better chance (4 vs 1 kind of deal, if you will). That’s my I made this thread, because I started to question how founded that assumption was.

So you think if I would be matched this round but didn’t rank, I would still get in regular decision? Is there any advantage to ranking non-binding schools then? Financially you have to have 0 EFC anyway so it would stand to reason you’d get the same package during the regular round too.