<p>I heard Penn State and BU are easy to get into, they admit over 50%.</p>
<p>TK: okay, maybe my school’s pattern is unusual, or maybe it’s just an anomaly. I don’t know, but supposedly, looking at Naviance’s scattergrams, for your school, is a good way to figure out your rough chances. In any event, while reports of getting into one reach out of ten, or reaches but not matches, or matches but not safeties, are all necessarily anecdotal, they are common enough to give an applicant cause for concern about his own strategy. If we turn the question of selectivity around, we have to appreciate that, for the college, every applicant needs to be rated for what the college thinks its chances of acceptance are: it’s reasonable enough that a college wants to accept students that want to attend that college, not just for yield protection but for the general atmosphere. I’m sure it’s better for a college to take the best candidates that it thinks will come. Looking at a candidate with much stronger stats than the average applicant, an adcom might think that the chance that that particular applicant will actually attend that school is too low to make it worth turning down a more likely student. It’s as much a part of fit as the rest of the package, and there’s surely a sentimental value for the college in taking students for whom the school is the first choice, rather than the fourth. Given that, the high-stat kid is stuck looking for colleges where his stats are not way out of line with the average, but where the acceptance rate is high enough that he can regard it as a safety. And my point is, there aren’t that many of those, that aren’t state schools. It’s why kids end up applying to so many schools: you only get to bet once, and the stakes are high, and the odds are really, really hard to size up.</p>