This is precisely the sort of thinking that gets some kids into trouble at admissions time. Michigan’s overall admit rate for OOS students is now about 20%, and considerably lower than that for engineering and Ross (business). So it’s not a “safety” for any OOS applicant regardless of their stats. A Michigan resident with a 4.0 unweighted and a 36 ACT will almost certainly be admitted, unless they’re an axe murderer. But they reject OOS applicants with those and similar stats all the time. It’s not a paint-by-numbers admissions formula as at many public flagships. They use a holistic admissions process in which the “Why Michigan?” essay has long been a centerpiece, and something they take very seriously. If an OOS applicant’s essay doesn’t clearly and convincingly articulate why that student really, really wants to be at Michigan, they’re going to be rejected (or at best waitlisted) regardless of their stats. It’s a simple equation, really: if you don’t want them, they don’t want you. And that’s not so easy to fake, even if you’re clever and a good writer. Call it “yield protection” if you like, but it’s motivated by more than yield; it’s about building and maintaining a campus culture around students who love the school and are happy to be there, rather than those who are there only grudgingly. And it’s no joke.
Socaldad, perhaps UofM could tell the application was not a top choice and there would be plenty of offers. Like you, I have to wonder why with the colleges you named that student even lobbed an application to U of M. UofM gets waaaay more apps than they need that for them the whole process is more about who they can eliminate because they probably won’t attend.
I sometimes wonder if the uni regrets using common app. I think sometimes that concept gets lost…that many times it is more about elimination than accepting. I also think that in general colleges aren’t and won’t staff up when suddenly they have 10 or 20,000 more apps. Just makes it more important for students to focus more on their individual college statements/short essays and the apps get less eyeball time.
@gallentjill: “how many spots are actually left for the average excellent student”
Well, they can make themselves to be more than average. I think it takes more than a year, though.
No school has an obligation to take your kid, no matter how smart or special. Just like in life, you have to learn the play the game, you have to put in the effort, and you have to bring something to the table. If your target school values intellectualism, well, then you’d better be intellectually curious and be reading classics in your spare time rather than dime store romance novels (I’m showing my age). If your target school wants leaders, well, then take on leadership roles. If you want to just be yourself, then find a school that appreciates you for who you are. There are plenty of great schools in this country, and there is plenty of information out there to be mined if you put in the time.
“A student figures that if you apply to 10 such colleges, you have about a 65% chance of getting into one of them. Not so bad. But if the unhooked student’s real chance is closer to 5%, applying to the same 10 schools gives them only a 40% chance of getting in to one school.”
Oh boy, here we go again.
@gallentjill
applying to more colleges that have low acceptance rates does NOT increase ones chances of getting into any ONE of them. I hope you understand this. Too many kids think their chances are greater based on the same type of false calculations scenarios.
Eveyone needs to think of it this way- EACH individual application is like buying ONE lottery ticket in ONE state lottery…
Buying a ticket for ANOTHER STATES lottery WONT increase anyones chance of winning any ONE of those INDIVIDUAL state lotteries.
@bclintonk My son had a similar experience with UMichigan. He got the Stamps scholarship at a different school, so that should give some ideas about the overall strength of his application. As to why UMichigan, that was an easy answer since my son is highly ranked nationally at his main EC, and UMich happens to provide a strong support for that EC. My son attended their summer camp, was well known to the faculty advisor responsible for the EC, etc. Moreover, UMich offers an uncommon major that my son was interested in and a not too common minor (my son actually referred to a specific professor’s area of research in his application essay on “Why UMich”). Still, a waitlist. Which was not a major upset, since he has other great offers, but the only mystery decision of all the places he applied to.
For UMich, test score is just as important as the application essay among several other factors too. Don’t blame the school if you are not accepted. There are other OOS students with perfect score got accepted. So the reason is never yield protection. It is what reflected in the application. They simply have many high quality students to choose from.
Here are their considerations based on the CDS:
Most important: Course rigor, GPA
**Important **: Test scores, application essay, recommendations, character/personal qualities, first gen
Considered: EC, talent/ability, geographic, state residency, volunteer, work experience, interest
Not considered: class rank, interview, religion, racial/ethnic status
I don’t think it’s that easy to publish the buckets which may even change from year to year. Students may fit into multiple buckets. This year it’s oboes, next year it’s bassoons that might have the edge. One year Professor Vendler pleas for more artists and poets - or at least people who appreciate the arts! - and they accept a few more poets. https://harvardmagazine.com/2012/11/writers-and-artists-at-harvard Another year they decide to create an engineering schools and trying to persuade CS majors to come seems like a good idea.
I agree with @lookingforward that sometimes you really need to dig in to what a college is saying about themselves between the lines. (Or sometime not between the lines.) Everything we heard from Tufts was about global citizenship. It’s full of kids who want to change the world now, who don’t need to wait till they graduate. For my son’s why Tufts essay (which was 50 words!) He said - it’s really just one word. Chalk. He talked about how all the chalked announcements about various events really struck him. I think he had the lowest GPA of any kid from our high school to be accepted there. But he got the school. A lot of kids who think it’s just a safety for Harvard don’t.
What should an average excellent student do? They should find some colleges that they like where they would be more than average excellent. I mean that in more ways than just test scores and uw gpa. Look for colleges that will give you access to your favorite extracurricular. Look for ones outside your geographic region. Don’t just apply to the same colleges that everyone else in your high school applies to. Take a chance on less beaten path.
Several posters have asked for transparency from schools for their different buckets. How would that data help when buckets often change from year to year, depending on the schools needs and wants. What may be a big need bucket one year may be a fairly empty bucket the next.
@gallentjill While I don’t think many schools have any interest in making their decision making process any more transparent than it already is, I also don’t think more transparency would actually reduce the number of application destined to be rejected.
One of my children participates in a sports activity that has almost a 95% attrition rate from entry level to the college level. When my child was invited to join this sport, we were told of this extraordinary attrition rate (due to injury, burnout, lack of continued interest, physical inability to achieve the highest level). Out of the approximate 20 families who began in this activity at the same time for the same team, only 2 of the athletes remain from the original group and both are still several years away from getting to college level. Jury is still out of whether either will achieve their original goals, though they are on target.
A few of the original parents had no set expectations for their child’s progress in the sport. But about 75% of parents at that first meeting thought that not only would their child go the distance - they were talking Olympics. 75% of parents heard the statistics, heard all the obstacles that could occur and 75% of parents decided that those obstacles and statistics didn’t apply to them and their child. When 75% of a group believes they will be part of a possible 5% success rate - well, the math is never going to work out. We were all told at the same meeting that maybe ONE athlete within the entire group might make it all the way. And yet, 15 or so parents truly believed it would be their child.
Being able to process the information one has been given in an accurate manner is more the issue here, rather than lack of transparency. I think most schools give enough information to be able to understand one’s chances of admission. The confusion comes in with parents and prospective students using fake math and the ‘swag’ method to guesstimate higher chances than the ones they are given by the school’s published data.
“Eveyone needs to think of it this way- EACH individual application is like buying ONE lottery ticket in ONE state lottery…”
Actually, that’s exactly the situation where gallentjill’s analogy holds up. The math of more = better works when the odds of being a winner in any particular lottery is entirely independent of the odds of being a winner in a different one.
One reason this breaks down in the college application arena is that your odds of admission to School A are not independent of your odds of admission to School B. A kid who gets accepted to Yale is more likely to be accepted by Harvard and Princeton than is a kid who is rejected by Yale. You can try to adjust for that by estimating your own “if there were 100 of me, how many of them would a given school accept” rate - hence the “if your actual odds were 5% rather than 20%” - but IMHO down that road lies madness.
Ditto with retrospectively calculating odds. If you flip 40,000 coins ten times each, statistics say some of them will come up heads all ten times. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something special about any of them.
But in the end, statistics is useless when applied to the individual. Which is why a guaranteed-for-stats admission or a rolling decision admission to a school you like and can afford is a wiser choice than an additional reach application.
@momofthreeboys “perhaps UofM could tell the application was not a top choice and there would be plenty of offers”
That’s my whole point, UMich (ranked #28 and is a top school) knew that this student would get offers in the top 25 based oni their complete profile. Why wouldn’t the student think these other top schools ranked above UMich are marches when the AO at top schools think they are too?
Said another way, UMich knew that this applicant would apply to higher ranked schools and had a very good shot at being accepted (not the 5-10% chance discussed here). Therefore, Michigan waitlisted the kid knowing it was highly unlikely that this kid would matriculate.
Even the chances are low at top schools, I never think lottery is a good analogy. Admission is not random at all.
If you’re not elite material, you arent getting into an elite, no matter how many other elites you apply to. C’mon, this isn’t random. Apply to 100 and they still need to see it and want you.
They have things they look for and most colleges show it. They don’t, however, have a page with a chart you can score.
“ECs in line with major…” this is often subject to interpretation and you can see it on CC. Many kids overestimate the significance of what they did or how it really relates.
Publishing more stats won’t help since parents, kids and some GC’s clearly lack the analytical skills to interpret the data which is ALREADY widely available.
I interviewed for Brown for years. I interviewed DOZENS of kids who thought that since Brown had the reputation of being the boho/hippy college, the fact that they were hippy/boho was going to get them in. Brown’s published stats clearly showed at the time that having a high GPA and high SAT score were the two most important elements in admissions (in tandem- not one or the other). You overall “hippyness”, marvelous though it might be, was not going to get you in coupled with a B+ GPA and 620/600 SAT scores.
And this was well before today’s admissions insanity. But insanity in its own right. Kids would adamantly refuse to believe the published admissions stats- and even those showed that the vast majority of Vals got rejected, and a significant number of 1600 SAT scorers were rejected as well (but having a 1600 single sitting was a better admissions predictor than having a perfect GPA, at least during those years).
The angry phone calls, the tears, I’d hear from a kid “But Brown is so perfect for me”. And no recognition- at all- that Brown might be perfect for you, but you might not be perfect for Brown. And truth be told- did Brown need more hippy/boho’s at the time?
This is demonstrably wrong. Mathematically, if the state lotteries are FULLY correlated (i.e. correlation of 1), then buying lottery tickets in different state lotteries won’t increase your chance of winning in any one of the lotteries. However, if the state lotteries are NOT FULLY correlated (i.e. correlation is less than 1), then your chance WILL increase and the amount of increase is the greatest if the state lotteries are fully uncorrelated (which is actually the case with lotteries). With respect to college admission, applying to multiple colleges DOES increase applicant’s chance of admission if the colleges s/he is applying to have admission criteria/processes that are NOT FULLY correlated. College admissions are never fully correlated and an applicant can maximize her/his chance of admission by selecting colleges that are as uncorrelated as possible.
@lookingforward “ECs in line with major…” this is often subject to interpretation and you can see it on CC. Many kids overestimate the significance of what they did or how it really relates.“
When your ECs support the rest of your file, no doubt it can help (or at least it can’t hurt). All things equal, if I’m the head of the engineering department. I would prefer a student who has a summer electrical engineering internship at a high tech company versus say working at the local Macys department store selling shoes over the summer.
@blossom “happiest college students.” Lol.
Brown recentky rejected 81% of vals. But nooo. Kids think it’s a crapshoot, don’t see that their approach may be shotgunning.
@blossom re: Brown, one of.my friends does interviewing of local student applicants each year and he has seen some top talent but none of the kids he recommended were ever admitted which goes to show how selective the school is and that the adcoms see the larger population of applicants and can better gauge fit. My friend only see a handful of applicants each year.