FSU is an elite public university? They have a fucking clown college.
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It’s the common application mouse click thing. Kids can apply to 30 schools and take their pick of the ones they get into. Colleges have limited spots to hand out to these huge increases.
FSU is in the same graph as UVA? And not because of sports conference???
my dad bitd: "relax...remember you only need to get into one"
OTOH some of my kid's HS classmates just applied to the 3-4 schools they really wanted and didn't get into any. Gotta be realistic about your chances.
University of CA has a pretty interesting guarantee program for community college transfers, https://admission.universityofcalifo...antee-tag.html
It excludes ucb, ucla, and ucsd.
My brother had a suite mate at Columbia that was a PHD student that went this route from San Jose. He has a 4.0 in the ealry 80's and DIDN't get into Berkley as a freshman so he went 2 years at a bay area CC and finished at UC-Berzerkley finishing at the top of his class for undergrad and went to Columbia for grad school through his PHD.
They must have stupid parents and counselors that are even dumber, it's not that hard to figure out real chances if you can do third grade reading and math. ALL median scores for admission is available for schools and if you can't figure out your choices using that you probably shouldn't go to college.
I know several kids who had great scores and > 4.0 gpa who didn’t get accepted to their top schools. The essay and extra curriculars / volunteering etc are important. Our high school has so many kids taking AP and IB that 15+% of seniors have a 4.0 or higher with great test scores. They won’t all get accepted to their top school choices. But most will apply to several top schools and several second tier choices as well.
That's where the upper middle class can really separate themselves by hiring consultants and writing coaches. The essay are more important than ever. I stand by my statement the kids didn't receive proper guidance if they didn't get into any school they applied to, even if it was only 3-4.
Yes. I also know plenty of extremely smart and intelligent people that transferred from CC system. Lots of positive from that route. Berkeley is currently excluded from that guaranteed transfer. But somebody can still apply as a transfer to Berkeley. The guarantee is the main thing about that pathway that I posted.
i do wonder how the top schools are making selections when they have a pile of 4.0/valedictorians to choose from
writing samples help, but still...they're looking at hundreds (& maybe thousands at places like stanford/princeton/UCberkely?) of highly qualified applicants
we got any uni profs here to shed light on this?
Obviously it would have been smart to apply to a safety school in case of not getting into your top choice, but median scores can be really misleading once you start to get into the real upper echelon of admissions difficulty. As people have mentioned, at elite schools, there are plenty of students who are qualified, so the median scores for the rejected students probably doesn't look that much different than the ones for the admitted ones. The admitted students will include sports/activities admits, legacies, students whose parents the school hopes will make a donation, and members of groups that are underrepresented on campus. The scores of those students will be all over the place, but on average, they'll be lower than students from the general pool. If 25% of the student body ends up in that category, then the median of general admission portion is going to be notably higher than what is reported. So if the students don't fall into any of those categories, admission will be tougher than it appears for them.
Again, if you mean that someone should have told them to apply to a safety that they are slam dunk going to get into, sure. But judging chances of admission is tougher than people think, especially as admission rates trend lower due to the flood of applicants. It becomes a bit of a crapshoot. Those 3 or 4 schools might have been the proper level to aim for, they just should have either done more apps or applied down a tier or two.
My daughter is neck deep in the applications process as we speak. Narrowing down the list of where she really feels she has a good chance, what’s in the affordable range and after today it’s essay time.
She’s the AP/IB kid with a 4.0, after school activities and volunteering. Decent test scores. No sports.
I’m so proud of my daughter. :)
I always chuckle at the fact that I went to the lowest ranked public school, U of MT. I filled out application the day it was due and dropped it off in person. Did buckle down and get more on the ball after "getting in." Turned out fine :-)
I can a bit. First, I think it' only is an issue at the absolute top tier. At the "highly selective" liberal arts college I taught at, there was a clear spectrum of applicants (and admitted students) with less than the desired number taking up the "perfectly qualified group".
I did my PhD at Yale, but was only on a graduate admissions committee. I now do alumni interviews for Georgetown, which is less selective, but still at 12%, which is tough. So I have some sense of things:
So how do you get into Stanford/Princeton/MIT? Good question. Let's ignore athletics/band/legacy admissions. It's all about standing out, especially in local environments that are grouped.
1. Come from an elite feeder. Every year elite colleges are admitting students from a similar set of elite high schools. If you're near the top here, you're doing well.
2. Have been really excellent at something. The traditional things are having done incredible research for a high school student, winning a national competition, being an Olympian, etc., but I remember one kid in a class I taught at Yale had several commercially released whistling albums. A lot of students I met there had things that weren't necessarily related to what they were doing, but proved they could be really, really successful at something.
3. Be from a group that the school wants to bolster. Race gets all the attention (legal and otherwise), but schools want a diverse student body in lots of ways. If you're from a state/region/country where there are few applicants, you may end up competing only against those folks to get in.
4. Sell yourself well specifically to that school. All schools have their own vision of themselves, and if your essay/resume items lines up with that vision, you're more likely to get in than an equally great candidate who is a less good "fit".
5. Relatedly, you need to catch the eye/imagination of the admissions officer. This is largely luck, as you never know what's going to catch their eye in terms of essays, etc., but the better job you do the higher chance I guess. At some point, after all the above categories are filled, the admissions officers are going to choose the apps they found most compelling, but that's hard to plan for.
thx for that, MB
Ha. That was the only school I applied to. Never visited, not sure I ever even bothered to find Missoula on a map. Parents told me to apply to the U of Minnesota (home state) just in case. Ignored their advice. Come September I got in some stranger's truck with all my stuff and waved goodbye. Worked out well for me too. :)
Ignoring legacy/athletics/band is ignoring what 1/4 or 1/3 or 1/2 for some schools?
Probably a 1/4 at the schools we're talking about here, though we'd have to disentangle legacies that play sports. In the Ivy League, teams are given certain numbers of students they can request to be admitted in different tiers of academic qualification. So they can't just request the players they want regardless of status. You only get a very limited number of requests for players who very clearly wouldn't get in otherwise, whereas you get many more for students who statistically match the admitted students profile, but might not otherwise standout enough to make the cut. The cut points between tiers are slightly different at the different schools. They are highest at Yale/Harvard/Princeton and lowest at (I believe) Cornell. The idea is to make it a bit harder for the 3 most famous schools to cherry pick all the best players in each tier.
But I said "Let's ignore legacies/sports" because it's clear what the processes are there and ::: ::: was asking how schools differentiate all the extremely qualified academic applicants.
Thing #1 applied to only two schools. He only applied to the 2nd because I said he had to. He got into his first choice no questions asked. I tried to get him to apply to UVM as a third and safety school, but he dragged his feet and didn't get the application done in time.
Thing #2 applied to six or seven. He didn't want to spend the money on his first academic choice, it would have been a stretch and he wants to keep his debt low. So he went to UVM which was the cheapest of all the schools that were an academic fit. Fortunately for him he's instate and in commuting distance. Unfortunately for me he's in commuting distance. After two years on campus he's living at home. Why he borrowed money to live on campus during COVID is beyond me. He should have commuted to class the first two and gotten an apartment this year. Oh we'll. Smart kids do dumb things.
Thing #3, well, he's a senior in HS and can't really decide where to apply. The schools he wants to go to he just doesn't have the SAT scores for, however he has decent grades, but not 4.0/4.0. He did sports all four years, but no clubs or engineering related extras. He's the opposite of thing #2 in that regard. Because thing #2 hit the first four years of the proficiency based grading trainwreck, his grades weren't good on paper. However, he had years of engineering activities and clubs, plus high standardized testing scores. Clarkson and RIT we're above UVM in his list that he wanted to attend, but didn't want to pay for. Thing #3 could probably get into Clarkson because our HS has a relationship with it, many alumni as teachers. But he won't consider it because of size and location. He went to the WPI open house on Monday. His SAT score and lack of engineering clubs is going to hurt him there. And he said all the female students he saw were nerds, not good looking enough. He doesn't realize how that actually could help him.
#2 won a scholarship to U of A in HS so that pretty much dictated Uni choice, they gave him more $$$$$ later on, with a coop program he did a 5 yr program and came out with zero debt, every coop sponsor offered him a job and he is still working for his last coop sponsor
# 1 who is probably smarter than #2 went to trade school for a high end trade instead of Uni, last i heard they make the same money
It was Alberta, them were the high flyin days and a barrel of crude oil was worth $$$ so when ever he did the coop gig he made 50K a year
U of A would give out 50 of the 25K scholarships back in the day, at some point they said they can't give #2 any more $$$$ cuz it looked bad, then they gave him more money, another 15 K for a total of 40K ,
in any case the uni education cost me zero
Coop was with Petrocan, Syncrude and a big oil field equipment co
I wanted to come back to this post & say THANK YOU
This school was not on our radar at all until your post.
And given I was asking in Sept of his junior year, it still kinda sat there as a dark horse for a long time.
He kinda looped back to it over the summer as he started to consider engineering more than pure math/science.
We took the kid to visit Golden in Sept for a open house day, and he was stoked about it & it became his first choice barring financial issues.
Well, he applied & we just heard last week that he was accepted with some scholarship enticement! We really weren't even expecting anything until mid December re: decisions. He is stoked (& we are proud & happy that he is stoked about it!)!
& thanks again to all for their comments, we talked about all of them
TGR maggot networking FTW!
That is awesome!!!!! Congrats!!!
I suspect many jewzers in his future.
Kick ass!
If you're in town visiting and are up for maggot beers or turns (or both), give a holler.
Congrats!
congrats 6 colons
Congrats, it feels great when your child gets accepted to each university, let alone assistance.
In a similar boat here. First college my daughter just got into a week ago came with assistance. Proud father moment :)
Thx, all
& good job buzz jr!
TGR FTW.
Congrats!
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Accepted into the Honors program as well. She’s very excited for the new chapter and it’s sure looking like it’s going to happen here. We’ve left it her choice completely and her desire to go instate tuition with very minimal debt is commendable. Med school has been her goal for quite a long time. The grandparents have a bit of a fund for their only grandchild and we are forever grateful to my parents. Taylor wants to save it all for med school and we are working to facilitate that goal.
Proud dad moment. I’m sorry, this dad has to gloat. I remember posting here when my wife started contractions. It’s somewhere in here. What a fuckin trip.
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