Yes, there’s no way that email means anything.
weighted 3.9! and she got in and has committed so you will be fine too!
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Congratulations to her. Did she submit scores? Thanks.
she submitted a 1450 sat
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Sadly, I think their “Let’s release 25% of the early action decisions now in December and make everyone else wait” scheme is not endearing them to potential students. It’s producing more negative than positive impressions.
It’s as if they have said “These are the Specials, and we will accept them now, because we like them very much, and the rest of you Non-Specials, we don’t care so much about you, so you can wait, like second class citizens, and for a vague timeframe, to hear whether or not we deem you acceptable.”
Not the message you want to send to the students who will eventually make up 75% of your offers.
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I haven’t been speaking with students who applied EA to know how the early release of acceptances is sitting with them, but my main response to your comment is that the early release on Dec. 21 will probably turn out to be to students who will make up around 10-15% of the class.
It’s definitely weird how they did it, but in reality it’s not much different than UGA, Clemson, etc… releasing their EA, accepting like 25-30% of the applicant pool and deferring the rest until regular decision. There are high stats students getting deferred left and right. Honestly, the common app has made it much more difficult to get accepted, especially early, at a lot of schools- it’s just so easy to apply to a lot of schools at once.
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The entire college admissions process is a mystery to me. I’ve been through it six times now. Just focused on the past few years, on one extreme, I have had a very academically high-ranked child who had a brutal admissions “season” in 2021, and another child who was no where near as academic but much more specialized, and had a spectacular admissions process the very next year in 2022.
Now I have a 2024 child who is totally different from my 21 and 22 sons. (Great! Can’t they make it easy for us and keep it consistent LOL.) My 24 kid has a much lower GPA than the others and is not “specialized” but has documented and lifelong learning disabilities. He already has more options from higher-ranked and good schools than my 2021 applicant even though he has nothing near the academic rigor.
For our 2021 applicant, he had a dozen+ APs, did great, excelled on the SAT, highly ranked varsity sport. For my 2022 and 2024 applicants, they never even took the SAT, lesser academics, not as highly ranked sports. Not a single SAT attempt between the two of them. Despite this, my 2022 son is at a much more highly ranked college that my 21 kid, and my 24 kid with learning issues already has better options than my 21 kid.
None of it makes a dang bit of sense to me on the applicant end of things. These schools change priorities every year and all of us are along for the ride. That’s my assessment after being through the wringer with “higher academia” too many times over. I know it’s changed since COVID. That’s a huge factor. I think the class of 2021 is a particular anomaly and would someday love to see facts and figures that break down how that class year fared. That said, my 21 kid landed exactly where he should (Clemson), but his app process didn’t give him near the options we thought it would. (No complaints, he’s so incredibly happy where he is and wouldn’t change anything.)
My “end of the day opinion” in just my opinion and probably only worth its applicability to my family. But where I’ve come out is that it’s all a dang crapshoot. Every applicant is viewed differently by each school depending on so many circumstances that we have no visibility into. Apply everywhere and see where you land and try your best not to get too invested in any particular school, because it’s such a mysterious process. (I know – easier said than done.)
Good luck all.
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2021 was the brutal Covid college rebound year. All sorts of crazy things going on. Glad your son likes Clemson. My Daughter just got in EA to Clemson, UGA, and VT. I really think she is leaning Clemson right now. We are way out in Carson City, NV and she wants to go back east for college. I grew up in Virginia and NC, so she’s been back many times…
The whole Academic prestige/college rankings thing is crazy also. Clemson has a lower ranking than VT/UGA per multiple ranking sites, but I doubt anyone would sense a difference. Clemson is a tough admit this year- likely end up in the 30-35% area going forward… I attended University of California Santa Barbara and VT and noticed absolutely no difference in quality between them, even though UCSB is a higher rated school. Some of this stuff is so arbitrary.
Anyhow, I feel for all the applicants. Most of these students are grouped so closely together in stats, EC’s, etc… that it almost seems to be a total luck of the draw on acceptances.
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The rankings have little to do with the quality of the teaching and the experience but much more to do with other arbitrary nonsense. The rankings tell you nothing about what may be the best fit for any individual. Good luck to all your applicants.
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Yes 2021 was brutal outlier, at least from my family’s perspective. My S21 has been so very happy at Clemson. So in my heart of hearts: all’s well that ends well. I truly wouldn’t change a thing. Clemson has been wonderful. He’s getting a great education, has amazing friends, an A+ experience, I couldn’t ask for a single thing more. I will love Clemson forever for the great experience.
But man was 2021 a wonky year! To this day we feel bad about pressuring our son to take the SAT that year. So many kids skipped it but we made our son focus that whole summer and take it in the fall because it had been so important in prior years. He worked SO hard on it and did great.
It was only in retrospect that we realized maybe it wasn’t needed… UGH. No one knew at the time, it was such an unusual application cycle. It’s honestly sort of painful to think about. He had friends much less academic with far greater application success.
Things are so much clearer after the fact… because of this experience, we decided that for the rest of our kids, taking the SAT/ACT was totally up to them. I honestly don’t care anymore because there are plenty of good options! OK so Florida state schools require a test – X them off the list! Plenty of other amazing options. Very easy to make these cuts when you’ve been through the grind and observed the subjectiveness and silliness of it all. My biggest mistake for my 21 son was thinking that a ton of APs, high GPA, and 1500+ SAT was super important! It’s really not. There are other kids with these credentials. An applicant having these stats just means they have a shot, it doesn’t mean it’s a guarantee. It’s truly all a crap shoot. I don’t mean to be a downer but the honest truth is this was eye-opening to me. In the sense of (1) where they’d be rejected/waitlisted and (2) the fact that ultimately they all land where they should and it all works out fine!
Honestly I’m just looking forward to being past the phase of the college acceptance game! One step closer every day!! LOL.
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yeah rankings are largely useless. I look at retention. How many kids are choosing to stay
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Isn’t that the biggest consideration in the rankings as well?
Retention may be one of the considerations in most rankings, but I certainly don’t think it’s the most important in all of them.
I guess there’s just no way of knowing if they will release another batch of decisions before they release all of them in February unless they tell us they will. The portal tea leaf reading may be a fun way to kill time while we wait, but it doesn’t seem to have any actual predictive value.
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no I don’t think so. It’s one of many and not the most important
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IDK? With Clemson and USC, it appeared to be a flat line GPA for anyone accepted from our high school. My gut tells me that below that line were all moved to a deferred status, pooling together those that are a solid target applicant and others that are a far stretch. no one was denied. Now all in same pool… meanwhile, I get the feeling VT did maybe pull high stats by college to get the process going and for whatever reason decided to let some in early - probably to align with activity from other colleges doing so (now that they no longer ED). I spoke to a AO at Vtech because of the UTX SRAR issue to be sure all was ok at VT. The counselor was great. Could see the SRAR update, but said they use the initial one that was submitted by the EA date. Then he went on to say that my child was about to start the review process so all was moving along as expected. This was the day before the VT first unexpected release of 12/21.
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great insights… thank you for sharing! Wish all could see this and be reminded that a college’s stats and goals do change! We are along for the ride!
IDK, it’s not like they deferred everyone else, and their decision date was always known to be February, so it’s not a vague timeframe, it is the one posted since applications opened. I take it to mean, these are students that we want to make an offer to now (for whatever reason), but we also have lots of other students we want, but need the time we already communicated to decide.
You probably didn’t realize that for months, the notification dates just indicated “TBD.” It was only in late December, after making 25% of their offers, that they announced by “late February” for the rest. It was definitely not always known.
I know they can do better.
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