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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.