Wustl vs Northwestern

Bala
Sun, 10 Jun 2007 22:08:20 +0000

Overall competitiveness is similar but the specifics for you may be very different.

Northwestern has long had one of the most transparent admissions processes in the country. They make public detailed data on accepted and attending students, even within specific divisions of the university. Their ED process is admit/reject with no wait list. In high school counseling offices across the country, one can look down the list of applicants year to year and see fairly reliable cut-offs re: GPA and SATs with the exception of kids with special talents/recruited athletes/ED legacies.

WashU’s process remains one of the most opaque. They remain one of the few schools that still will not make info available via the Common Data Set. Despite their contention that 93% of freshman rank in top tenth of HS grad class, experience at our competitive local school (doesn’t make public student rankings and therefore not available to US News) shows that virtually no one heading off to WashU ranks that highly year after year after year. SAT scores, obviously released to US News, are consistently high and in the range of published medians.

NU and WashU are both great schools but play by very different rules when it comes to admitting students. Rule of thumb – trust the track record of your own HS to tell you what your odds will be at NU. Trust the numbers WashU wants to promote for US News purposes (SATs and rankings if your school ranks) to tell you what your odds are there. Locally, higher achievers have ended up at NU than WashU but there is a lot of overlap. Generally, presume that high grades and SATs are requisite at NU. If your school does not release rankings, only high SATs are a clear requisite at WashU.

Last word – NU is using its waitlist fairly heavily this year after finally going to the Common App and seeing an almost 20% increase in applicants. That is on top of a 13% increase last year. With the uncertainly of where numbers would fall out, they opted to keep acceptances low and not risk going over-census for the freshman class. This year’s class will be even more selective with accepted students median SATs this year up at 1462.