I think something that hasn’t been mentioned is when our kids see peers who they perceive as average get into their dream school, that adds to their view of what a match is. My daughter has shared with me a kid that was amazing (national science awards, president of class, etc, 15 AP’s) get into Harvard…that makes sense to her, no matter how much she works, she will never top that student. Then another, very underwhelming, few AP’s, mediocre student, who’s only EC is the same one my daughter is in, and hasn’t been a leader in that EC, get into UCLA, one of my daughters dream schools, then the % are confusing (if she can get in, then I should be a shoe in) After I asked her a few questions I am pretty sure the girls parents didn’t go to college…so I had to tell my daughter that she was probably first generation, so she can’t compare her. Our kids have their own idea on who is smart, applies themselves, and will probably make a difference in the future but that is not necessarily the same list the Universities are working with. It is important to not trust the stats and be conservative on your expectations.
@Rivet2000 in S19’s case, his well-roundedness and undecided major will hopefully be appealing to LACs. He can take each of his strengths and contribute on campus in many ways. I get that his app might want to be focused around a certain personality trait (perhaps his curiosity for multiple subjects) but he can’t make himself into something he’s not. I imagine his essay will be tricky to write. He will somehow need to make it clear who he really is in a straightforward way and, like someone already suggested, “show” examples. I think it may take all summer for him to get it right but it may end up being the most important part of his applications.
@19parent I agree with your post in a big way. At our high school, the tippy top students have a chance of getting into a tippy top (Ivy, Stanford) but most kids who get into those schools from our high school are athletes. Their grades and scores put them maybe in the top 20 percent of our class but not the top 5 percent. It’s very discouraging to the top non-athlete students. But Ivies need full pay athletes and that’s what they get from our high school. Most families don’t realize this until the middle of junior year when they start looking at Naviance and it’s a real shocker since they’ve seen their student rise to the top of our class for the previous three years.
" Our kids have their own idea on who is smart, applies themselves, and will probably make a difference in the future but that is not necessarily the same list the Universities are working with."
Good point and one I’ll try to remember to discuss with my kids. It’s important for them to also know how often those ideas are wrong, too. My magnet school 25th reunion was an eye opener. There were some incredibly successful people - most of them weren’t necessarily the ones that we all guessed would be. And on the other hand, there were many surprises in the opposite direction as well. We had a math prodigy who we all expected huge things of and he was living a very happy middle class existence as a mid-level grind in a government org. Another top student had dropped out of college and ran a landscaping crew. Obviously there were factors at play that none of us knew about. Tough to predict the future of high school seniors with 100% accuracy…
i realize this thread has evolved (devolved) into a boatload of other topics but as to the original question: Why applicants overreach, I’d make the argument that few do.
Most of the rejected kids that I see here had the grades, the ECs, the recommendations…they just didn’t quite make it…might have been someone slightly better qualified, might have just been bad luck…but I really don’t see hordes of unqualified applicants tossing their hats at top 20 schools. I simply see huge groups of talented kids who – perhaps in past years – would have been happy indeed at these colleges.
Note that this thread is not just about “top 20” schools (which most realize are reach for everyone). The examples I was thinking more of were schools like UCD/UCSB/UCI that many applicants mistakenly assume are match/safety for them when they are really high match or reach for them.
Of course the elites get 25-40k apps. I’d call that a horde. And it’s not just Northeast kids, not by a long shot.
But any school that’s around a 25-30% admit is rejecting 70-75%. Irvine got 116k apps. Roughly 70,000 were not admitted. Mind boggling. SB got 80+k last year and rejected over 50k. We can’t pretend those were all unqualified kids who threw in an app for yuks.
For the UCs, it can definitely be the case, there is no extra effort to apply to another UC, just click the box. I don’t’ want to minimize the app fee for lower SES families, for middle and upper class, there are a lot of apps for yuks.
138 #175 #221 yep! #183, #211, #212 Amen!
Are we talking about why posters on CC are disappointed or about the general population? Because I truly think the there are some key differences in why each of those populations are disappointed come April.
For the general public: They don’t know what they don’t know. Lack of education on the college admissions process, including how to access admissions resources, how to extrapolate useful applicable information from the resources that they do have. (Please someone devise a system that lets all incoming HS families know that the CDS exists!)
For the CC community: Arrogance. Assuming that adcoms will be blown away by outstanding stats or ECs or awards and assuming one outstanding component of the application will make up for another area that is lacking.
Echoing other posters who cited under estimating the importance of finances (I am 100% sure ability to pay full freight made a difference in my family’s admission results) and overestimating your importance/ability in comparison to the ENTIRE applicant pool.
I think most adcoms are looking for: demonstrated academic ability, willingness to seek a challenge, dedication/commitment, humility/resilience. Present that whole package and you are more than 1/2 way home!
@ucbalumnus…#225 this made me laugh. As the parent of non top #20 (even top #50) school seeking students, I’ve become accustomed to every CC thred seemingly devolve into a discussion of the tippy top schools, lol. There is a whole great big beautiful world out there of fantastic schools and opportunities beyond the coveted elite!
@gallentjill I think you are me.
In all fairness to posters who have focused on the very top schools, ucbalumnus did mention “super selective schools” in the original post. I suppose it depends on your definition of “super selective.” For the “middle” UC’s, more selective than anticipated, sure. I would not call them “super selective” though. I would call Berkeley “super selective.” I would call a number of other excellent public universities “super selective” for out-of-state, but not for in-state.
- Assuming that all college admissions officers (at a particular college) are equal and don't have their own biases.
- Assuming that each college admissions officer goes thru the same pile of applications like his/her co-workers. IOW, a rejected candidate gets filtered out by more than one admissions officer.
The above are a couple of reasons why we see applicants from the same school having such different and unexpected outcomes at a particular college.
But that makes no sense given the point billcsho made earlier, that Michigan accepts plenty of other OOS students with equivalent stats and presumably equivalent chances of being admitted to top privates.
Now I do think yield management might be a factor, but not in the crude “She’s too good for us” way you suggest. Michigan has a large entering class to fill, and to fill it they need to make a lot of offers. If their projected yield is off by even a little, it could mean they end up hundreds above or hundreds below their enrollment target, either one of which is a serious problem… So they try to develop sophisticated algorithms to project yield from various subcategories of applicants, based on past experience. You and I don’t know what’s in those algorithms, but we do know it can’t be simply “too strong a candidate, so reject or waitlist,” because we know they accept many OOS students with extremely strong stats, and they enroll some sizable fraction of them. Their biggest sources of OOS students are the New York metropolitan region and the Chicago suburbs. They also get a non-trivial number from California, but relative to the state’s population not all that many—probably in part because California has extremely strong in-state public options which will be much more affordable for a California resident, and in part because of the weather. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Southern California kids are less likely to enroll than Bay Area kids, because many SoCal kids think even Berkeley is too cold. OOS legacies probably enroll in larger numbers than non-legacies (and that is something they ask about on the application)… And there are probably particular high schools where they do particularly well, and others not so well. So it could be their algorithms told them “SoCal kid + extremely high stats + not a legacy + from a HS that has never sent us a single student despite X offers of admission = highly unlikely to enroll.” A compelling “why Michigan” essay might be enough to overcome that, but if was merely interesting and well written, perhaps not. Obviously someone on the admissions committee liked her application because they waitlisted her instead of rejecting her outright. But their job is to fill their class with the best students they can get, not to award offers of admission as prizes for past performance, and in service of that goal it’s perfectly sensible for them to take any and all factors into consideration, and not to waste offers of admission on those applicants they deem least likely to attend if offered. That’s called “yield management,” not “yield protection,” and every selective school does it, though of course they all do it differently depending on their own yield experience. To say it’s a “joke” that Michigan waitlisted this kid is to assume that she’s somehow entitled to admission on the strength of her stats, which she’s not. Now if she were a Michigan resident she might have a legitimate beef—but then among in-state applicants Michigan’s yield is extremely high, even among the highest-stats kids, so she almost certainly would have been accepted.
I don’t think it is arrogance. I think there are just too many exceptional kids with no hooks. And I think in the UC’s there are now 6 super selective schools. Students are getting into Berkeley and UCLA and getting shut out at Irvine and San Diego. The main difference I see is not admit rate as much as acceptance rate. UCLA and Berkeley are around 50% acceptance. The middle 4 are around 25% acceptance. That says to me that there most students are applying to 4-6 UC’s. Each school is selective but because of the 2 for every one transfer rule, first generation, athletes, there are just not enough slots left for the great 4.0 students in the state, so some are getting 4 acceptances while others are getting none. You can increase your chance but there will still be 10-20 (my guess) exceptional students that fall through the cracks. I don’t think those students are any less then, they just don’t have a hook, are applying to a popular major, are at a large school with a lot of qualified students. It is also not that those students think they are too good for the safeties, they just would prefer to go to a community college and transfer rather then attend a school that doesn’t have what they are looking for or go out of state.
"UCLA and Berkeley are around 50% acceptance. " :-q
Uh, NOOOOO!!! I dont know where you got those numbers from, but they are flat out wrong.
http://www.dailycal.org/2017/07/06/uc-berkeley-releases-2017-18-admissions-data/
http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses/ucla/freshman-profile/
Perhaps you mean yield rate?
For what it is worth, here are the 2017 UC frosh admission rates by campus and GPA band (not major/division specific, since they do not publish major/division specific frosh admission rates by GPA):
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21182988/#Comment_21182988
Campus 4.20- 3.80- 3.40- 3.00-
higher 4.19 3.79 3.39
UCB 43% 13% 2% 1%
UCLA 47% 12% 2% 1%
UCSD 84% 39% 7% 1%
UCSB 82% 45% 10% 1%
UCI 94% 52% 11% 3%
UCD 90% 56% 17% 4%
UCSC 93% 76% 44% 14%
UCR 98% 90% 63% 23%
UCM 98% 96% 89% 57%
Note: the UC weighted-capped GPAs used above typically correspond to unweighted 10th-11th grade GPAs about 0.3 lower in hard (honors/AP/etc.) courses. So the top band of 4.20-higher GPA is like unweighted 3.9-4.0 GPA.
As you can see, the UCs are not super-selective for many students at the top end of the GPA range (and not applying to more competitive majors/divisions). But those in the “UC disappointment” range of 3.80-4.19 GPA (like unweighted 3.5-3.8 GPA) commonly seem to overreach the “middle” UCs, assuming that they are “matches” or “safeties” when they are high match at best.
If there is a yield protection/management at UMich, the only reason is they have sensed the students would not attend. It is not because of the stat as there is NO over-qualified applicants. I know an arrogant in state students this year with pretty strong stat and not admitted too, neither by any HYPS he attempted. It will be reflected on the application if you really want to attend UMich or not, regardless of your stat.
“Almost all the “top” colleges were built over 100 years ago. Since then, demand for college education has soared (not only from quadrupled population size, but also from more disposable income as well as greater access to women and minorities.)”
Yes, and the top colleges have grown in size since 100 years ago. Most by a lot. Back 100 years ago, even the top universities were the size of LACs today (go back even farther, and universities were even smaller; Amherst was the second most populous college in the US at the start of the Civil War).
In 1900, 505 men graduated from Harvard with bachelor’s degrees: http://www.archive.org/stream/harvardcollegec06goog/harvardcollegec06goog_djvu.txt
In 1891, 555 students attended Stanford in it’s first year: http://facts.stanford.edu/about/chron
These days, each undergraduate graduating class from both Harvard and Stanford is between 1500-2000.
And the public flagships have really grown. After WWII with the GI Bill, they exploded in size.
In 1886, UIUC had a grand total of 21 professors in its faculty: https://www.library.illinois.edu/mappinghistory/campus-history/the-early-years/
“This is not the first time that I’ve seen C added to HYPSM. I guess that it’s supposed to be obvious which university is meant, but somehow it’s not to me. Columbia? UChicago? Caltech?”
I personally prefer the acronym HYPSMCCCCDNPDBRG.
Easier to remember.
"I personally prefer the acronym HYPSMCCCCDNPDBRG.
Easier to remember."
laughing… and wondering who N, P2, R, and G are… (assuming the Ds are Dartmouth and Duke, B is Brown… )