20 plus applications

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Man some of your people care a lot about what other families choose to do.

Only because it affects other people, and perpetuates a cycle where kids have no choice to apply to more schools each year to get the same number of offers.

+1000

If we could return to kids applying to 2-3 reaches, 2-3 targets and 2-3 safeties, then there would not be 60K apps for each T20 school

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Man some of your people care a lot about what other families choose to do.

Only because it affects other people, and perpetuates a cycle where kids have no choice to apply to more schools each year to get the same number of offers.

+1000

If we could return to kids applying to 2-3 reaches, 2-3 targets and 2-3 safeties, then there would not be 60K apps for each T20 school

And who would that help?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:"This is one reason why percentages of kids accepted and yield has gone down at T20 schools. Instead of applying to 6-8 school, students are applying to twice that. More applicants and the same number of acceptances. If the same kids get into numerous schools, then most of those schools will take a hit to their yield."

By definition, only 10% of the applicants nationally in any given year have SAT scores in the top 10th percentile. Let's say that's 50,000 kids in a given year. Before TO, nobody below that percentile was making it past the first cut for admission to Princeton or Stanford. They weren't considered "qualified" without that score and a GPA of 3.8+. Five years ago, the fact that hundreds of thousands of kids who scored in the 50th or 70th percentile on the SAT threw their applications into the Princeton pile alongside the 50,000 who were qualified didn't make admission to those schools any more difficult than it already was, FOR THOSE KIDS WHO WERE QUALIFIED. Sure, the Princeton overall acceptance number that included average students with zero chance of ever being admitted might have gone down. But Princeton could just weed out those mediocre performers and then turn their attention to choosing from among the top applicants. In that scenario, Perfect Peter with his 1580 and 3.8+ was never going to lose his spot to Mediocre Martin who only scored 1200 on the SAT even if Martin also had a 3.8+. Today, with TO, we've changed the pool of people who have a shot at admission at Princeton because people with crappy SAT scores can now try to slip in among the qualified kids. And we've blindfolded the AOs at Princeton and Stanford so that they can't use the SAT score to tell which kid has an inflated GPA and which one is the real deal. THAT, using TO, is what decreases the acceptance rates for the kids like Perfect Peter with top GPAs and top 10% SAT scores.

If we had access to the acceptance rate by GPA+ rigor and SAT scores at Princeton and Stanford, we'd likely see that the acceptance rate for QUALIFIED applicants (those in the top 10% SAT and a 3.8+) hasn't actually decreased by more than the increase in the pool of students who meet the schools' threshold stats. (There are more of these qualified kids in raw numbers now than there were five years ago due to population growth.)

I agree with your overall point about TO but your 50K number is way under in accounting for the top 10%. Because of super scoring and ACT scores the number of individual applicants in an application year is much larger. 1400 is the 95th percentile. According to the Common App report (Appendix A) for 2022, 175,245 applicants applied to colleges with SAT scores >1400 or ACT scores >31. 500K+ have GPA >3.8.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"This is one reason why percentages of kids accepted and yield has gone down at T20 schools. Instead of applying to 6-8 school, students are applying to twice that. More applicants and the same number of acceptances. If the same kids get into numerous schools, then most of those schools will take a hit to their yield."

By definition, only 10% of the applicants nationally in any given year have SAT scores in the top 10th percentile. Let's say that's 50,000 kids in a given year. Before TO, nobody below that percentile was making it past the first cut for admission to Princeton or Stanford. They weren't considered "qualified" without that score and a GPA of 3.8+. Five years ago, the fact that hundreds of thousands of kids who scored in the 50th or 70th percentile on the SAT threw their applications into the Princeton pile alongside the 50,000 who were qualified didn't make admission to those schools any more difficult than it already was, FOR THOSE KIDS WHO WERE QUALIFIED. Sure, the Princeton overall acceptance number that included average students with zero chance of ever being admitted might have gone down. But Princeton could just weed out those mediocre performers and then turn their attention to choosing from among the top applicants. In that scenario, Perfect Peter with his 1580 and 3.8+ was never going to lose his spot to Mediocre Martin who only scored 1200 on the SAT even if Martin also had a 3.8+. Today, with TO, we've changed the pool of people who have a shot at admission at Princeton because people with crappy SAT scores can now try to slip in among the qualified kids. And we've blindfolded the AOs at Princeton and Stanford so that they can't use the SAT score to tell which kid has an inflated GPA and which one is the real deal. THAT, using TO, is what decreases the acceptance rates for the kids like Perfect Peter with top GPAs and top 10% SAT scores.

If we had access to the acceptance rate by GPA+ rigor and SAT scores at Princeton and Stanford, we'd likely see that the acceptance rate for QUALIFIED applicants (those in the top 10% SAT and a 3.8+) hasn't actually decreased by more than the increase in the pool of students who meet the schools' threshold stats. (There are more of these qualified kids in raw numbers now than there were five years ago due to population growth.)

I agree with your overall point about TO but your 50K number is way under in accounting for the top 10%. Because of super scoring and ACT scores the number of individual applicants in an application year is much larger. 1400 is the 95th percentile. According to the Common App report (Appendix A) for 2022, 175,245 applicants applied to colleges with SAT scores >1400 or ACT scores >31. 500K+ have GPA >3.8.

Forgot to add the link: https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ca.research.publish/Research_Briefs_2022/2022_12_09_Apps_Per_Applicant_ResearchBrief.pdf

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing the exact numbers, PP. And to be clear, I'm not arguing that all of those kids would apply to Princeton in any given year. But it's a finite number that does not include the other 90% who didn't make the cut.

And you're probably right that it should be more like the top 5% who would ever have a shot there.

[Anonymous]

Some schools also provide fee waivers fairly broadly, so it can be easy and affordable to apply to a large number of schools even if you are not wealthy.

[Anonymous]

"If we could return to kids applying to 2-3 reaches, 2-3 targets and 2-3 safeties, then there would not be 60K apps for each T20 school"

No. Just no. There are so many problems with this argument.

1. The vast, vast, vast majority of students are not applying to the schools that receive 60K apps. They are also not applying to T20 schools. Very few kids have parents who will pay the application fee to NYU if it's clear that this is money down the drain. I think it was about $85 last year when my kid was a HS senior. We have a lot of disposable income, but there's no way that I would waste that money on an application to a school that DC had zero chance of being admitted to.

2. A reach school for the valedictorian at Blair HS or Sidwell is not a reach school for a kid in the bottom quartile at a South Carolina high school. And not everybody is capable of determining what college is an appropriate reach for them. Limiting people to 2-3 reaches doesn't do jack squat to decrease applications to any particular school. Those categories are way too vague and they are different for every single kid.

3. Until you can articulate how an applicant is harmed by having to compete against 59,999 other applicants, you haven't identified a problem that needs to be solved.