<p>A friend of mine told me that applying to a lot of Ivy league colleges and other top institutions can hurt you ... She claims that colleges can find out where you apply and hold it against you if they suspect you are merely after admission to an Ivy League college. Is this true? So many kids on here, myself included, are applying to a lot of schools (I think I saw someone applying to 18)!</p>
<p>Is this true or urban legend? My friend claims a friend of her mother had her daughter (who was valedictorian) apply to like 15 top schools and that she was rejected from every Ivy and only accepted to one school ...</p>
<p>ummmmm…statistically speaking if admissions to all schools was completely independent, then yes, you would have a better shot of getting into an ivy by applying to all of them. However, admissions to different schools are not independent events because on these applications to top schools you can’t just fill out name, school, date of birth, address, phone number, then have your school deliver a transcript and your SAT scores. These applications take time and thought to fill out. The more schools you apply to, the less time you have to spend on each application, and the less thought you put into each application and the adcoms at these top schools WILL be able to see that you didn’t spend a whole lot of time on their application and they will not be impressed with that. I guess you could say that application quality is negatively correlated with number of schools you apply to (which may be why the valedictorian was admitted to only one school). Adcoms at top schools want to admit students who want to go to their respective schools for what the school offers, not because the school is an ivy, or is prestigious. I applied to 8 schools: 3 safeties (NC State, Florida State, and East Carolina), 3 matches (UNC-Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, and Emory) and 2 reaches (Duke and Columbia). I don’t want to jynx myself, but so far, I’m two for two (admitted to NC State and Notre Dame).</p>
<p>So instead of applying to the top 20 USNWR schools, try applying to about 5-6 you really like (my parents made me apply to NC State and Florida State, but both had fairly painless applications).</p>
<p>Rumors. Your wallet will be shrieking thought. CSS, SATs, Fees. Fun. Your chances will not be hurt other than not having optimum time to dedicate to ____ College.</p>
<p>The lower you go down the ranking of colleges, the more the colleges care about how seriously you want to go there. They don’t want to fill their class with a bunch of kids moping about how they didn’t get into Harvard and had to go to College X. That’s why they love ED so much. </p>
<p>So the application should show “genuine” interest in the college. If you are doing 15 applications, it’s hard to show “genuine” interest in 15 different schools. 7 good well thought through apps may be better than 15 half-hearted ones.</p>