Brutal Admissions Year!

[Anonymous]

Our college counselor told us it was much, much harder to get into most schools as a female applicant. Great.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, if it's any consolation, it's also been a brutal year for all those poor and minority students. I work for an org that helps low-income students attend college-most of our students are black or latino. We've been hearing from various admissions offices that there is a huge pool this year, and while many of our students would have been likely admits if they could pay, schools don't want to spend a huge amount of aid on one student with a $0 EFC when they could spread that money around and give several students a decent amount of aid. It's tough out there.

Yes, I've heard that as well. I'm just not a believer in affirmative action. I think it is unconstitutional.

White males are admitted with lower qualifications than white females, or Asian males or females. What do you call that? The natural order of things, no doubt.

As a white male I think schools should take the most qualified kids, but I also understand why they might want to diversify their student body. If I were in charge though, it would be mostly grades, APs and SAT scores that drove the majority of the admission decision, diversity/legacy/athletics be damned.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our college counselor told us it was much, much harder to get into most schools as a female applicant. Great.

It's true. Trust me. My DD should not have gotten shut out of the schools she applied to - she's just a dime a dozen to them.

Y'all wanted 'fairness'. This is what you get.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Anyone else's kids experiencing this? Got into three good schools, but shut down at so many others! Hearing the same from my friends about their kids as well, and from the kids themselves.

My sister hosts exchange students from China and they are experiencing the same thing up north - #1 in the class, great extra-curriculars, and schools that were well within their reach even 2 years ago are rejecting them left and right. The poor kid is taking it very personally, as are many others. It's heartbreaking to watch.

Asked a friend who is an educational consultant and he confirmed it's getting really brutal out there, more so than even five years ago, and he doesn't see improvement - he sees it getting worse. He says that the common app certainly contributes to it (volume), foreign admissions does as well, (which are very lucrative for colleges), and also that there is an increased focus on admitting more minorities to balance the classes , which helps colleges them up the ranking list. What this is doing is forcing all students, especially those born in good socio-economic standing (i.e more middle/upper middle class) to pile on the APs, pile on the extra-curriculars, pile on the charitable work, etc.

It makes me wonder (a) why parents continue to allow this crazy system to brutalize and burn out our our kids and (b) what we as parents can do to get enough to say 'we are not playing this crazy game

Something needs to change. I plan to do some more research into all this and get myself involved in righting the wrongs within the system. I'm sure I'm biting off WAY more than I can chew

Newsflash, its been brutal for about 10 years now with the record breaker 8 years ago. Hey look at the bright side, those driven Chinese students are going to raise the bar and make the slacker Americans work that much harder for their acceptances

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our college counselor told us it was much, much harder to get into most schools as a female applicant. Great.

Unless they are the traditional stem/engineering schools, then the girls have the advantage.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our college counselor told us it was much, much harder to get into most schools as a female applicant. Great.

Unless they are the traditional stem/engineering schools, then the girls have the advantage.

Didn't seem to be the case for my DD.

[Anonymous]

Purely out of curiosity I have perused college confidential over the past couple of days. It looks like some kids are applying to MANY schools (seriously, some are 20+, but most are 10+). I'll be fascinated to see how the wait lists shake out (not that I'd have any reason or way to find out….)

[Anonymous]

Only 16% admit rate at Cornell for NoVA applicants if I understand the #s correctly. Brutal!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Only 16% admit rate at Cornell for NoVA applicants if I understand the #s correctly. Brutal!

^ including TJ applicants!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
There are some fields that where you go undergrad matters. I was looking through where the professors went at the school my son will likely be going to and what shocked me was that practically all of them went, for grad and undergrad, to the same few schools: Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Caltech, etc.

If you want to go into academia, names matter.


Fair point! But keep in mind that professors, especially at the better schools, will invariably have a doctorate or at the least a masters degree. So it becomes more important where one does the post-graduate degree.

I promise you that where you went to graduate school matters to hiring committees filling professor slots, but they do not care, at all (nor are they likely even aware of) about where you went to undergrad. Grad school admissions committees care about where you went to college, but not always in a way that favors Ivies.

One teeny exception is if you are applying for a professor position at a SLAC and you only went to big state schools. I've been told that if that's the case, you need to sell the fact that you "understand" the SLAC philosophy. And, there may be a very small edge to people with Ivy backgrounds if you want to teach at a school like Amherst or Williams, where parents want their precious children taught by "the best." But, that's purely icing -- your grad degree is the only one that really truly matters.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our college counselor told us it was much, much harder to get into most schools as a female applicant. Great.

Yes, white women have it so tough in this country.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our college counselor told us it was much, much harder to get into most schools as a female applicant. Great.

It's true. Trust me. My DD should not have gotten shut out of the schools she applied to - she's just a dime a dozen to them.

Y'all wanted 'fairness'. This is what you get.

Your snowflake isn't the only one with stellar grades/scores. There are 20,000 just like her for only 2,000 seats.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, the peak year for college applications was 2009 and the numbers have been going down since. It always feels like the worst year though when one's child doesn't get into one's choices. That dilemna is as old as time.

The number of applicants down but the number of applications... Up!

Yes, which makes it more competitive.

Um, no.

Each applicant can attend only one school. So, unless colleges reduce the number of spots available, fewer applicants make admissions less competitive, no matter how many applications they send out. In the end, each applicant will choose one school. If fewer applicants have sent out more applications, the average school yield will fall. Schools won't have enough students to fill available slots, so they will go to the wait list. If they think this is a trend, next year they will accept more students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, the peak year for college applications was 2009 and the numbers have been going down since. It always feels like the worst year though when one's child doesn't get into one's choices. That dilemna is as old as time.

The number of applicants down but the number of applications... Up!

Yes, which makes it more competitive.

Um, no.

Each applicant can attend only one school. So, unless colleges reduce the number of spots available, fewer applicants make admissions less competitive, no matter how many applications they send out. In the end, each applicant will choose one school. If fewer applicants have sent out more applications, the average school yield will fall. Schools won't have enough students to fill available slots, so they will go to the wait list. If they think this is a trend, next year they will accept more students.

Probably some truth to this. ....DD has been wait listed at one of the more competitive non-Ivy schools. They advised DD that they "expect to go to their wait list" but gave no idea/guarantee as to how many would be selected.

[Anonymous]

Regarding the wait lists, google the school's common data set and you can see previous year's wait list and admission results. Some school's wait lists are a long shot- single digits.