No formula required. None was asked for. Only asked for people to be honest in the holistic process. Not a hard concept.
Kids overreach because, however slim the chance is, they just might be the one who gets in.
If you truly are overreaching, rather than carrying a 4.0 gpa and a near perfect SAT, you really shouldnât be too upset if you donât make the cut.
@lastone03 I donât disagree with your last post. I understand the issue of limited funds to spend on applications. There is also limited time and emotional bandwith. I think, however, that all of that is far more relevant to the schools that accept a reasonable number of applicants - for argument sake, say about 30% and higher. In those cases, kids can believe they have a reasonable chance and if there is information out there that changes the picture, it should be known. For example, the fact that American U has an 80% acceptance rate for ED and a 20% rate for RD. This is a major issue that could easily change a studentâs strategy. Much of this information is available but you need to do a lot of digging. Perhaps it should be more front and center.
On the other hand, when we are talking about schools with single digit admit rates, the assumption should be that the student is NOT getting in. No amount of extra information is really going to change that equation. A student deciding to send the application anyway should simply make peace with that idea going in.
Colleges telling you it is a holistic process is being honest. Theyâre telling you its not stats alone. Thatâs not a hard concept to understand either.
âActually no. I was specifically asked to do so because of my alumni schoolâs unfamiliarity with the region and her school.â
Notice I used the word âmanyâ. In my experience, it is true that âmanyâ know their region even if that wasnât true in your particular anecdote. Iâm sure at times some donât for various reasons.
Boston Latin School. Established in 1635. A public HS (but exam entry) and a well trod path to Harvard. I donât have the stats on the kids who get into Harvard but there is no need for Harvard to twist itself into knots-- itâs a public HS with a âcream of the cropâ student body. There is no finger on the scale for kids from Boston Latin.
Stuyvesant HS. Public school in NYC. A feeder to Columbia. It is probably MORE difficult getting into Columbia from Stuy than from hundreds of other HSâs- the adcomâs know the school at a granular level, knows who the tough AP History teacher is, knows who never gives an A.
For the folks asking for transparency on feeder HS;s- how does this help you in any way? If you donât live in Boston or NYC, itâs not relevant. And if you DO live in Boston or NYC and your kid does not attend one of these schools, itâs not relevant. And if you DO live in Boston or NYC and your kid DOES attend one of these schools, you already know this because thatâs why you wanted your kid there in the first place. Elite HS education without paying the prep school price tag.
Not sure why you think transparency is helpful here.
And we found the adcomâs pretty transparent btw. I have no quarrel with their honesty. For every parent who looks at admissions odds of 10% and says âwow, one in ten, those are great oddsâ there ought to be hundreds more saying â90% chance of rejection? wow, thatâs soberingâ.
But this is America where folks spend the rent money on lottery tickets and blow their tax refund at a casino, so what do I know?
For every parent who looks at admissions odds of 10% and says âwow, one in ten, those are great oddsâ there ought to be hundreds more saying â90% chance of rejection? wow, thatâs soberingâ.
Yes.
@CU123 I tend to be leery about pro college advisor making blanket statements. You donât get in just cuz one reader likes your essay and you get rubber stamped.
Itâs not arrogance. Weâre at 29 pages and no one has yet talked about their own research into what the colleges write, the sorts of kids they tout, their self images, etc. Or what theyâve learned about those attributes their targets want. But lots of talk about it not being tranparent enough, plus assumptions or hearsay or bloggy âexperts.â
Try it.
@lookingforward can you give a specific example of what you mean? What kind of research would have helped at a particular school?
According to Naviance, my kid would not have gotten into one of top 5, let alone top 10 ranked schools. The way I viewed âholisticâ admission was the college could accept anyone they wanted to for any reason at all. We took nothing for granted, and our approach was everything depended on our making the application the very best; basically, our application had to be top 4% of all the applications to have any chance to get in. And honestly, the application we put out to Stanford was the best one we could possibly have produced in 2 months, so we would have had no regrets at all if we were denied; we had absolutely no expectation we would be accepted. Also, there was NO WAY we could have given the same attention and time to other applications. Therefore, our kidâs applications to UCs and Honors College was not a top quality according to our standard, but we were not too concerned because we thought he would get into some of other colleges and 100% to the Honors College. My hope and guess was that many students would devote their time and effort to several schools and would not be able to devote enough time and effort to Stanford one. I think that turned out to be the right approach.
@gallentjill @lookingforward
Regarding research into what specific schools want, hereâs what Iâve seen.
Agnes Scott, going by CDS data, would be a good school for my kid: womenâs college, ethnically diverse, residential campus in a city, kid likely in top 25% for GPA/rank/test scores. She took one look at it and crossed it off the list, because their YouTube videos and common app questions make it clear that theyâre looking for women who want to be leaders. âThatâs not me,â says my child, quite accurately.
Not yet off the list, because she hasnât yet looked at it beyond the stats: Knox, which emphasizes hands on and service learning, neither of which are her thing.
Probably a good fit: Lawrence, which likes musicians so much that all of their Lawrence Minute videos include a credit for the student who did the music, and most also feature student choir/orchestra/band performances. Also strong in the sciences, particularly physics. My 8-year orchestra kid with three high school physics credits might get some love there.
Thanks @allyphoe! And that is one of the great things about this site. It would never have occurred to me to check out youtube for information about the âfeelâ of a college.
@gallentjill â for me, the âresearchâ also meant being able to assess strengths and weaknesse of the applicant and targets schools based on that assessment. So that didnât mean trying to puzzle out what the colleges want on a broad level â it meant figuring which colleges might be looking for students like my daughter. Iâd see it like auditioning for a role in play â first you have to figure out what productions are casting roles that fit. The role doesnât have to be the lead â in fact itâs probably much better if it isnât the lead role - probably less competition for minor supporting roles. My daughter got her first role in the local youth ballet Nutcracker production because she was the right size for the costume and could do backflips â so after having seen the ballet the previous year, she auditioned for that particular part of the child whose choreography included three backflips across the stage. No other kids who auditioned that day could do backflips-- so of course my daughter got the role.
Same deal with colleges, except different âroleâ. At the college level, my daughter was auditioning for the role of âprospective Russian major with dance backgroundâ. So that meant finding colleges with well-developed but underenrolled Russian or slavic language departments; extra bonus if the college also had a well-developed, non-audition based dance departments open to non majors.
The data was easy enough to find and we really didnât pay much attention to what the colleges âwantedâ on a broader scale. I mean, colleges want kids who have high SAT/ACT scores â my dd didnât have that. Colleges like kids who have taken calculus in high school â my daughter had no math beyond advanced algebra. But the point was that all the colleges want MORE than one type of a students. My daughterâs alma mater also wanted students for their fencing team â not my daughter, but at a local admitted students event we met a young woman who was a fencer and also a URM â so same college, different roles.
Allyphoe is spot on. Does anyone really think the kid who applied to 10, 15, 20 colleges has looked at the available data, has watched some videos, made a visit, read the aid pages and really âgets the smaller colleges? I donât when I see some of the lists that get posted. Most of the very selective publicâs DO count unweighted GPA and test scores highly but they get tens of thousand of more kids than they have places in their freshman seats so it is rather silly to think that you can rank order a bunch of 4.0 kids and unless the kid can make the why me argument it is over before it began. Personally I think the only answer is to limit college applications and limit the amount of times the kids can take standardized tests because I donât think weâre going to see them doing the homework to be able to put together truly meaningful lists.
And Many here are guilty of thisâŠposter wants help finding such and such in the mid-Atlantic and multiple posters will jump in with âwhaddaboutCarletonâ or âwhaddaboutPomonaâ. Or the family that wants no greek. And posters go âwell what about xyzâŠit has Greek but it isnât a big deal. Hello? Just totally Random colleges outside the region the poster wants or totally ignore that the kid doesnât want a college with Greek life. It just makes me laugh out loud and roll my eyeballs. I just think kids and parents have just gotten random, apply too many places and have lost the ability to discern subtle differences.
@gallentjill We homeschool, so it was all on us. That meant a lot of research. My kidâs first requirement was dance. It could be a full fledged dance BFA or just a dance minor offered. But there absolutely had to be the opportunity to continue dancing. Her second was that it should be no more than a dayâs drive from home. We decided that either a LAC or a school with a good liberal arts program would be ideal because she likes cross discipline collaboration and those give her the best options to do that.
We looked up all the LACs in our region. We eliminated any that did not have dance. We eliminated any that we were too strongly religious, unless they had a really good dance program. She then checked out the web pages to see if any strongly repelled or attracted her. We did the same with some larger schools as well. I think we ended up with around a dozen or so schools she thought sheâd like to know more about. After she took the PSAT, she was very happy that many of the colleges that she found interesting, were also interested in her.
Next she looked at alumni magazines, contacted admissions and dance departments, and looked at assorted review sites. I looked at the common data sets to see how she matched up. I also looked average loan amounts and how the schools structured financial aid. I also looked at what they required of homeschool applicants because that is another ball of wax. I was practical and suggested that a couple were unlikely to offer enough aid year after year. She nixed a couple who had more hoops than she wanted to jump through.
College visits were the last step before deciding where to apply. She set up interviews, overnights, tours, meetings, etc. She happened to fall in love with the school her parents attended, so she got the bonus of being a legacy. She applied ED and that was that. I am not sure how much being a legacy helped because we are not big donors and needed a decent chunk of financial aid.
@gallentjill YouTube videos, particularly those published on the schoolâs official channel, can be really helpful. I also like school-sanctioned student blogs and Google Street View.
Oh, and course schedules! Even at schools that have overall small class sizes, their approaches to class size and capacity limits can be really different. This is particularly helpful for @calmom 's method; if a school offers four years of Chinese language classes, but their enrollment is only half the capacity, my kid who plans to take Chinese so she can communicate with her grandparents better and who has ECs and LORs indicating a willingness to actually speak a language she doesnât yet have much ability in might get more love.
OTOH, the school whose first four courses in the psych major sequence are always all at capacity is unlikely to be looking for more psych majors.
How many do we see who apply to every single Ivy? As if Dartmouth and Brown and Columbia would all be fits for the same type of student? Do they even differentiate their âwhy this collegeâ essays?
Similarly, when I spent time on the St Lawrence website, and front and center, in big letters, were statements like âOur students are doers!â â I thought, yes â that is my kid! Now, if I had a kid who is a quiet, reflective, not a joiner, then I would have moved on. But it kept St Lawrence on our list deep into the process.
In addition to class offerings and course schedules that @allyphoe has mentioned, I found it helpful to count up faculty, particularly with respect to tenured faculty. The year my daughter was applying, one major midwestern university was planning to drop its Russian department when their sole remaining tenured Russian professor retired; another LAC was in the midst of an an internal conflict between students/faculty and the administration over whether to retain their struggling Russian department. So of course those schools were dropped from consideration as soon as I stumbled across that information.
These are great points! @calmom sorry if these are stupid questions, but how do you know how many tenured faculty are in a department? How do you know which majors are over or undersubscribed? For example, my daughter really wants to be a philosophy major (along with premed).