<p>People apply to a lot of reach schools. To a lot of people an Ivy League is an Ivy League and Harvard is no different from Stanford if they get into either one, so what’s the harm in increasing the chances of a prestigious education by applying to all 8 and MIT and CalTech?</p>
<p>NE Pats girl- you can do your D a big favor by NOT ranking or stacking or comparing these schools on the basis of how happy you think she would be. First- you don’t know. She can be at her top choice school with a terrible roommate and a bunch of classes that meet at 8 am and be perfectly miserable. Second, you are setting yourselves up for I don’t even know what.</p>
<p>Life is full of trade-offs. no single school is perfect, no single school is terrible, they’ve all got different tradeoffs to deal with. I wouldn’t be stacking right now with 6 EA applications on the table. What if she gets in to none of them and gets deferred until Spring? Don’t start moving things up or down the list until you’ve got the information in front of you. </p>
<p>I’d like to see the yields of those selective schools get as much publicity as their admission rates. This way, we will know which schools are playing the admission game by racking up the number of applicants through their aggressive marketing.</p>
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<p>Someone could apply to 9 UCs on one application and apply to 22 of 23 CSUs on another application (the 23rd CSU can also be applied on that application, but requires additional information). So that is 31 schools on two applications (no transcripts or recommendations needed, and only one set of test scores per system, but an application fee for each school), without a huge amount of effort (other than the cost of the application fees).</p>
<p>Meh, I did three, and only two were really serious. One was just free and the college sent me a shortened app, so I applied. The other two were in my budget and I knew I would get into both. Why apply elsewhere?</p>
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<p>Several reasons.</p>
<p>1) It doesn’t necessarily increase a kid’s chances to apply to more.
2) Rejections can sting–especially when there are more than one of them.
3) Applications cost money and time.
4) The kid doing this scattershot approach is not likely to be equally happy at all of these schools, so to randomly apply to all of them suggests lack of research and concern for the “fit” that would help him/her be successful.
5) The more students who do this, the worse the chances for everybody (not that I’d expect a lot of people to care).</p>
<p>Someone gave us very good advice when D1 was applying in 2012. This friend’s daughter had been rejected or waitlisted at 5 of 6 schools, all considered “matches”. This friend said to go very broad with our daughter’s match schools, because even if our daughter matched the stats, she wouldn’t necessarily be accepted. While D1’s counselor suggested the 2-3-2 combination, we decided to do 1 reach, 6 matches, and 3 safeties. She was waitlisted at 3 matches and accepted at 3 matches (rejected by the reach and accepted at all safeties). She loved the 3 matches and so she didn’t even go on the waitlist for the others. Who needs to make a decision among more than 2 or 3 well-liked schools? It was good advice. A match doesn’t necessarily mean a student will be accepted, especially if his/her match colleges accept fewer than 10%. (Of course she waited until 12:00 noon on May 1 to actually choose between the final 2, but that’s another story.)</p>
<p>I applied to 14 schools but several of them were fee waiver/essay-less schools. </p>
<p>@Blossom, why would you not rank a school on how happy you’ll be? I think “fit” is the key to picking the right school and while “fit” might encompass a lot of things like location, price, and offerings, I consider it more of a “how happy will I be there” thing. No one said decisions were being made prior to the EA results. In fact I said “I can definately see D’s RD list changing/decreasing once the EA results come in”. And, fwiw, of the 6 EA schools, only one admission is questionable (yea I know nothing is 100% but in my best estimation).</p>
<p>I don’t see how anyone can predict future happiness. And check out these boards in January when parents start posting that their Freshman are looking to transfer from their ED admitted school or their “all my life I’ve wanted to go to” school to realize that you can fine tune the list all you want- but you can’t predict how happy your kid will be.</p>
<p>For me- as long as my kids were in academic fits, I was prepared to tell them to learn to adjust socially. But for some kids the opposite is true. And for some kids- there is a random effect. Good roommate, good dorm, pledging the frat they wanted- it’s all good. For other kids, not so simple.</p>
<p>YMMV.</p>
<p>I think @blossom mades a good point a few posts ago.
People on CC like to emphasize the importance of “fit,” I agree that fit is very important but you can also carry it too far and build up expectations too high for the supposedly “perfect fit” school. My kid has her ED1 school and a possible ED2 candidate, but after that everything on the list is full of trade offs. I don’t post the list on CC because I know people would pick it apart and say it doesn’t make sense to them, but each school is on the list for a reason and each school has pluses and minuses. And I also agree that there is a big unpredictability factor in how much your kid will like a specific school.</p>
<p>1) It doesn’t necessarily increase a kid’s chances to apply to more."</p>
<p>No, not necessarily but year after year there are surprising(shocking) results. Kids get into reaches and are rejected or waitlisted to matches or less competitive schools. A kid gets into Harvard, but not Cornell. Accepted at Yale, but waitlisted at WUSTL. Kids that no one thought would have a snowballs chance end up getting into that one top school even though they have a pile of reject letters from other schools. The Val from our school last year got rejected all over the map, but got a likely letter from Dartmouth RD after being deferred ED.</p>
<p>2) Rejections can sting–especially when there are more than one of them.</p>
<p>True, but I don’t think applications should be limited based on fear of rejection. Also, in the case of the Val, all those rejections didn’t sting much once the likely letter came. </p>
<p>3) Applications cost money and time.</p>
<p>Can’t argue with that. But I didn’t spend money on private school, test prep(or multiple test sittings), college counseling, summer “experiences”, traveling the country to visit colleges, etc., so I am more than happy to pony up the money for as many apps as my S is willing to invest his time in. </p>
<p>4) The kid doing this scattershot approach is not likely to be equally happy at all of these schools, so to randomly apply to all of them suggests lack of research and concern for the “fit” that would help him/her be successful.</p>
<p>Well, lots of differing opinions here too, including the Polyanna “bloom where planted” mantra, that gets thrown around. I do disagree with that however, and mostly see it used when parents can’t/won’t pay for the schools the kid feels are the right “fit”-suddenly “fit” is overrated, lol. I do believe a kid can be happy many places though, and some kids are naturally more flexible than others. S is applying to LACs and Universities, rural and metro schools-he genuinely feels comfortable in many settings. I don’t agree that a kid that likes Columbia can’t possibly like Dartmouth and is just an Ivy prestige chaser-S isn’t applying to either btw.</p>
<p>5) The more students who do this, the worse the chances for everybody (not that I’d expect a lot of people to care). </p>
<p>I don’t know about that…possibly if kids from the same school are going head to head? That doesn’t really happen at our school though. But colleges have to accept in numbers proportionate to their yield, so they are factoring in that many applicants that they accept will go elsewhere, so those accepted kids aren’t really “taking” a spot from anyone-the spot frees up.</p>
<p>Enough? If you are a good student a minimum of 1 (a safety that meets all criteria and the student wishes to attend) with 3 (safety, match and reach) giving one opportunities for stronger caliber schools. Beyond that it depends on the student’s goals beyond just the academics. If you are looking for scholarships more may give you better options, if you have a specific caliber of school your looking for then more may be better, if you just aren’t ready to make a decision at application time more applications will give you more choices. It does amaze me how many schools our students consider and apply to these days. We told our D that we will pay for 5 applications. If she chooses to pay for more or there are some schools that don’t have application fees then she is free to apply to as many as she feels is necessary. </p>
<p>We only had to pay for 2 applications, because most of the schools she visited gave her application fee waivers because she visited. Of course, her schools have acceptance rates of >60%, so they are trying to create an incentive to apply. </p>
<p>I didn’t read through the whole thread…I hope I am not repeating what has been posted. The article said:
It is very important for applicants to demonstrate interest to their matches and safeties or those schools may think they are safeties and therefore deny admissions.</p>
<p>As long as a student has the stats to apply to reach schools, he/she will increase the chance by applying to more reaches. As an example, a student could get admitted to UPenn, but get denied at Cornell for whatever reason, likewise for HYPS. If a student doesn’t have the stats to apply to top 20s, it wouldn’t matter if he/she were to apply to 2 or 20, he/she would still be denied at all top 20s. I tell students to have more reaches, have few good solid matches and safeties, and spend the time to show love to those matches and safeties.</p>
<p>How many schools is enough? It all depends on the student. </p>
<p>Our kids spent a lot of time vetting colleges before the applications were even started. One kid applied to seven…and that was a lot for that kid who was a music major and had to audition for all seven.</p>
<p>The second kid picked three schools. She applies EA to two and the third was rolling admissions. She was accepted to all three by December 10. But we (silly) parents insisted she apply to one school that was closer to home…and the trade off was she wanted to apply to one reach. In retrospect, those last two applications were a waste of time and money since she had already been accepted to her top three choices.</p>
<p>YMMV depending on the student. </p>
<p>I take my hat off to all those with short lists and ED choices. My D can’t identify with them. She’s visited 15 schools and researched many more, influenced by the tons of mailings, the ceaseless e-mails, the school’s phone calls, the college’s visits to her school, the college fairs, and her peers’ opinions. Amazingly, all the colleges say they are the best school for her! She’s blessed with high stats, and likes many schools for different reasons. Could be simply that there are a lot of terrific schools out there, that her visits or analyses have shown her something she really liked about each one, or simply that it was a beautiful day during the tour and the student guide pointed out something awesome. She does not have that “dream school”, at least not yet. Her list is at 15 with maybe 6 top contenders, perhaps a bit heavy on the reaches, but all of which she likely would be happy at. As time goes on, she will probably pare her list somewhat, but I don’t think she will make her final decision until the very last deadline is due, and won’t have that number one school in her mind until after all her acceptances (and rejections) are in. It can be difficult to make those decisions and we’ve provided guidance, but I understand a student’s reluctance to preclude certain schools from a list because of the overall uncertainty of where you’ll end up be accepted.</p>
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<p>Safety schools for which the applicant falls into their automatic admission (or automatic scholarship) criteria would not be a concern for “level of applicant’s interest”. Of course, schools using “level of applicant’s interest” may be less reliable as safeties, since they also tend to use more subjectively evaluated criteria for admissions.</p>
<p>I don’t believe there is such a thing as automatic admission, except for schools that only look at applicant’s hard stats. For many top students, they wouldn’t be interested in such schools and therefore they can be safeties if a student has no interest in attending. Our instate was D1’s automatic admission, but she cried after she visit the school. For D2, we just didn’t even bother to put it on her list.</p>
<p>I’d make sure my high stats kid visited at least one safety where they found something to love. Especially since I know so many kids who end up at their safety for lots of reasons.</p>