football message boards and college admissions

August 23, 2023 11:16 AM

I have kind of a dumb question about college admissions that I can't get out of my mind.

I went to a Big Ten school with a prominent football program. Like many alums, I follow the football team, and I read some message boards dedicated to my alma mater's football team. For a long time, this school had a reputation for, um, not-very-selective admissions. This has been changing for a while; I started in 1998 and even by then they were hyping up the qualifications of incoming freshmen. This seems to be the general direction of other Big Ten schools, and of flagship state schools in general, to the point where my school now has an admission rate of 57%. That's still not very selective, but it's apparently too selective for the children of many of the posters on these message boards. With this being back-to-school season, a lot of them are sharing stories about how their children were rejected despite seemingly outstanding qualifications. Everyone else sympathetically responds how, yeah, it's basically impossible to be admitted anymore.

I... doubt some of these stories. Every kid mentioned seems to have a GPA north of 4.25. Maybe that's true, but I do find it curious that none of these posters ever mentions test scores or extracurriculars or letters of recommendation or really anything about why the student wants to attend this school besides the fact that their dad watches their football team. To me, mentioning a high GPA without test scores, etc. sets off a flag that their grades are probably inflated. Some combination of test scores not being consistent with the GPA, no real personal relationship with teachers or extracurricular leaders, or a lot of other kids in the school with similarly-inflated grades pushing the kid in question into the bottom half of the class. That's my general understanding of the college admissions process, at least, although it's a couple decades out of date. But I know several of you work in admissions, so is my understanding still correct? Does this sound weird to people who actually know what they're talking about?

For reference, the 25-75 percentile range for test scores at this school is 28-33 ACT, 1340-1480 SAT. Average GPA around 3.8. 98% of admitted students were in the top 25% of their HS class, 72% top 10%. These do seem a little higher than when I applied (although well south of Harvard, where 33/1480 are the 25th percentile, not the 75th), but not so high that I would've been immediately rejected when I applied in 1998. I wasn't exactly valedictorian material, although, in addition to my good but not great GPA and test scores, I took mostly AP classes and did a ton of extracurriculars (including leadership positions).

So my question is, am I crazy to think the kids these message board posters are talking about maybe aren't as above-average as they seem to think? Or is my view distorted because I'm above average myself?

(No, I don't know why I care about this.)

posted by kevinbelt to Education (25 answers total)

am I crazy to think the kids these message board posters are talking about maybe aren't as above-average as they seem to think
You're right on the money. The world is a lot bigger than the suburb they're simply passing classes in.

Every kid mentioned seems to have a GPA north of 4.25.

So there was a whole thing about this in my area earlier this year during the supreme court case, and people were throwing out numbers like this. One of the anecdotes shared on local media specifically mentioned a high school that I'm familiar with due to family - the rejected student had, as you say, like a 4.3 GPA, but due to college and AP class bonuses at that high school, the valedictorian last year had something like a 5.2 GPA! So the 4.3 sounds great against a 4.0 scale but in all actuality at that school was really just a strong average. Makes for a great soundbite but when colleges are trying to get top students from a high school it all starts to come together.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 11:39 AM on August 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

There was an article in our local newspaper The Toronto Star about 2 high school graduates who had a 100% average and their plans for university. One of the students didn't get into their 1st choice program which on the face of it sounds ridiculous. They had lots of extra-curriculars and work to show interest in the field too. My guess is that the accepted applicants all had very similar profiles with respect to grades and extra-curriculars so having a slightly better average than someone else doesn't really mean anything. I'd also say that high school grade inflation is very real over here and that may be a factor why kids with really high marks still aren't getting into the programs they applied to.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:59 AM on August 23, 2023

A good GPA is something to point at. But I will go to my grave believing I was accepted to my B1G school solely for my ACT score. I was a pathetic student in high school with middling grades. I sucked at math and science. I dropped out of the Spanish program. But, I was a beast at standardized testing and was complimented on my score during orientation.
posted by Stuka at 12:13 PM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

So my question is, am I crazy to think the kids these message board posters are talking about maybe aren't as above-average as they seem to think?

My experience is that people who have the time to go on the internet and talk about how great they are at literally any athletic endeavor and conclude that any process that doesn't recognize that greatness must be at fault, they generally don't have a well-calibrated sense of themselves or their real abilities.
posted by mhoye at 12:22 PM on August 23, 2023

These are parents talking about their kids? At least some of those numbers are going to be inflated, whether from Trump-style 'hyperbole makes the story better so I automatically inflate everything' instincts and whether from just not knowing or remembering the exact number.
posted by trig at 12:25 PM on August 23, 2023

It was explained to me that colleges have some formula to normalize gpas across schools and across the country. It was also explained to me that grades are not the sole deciding factor. For instance, if the band needs a tuba player, an applicant that has tuba band experience with a similar or slightly lower applicant than the student who took photography, the tuba player will get in. Also, in an effort to diversify an incoming class, ethnicity may play a deciding factor all else being equal.

I would add too that if you can get an interview and are a personable person, that can have a big influence on the admissions decision. When I applied to business schools, I had an undergraduate gpa of around 2.5 (that includes a 3.9 my last year), but I had a 780 (out of 800) on my GMATs and I got an interview with the Dean of Admissions. He flat out told me to get an interview anywhere I wanted to go and I would greatly increase my chances. I got into 3 top 5 schools, (Kellogg, Chicago, Darden).

As far as the football team goes, the coach or the team probably has a certain number of "free passes" to hand out to players that may be below average academically, but who the coach and the university think can handle the work load with support. I don't know for a fact about BIG 10 football, but I do know for a fact about a few D-1 basketball and lacrosse programs. I was called by an assistant coach about a student for whom I wrote a letter of recommendation based on his character, work ethic, and desire to attend, telling me that they were going to use one of their small handful of exemptions on this kid and asking if I would go out on a limb for him or was the letter just a typical puff letter of recommendation. He explained that they cannot afford to get it wrong with the few exemptions they have.

On a more personal note, one of my sons was a terrific athlete and a darn good student. He went to a national lacrosse showcase tournament and I was thinking he would start to get college coaches calling. He was fast, great stickwork and willing to hit or be hit. When we got to the tournament, it turns out that 5'9" white kids who can run a 4.4 40 and play lacrosse are a dime a dozen in this country. There are a lot of whatever it is your child excels in all over this land. They are unique like everyone else. What did help my son with his admissions was his plan to go ROTC.

It also matters if you are in-state or not at most state schools.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 12:27 PM on August 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

Schools that actually reject students are waaay harder to get in when we were in school. I don’t doubt these stories.
posted by sandmanwv at 12:29 PM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Everyone else sympathetically responds how, yeah, it's basically impossible to be admitted anymore.

Bingo. Tell story about kid not getting admitted despite qualifications -> sympathy.

This is a message board with parents who have a vested interest in their kids attending a specific school. For all you know, at least some of the kids didn't want to go there and purposefully half-assed the essay. Or some of these parents hired the same application coaches and their kids on paper all looked the same (same 'optimal' extracurriculars, same high school course loads, same interests) and the admissions office passed on them for being so bland.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:40 PM on August 23, 2023

Schools that actually reject students are waaay harder to get in when we were in school. I don’t doubt these stories.

Applications have dramatically increased in the last couple decades, so even as numbers of students increase, the admission rate has shrunk quite a bit. So on the one hand the stories are true but on the other hand I usually see them combined with complaints about DEI. Probably that's not the whole story, it's more that as JohnnyGunn said "5'9" white kids who can run a 4.4 40 and play lacrosse are a dime a dozen in this country".


See the "Applications, admission and enrollment at 56 schools with admit rate averaging below 22% in Fall 2019–Fall 2022" table from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_admissions_in_the_United_States#Rankings
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 12:41 PM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

There are tons of reasons that this may happen...

- Some kids have inflated GPAs because of the way the school grades or maybe because of class rigor. Colleges look at the individual school reputation as well as the types of classes the kid has taken.

- Some colleges have high admit rates overall, but very low rates for specific majors.

-Some high stat kids get turned down for yield protection. Basically that means a college will turn down over achieving kids because they think they will most likely take offers from higher rated schools. A lot of "high achievers" who get rejected by a school love this reason.

-Ability to pay does play into admissions at most colleges. Some colleges are need-blind, but at most places, a full pay applicant may have a slight advantage all things being equal.

-GPA is only one factor. Standardized tests still matter in many places.

-Location may be another factor. I live in VA and there's always folks in Northern VA complaining that they didn't get into a school because too many kids from their school were accepted.

I'm sure there's lots of other reasons, but the ones above are very, very common.
posted by jraz at 12:42 PM on August 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

57% may seem like a high admission rate, but Ohio State is considered "highly selective" on that basis. Something like 25,000 applicants were rejected. That's a lot!

When it comes to admissions and grades/scores, where the student went to school can make a difference as to how these numbers are interpreted, and I think admissions offices pay attention to that. There are plenty of not-so-challenging school systems in which most every college-bound student has a GPA in the neighborhood of 4.0 or higher. On the other side of that coin, my high school GPA was barely 3.0 and I was accepted to schools that rejected plenty of 4.0 applicants. But I was fortunate enough to grow up in a place with a top-rated public school system that accounts for more than 50% of the city budget. All of which is to say that, insofar as admissions were concerned, my 3.0 was higher than a lot of 4.0s on a kind of adjusted scale.
posted by slkinsey at 12:42 PM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I could totally imagine that these truly above-average kids are nonetheless falling short in admissions. It's a crapshoot. My daughter is an incoming freshman and my son is a HS senior. Stories from their classmates - kids I know who are really smart and well-rounded from an excellent school district - are all over the board. One young man got a full merit ride to his selective top-25 private college and got deferred at Wisconsin-Madison. A woman got flat out rejected at Colorado-Boulder, then "appealed" (I didn't know you could even do that) and within a week she was not just in but offered a spot in the honors college. (She didn't go there.) One kid who is a legacy gets deferred at Michigan State while a comparable kid with no connection gets in.

There's just a glut of smart, well-rounded suburban kids that look a lot alike. And with the Common App, it's easier than ever to apply to 5 or 10 or even 15 schools so for the universities there is some strategy to admitting kids that you think might reasonably matriculate. Places like Wisconsin see 60,000 applicants for an enrolled class of less than 9,000. The University of Chicago, which has a higher bar to apply in the form of some unique essays and which should be a draw only for the smartest of applicants, sees 37,000 applicants (!!!) for 1800 spots. So even a supergenius with perfect credentials has a vanishingly small chance of being in that number, because most of the applicants are supergeniuses with perfect credentials.
posted by AgentRocket at 12:43 PM on August 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have a friend from my B1G days who is a distinguished alumnus of our school, with his picture on the wall, etc. His 4.0 Eagle Scout son with a recommendation from a Dean at that school didn't get admitted. It's tough out there for the flagship schools.

My daughter was accepted at two B1G schools, but opted to go to an MVC school because the scholarship offer was so much better.
posted by COD at 12:44 PM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ability to pay does play into admissions at most colleges.

You know, this is something people say a lot, and it sounds truthy enough, but I'm not sure how true it really is. I spent my entire upbringing around academics, plenty of whom spent time connected with the admissions process, and they all said that admissions didn't consider ability to pay out of the applicant's own pockets. Really, when you think about it, why would it make a difference? The schools have a certain amount of scholarship money they're going to give out every year no matter what, and there are always student loans, grants and external scholarships. The people who still can't pay tuition even with those things... well, they're not going to attend anyway, irrespective of whether or not they're admitted.
posted by slkinsey at 12:54 PM on August 23, 2023

the rejected student had, as you say, like a 4.3 GPA, but due to college and AP class bonuses at that high school, the valedictorian last year had something like a 5.2 GPA

Back 20 years ago when I was applying to college my school included a factsheet with both average and highest test scores and GPA (as well as the classes available for all students to take) so that admissions could evaluate the student in context of any grade inflation (or generally low performing school), etc. My school wasn't spectacular so I assume this must have been common practice.
posted by phunniemee at 1:05 PM on August 23, 2023

Ability to pay does play into admissions at most colleges

.edu staff (though not FA dep't) here, and I don't think this is true for American kids, given the number of schools that proudly trumpet "need-blind admissions."

On the other hand, it's widely believed that international students typically pay full fare, and so schools like to admit them when possible to save having to dip into scholarship funds.

(Not rigorously fact-checked, just received knowledge after getting three kids into college. I have asked our admissions staff before if they would do a lunchtime talk to my department about how to get our kids into any school, and they declined. *shrug* No one wants to reveal their secrets, I guess.)
posted by wenestvedt at 1:46 PM on August 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ability to pay does play into admissions at most colleges.

I'm not sure how true it really is

Because of the way state subsidies work, international and out-of-state students paying full-freight bring more cash into the school than local students.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:50 PM on August 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sure, in-state tuition versus out-of-state tuition can be a meaningful difference in income for a state school. However, that doesn't touch on the question of "ability to pay out of their own pockets." It seems to me that a state school would receive the same income from out-of-state students who are financing their tuitions with student loans, grants and/or scholarships as they would from out-of-state students who pay "out of their own pockets." Moreover, it's my understanding that state schools (perhaps by mandate) give some admissions preference to in-state students. It's possible that the admissions staff at a school might give preference to non-scholarship students so they don't have to give out as much scholarship money, but I'm not convinced that's the case. It's more one of those "people say" things.

I wonder how many schools effectively separate the admissions staff from the financial aid staff.
posted by slkinsey at 2:11 PM on August 23, 2023

why would it make a difference? The schools have a certain amount of scholarship money they're going to give out every year no matter what, and there are always student loans, grants and external scholarships. The people who still can't pay tuition even with those things... well, they're not going to attend anyway, irrespective of whether or not they're admitted.

The way I heard it explained when my school was considering ending its need-blind admissions process (and I should note that the existence of need-blind admissions as a special category implies that NON-need-blind admissions are the norm!): 1. College rankings and general prestige considerations include not just the school's acceptance rate but the number of accepted students who attend, and if you have a bunch of kids getting accepted who can't afford it, that lowers your matriculation rate. 2. Colleges want students they know can afford to not just start but finish. Financial need is the biggest reason students drop out or transfer.

Further, I remember there was a big brouhaha when my alma mater put out (or had leaked) a memo about their admissions priorities, and one of them was to attract more students from wealthy families. The reasoning was to have alumni who would be more likely to donate in the future and to be able to give more aid to kids who needed it.
posted by lunasol at 2:14 PM on August 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

As mentioned, the program or school a kid applies to also plays a significant role. I applied to college twenty years ago (so... not recently, but more recently than much of MeFi). I was the first of the smart kids at my school to get in to the Big 10 state university, weeks before anyone else. Why? I applied to liberal arts (with no specified major, at that), they all applied to engineering. We were otherwise basically interchangeable on paper. Almost all those kids would eventually get in for engineering, but it was much more of a toss up for the "good, but not remarkable student" demographic.
posted by hoyland at 2:16 PM on August 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ability to pay does play into admissions at most colleges.

I don't think it does, because if you look at the actual stats of who gets admitted to college across the US (especially flagship universities) the populace is already middle class to upper middle class. That's who get the highest grades. So it's kind of self-selecting.

The large university I went to publishes requirements for entry re: class rank & SAT/ACT score:
1st quarter class rank: ACT 24/1180. 3rd quarter is 27/1280. So if you consider that a 1280 is among interested test-takers (generally) and the SAT itself publishes that for 2022, a 1200 is better than 70-80%, so a 1280 is less percent than that. So for top 1/4 class ranking, you have to have a SAT/ACT score better than about 65% of people who took the test.


Easy to see that lots of people are going to be rejected.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:05 PM on August 23, 2023

So the point is, you have to either have a very high class rank or a very good SAT/ACT score, or you are going to be rejected.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:10 PM on August 23, 2023

Ability to pay also self-selects out students at poor/low quality schools, so unless you already have a high income that you can transfer, going to a 'poor school' so you can be top 10% is a bad strategy. The majority of those kids, even the top ones, don't go to flagship universities. They go to community college or the local small university at best.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:13 PM on August 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Re: ability to pay - non-need-blind admissions are the norm at US universities, ability to pay is absolutely a factor in admissions at the majority of institutions. There are only somewhere in the realm of 100 colleges/universities in the US that are need-blind, and that list is shrinking, as many schools are limiting previous need-blind policies due to budgetary issues. Source.
posted by augustimagination at 9:52 PM on August 23, 2023

"need blind" has always been a lie. Only like 5% of students at Ivy Leagues come from family incomes below $50k, and only like 20% from family incomes below $100k. So heck yeah, if they find some unicorn whose family is poor, yet still excels at school and on standardized testing, heck yeah they are going to take that person, maybe several universities will fight over them.

Also, research is out the SATs/standardized testing are the 'least bad' forms of selection, ie: class rank, extracurricular, and volunteering, etc are even more income-based than standardized testing scores. It's really easy to identify rich kids who can pay just by looking at their admittance forms.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:55 AM on August 24, 2023