Where did you see you received it? I doubt they would pay for me to fly on from London but I’m curious.
The real day of reckoning will come when financial aid offers are relased…
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it was sent in a email about an hour after acceptance notice.
Still no email to check my portal. I’ve always received all other Washu emails. I find it odd that I didn’t receive anything today. Both admissions officers still showing in portal. I’m considering emailing to find out why. Anyone else?
WashU is need aware. So if you applied for financial aid, your chance of getting in is less.Look at the median income of admitted students-you will get the idea then.
Very impressive achievements! WashU is known for yield protection (I did some research on yield protection when my S24 was waitlisted from a couple of schools last week, including Notre Dame), and it definitely seems like that’s the case with all of your accomplishments. I know it’s hard not to take it personally, but I would take that Vanderbilt full tuition scholarship and run with it. Congratulations!
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I really don’t think they are yeild protecting…
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Didn’t have to check portal because email said son was accepted
Incorrect. WashU announced becoming need-blind in fall of 2021 and it was effective either that year or the following year.
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that is correct, its need blind and no loan now, it was need aware for my son in 2018
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WashU, along with all schools with both ED1 and ED2 such as Northeastern, yield-protects in a nicer looking fashion. Unfortunately, this has become a reality everywhere in the country. Regardless of whether the AO contact disappeared from portal or not, My D24 was rejected, among other high stats applicants. Fortunately, WashU was the #8 school on her college list, and all of her remaining applications for which she’s awaiting decisions have only one early round.
Congrats to all admitted students!
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Oh ok. I stand corrected. Thank you!
Rejcted. IB student. Been rejected by a lot of my reaches. Worried for the rest. Congrats to all that got in though.
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don’t lose heart, reaches by definition are going to be tough to get in, hope you have many safeties as well. Good luck
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Thanks so much for the info. Is a portfolio review part of admission application or before the official process? DD is in grade 8, so she is just going to begin finding unique ec to craft a story around her creativitiy. Her math is strong, so she may add an engineering aspect.
My two cents is “yield protection” can mean different things to different people.
If that is defined as intentionally manipulating reported yield as high as possible to look better to the world, then I personally don’t believe WUSTL is doing that, and in fact I am skeptical really many if any colleges do that. Including because yield isn’t even really reported widely, it is not part of the US News formula, and so on.
However, what I do think is true is reportedly a lot of colleges are using sophisticated yield models during admissions, and these yield models are helping guide all sorts of decisions, including not just basic yes/no admissions decisions and simple enrollment targets, but also sometimes including allocation of merit and possibly honors, possibly likely letters and equivalent, possibly help hitting class-wide targets like budgeted amounts for net tuition but also potentially a variety of other institutional priorities, and so on.
This sort of “yield protection” is not about optics, it is about ending up with enrollment classes that are as close as possible to optimal given the institution’s budget, goals, and priorities. And I find it perfectly plausible WUSTL and many other colleges are doing some version of that.
And in practice, what this means is for reasons entirely outside of your control (barring doing something like applying ED), some of your RD colleges might well reject you because some yield model said admitting X1, X2, X3, . . . would be more likely to yield an optimal enrollment class than admitting Y1, Y2, Y3, . . . , and you ended up on the Y list and not the X list and that was that. Which is not something you need to be happy about, but nor should you take it personally.
And hopefully some other great college will put you on their X list, and that is all you really need.
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Agreed, but 1), having a yield rate around 50% really put schools like WashU into second tier, which they don’t want to be in, and 2), to improve personal odds of getting into better fit schools, a student might have to cope with the yield protection challenges by applying to much more schools than it was necessary before, which put a lot more unnecessary stresses and burdens on the student.
I really do not think (1) is actually an issue per se. Like, who even knows that statistic? How does that compare to other colleges normally considered peers of WUSTL, like Vanderbilt or Rice? I know a lot about colleges at this point off the top of my head, but I’d have to actually look that up, because it is not commonly reported or discussed.
But (2) is a potential issue. I’d just note there is another way to address it, namely apply to academic peer colleges that are less popular and otherwise less concerned about losing admits.
Now, that is a bit of an issue with colleges like WUSTL, because most of its academic peers are similarly popular. But I think a good bet would be something like Wisconsin OOS. To briefly review, for the class of 2027, WUSTL had 32240 applicants, 3855 admits, 1832 enrolling. Wisconsin had 36687 domestic non-resident (also excludes Minnesota) applicants, 15799 admits, 2696 enrolled. That of course is a WAAAAAAY lower yield percentage, but Wisconsin (like many publics) doesn’t really care, it just wants to get enough OOS students to meet its budgetary goals. So you are way more likely as a high numbers domestic OOS applicant to get admitted to Wisconsin.
So yes, you could apply to a long list of schools like WUSTL. Or, assuming you have the numbers, you could apply to Wisconsin and then just a short list of schools like WUSTL. But then you have to be OK going to Wisconsin. Although that could happen either way, so . . . .
And you might say Wisconsin is not a good fit for you, you really want to go to one of the wealthiest mid-size research universities in the world, like WUSTL or Vanderbilt or so on, not a larger publicly-subsidized college even if it has a lot of really strong departments. And OK, sure, I can see why you might want that, my kid sure does. And it is true that is not such an easy ticket to punch these days, with only so many such tickets available and so many people wanting them.
But I do think it is worth remembering there are alternatives. And if you find that stressful, it is presumably because you are putting a lot of pressure on yourself to get one of those far more limited tickets. And again I totally understand they are nice if you can get one, but I also think we should be consistently communicating to kids they are still just schools, and many more colleges are also excellent at being schools.
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My D24 does know the “alternatives”. She’s had offers from schools she likes and is willing to attend, but this is her personal fight to pursue her excellence, and get herself the best possible education and recognitions, although this has put a lot of workloads and anxieties on herself. We as parents have no choice but to support her efforts from day one, and we just wish (though we know it’s impossible) that there are less road hurdles like yield protection standing in the way.
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That’s fair and obviously every kid has to figure out a healthy balance between the pursuit of recognition and possible resulting anxiety for themselves. I just wanted to make a point of making sure we were listing all the alternatives for getting the best possible education, independent from admissions to highly selective colleges as a type of recognition. Including because these schools, for good or ill, do not really care about recognizing the most meritorious applicants so much as filling their classes in a way that meets their institutional goals. And that mismatch of aims is the fundamental source of what people call yield protection.
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