Is the strength of your high school class factored into the "holistic" admission process? I know a number of kids from private schools this year that have the test scores for automatic admission if they were top 25% and if they were in a public school they would very likely have been top 25%, but they are still waiting for an admission decision which in all likelihood will be less that regular admission. In small schools there aren't a lot of slots in the top 25% and just a few extra
couple of extra superstars can quickly fill up those slots. I'm definitely getting the feeling that private school unless you are at the very top is a hindrance to A&M admissions even if you are getting a better education in many cases.

Howdy All,

My Name is Luis Rodriguez, and I am also an admissions counselor here at the Prospective Student Center. I am filling in for Jayson here on Texags while he is out on leave. Here are some replies to the questions some of you have posted recently.

Chris_aggie: Yes, if you have been admitted into the Blinn Team then you must also apply to Blinn College. The Brenham campus is the only option on ApplyTexas so that is what you need to select.

CoppellAGGIE: there is no appeals process for admissions decisions, all are final.

Rock_Aggie: The high school that an applicant has attended will not make a diffence on the application. All high schools are looked at equally and therefore what we are most concerned with is the class ranking which is an indicator of how the student fared amongst their peers in that particular school. If you have questions about this please feel free to contact our office and ask to speak with an admissions counselor.

If anyone has additional questions for us please feel free to contact our office at 979-458-0950.



Jayson Naiser '05
Admissions Counseling Advisor
Aggieland Prospective Student Center
jnaiser at tamu dot edu

Tel. 979.458.0950

http://texags.com/main/forum.reply.asp?topic_id=1540122&forum_id=17

My daughter and a number of her friends got an email 2 1/2 weeks ago saying that her admissions decision would be either admit,summer start, BlinnTeam, or A&M system (I think that was all the options listed) and would come within the next 2 weeks. Her friends seem to have all gotten their notifications, but hers is still not out. Are these just running a few days later than planned? There are a few deadlines coming up April 1 so we are trying to figure out options. It's really frustrating when you get letters that appear to invite her to the honors program, but she can't even get an admit/no admit decision before late March or after. I saw someone earlier said that AIS seems to get updated on Wednesday mornings each week. Is she just waiting for the next batch to be uploaded on Wednesday?

quote:

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Rock_Aggie: The high school that an applicant has attended will not make a diffence on the application. All high schools are looked at equally and therefore what we are most concerned with is the class ranking which is an indicator of how the student fared amongst their peers in that particular school. If you have questions about this please feel free to contact our office and ask to speak with an admissions counselor.

---

Interesting, because I had one particular person associated with the admissions process as a patient and (s)he stated, without a doubt, that there were several high schools in Texas that are considered as "fast track" schools (I believe that was the term used). Basically, these schools are so academically good that the students that apply from these schools are given the benefit of the doubt and are considered more college ready than students at other schools.

Also, I asked earlier about a problem with the Dwight School of Engineering having a problem with admission decisions this year. I never received a definitive response from Jayson, but I did from a very reputable source. Basically, the admissions process this year was automated to a certain extent. There was a glitch in the system, so any applicant that applied that met the basic admissions criteria for the University - not necessarily the College of Engineering - was "admitted" to the engineering major of choice. The mistake was identified and, rather than contact those students and tell them a mistake was made, the administration felt they would just expand the class this year a little, expecting a higher number of students to drop out/ change majors than usual. Just a little FYI.

Fight!

I don't understand how / why a college with our recourses can not deliver a decision to a student in less than 6 1/2 months! At $60 a piece and almost $1.9 M in app fees you would think we could hire a few temporary employees to help out the process and get our prospective students an answer in a more timely manner.

What is going with our admissions office?
E-mail received on March 1indicating students would receive answers by mid March. Later phone call yesterday stating all done by 3:00 pm today and still nothing in daughter's on-line page.

We should be better than this!

Is anyone in admissions willing to verify that review admissions received after some day earlier than the application deadline almost all became PSA or reject with very few exceptions. I think publishing that fact will help next years applicants have a sense of urgency. For the last couple of weeks on the websites I monitored I don't remember seeing anybody post that they got full admissions and only a couple got Blinn Team. The last batch today appears to have been almost all PSA. I think the rejects had already been notified.

Warning Long

First of I just want to say that this is Jayson, I am back in the office.

Harrierdoc,
I can assure you, regardless of what the person told you, that we do not take into account the school. While some schools may be academically rigorous and prepare students for college, we do not look at the fact that they attended that school in our admissions process.

In our process we look at what the student has control over. It would not be fair to look at the school, as not all students can choose where they go to school.

Admissions timeline
As for the timing, we worked to get the decisions out as fast as we can. Each year we try to get faster in the process, but we end up received more and more applications and in turn pool becomes more and more competitive. This ends up slowing us down to the point of where we end up on the same timeframe as the year before.

We realize and understand that the process is stressful to the students and their parents, but we received over 30,000 applications and we go over them very thoroughly to make our decisions. I do know that we have now finished this year and all students should have received their decisions this weekend.

To give you all an idea of how the process works let me briefly explain how we handle the application process here.

The reason it takes so long for us is we wait until all the applications are completely reviewed before we make the majority of our admissions decisions.

First we have to process all the information we receive by the deadline, January 15th into the systems. This includes applications, essays, letters of rec., transcripts, additions to the activities sections, etc. Once we process all the received information into the system we have to then look at all this information in our review process to put our application pool together. Once we have the pool finalized we make our decisions.

*I will say that no matter how long it takes us to make our decisions it is always best to apply early.

Rock,
We don't have a date or a way of knowing what types of decisions we will be sending out when we make our decisions. Our office really scrutinizes over the decisions and a full admissions can be offered at any point in the process. While many of people may have been offered options later in the process that doesn’t mean that that is the only types of offers we are offering or will offer at that same time in the future.


Jayson Naiser '05
Admissions Counseling Advisor
Aggieland Prospective Student Center
jnaiser at tamu dot edu

Tel. 979.458.0950

http://texags.com/main/forum.reply.asp?topic_id=1540122&forum_id=17

Are there any summary stats on review admissions part of the public record? I'm curious on the size of pool and number in each category. Of the 8 or so kids I am familiar with that were in the review pool (both private and public schools), none got full admission so I am curious what factors statistically had impact. I know it is a review so there are some factors that are not strictly quantifiable like essays. It's just I have heard a lot of debate on whether schools particularly smaller ones should publish class ranks below the top 10%. How would that impact admission decisions? I think even a few large public districts have started only reporting the state mandated top 10% and letting everyone else stand on their GPA and other factors. Are you better off only sending in your best test scores or are all the rest truly dropped from the admissions information?

Are you really saying that top 25 percenter that comes from a very competitive, private high school is not bumped over a top 25 percenter from an average, public high school?

Rock,
The numbers for this year are not out yet as we just finished. But if you go to http://admissions.tamu.edu/counselors/profile.aspx you can view last years profile and http://www.tamu.edu/customers/oisp/ contains all the public numbers for the university.


Jayson Naiser '05
Admissions Counseling Advisor
Aggieland Prospective Student Center
jnaiser at tamu dot edu

Tel. 979.458.0950

http://texags.com/main/forum.reply.asp?topic_id=1540122&forum_id=17

jb - I believe that might be the case. My daughter is top 25% from private school with 95% average and very positive letters of recommendation and was rejected (offered system). Son made it in last year with lower grades, not top 25% and the same letters of recommendation.

Lower SAT score however probably killed her.

She is going to Galveston.

jblaschke,
In our review process, yes, the students would both be top 25% and the same in that factor.

texag84 - Galveston is a GREAT choice - it is simply an extension of CS. Students get A&M sports passes and great football seats. And all it takes is a 2.5 on 30 hours to transfer to CS. But she may fall in love with the island!

Thank you. I'll have her call you.

[This message has been edited by ag97dds (edited 4/3/2012 2:46p).]

The deadline for the fall has passed (March 15th). I would recommend having her call us and we can visit with her to see what the best route will be for her.

Jayson Naiser '05
Admissions Counseling Advisor
Aggieland Prospective Student Center
jnaiser at tamu dot edu

Tel. 979.458.0950

http://texags.com/main/forum.reply.asp?topic_id=1540122&forum_id=17

Jayson,
Thanks for the links to the statistics. I found a few facts/extrapolations that might be of interest to future applicants.

1) It looks like for last year's admissions (2011) after you remove the automatic admissions you received 18336 applications and admitted 5111, so 27.9% of the non-automatic applicants were admitted.

2) I would assume there were 1000-1500 Blinn Team or gateway offers just based on enrollment numbers I have seen. If those were included in the 5111 review admits then the rate of full admission in the review process is heading down toward 20%.

3) Of the review admits ~3462 were apparently ranked in the top 25% and 1484 were between top 25% and top 50%.

The moral is find a way to be automatic admit or the odds of full admission are not in your favor. Based on experience, if your not in top 25% your test scores need to be well above the bar that would get automatic admission if you were top 25% so keep trying to raise it or you will fall into the PSA stack or reject stack.