<p>@billcsho: I would not blame you for trying!!..LOL.</p>
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<p>A long time ago now, my kid was invited to an admissions presentation by Harvard, which was held at the Harvard Club in NYC. There were several hundred high school students there. Part of the presentation was given by a young woman who was a current Harvard student. Someone asked her where else she had applied. After getting into Harvard early, she applied to 17 other colleges. The kids spent most of the rest of the presentation trying to figure out which 17 colleges someone who already knew she was accepted to Harvard would apply to. A fair # of kids walked out saying things along the lines of “If she’s a typical Harvard student, I don’t want to go there!!!” </p>
<p>I think the admissions officer was stunned–apparently he had never asked her that! </p>
<p>@jonri, we had a similar situation at my son’s school also. SCEA into Harvard, bought all the apparel and decals (and this at a school known for being low-key about acceptances in respect for kids whose results weren’t everything hoped for, applied to a zillion other schools. Her name became a verb: “to [her name] it” came to mean “performing actions consistent with being a d-bag, trophy hunting, waste of Adcoms’ time.”</p>
<p>“Anybody who was in at Princeton early and stated an intention to apply to the seven other Ivies RD would face a gauntlet of criticism around here.”</p>
<p>I see nothing wrong with a student accepted to HYPS during SCEA applying to any other college during the RD round so long as the applicant complies with the SCEA provisions for two reasons:</p>
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<li><p>The total number of students who declined SCEA acceptance would not be expected to change much year to year and the number of SCEA acceptances sent out would reflect this.</p></li>
<li><p>For most schools it is impossible to predict the total aid that a particular school would offer. A high quality applicant has earned the right to evaluate all offers.</p></li>
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<p>There are valid reasons for keeping a lot of other applications open to schools where there is a realistic chance of a better financial aid offer than the SCEA school, if finances are significant concern. In [this</a> thread](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1510891-9-for-9-full-ride-offers-at-hypsm-top-ucs.html]this”>9 for 9: Full-Ride Offers at HYPSM + Top UCs - Parents Forum - College Confidential Forums), some posters criticized the student for keeping applications open after getting an SCEA admission to Harvard, but they may not have realized that the potential differences in net price due to varying financial aid offers, potential merit scholarships at some of the schools (not YPSM), and a potential outside merit scholarship were likely significant for the student in question, who came from a very poor family.</p>
<p>“There are valid reasons for keeping a lot of other applications open to schools where there is a realistic chance of a better financial aid offer than the SCEA school”</p>
<p>Right…which is to say, not other Ivies. No need-only school is going to be more generous than Harvard or Princeton. If they want to go after the A.B. Duke scholarship and the like, that makes perfect sense.</p>
<p>It’s unlikely for other Ivies to offer better aid than Harvard. But I can understand applying to Harvard SCEA even if it wasn’t your first choice (or you hadn’t done enough homework yet to know if it was your first choice) thinking that you might get a boost there that was less necessary at other schools. I’m not convinced how much of a boost it is, anecdotes aren’t data, but my kid did get in even after telling the interviewer that he hadn’t applied to Harvard SCEA because it was not his first choice. In that sense they are not like Penn, where you get a definite boost (especially if you are a legacy.)</p>
<p>It’s also possible to get all your applications in before you hear back from the EA college, though my kids never handed anything in until the last possible moment.</p>
<p>“who came from a very poor family” @ucbalumnus are we still talking about “8 Ivy kid?” His parents are both nurses and he self reported his income on a thread here as over 100k</p>
<p>No, different student who (last year) applied to and was admitted to HYPSM and 4 UCs (CA resident) and also got the Gates Millenium Scholarship. Follow the link and read the article.</p>
<p>Someone earlier wrote, ““There was no place for a kid like this at a top 10 college?” Not unless he is a minority or first generation international student in this country with parents from overseas.”</p>
<p>This is nonsense. The val from DS’s HS is a white kid who is not first generation and he got into Princeton, Brown, Cornell and Penn plus a number of other universities. DS is a white kid, not first generation, admitted to Columbia EA.</p>
<p>That kind of comment is divisive and inaccurate.</p>
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<p>How many “choices” did he have?</p>
<p>The way to gather more rejections letters is to apply to more high reaches. </p>
<p>Way back in neanderthal times (like, um, ~15 years ago) I got my son a book about high stakes, Ivy admission, and a couple of books about great colleges for B students, and it was a no brainer to focus on good fit LACs and save the application fees for Ivies. (My son was a 4.0 student, took all AP’s offered at his high school, plus NMF status… but it was clear to us back than that those creds are merely the bare minimum needed to avoid outright rejection – and that was back when admissions was probably half as competitive as it is now.)</p>
<p>@Momfromme: Thank you for sharing that. This forum needs more people like you. Keep up the good work!.</p>
<p>About Vanderbilt…Want to jump in here and say that last year my child, too, was shut out of the top 10/ Ivies, despite legacy status at one of them. Similar stats to OP’s: tip-top scores and GPA, impressive ECs. But she was a female coming from a NY suburb- and say what you want, that lowers the odds. So we were disappointed but not shocked when the rejections came in. It was rough. But my child is now absolutely THRIVING at Vanderbilt, a school we knew very little about when she applied. But they offered pretty awesome financial aid so we took a look last April. She was impressed by the friendly environment, classic campus-y college feel and the fun of having Nashville at her doorstep. So, although virtually every relative’s response when she said she was going there was, “where’s that?” it was a great decision. She couldn’t be happier. She has an active social life, does community service, works for the school paper and made the dean’s list. Her closest friends are from NJ, Chicago, Atlanta, LA and Korea. Vandy is still a bit of a “best kept secret” in our area. But I doubt that will last. In a few years it will get as tough an admit from around here as Penn has become! </p>
<p>I remember 7 years ago the admissions counselors were coming up to our high school and begging kids to apply. They made a big point that kids from the NE would get geographic bonus points - and possibly other plus diversity points as well. </p>
<p>Isn’t there a confusion between 1st generation immigrant, and 1st generation to go to college, in some of the comments above? The admission advantage should go to 1st generation to go to college. </p>
<p>"“There was no place for a kid like this at a top 10 college?”"</p>
<p>No, there was no place for this <em>particular</em> kid. Thousands of kids like this (middle class, white, educated parents) did get in. There isn’t enough room in the top 10 for every kid with outstanding qualifications. There wouldn’t be enough room even if the top 10 only admitted white, middle-class kids. Thousands of superb candidates won’t get in, and when that’s your child, it’s painful. </p>
<p>But to be in the top 20 instead of the top 10 is still a great outcome offering fantastic opportunities to those students.</p>
<p>Sorghum, that was one point being made regarding the article about the young man who got in all 8 Ivies. His being a first generation immigrant was cited as one quality that made him desirable to the elite colleges. He was first generation born in the US, but not a first generation college student for his family. Both his parents were educated. That was another cause for some to comment on his case, since the assumption people had was that the hook was being first generation to go to college, not first generation in the country.</p>
<p>Just because I was looking at the FA page at my son’s school for a phone number. I thought I would bring up a statistic that I saw. Fourty-five percent of the kids at his school receives NO need-based financial aid. That number right there tells you that almost one out of every two students comes from a privileged background. I think that you don’t need to go further than that to realize that the upper-middle class/upper class student is very well represented at his school. Given that upper-middle class and upper class comprise about five percent of our population but 45% of students on a top-tier campus are from this background, one could posit that it is much easier to get into a top-tier school if you come from a privileged background! 
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.</p>
<p>Whenever I start to feel put upon because D (or S before her) has this or that “unfair” obstacle to overcome, I remind myself that by simply being born with a fairly good head, a fairly healthy body, a family who loves and supports them, and enough financial resources to insure that they will have the opportunity to get a good education (and, yes, you can get that even at the much-maligned “directional state U”), my kids already won the golden ticket. Now, it’s up to them to make the best of it and not be eaten by squirrels (to extend the Dahl-inspired metaphor).</p>
<p>EllieMom: excatly! I remind my kids that they won the golden ticket as well As one of my kids sometimes says many of these are “rich people’s problems” (with rich in this context including all of us middle class families who can even contemplate funding kids going away to college). </p>
<p>And momofmuscian, interesting point. </p>