Yes, it looks they used careful language to emphasize selectivity. Room for 1/25 does not mean they accept 1/25. They were also careful to be generic… “one of the largest” etc…
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Sure. Take Yale. They have a pretty informative Admissions Podcast. In Episode 26, “Should I Even Apply?”, they laid out six factors they called necessary for admissions. In Episode 30, they revealed a new Initial Review process, where senior officers do an initial cut of uncompetitive applications without going through the full review process (although they still go to Committee for a decision). They connected that back to Episode 26, although suggested there were perhaps others way to not be competitive. An important discussion from that Episode:
MARK: I’ll say it very plainly. We have more uncompetitive and sort of unqualified applicants in our first-year admissions process now than we did not even all that long ago. So I–
HANNAH: Right.
MARK: –started reading admissions files about 15 years ago. We had about 26,000 applications, just about half what we have now, and I don’t think that this kind of Initial Review process would have worked in that stage.
HANNAH: Right.
MARK: I think there would just be so many more of the applicants who would be so competitive that it kind of wouldn’t be worth your time to be adding this initial step because you just wouldn’t wind up identifying that many students who weren’t really competitive in the process. That has changed.
HANNAH: Right.
MARK: A lot more of our applicants, just as a percentage of the pool now, don’t meet those kind of necessary criteria to really truly be competitive in our process. Most do.
HANNAH: Yep.
MARK: But a lot don’t.
HANNAH: A lot don’t, and we needed a way to more efficiently work our way through those files to make sure that we’re giving our area readers more time to focus on the strongest applicants.
MARK: And that part so far has been great. I think we as admissions officers really appreciate when you’re going through your area, now knowing that going through one by one file if it’s already gone through the Initial Review stage.
HANNAH: Mm-hmm.
MARK: Every single application that we’re reading is going to be strong and competitive, and we can really invest the time in making sure we’re doing a full read, taking the kind of notes that we want to prepare that file for committee. And this adds a lot more consistency to the process of reading.
HANNAH: Right. So you’re reading fewer in a day, but they are generally stronger, and you need to dig in more.
All this is still pretty vague, but they have at least confirmed they get many applications they do not consider competitive, and that do not have the same chance as others. The question is then which are like that.
Again Episode 26 provides some guidance, but they have been filling in the picture a bit recently. The Yale Dean of Admissions recently appeared on the Dartmouth podcast hosted by their Dean of Admissions, and long story short, appeared to confirm what many had begun to guess, that test optional is maybe not so optional outside of special cases, and was potentially critical to getting a normal application past the initial review (although was not discussed again after).
And the Dartmouth Dean agreed. Dartmouth is a whole other subject, but they have also been discussing an initial fast-tracking review, and in their case they have been developing a sort of AI/Big Data approach to making the first cut. Recently the Dartmouth Dean described this in much more detail.
None of this is completely definitive–yet. But with each piece they add, they are making it a little easier to assess whether you realistically can pass their initial review. And to me, this type of openness is relatively new, but appears to be a response this problem of getting too many uncompetitive applications. And these colleges, at least, seem to be willing to actually discuss these issues in a way that could, and really should, discourage some applications.
So in my ideal world, Dartmouth would eventually release a public tool similar to its NPC where you could input your information and it would estimate whether or not you will get past their initial review. This is not going to be perfect, but it could be accurate enough to guide a lot of people properly. And it is theoretically possible because of the sort of tool Dartmouth is developing for its own use.
Yale is still using senior officers for that task, but I have a feeling others will be following in Dartmouth’s footsteps in coming years, possibly including Yale.
In a way, this could eventually become like the UCAS Tariff Point system in the UK. That system is not perfectly predictive either, but it gives potential applicants (who can only pick 5 schools in the UK) valuable guidance. We have not had such a thing in the US including because of all the lack of standardization, but the tools Dartmouth (and likely others) are developing could finally allow for a similar system in the US.
So for sure I don’t know if they will actually go that far. Still, I think recent events have at least shown why they might. Again, Yale and others are openly complaining about the number of uncompetitive applications they get, and being more and more open about whether or not you should even try. Meanwhile, thanks to litigation and such, the cat is out of the bag on things like ALDCs preferences. I mean, even just the incoming Princeton surveys are pretty revealing:
You can use that tool to compare ACT or SAT scores for recruited athletes to non-recruited athletes, or legacies to non-legacies. As these schools have suggested, with legacies the differences are pretty subtle. With athletes, very much not so. You can also see who submitted by athlete status, and almost half of recruited athletes in that incoming class did not submit, only 18.6% of non-recruited-athletes. Again, optional is maybe not so optional for most unhooked applicants at Princeton.
The sort of public tool I just described would let you do the same sort of thing, try out hypotheticals where you did or did not report being a recruited athlete, or legacy, or so on, and see if it affected your chances of getting past the initial review. But at this point, I don’t think that would really be telling people things they didn’t already know.
As a final thought, the Yale people made it very clear the initial review question is a simple yes or no. And even if you get a yes at that stage, you are still a long way from being admitted. Indeed, just doing a little math, they said it was most applicants moving on, so say that was 60%. If under 5% total get admitted, you are still talking less than 1 in 12 at that point. I think if you account for hooked applicants, very likely you might be looking still at 1 in 15, or worse.
So just because the tool I am describing might say you have, say, a 99% chance of getting past the initial review at Yale, doesn’t mean you are likely to be admitted eventually. But if it could tell others they only have virtually no chance of even getting that far, that could be helpful.
Anyway, we’ll see.
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Thank you. Interesting. It is such a departure from the past because I listened to a Yale podcast episode in which they said they refuse to answer the question, “Should I even apply” because reviews are “holistic” and they cannot definitely say somebody has no shot. At least that was my interpretation of the exchange.
I didn’t realize that Dartmouth was doing that initial screen with AI and is of particular interest to me because my DS24 has applied ED to Dartmouth.
If that’s the direction things are going, I think the way to make things even more transparent, and a lot fairer, is to stop pretending that for kids who meet the academic criteria, admission is anything but a lottery. The academics allow the kid to purchase the lottery ticket, but then it’s a lottery.
So make it a lottery. Come up with a formula to normalize differences in grades, GPA, test scores across income, geography etc. and publish the criteria that enable the entry into the lottery. Then pick the class at random. Or if a school wants an oboist for the orchestra, then tell the lottery to pick from the kids who play the oboe.
I realize that this could and would be gamed. But it seems a lot more transparent than it is now where an AO would be extremely hard-pressed to justify why they picked one exceptionally qualified kid over another.
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I am not sure that “holistic admissions” is synonymous with “random” admissions. A lottery of students who make a certain stats bar seems pretty random.
I think it is relevant to make a point here that often “hooked” students are hooked because they have BOTH academic qualifications and also have something special about them that qualifies them beyond academics alone. A recruited athlete, for example, can not become “hooked” until they pass a rigorous pre-read process- so essentially, their ED application is their second time applying to the school after both the coach and admissions have reviewed their application. Lots of the top athletic recruits never get hooked at Williams because they do not meet the academic standards.
With this in mind, I think we need to dispel the notion that athletes are snapping up spots in class that normal kids don’t have access to with lower stats. I don’t see the rest of the applicant pool any differently, they are just entering the process in Nov instead in Aug or Sept. The musician with exceptional talent is offered admission from a wholistic perspective. It isn’t random. Wholistic admissions is about attracting a class of outstanding students who are athletes, artists, philosophers, writers, musicians, actors, etc.
That doesn’t mean that all of the kids who make it into the qualified pile aren’t special, bright, promising young people who deserve to attend the best colleges. However, suggesting that the school use a random lottery system for all kids with only exemplary stats is pretty much the opposite of “wholistic”.
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I agree. This really does feel like a change in the normal evasive talking points, and I do think it is because these colleges see the recent flood of uncompetitive applications as a problem that has gotten out of hand.
Just channeling my inner AO, I don’t think they believe it is a lottery, I think they believe they are crafting classes which are the best bets to fulfill their various institutional goals and satisfy their various groups of stakeholders. The faculty are looking for certain types of students (perhaps down to at least the departmental level), the development office has its own long-term strategies, the part of the administration that runs residential life has all sorts of goals, someone is watching the budget, and on and on.
Another interesting tidbit from Yale I learned recently is that on their five-people admissions committees, usually there is a faculty representative and a representative of the residential college Deans. I don’t think that is arbitrary, I think they are there to give those stakeholders a voice in shaping Yale’s classes.
And then there is a final, final step where some people who were either marginal admits or marginal denials in individual committees go back into one big final review committee which adjusts things around until they are happy with the overall class.
I understand from the outside that this looks like a lottery, because how on earth is an individual kid supposed to predict what is going to happen in a process like that? It is way too complex to be predictable from the outside.
But from the inside, I seriously doubt all these stakeholders would be content to replace this sort of deliberative committee process with a lottery. Instead, I suspect they will continue to want to be able to represent their respective constituencies.
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Yes, I’m sure they wouldn’t. But they would also freely admit that they could pick 4-5 classes from the applicant pool and be perfectly happy with each of the classes. So that suggests it is in fact very random.
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Hmm, I am not so sure about that.
I think what they usually say is there are many more people who are academically qualified than they can admit. But that is only part of what they rate.
And I’m not sure I have seen them suggest there are that many people who really fit the college equally well in non-academic ways too. Indeed, if you look at something like the Harvard lawsuit admissions data, approximately 8 times as many people got an Academic 2 as were admitted. But once they also filtered for Activities 2s and Personal 2s, they were up to something like a 75%+ admissions rate. So, not actually a multiple of those who they scored as very strong in all three of those ways.
And I think that is what kinda trips up some people. Each individual thing–academics, activities, and personal/fit stuff–is not necessarily all that strict of a filter on its own (although for Harvard, at least, the strictest was actually the personal/fit stuff). But people who actually get rated as very strong in all three ways are quite rare, rare enough that they end up admitting most such people.
OK, so in concrete terms, it looks like somewhere early in the second non-overlapping class, Harvard would have had to start compromising in terms of internal ratings on one or more of those three factors. And I am not sure their stakeholders would have been perfectly happy to do that.
I’m admittedly feeling a bit cynical today, so maybe take this with a grain of salt. But while these various podcasts (Yale, Dartmouth) are well done, and I’m sure well-intentioned, I also find them mildly annoying.
First, I still find most of the language to be very vague and more consistent with institutional talking points than candid information. For example, most of Yale’s six “threshold” factors are so general and obvious as to be almost meaningless: you need to have a good command of the English language, you need to have a rigorous course load, you need to have good grades, etc.
Second, I find it a little ironic when AOs complain about unmanageable application volumes, yet merrily continue to send out marketing materials, and put out their annual press releases promoting the higher than ever application numbers and lower than ever acceptance rates.
Third, colleges continue to hold on to admissions policies that serve them but make the process more stressful for applicants(such as binding or restrictive early decision rounds). More than one AO at our info sessions bemoaned that they did not like ED - the Williams AO was particularly vocal about it. Well, why not get rid of it? I get that they are operating in a competitive market and it’s risky to be the one to take the first step, but taking such risks can also be the mark of true leadership. And no one better to do it than the most competitive and wealthiest schools of them all.
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Let’s return the topic to Williams. And specifically ED at Williams
Holistic admissions, schools other than Williams, SCOTUS, etc, while fascinating, aren’t the focus of this thread
Posts that don’t comply are subject to deletion without comment.
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Did the Williams AO give the reasons why they did not like ED? Very curious. Thanks!
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I don’t remember what he said precisely but the general flavor was that it increases pressure on kids and causes equity issues (because ED applicants are typically wealthier).
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Rejected. Damn. 3.94 UW (top 5%), 35 ACT, 12 APs, extensive EC’s, etc.
Of course, we knew this was a real possibility. But I kind of expected that she’d be deferred. (Was anybody deferred?) The good news is that D24 can put Williams in the rearview mirror and focus on other schools. The bad news is that it’s hard not to second-guess her application. (E.g., Is it worth even applying to other Williams-adjacent schools in RD?)
D24 seems okay, but I haven’t pushed the issue. She won a regional academic competition this morning, so that should help buoy her spirits a little. But, personally, I’m not looking forward to another four months of this.
Onward and upward.
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I think the concern is that they do not want to encourage students to apply ED just because they think that the AO will give the application extra “credit” for commiting early. The rigor of review is the same, so it does not really increase your chances. So, they don’t want students to feel pressured into applying ED for strategic reasons only.
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Yes, it is. Last year, my D23 ended up being admitted in the RD round to a few schools that were more selective than the school that rejected her in the ED round – all LACs (and of course she was rejected from a few highly selective schools, too, but it was worth it to apply). You really can’t tell. Remember that the ED advantage is not what it seems on the surface, especially at LACs, where so many of those spots go to recruited athletes. So you have the right idea – put Williams behind you, still apply to a few reaches (because your kid has a great record), but do make sure you’ve got some targets and safeties that she would love to attend.
Btw: with a semester (almost) under her belt, my daughter loves her school and cannot imagine being anywhere else. Take a few days to let the sting fade, and then look ahead to new possibilities. It will all work out.
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We had two from our school apply- one was deferred. I haven’t heard of a whole lot of deferrals yet either though.
Sorry to hear your kiddo didn’t get an acceptance. I’d say YES to applying to Williams adjacent with that application (along with some good safety options). She might be a perfect fit for what another school is looking for! Congrats on her comp. She should add that to her application for RD now!
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I would not read too much from one decision, know of many that did not get the nod from Williams ED but ended up accepted at Stanford and others, when you have the numbers as you do, it really becomes a random lottery (accepted to Columbia or Harvard but rejected ED at Williams is not uncommon)
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deferred
1550 SAT, 4.0 GPA at a rigorous private school, lots of writing and theater ECs. everyone around me (including my college counselor) is surprised.
I just wonder how they make their decisions in 3 weeks!
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As everyone else is saying, one rejection from such a selective small college just doesn’t contain any really useful information. So yes, absolutely keep applying to a robust list, including some well-chosen reaches as desired.
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Hmm. It does indeed.
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