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.

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.)

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

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.