Why avoiding highly competitive schools is a winning applications strategy

PurpleTitan
Tue, 30 Mar 2021 19:50:51 +0000

I posted the following in the other thread by the OP.

It seems that the mom mentioned really doesn’t understand the numbers and motivating factors of many American colleges. There also seems to be a blindness about LACs and other types of schools by some people. As if a school isn’t ranked among the top few US News National Universities, they don’t exist.
To an extent, that type of thinking may be due to the fact that in many countries, there’s not much that differentiates schools besides prestige (and geography). Then they carry that mindset to the US, but American higher ed is very different and much more differentiated.

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One big thing is that many people just don’t have a good grasp on the numbers. Nearly all of the privates in the top 25 have relatively small undergraduate student bodies and the US is a big country. The privates in the top 25 added together take in roughly a little over a percent of all American HS grads, but when you consider that close to or even half the class at Ivies/equivalents are hooked and that they fill roughly half their class via ED/SCEA and they all admit holistically and they generally want a balanced class (while a ton of kids want to study a hot major like CS), well, your chances at nearly all of them may be close to zero if you are unhooked and looking to major in CS. Meanwhile, for something like CS, the top publics may be as difficult to get in to as the Ivies/equivalents if you are OOS. UNC’s OOS acceptance rate is around Cornell’s, for instance, because UNC is forced by their state to cap the OOS enrollment at 18% of the freshman class.

These days, if you are an ORM guy looking to get in to a good CS program, there aren’t too many avenues where you’d have a decent chance even if you’re top 1% in everything . I’d say UW-Madison, UMass-Amherst, definitely McGill/UBC/other Canadian schools (besides Waterloo, which is holistic and also very difficult to enter). UW-Seattle as a possibility but not for CS (but they have some CS-adjacent majors that are easier to get in to. Possibly one of CMU’s many CS-adjacent majors (but not CS). But places like CMU and UW-Seattle would still have all the top tech companies come to recruit.

And there would also exist the CC route. UVa automatically takes you as a transfer if you manage a 3.7 GPA at a VA CC for 2 years (but they don’t guarantee CS). Many of the UCs participate in TAG. And it seems to be easier for OOS with a stellar CC GPA to transfer in to engineering at some top publics like UMich compared to straight out of HS.