What you're missing is that university admissions are not based on a meritocacy in this country.

Diversity is everything here. Which means that someone who checks a box on a form that you child doesn't check will overtake someone like your child who has way better scores.

Anonymous wrote:You said the likes of Duke, Vandy, and Rice, but Emory and USC aren't apart of that. A 33 is avg for Emory nothing special.
Now I can see wake being a Match

I forgot the ? after the first sentence.

You said the likes of Duke, Vandy, and Rice, but Emory and USC aren't apart of that. A 33 is avg for Emory nothing special.
Now I can see wake being a Match

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:These privates don’t limit application numbers? DC private school kids are not applying to 20-25 schools. No way.

NP. Private out west. No limits here. My kid did 15, no idea what his friends did.

My kid is at a big 3 DC private. Counselor strongly recommended 8 schools max, but DC applied to 12. DC now has a ton of deferrals and is really wishing they applied to 15. If so many kids applied to 20 schools, hopefully there will be a lot of WL movement in May.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:These privates don’t limit application numbers? DC private school kids are not applying to 20-25 schools. No way.

NP. Private out west. No limits here. My kid did 15, no idea what his friends did.

15 is somewhat manageable, but 25-30 is ludicrous.

You are also forgetting about geographic diversity.

Anonymous wrote:These privates don’t limit application numbers? DC private school kids are not applying to 20-25 schools. No way.

NP. Private out west. No limits here. My kid did 15, no idea what his friends did.

Anonymous wrote:OP it's because of the number of applications to each school.

At my local public HS most students do 25 applications. At our local very expensive private same.

Parents all over the country are pushing more and more applications out the doors of their homes. That skews the numbers.

Raleigh NC average number of college apps per household from a prestigious private 20.

My lovely neighbor had her daughters do thirty.

These privates don’t limit application numbers? DC private school kids are not applying to 20-25 schools. No way.

OP it's because of the number of applications to each school.

At my local public HS most students do 25 applications. At our local very expensive private same.

Parents all over the country are pushing more and more applications out the doors of their homes. That skews the numbers.

Raleigh NC average number of college apps per household from a prestigious private 20.

My lovely neighbor had her daughters do thirty.

Anonymous wrote:You are doing the math wrong because you don't seem to understand how admissions works. They don't rank kids by ACT/SAT and pick off the top. They don't, and they never did. Kids with much lower stats than your kid will get into those 90,000 spots you mistakenly expect belong to the top test takers.

The most important thing to realize is that your child should be focused on what they want to study and which of the thousands of school out there have great undergraduate departments in that area.

Glad someone is noting that flaw in the reliance on standardized test scores. Instead of focusing on checking the boxes to clear the "bar" for ivies or top 50, the kids' and parents' time will be well spent on finding a passion in and out of the classrooms. There is a right school out there for every student and the success is measured in what the student can get out of opportunities available to him/her. "Doing the math" from only the applicants' perspective is ill informed and fruitless because ultimately the offer decision is out of your hand.

A friend who has a master from a lesser known local private university has said over and over again that as a VP, he has hired and fired plenty of the ivy graduates.

A 33 ACT isn't all that relevant when large numbers of applicants are getting into great schools with no scores are all.

You are doing the math wrong because you don't seem to understand how admissions works. They don't rank kids by ACT/SAT and pick off the top. They don't, and they never did. Kids with much lower stats than your kid will get into those 90,000 spots you mistakenly expect belong to the top test takers.

The most important thing to realize is that your child should be focused on what they want to study and which of the thousands of school out there have great undergraduate departments in that area.

“Tip Top” State Colleges take more of their state students.
They limit out of state students.

Pp here. Sorry should say “strong public”.

Top 3 private you will see about a 2-4x increase in fraction admitted to each tranche of universities.

Here is a quick exercise to cut through the noise.

Look at Naviance, matriculants only, to every school you would consider and be happy with.

For our school, that’s 9 years of data. Since they use Naviance to send final transcripts you can assume the data is good. (Admit defer deny data is self reported so assume there are non randomly distributed errors there.)

For USNWR top 25 plus top 5 SLACs you’ll find about 10% of a strong private HS. Percentage is stable for the pst 9 years which is the available data.

So ideally you want to be in the top 5% of your HS. That data isn’t reported anymore in most places, but you can probably estimate it from the naviance data you can see.