College application lessons learned

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:My kid has a rough time in Covid but a silver lining has been this: if you let go of the idea of going to a "top" or competitive school, the process is actually easy and fairly stress-free (and you'll get a lot of merit money too). There are a ton of schools with high acceptance rates that are eager to have your kid.

This. The school doesn’t matter as much as what you do once you’re there.

I think that really only applies to non elite colleges. Let's be honest here.. elite colleges buy you the connections and network not readily available to the rest of the colleges.

My kid didn't apply to HYP, but they did to Stanford and MIT (deferred). I'm not holding my breath, though.

It really doesn’t. i think it may be lifechanging for a small group, but not that significant for most. Not to pull out the old “my spouse and I went to HYP” line, but although there are several high fliers among our classmates there are many more normal people living normal lives working at normal professional jobs. Lots of my college friends work PT and stay home with kids—and while they are doing fine (and they are interesting and scintillating people with many talents), they are not rich or fancy by any means.

Agree, my spouse and I also went to the same level of schools, for undergrad and grad school. I think people who did not overestimate the value of the experience and name. Plenty of our classmates went on to completely average careers and plenty of the high flyers we know went to schools not in the T30.
Some of the people who make it into the elite colleges peak in high school.

+1 to this. My husband works on Wall Street and they love their elite feeder schools, but they also love Division 1 athletes or even athletes from lower tiered schools. Think lacrosse bro at Mary Washington.

Yes. And don’t forget that successful people from “no name” colleges like to recruit smart, yet humble kids who went to similar type schools. This is especially prevalent among men in their 40s and up. They are sick and tired of the pretentious kids from name brand schools.

More like dumb white men want to be surrounded by other dumb white men.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Never admit having a disability. It will automatically get you removed from competitive schools. You would think collages would be impressed as kids with physical disabilities are doing things on “hard mode”, but it’s a LIE. Always check the box “No”.

What if you have a prosthetic arm? Don’t check the box?

Tell them after they admit you, never before. There is no good way to come off as “over coming diversity” when you have a disability. All the university will read is “Why waste the spot?” , knowing how hard it is for the disabled to get jobs.

I guess if your parents have millions or billions, it won’t matter…….

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid has a rough time in Covid but a silver lining has been this: if you let go of the idea of going to a "top" or competitive school, the process is actually easy and fairly stress-free (and you'll get a lot of merit money too). There are a ton of schools with high acceptance rates that are eager to have your kid.

This. The school doesn’t matter as much as what you do once you’re there.

I think that really only applies to non elite colleges. Let's be honest here.. elite colleges buy you the connections and network not readily available to the rest of the colleges.

My kid didn't apply to HYP, but they did to Stanford and MIT (deferred). I'm not holding my breath, though.

It really doesn’t. i think it may be lifechanging for a small group, but not that significant for most. Not to pull out the old “my spouse and I went to HYP” line, but although there are several high fliers among our classmates there are many more normal people living normal lives working at normal professional jobs. Lots of my college friends work PT and stay home with kids—and while they are doing fine (and they are interesting and scintillating people with many talents), they are not rich or fancy by any means.

Agree, my spouse and I also went to the same level of schools, for undergrad and grad school. I think people who did not overestimate the value of the experience and name. Plenty of our classmates went on to completely average careers and plenty of the high flyers we know went to schools not in the T30.
Some of the people who make it into the elite colleges peak in high school.

+1 to this. My husband works on Wall Street and they love their elite feeder schools, but they also love Division 1 athletes or even athletes from lower tiered schools. Think lacrosse bro at Mary Washington.

Yes. And don’t forget that successful people from “no name” colleges like to recruit smart, yet humble kids who went to similar type schools. This is especially prevalent among men in their 40s and up. They are sick and tired of the pretentious kids from name brand schools.

More like dumb white men want to be surrounded by other dumb white men.

Sure - keep telling yourself that.
DP

[Anonymous]

Don't let your college dreams and hopes interfere with your kid's college dreams and hopes. It is really hard, but you will end up wasting alot of money visiting and applying to schools that you love but your kid has zero interest and won't want to attend even if they get in.

[Anonymous]

Try to look at the parent pages to see if there are any big issues going on at the schools and maybe cross them off the list. D loved a school and got in. No we are facing a huge housing crisis and are going to have to pay three times as much for housing after freshman year for her to continue at that school. Never mentioned housing crisis in tours.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Try to look at the parent pages to see if there are any big issues going on at the schools and maybe cross them off the list. D loved a school and got in. No we are facing a huge housing crisis and are going to have to pay three times as much for housing after freshman year for her to continue at that school. Never mentioned housing crisis in tours.

This is all big public universities.

The term “housing crisis” is thrown around very, very broadly. Kids are not content to live in student housing anymore. They want fancy apartments with only 1BR.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Try to look at the parent pages to see if there are any big issues going on at the schools and maybe cross them off the list. D loved a school and got in. No we are facing a huge housing crisis and are going to have to pay three times as much for housing after freshman year for her to continue at that school. Never mentioned housing crisis in tours.

Do you mind sharing which school?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Try to look at the parent pages to see if there are any big issues going on at the schools and maybe cross them off the list. D loved a school and got in. No we are facing a huge housing crisis and are going to have to pay three times as much for housing after freshman year for her to continue at that school. Never mentioned housing crisis in tours.

I wouldn't necessarily call that a crisis, it's the case at a lot of universities but it is a good idea to find out from parents how difficult or not is the off campus housing search and what people are paying. DS is off campus at VT and we spend less than when he was on campus and it was not hard to find a place. But, one thing you might learn from that parent group is how many kids have trouble with math instruction at VT. Most students have to take self-paced online math classes for the basics. Works for some but is awful for others.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you are interested in Virginia Tech, the supplemental essays are truly the only real way to stand out. Everyone applying has the same high stats. It's foolish to think you're a shoo-in because you have a 4.5 and 1500 SAT and a bunch of good ECs.

Supplemental essays and service-based ECs are the only real way to differentiate yourself.

I agree that the supplemental essays at VT are important (they say they are Very Important in their common data set). But I disagree that everyone admitted/applying has high stats--saying that discourages kids with lower SAT scores from applying and they really do have a strong chance of getting in. In fact, for the 2022-2023 Common Data Set the 25-75th percentile range was:


SATs
Critical Reading: 610-700
Math: 610-720

So even many of those who fall in the top 25% of accepted students at VT have far below the 1500 SAT in your example. And 25% of the students fall below 1200. The reason this is the case is because at VT they only rank SAT scores as "considered" not "Important" or "Very Important" (see common data set). So VT is a great school for students who have a high GPA but slightly or even a lot lower test scores.
And the average GPA is 4.03% so strong, but also below the 4.5. (They consider GPA as "very important" like nearly all schools do).

VT also does not rate Extracurriculars or Volunteer Work as important in their applications (as per their own common data set) so while I'm a big fan of service work, VT says they don't rate that as very important or important in their application decisions.


My big takeaways: High SAT scores REALLY don't matter for VT -- they regularly accept a 1250 SAT kid over a 1500 SAT kid even if their grades and class rigor are similar, and they are applying for the same major, so it's hard to know why. It's hard to imagine how they assess supplemental essays at the scale they are doing in a way where they can meaningful assess one is so much better than the other, but they do say those essays are "Very important" and SATs are not. So don't be afraid to apply to VT just because top students aren't getting in--many others who have average SAT scores are!

There's also some evidence that VT engages in enrollment management yield protection for strong students they think are using VT as a back-up option, so if you have a high GPA and high SAT scores and want to go to VT as your first choice, apply ED so they know you are really interested.

And, the most general advice for all schools: Read the Common Data Set section on Freshman First Time Admission for the most recent year. This tells you parts of the application they consider important/unimportant (how many people know that VT doesn't care much about SAT scores but cares about Supplemental Essays?? Totally unexpected for a technical school, right?), acceptance rates by gender and state domicile, average GPA and distribution of class rank. 25-75th range of SAT scores for admitted students (and these days pay close attention to the percent who submitted them--some schools that are test optional basically require them and over 75% of accepted students still submit them, some schools are test optional and only the highest scoring students submit them so the distribution of scores can look high, but only 20% of accepted students submitted scores).

Speculation, you mean. There is speculation. There is no actual evidence of this.

There is evidence --not just yet conclusive evidence. But enough evidence that they should be more transparent about their use of enrollment management software. They have reported using the enrollment management software to SCHEV (State Council of Higher Education in Virginia) that colleges use to predict who will enroll after being accepted and that has been criticized for being used to reject more highly qualified candidates that are less likely to enroll. There are cases on file with SCHEV right now about this and it's being examined.

Thank you for posting. I have suspected exactly this. I would love to understand the approach where the high scoring student gets penalized via yield algorithm.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Never admit having a disability. It will automatically get you removed from competitive schools. You would think collages would be impressed as kids with physical disabilities are doing things on “hard mode”, but it’s a LIE. Always check the box “No”.

What if you have a prosthetic arm? Don’t check the box?

Don’t the colleges see you have a disability flagged somewhere in the score reports from college board or in your school file?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid has a rough time in Covid but a silver lining has been this: if you let go of the idea of going to a "top" or competitive school, the process is actually easy and fairly stress-free (and you'll get a lot of merit money too). There are a ton of schools with high acceptance rates that are eager to have your kid.

This. The school doesn’t matter as much as what you do once you’re there.

I think that really only applies to non elite colleges. Let's be honest here.. elite colleges buy you the connections and network not readily available to the rest of the colleges.

My kid didn't apply to HYP, but they did to Stanford and MIT (deferred). I'm not holding my breath, though.

It really doesn’t. i think it may be lifechanging for a small group, but not that significant for most. Not to pull out the old “my spouse and I went to HYP” line, but although there are several high fliers among our classmates there are many more normal people living normal lives working at normal professional jobs. Lots of my college friends work PT and stay home with kids—and while they are doing fine (and they are interesting and scintillating people with many talents), they are not rich or fancy by any means.

Agree, my spouse and I also went to the same level of schools, for undergrad and grad school. I think people who did not overestimate the value of the experience and name. Plenty of our classmates went on to completely average careers and plenty of the high flyers we know went to schools not in the T30.
Some of the people who make it into the elite colleges peak in high school.

+1 to this. My husband works on Wall Street and they love their elite feeder schools, but they also love Division 1 athletes or even athletes from lower tiered schools. Think lacrosse bro at Mary Washington.

Yes. And don’t forget that successful people from “no name” colleges like to recruit smart, yet humble kids who went to similar type schools. This is especially prevalent among men in their 40s and up. They are sick and tired of the pretentious kids from name brand schools.

More like dumb white men want to be surrounded by other dumb white men.

Because your college was super diverse by race, class, gender, ethnicity?

IDK about the men who did this, but as a kid who grew up working class and attended a "no name" school for undergrad, I never passed on reading a résumé from one of these schools when I hired interns and associates when I worked in DC. I found that nearly all the folks I hired from no name and name brand schools had pretty comparable skill sets. Some of the kids in the former category needed a little more self confidence and that was part of the reason why I hired them - help them get a DC internship in case they wanted to work back in DC after graduation. There was only one truly pretentious kid, who was still a good worker. He clearly had read everyone's bio, saw I was the only one who had attended an Ivy (grad school), and would try to chat me up. Younger staff used to laugh about this as they knew I was the last person who would be swayed by our "shared" connection.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Never admit having a disability. It will automatically get you removed from competitive schools. You would think collages would be impressed as kids with physical disabilities are doing things on “hard mode”, but it’s a LIE. Always check the box “No”.

What if you have a prosthetic arm? Don’t check the box?

Don’t the colleges see you have a disability flagged somewhere in the score reports from college board or in your school file?

i don't think so

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Try to look at the parent pages to see if there are any big issues going on at the schools and maybe cross them off the list. D loved a school and got in. No we are facing a huge housing crisis and are going to have to pay three times as much for housing after freshman year for her to continue at that school. Never mentioned housing crisis in tours.

I wouldn't necessarily call that a crisis, it's the case at a lot of universities but it is a good idea to find out from parents how difficult or not is the off campus housing search and what people are paying. DS is off campus at VT and we spend less than when he was on campus and it was not hard to find a place. But, one thing you might learn from that parent group is how many kids have trouble with math instruction at VT. Most students have to take self-paced online math classes for the basics. Works for some but is awful for others.

Three times as much could be a budget crisis for many families. This happened to my sister for junior/senior year - no more on-campus housing and EFC didn't adjust for that (maybe it does now?) - very hard on my parents.

Any HS friends with kids interested in schools in big cities - I don't necessarily dissuade, but I am very real with them about the costs and the logistics. "Your kid goes to NYU and the only housing they can afford is in the Bronx and Queens - that's a VERY different college experience than what they may envision."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Try to look at the parent pages to see if there are any big issues going on at the schools and maybe cross them off the list. D loved a school and got in. No we are facing a huge housing crisis and are going to have to pay three times as much for housing after freshman year for her to continue at that school. Never mentioned housing crisis in tours.

Do you mind sharing which school?

I would give the exact opposite advice--the parent pages of many schools give a distorted view of reality as a few panicking parents post problems (wow, accidental alliteration) immediately before they really solve them. Our DC's school parent page showed a "housing crisis" that turned out fine for 99% of students as they figured out all the options.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Try to look at the parent pages to see if there are any big issues going on at the schools and maybe cross them off the list. D loved a school and got in. No we are facing a huge housing crisis and are going to have to pay three times as much for housing after freshman year for her to continue at that school. Never mentioned housing crisis in tours.

Do you mind sharing which school?

I would give the exact opposite advice--the parent pages of many schools give a distorted view of reality as a few panicking parents post problems (wow, accidental alliteration) immediately before they really solve them. Our DC's school parent page showed a "housing crisis" that turned out fine for 99% of students as they figured out all the options.

+1000