<p>Anyone encounter difficulties with GCs wanting to steer kid to certain schools/safer schools. My view is D should take some risk--of course have a safety and a couple of "in range" but D wants reaches too. GC wants to play it safe--why would that be?</p>
<p>^Your GC may have a more realistic assessment of what’s a feasible reach, or she may just have been burned in the past by parents complaining if little Susie or little Johnny didn’t get into every school. </p>
<p>Years and years ago, my GC tried to steer me to a woman’s college - after four years at a girl’s high school - I was soooo ready for co-ed education.</p>
<p>Our big public high school’s GCs are overworked. I think this is partially the cause of a tendency to steer kids toward big state colleges that accept large numbers of our seniors every year, and have very simple application procedures – none of those annoying common app forms, teacher and counselor recommendation requirements, essays, etc. Click, click, and you are in.</p>
<p>The operative word is “reaches”…you don’t really need a whole bunch of those. In my opinion one or two. No one here can guess what the GCs motivation is but maybe take a second look at the list and see if it’s really too reach heavy. Certainly for the most part GCs don’t have the knowledge you or your student has, but perhaps take it as a note to self to take one last look at the list before pushing send.</p>
<p>Public or private HS?</p>
<p>Depends on the reaches. When their acceptance rates are 15%, a few might not cut it. My D is looking at schools that no one from our HS has ever applied to, so the GC are not very familiar with them.</p>
<p>You know…as long as your child has safety and match schools that she would LIKE to attend, then really apply all you want to those reaches. Our daughter originally applied to ONLY three safety/match schools. She was very happy with those three choices. We asked her to add a school close to home and she asked if she could add a reach if she added the close to home school. Truthfully…we should have left her alone with the three original schools. </p>
<p>If you don’t mind paying the application fees…then really it’s your business. But as noted, the GC is probably trying to give you her honest assessment at good bets.</p>
<p>I will say…in BOTH of our kids cases, the GC told them not to bother applying to the school they attended. In both cases, the GCs were misinformed for one reason or another (in DD’s case, they knew nothing about the school other than what they read online…in DS’s case…he was a music major, and the GC knew only about academic admissions).</p>
<p>I disagree I think under some circumstance applying to a fair number of reaches may be a perfectly sensible strategy - my younger son loved his safety. He ended up with 1 safety and 6 reaches - he got into three reaches and a safety. Older son was one for whom any match school was a reach - he applied to two safeties and six reaches. Got into two safeties and two reaches. What if he’d only applied to the two reaches he thought he liked best? He’d have missed out on a great school.</p>
<p>My younger son didn’t like any of his supposed match schools better than his safety so he dropped them. My older son really had no match schools because for high stat tech kids they don’t really exist.</p>
<p>Both kids got into at least one school early so that they didn’t need to worry about being stuck high and dry in April.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s my definition of a reach…basically a school where the chance of getting in is about the same as being hit with lightening or winning the lotto…which we all know can happen. For me if you’re within their 25-75 range it’s a match. So it could just be my definition. We don’t know what criteria the OP is defining as reach. My oldest didn’t have a true reach, my middle one did (and of course didn’t get in).</p>
<p>I consider all of the sub-15% acceptance reaches, even for great stats. So, we thought applying to more than 1 or 2 of these was the way to go. Yes, there will be a safety and 2 matches too, so I didn’t see the downside in rounding out the list with 4-5 reaches. D is a good candidate anywhere, but not a shoe-in either. She attends a small private school and I think the GCs are programmed to beat down crazy parental expectations. I am not that and am very realistic that the top schools are indeed reaches. But, if I agree I understand that these are low expectations, shouldn’t we be able to apply to the schools that D really wants to take a shot at?</p>
<p>Perhaps the school wants to brag about its students’ accepance rate and so discourages reaches because they likely won’t get in.</p>
<p>I’d say a match is a school where I think there’s about a 50% chance of being accepted. If you look at Naviance there’s a mix of red and green dots in the area. My older son’s non-safeties were all so called lottery schools though I actually did think that he was probably close to a match at the school he was a legacy at despite its ca. 15% acceptance rate. (It’s even less now.) (He had some other things going for him that for various institutional reasons were going to be especially favorable that year.) </p>
<p>With my younger son it was hard to judge - his CR score was in the top 25%ile everywhere he applied and his math score was close to the bottom 25%ile. His GPA was near the bottom 25%ile, but his rank was good, but bumped up by the fact that it included orchestra grades. But we knew his safety was safe, which was all that really mattered. </p>
<p>I agree with erlanger if the student has the stats for those sub-15% schools, it’s good strategy to apply to more than 1 or 2.</p>
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<p>They may also be trying to reduce the amount of work expended on a student they don’t feel is worth as much attention. </p>
<p>That was an issue at my public magnet where the administration tended to focus the lion’s share of attention on the top 10% of the seniors despite the fact that even the middle 75% of our graduating class tended to gain admission to elite or well-respectable unis/LACs or without necessarily having many hooks. I was one of them. </p>
<p>Moreover, GCs are human like everyone else and have strong biases for or against certain schools/students that must be accounted for by the students and/or their parents.</p>
<p>YES, we encountered that this year.</p>
<p>My dd attends a small private all girls school that is a college prep school and has an excellent reputation. The College Advisor begins meetings with the student/parent as early as freshman year so we are very familiar with her.</p>
<p>But, I noticed this year (my dd being a senior) although she steered my dd and her friends towards their matches and reaches she somewhat pushed safetys. We only visited two safetys since we had made a list of schools together (just my dd and I), visited matches and one match/reach but that is because I was very involved and knew exactly what my dd wanted.</p>
<p>Anyway, I really believe the CA, at least in my dd’s school, pushes the safetys so she can have job security. All the girls are high achievers so their safety schools are giving them money and trying to lure them and money talks. At the end of the school year, the school can brag that they received $XXX Million in scholarships and that is a credit to the school/CA. The graduations get listed in the local paper so all can see how much each private school gets in scholarships.</p>
<p>My dd ended up applying ED to her match school.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>I think in theory it is good to apply to reaches as long as you have a base of match/safeties however, those reaches still require essays so there is extra work to be done unless you can really recycle ones already written.</p>
<p>Even if you don’t go to your reaches, it feels good to know if you were accepted. And alternatively, if you don’t get in you know you at least tried.</p>
<p>This comment isn’t meant as a reflection on the OP’s child… I am mentoring a HS senior going thru the college app process with backing from a local nonprofit organization. Because she’s an “A” student, her college wish-list is heavy with reach schools. At first I was enthused with this list and was ready to support this plan. But weeks have passed and she hasn’t met any of the deadlines we’ve set together for getting the application work done…not one word of the essay, not a defined list of schools (besides the reaches), nothing. So suddenly I’m finding myself looking more closely at the safeties that might work for her. I’m figuring, if she is having this much trouble simply applying to college, then let’s be realistic about finding a school that won’t burn her out.</p>
<p>S doesn’t get much feedback from his GC at all. The kids log on to docufide/parchment to send their transcripts. I haven’t figured out yet if the GC does anything other than load school info to the common app.</p>
<p>The most common advice I’ve seen is to apply to 2 safeties, 3 matches and 3 reaches, but that seems to be a low target for high stat kids for whom matches are really reaches. One of S’s friends has already applied to 15.</p>
<p>Is there a general consensus on which schools are always reaches? Top 20 or top 30? Admission rates under 20% or under 40%? I keep worrying that S has only one safety and everything else is a reach, even the ones where his stats are top quartile.</p>
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<p>Beyond the usual super selective schools where an applicant with “near maximum” academic stats will be rejected more likely than not, there is also another category of reaches for students who need a lot of financial aid: schools which usually give insufficient need based aid, where the chance of getting enough need based aid and/or merit scholarships is low (but greater than zero). Beyond that, schools which have no chance of being affordable are out of reach and should not be applied to.</p>
<p>Cost safety: definitely affordable at list price or under minimum possible financial aid awards based on stated policies.</p>
<p>Cost match: more likely than not to have sufficient financial aid to be affordable.</p>
<p>Cost reach: more likely than not to have insufficient financial aid to be affordable.</p>
<p>Cost out-of-reach: definitely unaffordable.</p>
<p>Any real safety must be a safety for both admissions and cost. When classifying reach, match, and safety, use the higher of the admissions and cost categories to get an overall classification (i.e. admissions reach + cost safety = reach; admissions safety + cost match = match; admissions match + cost reach = reach; admissions match + cost out-of-reach = don’t apply).</p>
<p>I think the GCs are programmed to beat down crazy parental expectations. After D1’s senior class college thing was all settled, I realized that the GC had tried to steer each kid toward an appropriate set of schools for that kid. I saw it as this: she tried to create reasonable sets of kids applying to various colleges. Why let some balloon pool of kids all apply to Ivies just because they hoped lightening would strike? Instead, she tried to keep balance in both the schools the kids aimed for and the number of apps to any one school from this hs.</p>
<p>We did want D1 to apply to one Ivy where, though it was technically a reach, D1’s particular interests and strengths were a great match for a program at that school that I knew was under-enrolled. It wasn’t so much a dream as a researched decision.</p>
<p>alynor, both my top stat kid and my not not quite top stat kid could never have made the effort to get 15 applications out. They preferred to find good safeties and then have 6 or 7 other schools that were reachy. That was especially true for my younger son whose stats had issues and felt he really needed to hit it out the ballpark with essays. </p>
<p>As to the question for what is safe or not safe - I found Naviance to be the biggest help here. But I also put together a spread sheet and I put in the info about SAT scores, selectivity and percent in the top 10% of the class and resorted the lists a few times to see how things worked out. </p>
<p>For my younger son (790 CR/690M, top 6% of class, ca. 9 APs) we figured schools with acceptance rates of at least 40% and where his math score was in the top 25% were safe. These schools claimed to have 25 to 65% in the top 10% of the class. (Keep in mind that 1/2 the schools in the US don’t rank, but since ours does, I figured it was worth keeping an eye on the number.) I figured matches were ones where his math score was in the middle of the range and selectivity was between 30 to 40%. Reaches were anything below that. For him it turned out that selectivity was the biggest predictor of whether he got in or not. The schools that accepted him all had acceptance rates of at least 20% that year maybe closer to 25%. (And for Chicago that was only in EA and at Vassar that may well have only been for males.)</p>