@ucbalumnus These schools care more about expressed interest from “overqualified” students than from their general applicant pool. It’s a way to discern mutual interest where it may not be outwardly apparent. There are many ways to communicate this, with the essay being an excellent focal point. For any student targeting a specific university, whether it be an Ivy or a public directional, it should be obvious that he or she will benefit from demonstrating this as clearly as possible to that school’s admissions committee.
Case’s generalized profile is a place for instance bright, somewhat nerdy/awkward kids with commitment to one or two activities and relatively little interest in social activities with good but not perfect stats. That doesn’t describe the typical Middlebury, Penn, or UVA aspirant. Even though they are higher stat schools, why would Case be considered a match or safety for someone aspiring to that other type of experience? Why are those kids even bothering to apply there? It’s likely because they’d rather go to a private university ranked #38 than a (non-elite) public one ranked #75, even though the public is actually a better fit for them and formally serves the mission of providing a safety net for high achievers in their state. As a safety for someplace like MIT or Rice, on the other hand, Case makes a lot of sense. The outrage and resentment expressed by some students denied to these “beneath them” schools because of poor fit reeks of an ugly form of entitlement and elitism.
It’s not the role of a private university like Case or Tulane to serve as a safety to higher ranked schools and the fact that they don’t treat every student denied admission to HYPSM as manna from heaven is to their credit, IMHO. If more schools put significant effort toward sniffing out the poseurs, word would get out and the type of frenzy you describe would diminish rather than increase. Students might actually start paying more attention to schools that are true matches for them rather than to determining the highest-ranked US News school to which they believe they will be admitted based upon two statistics. This would make admissions committees’ jobs infinitely easier, although they could contribute a bit by cutting back their overly-aggressive marketing campaigns aimed at lowering admission rates. Reducing the stigma some feel for the true safeties for these high stat kids, the public flagships, would be another step toward injecting some sanity into the process. It’s no picnic getting admitted into these places nowadays. It would be nice if more of the status obsessed crowd acknowledged this by celebrating it as a success rather than a given and, heaven forbid the kid actually attends there, as a failure.