Recently a blog post from Ivy Coach came to my attention. The headline: “Is College Confidential An Accurate Source?” As predicted by Betteridge’s law of headlines the article’s answer is “no”. In fact, it jumps to that conclusion in the first subhead: “No, College Confidential Is Not an Accurate Source for College Admissions”. As a former Head of Community and consultant for College Confidential, I was curious how they came to that conclusion. To take a page from their post:
Ivy Coach presents no evidence that College Confidential is inaccurate
For those of us who were around for the great debates over Wikipedia, this is a familiar problem. It’s not hard to make a case why in theory crowd-sourced information would be wrong. But if an article critical of Wikipedia pointed out an example of a mistake, the Wikipedia page would be edited within moments of publication and the majority of readers would see the corrected information. In effect, the very act of pointing out flaws allowed Wikipedians to highlight the strength of the wiki format. So the only critiques that survive lack specific examples.
I don’t know if the Ivy Coach blog author was aware of this problem or was just too lazy to actually hunt for examples of inaccurate information. What I can say for certain is that the post only includes one link to College Confidential[1] when it introduces the site in the opening paragraph. With the exception of a link to Emory University, all the other links on that page go to other Ivy Coach content.
So the premise of the article is clear: College Confidential (CC) isn’t reliable so use Ivy Coach instead. Instead of disagreeing without evidence, let’s see if we can validate the claims made by Ivy Coach and see if they hold up.
Students’ success stories
The author points out that students might not be telling the truth about how they got into a school or even if they were admitted at all. Now CC does have a category for admission stories. There aren’t a lot of recent posts (the category gets active after regular decisions are announced in March) but I think you will quickly see that these stories frequently receive pushback. Consider, for instance, some of the comments to Insane shotgunner pulls 3 T30s, 2 LACs, and 1 ivy for total of 70 acceptances:
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Applying to very low admit rate schools and getting into 10 is not a bloodbath.
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Are your listed scholarships amounts annual or total over 4 years? Did you get your school scholarship? You accepted to many great schools but it is hard to see are they affordable or not.
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One thing I don’t understand is why you applied to public schools that do not give scholarships to OOS students? With such a large number of schools, I expect it would have been hard to research all of them?
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I would not recommend people to use this approach.
CC has a reputation for being overly skeptical of student stories. It’s unlikely the author of the Ivy Coach blog read the replies (assuming they read any of the initial stories at all).
Statistics
This one hits close to home. In November I populated the stats listed on the top of most school categories. You can see an example of what’s available on the Emory University category. At the bottom of the post is this note:
Data source: IPEDS as of the August 21, 2024 release
This is Department of Education data. The stats haven’t been updated to the January release yet[2], but they are accurate as of August. Unless Ivy Coach has information that the US Government is putting out bad data, I’m not sure why they claim it to be “entirely inaccurate”.
Now I know the criticism is that parents and students post inaccurate stats, but the post doesn’t show any examples. If there’s so much bad data on the forums, it shouldn’t be hard to cite an example or two. Instead the post touts Ivy Coach’s own methods:
When we at Ivy Coach post admissions statistics, we curate them directly from college press releases and Common Data Sets — the admissions figures publicly shared by the universities themselves.
We’ll get back to that in a moment.
“Chance me.”
This is the closest to a valid criticism. College Confidential is one of the very few places students can go to get an outsider perspective on their chances for getting into various schools. The ApplyingToCollege subreddit specifically bans such threads. As the blog post points out, accurately estimating a student’s chances requires lots of information about them. That’s why CC includes detailed instructions and a template for these threads:
While most of the people on the site are not former admissions officers, some are. In fact we know of current admissions officers who have posted under pseudonyms in the past. But I think that’s missing the point of these threads for the people who post them. The real value comes from putting together your case for admission and getting outside feedback. The actual odds of acceptance are pretty random even if you have the full picture.
Taking colleges at their word.
Remember when I quoted Ivy Coach’s method for collecting stats? That’s right. It takes the data from the college websites. Now the post argues that trusting college websites isn’t a good idea. I suppose this could be persuasive if there were an example of people on College Confidential just trusting colleges. But that’s not part of the CC culture, so examples are not so easy to find.
Let’s take that Demonstrated Interest example. The idea is that students are more likely to be accepted at a university if they do things like visit the school, open emails or ask to interview alumni. A few years ago someone asked about alumni interviews at Emory University, the school the blog post mentioned as not being accurate about whether they consider Demonstrated Interest. Indeed one of the answers to the question was:
The website also says that demonstrated interest does not play a role in admissions decisions . . .
That’s exactly what the blog post predicted would happen on College Confidential. That’s not the end of the answer, however:
. . . but if your [daughter] would like to learn more about the college then she should contact them.
This isn’t taking a position on whether the website is lying. Instead the answer suggests setting up an interview based on the student’s interest in the school. This advice would be helpful if, by some chance, Demonstrated Interest is considered in the end.
This is a far more nuanced position that what the blog post implies:
For example, Emory University writes on its website that they don’t measure Demonstrated Interest. Therefore, it must be true! Of course, Emory invented Demonstrated Interest!
So the only evidence Ivy Coach has the Emory is using Demonstrated Interest in admission decisions is that Ivy Coach doesn’t believe the Emory website is telling the truth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Communities operate on self-correction
Ivy College seems to operate under the idea that experts possess the only source for truth. Research shows experts tend to follow other experts to avoid being alone and wrong in a striking example of herd mentality. While experts can be very helpful in many circumstances[3] they aren’t infalible.
Neither are communities, of course. Taken individually, people are frequently wrong. But unlike expert opinion, there’s hardly anything that someone can say that won’t get some pushback. Other members of a community can observe a variety of opinions and assertions and come to their own conclusions. That’s how a community can self-correct in a way that experts never quite seem capable of.
To read my analysis of the College Confidential community, please see Case Study: College Confidential.
It’s to the umbrella site, not the forums themselves, for what it’s worth. ↩︎
I got a new job and I haven’t had time to get the latest data just yet. ↩︎
I’d rather trust a single structural engineer to evaluate whether my construction project is sound than a hundred amateurs, for instance. ↩︎