Why reasonably assessing a student's chances matters

Parents Forum
1

I have noticed that there are a lot of misconceptions on the board about the accuracy and importance of chancing students. To me, you need to be able to establish a reasonably accurate range of candidate schools, from reach to safety schools, and then focus on assessing those schools to identify schools that are the best fit for the student’s interests and personality within that group.

Reasonably assessing a students chances matters because it directly impacts the choice of schools to investigate and visit, the choice of schools to apply to, the number of schools to apply to, and developing a good list of reach, target and safety schools.

Example: If someone convinces you not to apply to a top school because you will not be admitted, they are correct the second you decide not to apply, even if, in reality, you would have been admitted. In my experience, this is more likely to happen to lower income and female students.

Example: In contrast, if an average student becomes convinced that they have the same chance as every other applicant to get in to top colleges, then they may be inclined to apply to schools that they actually have no chance to be admitted to.

None of this means that you have to be able to calculate exact percentages, just being objective, and accurate enough to establish reasonable ranges for the student. If you are too aggressive, you may be locked out. If you are too conservative, and you may not apply to some great schools where you would have been admitted.

Complicating factors:

  1. Colleges want you to apply to their school, even if you have no chance.
  1. Counselors and consultants are incentivized to encourage students to under apply. That way the student will get in quickly and with fewer applications. There will also be less risk of not being accepted anywhere. The fewer top 20 schools you apply to the easier their job will be. Consultants often advertise how x% or students were admitted to one of there top three choices. To get a high percentage, they need you to make your top three choices as easy to get into as possible.

My point is that it is important for parents and students to understand how this works to help them develop an appropriate list of colleges with reach, target and safety schools.

I am hoping that cc:'ers will add comments that will further assist parents and students in getting a clear understanding of this as students in the Class of 2020 are developing and revising their college lists right now.

2

Of course, making sure that a “safety” school really is a safety is among the most important parts of making the application list. This time of year brings out posts about students being rejected or waitlisted from their “safeties” (or sometimes not getting enough financial aid and scholarships to make them affordable), which means that they were not really safeties.

Note that an understated wrinkle in assessing chances is that many schools have different admission buckets (other than well known “hook” categories like recruited athletes). A common type of admission bucketing is by major or division (e.g. applying to a popular division like engineering or business or a popular major like nursing may result in facing a significantly higher selection bar than most students). Admission bucketing may also be based on residency (commonly for public schools, though some private schools may look for geographic diversity). Some schools have automatic admission criteria which can make them admission safeties for students who qualify, but which are much more difficult to gain admission to otherwise (e.g. UT Austin).

3

If you’re in the ballpark of their admitted class, then the chances are the published admit rate. The end. Don’t remotely kid yourself that you can estimate with any more precision and even if you can,big whoops if it moves you from 10% to 15%.

4

Yes, there are definitely different “buckets” than the normal hooks people think of. My D wanted to major in Classics/Intensive Literature. Yale has a great Classics Department and they have to ensure they have students in it to justify the professors and the other expenses to run the Department. So, I am sure my D fit very nicely in a very small bucket.

Please don’t think that if by some chance you apply saying you want some obscure major will help you. If your transcript is heavy in STEM classes and you say you want to be a German major, that probably won’t fly. My D had been taking Latin since 7 grade - so she had 6 years of it, including AP Latin, when she applied. So saying she wanted to be a Classics major was definitely foreseeable.

Just think, if Yale was full of STEM pre-med types - oh what a boring place it would be. It also could not be a place full of Literature/History types cause no scientific research would get done. You need a balance, pure and simple.

5

The thing about chancing on CC is that kids almost never present the whole picture adcoms will look at. And of course, the posters who respond don’t know how most schools (other than the auto-admitters) weigh various aspects of the app and what makes for impressive. It’s valid to check your scores against matriculated students, but that’s limited, just a portion of the whole. Many, I think, have stars in their eyes (wow could I get into fill-in the-blank?) And they never really learn what Name It Top U is really about (beyond the rep, the supposed future job chances or grad school potential) and looks for.

I agree with “identify schools that are the best fit for the student’s interests and personality within that group.” But you’e also trying to glean where YOU represent what THEY like. You do that by poring over the offerings (academic and other,) what they say about their philosophy and values, seeing what sorts of kids they brag about and what those are involved in (in their depts and outside class.) You find the “what we look for” and/or you figure it out from reading and re-reading the college’s own site. You match yourself, not just think endlessly about “what I want.”

I also agree with taking a few calculated risks. But calculated isn’t the way many approach it- they figure they’ll just throw their hat in the ring, what the heck. For the schools with so many apps, if you haven’t done the homework, if you really don’t know the school, you may be just so much more noise, bogging down the process. Be wise.

6

@Pizzagirl “If you’re in the ballpark of their admitted class, then the chances are the published admit rate. The end.”

The problem with that is that “in the ballpark” is very vague. To me, your comment seems to encourage student to apply to a lot of top schools that they have basically no chance to get into under the theory that everyone has basically the same chance, based on their assessment that they are “in the ballpark.”

I know that you have a very sophisticated understanding about what “in the ballpark” means, but the average parent or student reading that may have no idea.

@pizzagirl “Don’t remotely kid yourself that you can estimate with any more precision and even if you can,big whoops if it moves you from 10% to 15%.”

PG, I would have been very disappointed if I did not get some bluster from you. lol Actually, doing better than the average is easy if you have a significant sample and enough data to work with and you are willing to do the work.

As far as “big whoops,” I would say that there are a lot of people who will tell a student with average or above average scores that their actual chance of being admitted to a top twenty college is not really the average percentage, but is actually close to zero. In some cases the person telling them that is correct. In other cases, they are completely wrong. That is why I think that, it is important to take a more sophisticated approach when possible.

I think that the acceptance rate is one thing, but the facts are that this is not an admissions lottery. If you can get information about the results of prior candidates from your school, and in addition to gpa and test scores, also consider the specific college or school you are applying to within the University, as well as sex, race, rigor of the candidate’s schedule, and overall strength of the candidates ECs, and quality of their essays, you won’t be able to know whether they will be admitted, but you can do a lot better than the average rate.

7

Many students are confused about what constitutes a safety. There is a big difference between a true safety where your grades and test scores flat-out guarantee admission and where the formal aid policy (and/or cheap price) flat-out guarantee affordability, and relatively a safe option where you can have a reasonable expectation of admission.

No formal statement of which grades and test scores guarantee admission, but no student like you who applied from your own high school in the past five years was every rejected? That one would be pretty safe. But please don’t count on it being absolutely safe. The year you apply could be the year that admissions gets tougher.

8

I think “chancing” had a bad rep because of the forum by that name on this site, where it looks like it’s mostly high school students trying to psych each other up (or psych each other out) by flinging out improbably precise estimates of admission chances to other high school students. No one – perhaps not even an actual admissions counselor – can pinpoint that a valedictorian with 3 activities and 5000 volunteer hours a year in Honduras has an 85% chance of being admitted while a similar student with 4750 volunteer hours in Senegal only has an 83% chance of being admitted. They might be able to give you a rough estimate based on research and experience which factors are weighted more heavily or which factors

I do think that high school students could benefit from more realistic and carefully thought-out advice using the principles that Much2Learn describes though. There just needs to be more caution and conscientiousness that I don’t really see from most of the “chance” assessments, where you get folks assuring minority kids that they’re basically assured a full ride at Harvard because they have a 4.0 GPA and other folks telling kids that their sub 2100 SAT score means that they shouldn’t apply to any selective schools.

9

@lookingforward “The thing about chancing on CC is that kids almost never present the whole picture adcoms will look at.”

I agree with that. I am contemplating what a parent or student might do to obtain a better assessment, if they can be objective. The facts are that a knowledgeable person can often do this, but it take more effort than just posting on a chances thread.

@happymomof1 “no student like you who applied from your own high school in the past five years was every rejected? That one would be pretty safe. But please don’t count on it being absolutely safe. The year you apply could be the year that admissions gets tougher”

Yes. You can always be the first. It was useful to identify the schools that had never rejected a student with DD’s grades and test scores from her school, and had a significant sample size. Then she applied to three of those, just to be safe.

10

A side-conversation with this…and something that I didn’t realize until I just finished this with my 1st kid last week…the absolute top colleges announce last. Which means that your kid could be feeling really good about their mix of applications (and how they’ve done) only to be hit with 3, 4, 7 rejections all within 48 hours at the very end… Not sure what to do with that bit of info…but i’m seeing it all over the boards right now…kids who were feeling great last week…who are knocked sideways by the huge influx of No’s at the very very end…

11

Or you may be applying into a more selective admission bucket at the school than the previous students were.

12

@SouthernHope “the absolute top colleges announce last.”

We approached this with our DD by discussing it openly. We made sure that DD understood that she would probably be rejected numerous times during this process, and that she should try not to take it personally. Additionally, it is important to be sure that heading into Ivy Day, she already had acceptances to a few schools where she would have been very happy to attend. That is where EA is very helpful. We also advised her to be hopeful, but prepared to be rejected.

To further drive this point home, in advance of Ivy Day, DD and I developed an admitted student travel plan with her for each possible scenario. We developed a travel plan in the case that she was admitted to no additional schools, and discussed how that plan might change depending on any additional admissions. I think doing that helped her to be completely prepared.

13

We were perfectly comfortable with safeties that were not 100% published data safe. But that’s because my kids took advantage of EA, priority applications and/or rolling admissions. Each had one acceptance in November - the best kind of safety of all.

Many schools don’t look at majors for prospective students. Harvard explicitly says it doesn’t, however I suspect the fact that they were expanding their engineering and comp sci offerings the year my oldest applied as a very obvious computer nerd was probably in his favor. But you know if the difference meant he had a 12% chance rather than a 6% chance, it’s still a reach.

14

We found it very hard to assess youngest kid’s chances. She had the grades, test scores, a couple of sports, nothing outstanding, definitely in the ballpark. The only thing I can think of to explain her good results is maybe her essay, which I did not think was fantastic. We followed the rolling admission safety and a few matches, then a bunch of reaches-for-everyone schools (no Ivys). Looking back, there must have been something about her they liked, just not sure what.