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<p>I think that’s the “College Confidential Complex” in action, as @ucbalumnus alludes to earlier. Spend too much time here you think that most people spend all of their time curating the perfect transcript and resume for their Harvard applications, and view Dartmouth and UPenn as “Safety Schools”. Most people aren’t like that but the people who aren’t don’t get interviewed by the New York Times about their college search experience, which creates the impression that applying to any college at all means that (at the very least) you must have several patents and life peerage from the Queen of England.</p>