Why avoiding highly competitive schools is a winning applications strategy

SebCoe
Thu, 22 Apr 2021 13:51:18 +0000

Based on my experience with S25 and D25, I believe that a search strategy should include a true analysis to be reviewed with your student of the colleges’ demographic composition which reveals how many seats are truly available. My best example is Wellesley. Wellesley admits 10% of applicants from the Midwest, 65% non-white applicants, 15% international. As a midwestern applicant, she was competing for 1 of 60 seats (120 Acceptances) without considering major, race, or geographic dispersion within the Midwest, etc. Wellesley recruits heavily in our large city with many private prep schools. How many women from one city will the college accept? How legacies were in the pool? Any ED candidates that fit that profile? (We’ve since learned that another student from her school with lower stats was admitted ED.) All factors showed that her true chance of RD acceptance was well below the college rate of 20% regardless of possessing objective stats that placed her safely in the top quartile of students. This spells Waitlist City.
Thankfully, in addition to her flagship safety, she was admitted to a highly selective LAC. Interestingly, when pairing her with a current college student from her “geographic area”, the match was from another major midwestern city over 300 miles away. I have no doubt that a significant factor was that the college wanted a student from our area amongst her other qualities. My lesson learned is that for national colleges you simply cannot look at high level admission stats and build your chances around those factors. The black box of admission decisions is structured internally in a way that applicants will never see. It makes the process mostly random for us.