What has been very annoying this year on CC is certain posters using “merit” and “holistic” to slam students who get into elite schools while others are denied, as if they weren’t admitted based on merit. This kind of thinking is precisely why students overreach. Elite admission is based on merit. While it may not be based on purely stats, to say it’s not based on merit is ridiculous and inflammatory.
@itsgettingreal17, it’s based on merit as the undergrad adcoms at elites define it, which may or may not correspond well to other definitions of merit. And they are looking to fill out a class to meet their goals as best they can, NOT to select the “most meritorious” or “most deserving”.
Because of that, if you use other measures, some people who were rejected may actually be “more meritorious” than those who got in (and also because most schools use different rounds like ED & RD with differing levels of difficulty of entry) so the truth remains that there are many paths to any goal, and you may not have to fit what different adcoms may want to see to reach them.
There’s a lot of misinfo and mis-guided advice out there. I agree that, if you say you’re driven to a goal but can’t figure out, say, average stats or how to build solid ECs or answer a Why Us- or that holistic is about more than stats- well maybe you need to be more realistic about your targets. Same if you don’t realize the competition is fierce, for elites, and quite serious, for many others. They’re looking for what they want. It’s not the same as your hs that may think, with your grades, some ECs, a title or two, a good nature, you’re a superstar. Your hs isnt college adcoms. You aren’t applying to a better high school. Lol.
And yet people continue to blame the colleges, blame things like yield management. Or Tufts syndrome. They tell kids not to do what the colleges want to see, just please yourself, be yourself. They claim adcoms will see “padding.” Well, follow all that and why should Top College X see you as their sort?
They boldly make claims admissions is polluted or only hooks are valued. Or that top colleges look for things like expensive sports so they can get around Need Blind. It’s misleading and all the while, kids aren’t informing themselves. Sorry, but it begets a cycle of ignorance. (And you’re pretty sheltered if you think low SES kids or those in underperforming high schools can’t take on solid challenges - academic, school ECs, and in their communities- and achieve.)
Crazy cycle.
“They tell kids not to do what the colleges want to see, just please yourself, be yourself.”
While I personally am a proponent of that path, it gets you to, “there are plenty of colleges who will love the kid you are,” not “this is the best way to guarantee admission to the most selective colleges.”
As the parent of a kid who will be applying to colleges 18 months from now, the thing that is hardest to wrap my brain around is the idea that the “match” range goes all the way to a 20% acceptance rate. When I was applying to colleges, uphill both ways in the snow, 20% schools were lottery tickets, because they could fill their classes multiple times over out of the applicant pool. The admissions environment has changed, but math hasn’t; 20% odds means you will most likely be rejected.
People have legitimate concerns about the current college admission process. Opacity, yield management, putting applicants in buckets (rather than looking at overall merits), chasing ranking by both colleges and applicants alike, etc. are real. BTW, the “Why Us” essay is part of yield management. However one define merits, college admission is clearly not based on merits alone. This less than meritorious process unavoidably produces inconsistencies and controversies, and we shouldn’t be surprised.
What buckets? How do you know how yield goals work? See what I mean? And at the school I work for, the Why Us is not about yield! It’s about genuine interest and the smarts to know why you’re applying. We know kids apply elsewhere, may actually prefer another college, and don’t assume a good Why Us is a promise. But a bad one is a strong indication the kid isn’t thinking on the right level.
Seen many apps/supps? You might be surprised that hs glory is no assurance of a good presentation.
The local GPA weighting for kids with good test scores can often be misleading. Many high schools no longer rank, so the kid with the 4.3 weighted, but is closer to a 3.6 unweighted because the school allows freshman to take AP classes and give a 1.0 bump up to those classes, does not really know where he falls.
On another thread, someone posted that the LORs were the most under-appreciated piece of the application. And those are the piece that people comparing application results among kids at their HS don’t ever see. A letter that praises a kid as a competent, good student is less likely to get into a top school than a kid that may have slightly lower stats, but is praised as a brilliant thinker with perhaps a couple of Bs.
According to this article, in 2017 Harvard’s incoming class was nearly 1/3 legacy. That leaves precious few spots for the average excellent kid. If the school wants to reward its alumni, might as well use all the average excellent spots there.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/06/harvards-incoming-class-is-one-third-legacy.html
They probably looked, but compared their exaggerated high school weighted GPA of 4.5 or something to the UC weighted-capped GPA ranges that are much lower and mistakenly overestimate their chances.
I’m not sure that I have ever seen any college admissions material that claims that they admit on merit alone. Most of what I’ve seen talks about using “a holistic approach” and examining the “entire story” in order to identify admits that fit into the class that they are engineering. The problem is that parents and students overestimate their “overall merits”.
Common buckets include:
- In-state versus out-of-state for state universities.
- Major or division, when specific majors or divisions are filled to capacity but others are not.
Usually, posters use “buckets” to declare poor URMs compete against other poor URMs. Or prep kids against prep kids. Not my experience, not so easily generalized. . IS vs OOS for a public U? Of course! After all, these schools are state supported. By major? What would you have them do? Take thousands of stem wannabes, exceed capacity, leave some majors underenrolled? These are institutional considerations. Not flaws. Not contempt for merit.
@allyphoe “As the parent of a kid who will be applying to colleges 18 months from now, the thing that is hardest to wrap my brain around is the idea that the “match” range goes all the way to a 20% acceptance rate. When I was applying to colleges, uphill both ways in the snow, 20% schools were lottery tickets, because they could fill their classes”
You need to remember that the 20% rate is for ALL applicants who applied, and some applicants will have stats in the upper quartile with very high stats giving them a greater than 50% acceptance rate. That school would be a match.
It’s a fallacy to say getting into a school with a 20% acceptance rate is a “lottery” as it presumes every applicant has an equal chance at acceptance which is just not the case. There are way too many factors for admittance to leave it to pure chance.
@socaldad2002:
“You need to remember that the 20% rate is for ALL applicants who applied, and some applicants will have stats in the upper quartile with very high stats giving them a greater than 50% acceptance rate.”
I would not necessarily make that assumption for all schools. You need to read that Lehigh thread posted by @gallentjill. The admit rate for those with top quartile stats in RD was. . .30%? Something like that.
@lookingforward I don’t mind schools having buckets, whatever they are. I understand school’s need to diversify across any characteristic it defines. But do it with transparency. Publish the data so the applicants know their real chances if they fit or don’t fit into certain buckets, and what they’re up against. This type of transparency will greatly reduce the amount of unnecessary applications, because applicants would have a better idea of what their “matches” are.
@1NJParent, heh, that’s if the colleges have “reducing unnecessary apps” as a goal.
But considering how much weight applicants and their parents (and USNews) put on admit rate, I doubt it is.
@PurpleTitan I completely agree. That’s not their goal. They want to keep the number in the denominators as high as possible, precisely for the rankings. No entity would voluntarily choose transparency if opacity is to its advantage.
@socaldad2002 “You need to remember that the 20% rate is for ALL applicants who applied, and some applicants will have stats in the upper quartile with very high stats giving them a greater than 50% acceptance rate. That school would be a match.”
Nope. That’s kind of the whole point of this thread - that once you’re over the good-enough threshold for stats, additional stats don’t necessarily improve your chances.
When a school could fill its incoming class many times over from the pool of qualified applicants, for any given qualified applicants the process isn’t a lottery in much the same way that a computer-generated list of pseudorandom numbers isn’t random. For purposes of predicting any one specific outcome, it’s a distinction without a difference. For an unqualified applicant, sure - putting in an application doesn’t meaningfully increase the odds of acceptance. But IMHO it would be a mistake for a kid to conclude that being qualified is sufficient to increase the odds of admission significantly above the overall rate, or that easily compared attributes like GPA / rank / test scores can make one more qualified.
“you need to be more realistic about your targets. Same if you don’t realize the competition is fierce, for elites, and quite serious, for many others.”
^^ THIS!!
A 5% acceptance rate means that 95% of applicants ARE REJECTED!!
At elite private colleges there ARE legacy kids, kids of faculty, recruited athletes, developmental admits, and URM’s that the colleges ALSO want to admit. So the slots available for qualified kids without any hooks are far fewer than the overall admit rate indicates. That IS the way it is.
"Publish the data so the applicants know their real chances "
Colleges DO publish their acceptance rates. It just seems too many kids and their parents have rose colored glasses , or blinders on and dont think that their kid could possibly be one of those that could be rejected. Because they are viewed as being so outstanding in the context of their HS or town or region.
And it drives us nuts when kids cant do the math- i.e.they think that sending in 10 applications to 10 colleges with 10 % acceptance rates means 100% chance of getting into one of them. It does NOT! .Yet every year, we see these ridiculous calculations.
sigh…
@allyphoe We will agree to disagree. The accept rates include all applicants, some of who have no business applying. The “top” kids. As I posted on another thread, close friend’s unhooked D who had u4.0, 36 ACT had a greater chance than 5% to get into Harvard. She also got into 2 other ivies, plus Duke, UCB regents, UCLA and was waitlisted at UMich (which is a joke and clearly yield protection). The only school out right rejected was Standford EA. It’s pretty clear these schools were matches for this applicant or at the very least had greater odds than the acceptance rate listed. She may be an outlier because she is an exceptionally bright student with tall the accolades but she certainly applied to many match schools for her “resume”…