A LOT of applicants and their parents (possibly guidance counselors and teachers even) have no clue that some schools are reaches, they have no idea whatsoever just how competitive admission to college has become. They simply do not have that knowledge base to guide their decision making. The same is true regarding what is needed to know for financing an education.
I agree that many applicants probably donât have that understanding⊠but the information is easily accessible. If I simply Google âcollege name acceptance rateâ the number pops up in a box at the top of the search page. So Google tells me that Yale had a 6.3% accceptance rate in 2016. Seems to me that anyone who is smart enough to think about applying to Yale ought to be able to figure out that means that the vast majority of applicants to Yale are goingt to be rejected.
I do think that among moderately selective colleges, applicants make the mistake of focusing too much on test scores. That is, the applicant sees that college A. accepts 25% of its applicants, and that the SAT score range for each subtest 600-720. Applicant has a superscored SAT of 760 on each subtest, so assumes that means he is better than 75% of all applicants to college A, and will then certainly be admitted. Of course that is nonsense, because college A (like all selective colleges) has a holistic admission process - and will continue to fill its class with students across its full score range. So I do think that people all around are prone to misinterpreting the statistical data on score ranges.
FINANCES is often overlooked.
Few schools are need blind. A glance at the FA and Merit is not a great indication. There are schools in the top 15 to 40 range that give high dollar money, but drill down and see it is only to a few students. Middle class students, especially upper middle class, are not in that group. So, ACT 34, 3.7 GPA with need is passed over for ACT 29, 3.5 without need.
Few students and parents know to look at Common Data Sets.
Absolutely! In my pre-USNWR college search (yes I am that old!) my college counselor helped me find the best fit colleges for my strengths and interests. I remember that there were places like Denison and Knox on the list. Besides the LAC I chose. Same for the kids with the highest grades. Some went to State Flagship. One went East for a specific sport. Otherwise, I can not remember a ârace for the topâ with East Coast elites as the brass ring. USNWR and the omnipresent Internet have created false values and false expectations. Our children are the victims, not because they canât get into HYP but because they think that they must, and that they can.
@blossom I donât know if Iâm missing something here, but I would be quite happy to teach John and Joanne, and have them as roommates. They kind of sound like great roommates, actually.
Not so sure about Suzy, because it kind of sounds like she might be a grade grubber who would argue over every less-than-perfect grade.
Maybe itâs just a cultural difference, but having grown up and been educated in Europe I think of colleges as educational establishments first and pretty much solely. I would be happy to teach John and Joanne, though I migh tnot want to get a drink with them afterwards.
@gallentjill , many seasoned posters on CC are aware of the yola sites, which list colleges with automatic full ride scholarships or competitive full ride scholarships.
http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com
http://competitivefulltuition.yolasite.com
QM , unfortunately, not that rare. Not an emotional connection or tugging heartstrings, rather info that shows adcoms how you activate, the level of choices you make, your thinking. How you will fit, how youâll drive. They want to envision you on campus, not your 4th grade fears or love of kitties or that you (real) hide in the attic when stressed. Lol.
Thereâs a lot of conformity expected. Not just in academics, rigor, stats, but the personal attributes. Of course. Imagine it. You think Columbia or NYU want kids who shy ftom the city experience? Or that schools look for kids who say itâll be hard to leave home, their little brothers, momâs cooking? (Real.)
Not necessarily lopsided, no. Or quirky. Think of it. Howâs it relevant that you ride a unicycle, if you canât offer the rest? Wouldnât you prefer the kid who claims a great interest in, say, justice, and went out and engaged in local causes, NOT founded another is club to write letters to kids in foreign countries? Or the kids who want a med future, claim they want to help people and actually went out and helped people, not just shadowed for a few weeks or volunteered once a year for a walkathon? Or the kids who say they want engineering and took part in related math-sci ECs and know what engineering is about? That doesnâtmake them bland or cookie cutter or tiring.
Unfortunately, most applicants, no matter their hs stsnding, donât get it. Itâs far too easy to exclude them. Iâd say, rather than looking for quirky or indiscriminately âdifferent,â what adcoms like is kids they can be proud of, today. Itâs not about predicting their careers. It starts with the four years on campus, how theyâll fit, activate, contribute to the institution ss it is.
Helps to try to learn what different colleges like. Not go on about yield protection, if a kid never figured out the rest.
There are many posters here who speak with seeming authority about what adcoms are looking for. Some say quirky. Some say lopsided. Some say well rounded. Some say not quirky but must have something to offer the campus. Many of these posts seem to contradict each other which leaves me to assume that either the posters are only guessing and donât have actual adcom experience or different adcoms and adcom members actually want different things.
It pains me to hear people talk about the kids who just join clubs as not contributing to the campus. If I were choosing, I wouldnât want to fill the campus with kids who only want to start their own things. Someone needs to join the existing clubs and root for the teams and make the posters. Groups need group members and not only presidents. But that is my own, completely uninformed opinion. I would love the kids who have already gone out to change the world, of course, but I would also value the kids who contributed enthusiastically to the community they were already a part of.
In terms of over-reaching, I think the best the kids can do is be very realistic about their list and include those schools that admit 50+%. Also, as has been said many, many times here, be aware of the schools that fill half the class through ED because the stats may be vastly different between the pools.
" Many of these posts seem to contradict each other which leaves me to assume that either the posters are only guessing and donât have actual adcom experience or different adcoms and adcom members actually want different things."
There is no single secret formula, only guidelines and tips. Which makes sense. There are thousands of colleges, why would they all be looking for exact same thing? Even at a single college, the college isnât only looking at one exact thing or type, theyâre looking to complete a class which includes multiple diverse elements. Heck, some of this even comes down to what order the apps are reviewed.
And everybody here - from the students to the parents to the GCs to the AOs to the random weirdos can only share the piece they know, which is a small piece of the overall puzzle. Itâs lilke a version of that old story about how if a group of blind people only touch one small part of an elephant, theyâd all likely describe completely different animals/things depending on what small part they touch. All you can do is mine for good info, see what might be helpful, discard the rest and move on⊠Itâs free advice and even with having to mine through it there are nuggets to be found, so itâs worth more than you paid for it.
When DS started the app process, I read and lurked for almost a year. Some of the posts were not helpful at all, some were not applicable but more than a few had nuggets of info that were useful and that we figured out how to apply. Hopefully there is helpful info for most applicants.
Maybe kids arenât over reaching? Maybe they would do well at the type of schools we are taking about? Maybe itâs just that while constructing the class of 20 Whatever admission is faced with an abundance of kids who would thrive at such schools but they just donât have the space for all these kids?
I would imagine the disappointment of having the gpa , the Act/Sat scores that are in line with the desired college, the LOR, the interesting essays, interesting ECs is way more pronounced than a rejection someone who is truly reaching would feel.
Also, from my kidâs experience, she didnât declare an intended major anywhere she applied. A lot of schools went to great lengths to emphasise the l likelihood a student would change their major. Maybe Engineering or Medical is different?
TrueâŠ
Actually, most colleges are need-blind. But most of them do not give good need-based financial aid. So the applicant may need to aim for the higher standard of a large enough merit scholarship, rather than just admission.
As @PurpleTitan alluded to, whether a school is a reach, match or safety is not just a function of where the applicantâs stats lie in last yearâs distribution, but also the admit rate of the school. And relying only on stats is far from a perfect way to chance, but we canât really verify the competitiveness of all the qualutative aspects of the app, nor exactly what the school is looking for. We might employ âsoft hooksâ if the applicant would bring geographic diversity or help even up the gender ratio (men at Vassar, women at Caltech, etc.) â maybe a soft hook improves oneâs chances by a few percentage points. But I do think that using stats to chance a kid/school is better than guessing. So here is a rough guide for chancing schools:
Basic rules:
- If your stats are in the middle of last year's accepted applicants' stats and you are unhooked, your chances are roughly the same as the admit rate. As those stats move higher or lower within or above/below that 25/75 range, your chances incrementally increase or decrease.
- If you can identify the admit rate of the round you are applying in, you can more accurately rate your chances.
- If you are an OOS applicant to a public school, your chances begin at a lower point than the overall admit rate, because nearly every public school is markedly harder for OOS applicants. If you are in-state, your starting point is a bit higher than the overall admit rate.
- Hooks tend to improve your chances, but to what degree is hard to say. Maybe they turn a statistical reach into a low reach, high match into a match, etc. Or, maybe the impact is not that much. It depends on the school and how much they value that hook in that admissions round, how many others with your hook are applying in that round, and how many spots the school has set aside for it. It's just hard to say how large the bump from a hook will be, so to be conservative, it is safest to avoid putting too much weight on hooks, unless you're an aggressively recruited athlete (in most cases). However, even there, at smaller schools sometimes the adcoms overrule the coach.
In other words, there are all sorts of caveats.
I think that admit rates are the starting points for chancing. Obviously your chances move up or down depending on how your stats compare to the schoolâs stats ranges, so check CDS:
Reach: 15% or lower admit rate
Low reach: 15-25% admit rate
High match: 25-40% admit rate
Match: 40-60% admit rate
Low match: 60-90% admit rate
Safety: 90+% admit rate
Now, not very many schools have a 90+% admit rate. So how do we find safeties?
(Keep in mind that a safety 1. must be affordable, 2. it must be an admissions safety, and 3. the student should like it. And if you are zeroed in on one major, also check to see how competitive admission to that major is.)
Identifying safeties:
- If the school would be a low match and your stats are at or above the 75th percentile, I think it can be safely called a safety.
- If the school has a 50-60% admit rate and your stats are at or above the 75th, it can probably be called a safety.
- If the school offers stat-based auto admittance, and you meet those stats, the school is a safety.
I donât think you can call any school a safety if its admit rate is under 50%.
Depending on the college, some majors (commonly engineering majors and CS, but not necessarily) may be filled to capacity, so that frosh admission selectivity is higher for applicants intending those majors, and/or there is a secondary admission process after enrolling as an undeclared student.
Yes, some students and parents take a high weighted GPA at face value, often without knowing what unweighted GPA it is based on. For example, here is a thread where the OP only gave a weighted GPA of 4.2: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/2073829-help-with-reasonable-reaches-for-science-girl.html
I think the emphasis on trying to be âpointyâ (or highly specialized) is misplaced and puts too much pressure on kids to tailor their lives to getting into college. I think extracurricular activities should be done for fun, not for college.
So, for worried future applicants, listen to this story:
We attended an admissions info day for alumni children, which included participating on a mock interview committee, at a highly selective college (Vassar), in November 2016. Most of the mock committeesâ final choices came down to two stellar candidates. One would be called pointy (excelled in extracurriculars related to her intended major). One would be called well-rounded. Different committee groups favored different applicants.
Afterwards, a parent raised her hand and asked the director of admissions which applicant he would have picked. He said two things. First, he said he would favor the well-rounded one, because she would be a good âcontributorâ to life on campus. Second, he said that every admissions cycle has a range of candidates, some of whom are more well-rounded and some of whom are pointy (I do not recall the word he used for that, but that was the gist), and Vassar takes a mix of both.
I think applicants should just be themselves, and then write their applications to showcase themselves in the best light possible. It is a fallacy to say that you cannot get into a top college if you are an excellent unhooked student without discovering the cure for cancer, winning an international prize, or showing some highly âunusualâ talentâ to imply that someone in the top ten percent of the class, who plays the violin and tennis at her school level only, will never be admitted because she is too typical. Top colleges do not avoid students like that; they have lots of them on campus!
It is accurate to say that the odds of getting into a top college are slim because there are many such excellent well-rounded candidates.
Hence, it is important to have a range of reach, target/match, and safety schools.
Adcoms are skilled at seeking out those who are applying to the school as a safety. There were many posts here on CC this cycle to the effect âI canât believe that I was rejected/deferred/waitlisted by X University. It was my rock bottom safety. I donât even like the school.â
Well, the school didnât like them either.
Safeties are a complete mystery to me. We never came across a true safety that met all the criteria repeated regular on CC. Does anyone really find a safety they truly love?
@Jon234, if you canât be with the one you love, love the one youâre with.
In New York at least, the public universities seem to rely more heavily on SAT scores and GPA and be less âholisticâ in their admissions, which makes their results more predictable. This year, for example, SUNY Binghamton rolled out its early action admissions by SAT score. The first round of applicants announcing results on College Confidential had SAT scores over 1500. The next round, a couple of days later, had SAT scores between 1450 and 1500. And so on down the line- finally with kids with lower scores being deferred. And, on Naviance, there is a near-perfect match of scores/GPA with admissions odds. The adjective ânearâ means there is a bit of attention to other factors at SUNYsâ but apparently much less so than at some private colleges (e.g., American, Northeastern) where the results are all over the place and quite unpredictable.
The other important factor is applying early to those state schools. Two stellar applicants I know applied to SUNY Stony Brook. One of them applied early and has been accepted to its honors program. The other one, with a slightly higher GPA and more state-level extracurricular accolades, applied regular decision, and was accepted, but was not accepted to the honors program. While the boys do not know for sure what made the difference, they are speculating early action. That makes sense, because as I recall, another SUNY, SUNY Binghamton, states that early action may help with admission to their honors program, even though it is announced later.
âAssuming that legacy and/or URM are huge advantages in admission even when they are minor considerations or not considered at all by the particular college.â
If you assumed this, you would not be disappointed as you would think that your acceptance rate for a college is considerably lower than the average acceptance rate. If the acceptance rate is say 20%, you would think itâs less than 10% because of the preference given to URMs, first gens, legacies, athletes.