Every year we see super high achieving students who are certain that they are going to get into some of the famous name schools. When long-time posters point out the importance of
building your list from the bottom up
not having a ‘dream’ school
being realistic what a 90+% rejection rate actually means
we get a lot of pushback. And then in the spring we get a bunch of posters who are gutted by their outcomes.
Note that typically these students are well-qualified for the schools that they applied to. They worked their hearts out. But there are so many incredibly strong students who are just as well-qualified.
So, class of '24: please don’t let this be you- we want to celebrate with you next spring!
Yes! Excellent post. The things I have learned during this process are:
-College is much more expensive than most people realize.
-College is much more competitive than most people realize.
-But…. There are multiple good, affordable options for everyone if you are open minded and do your research!
Definitely do NOT encourage one “dream school”. Good luck 2024ers!!!
Love this post! It’s a little dizzying with the number of chance websites out there to pre-digest a student’s data, the sheer volume of communication from colleges by email, text, and phone, the websites to read and view, the visits, etc. I am trying to help my DS24 keep up but it’s a lot of volume for a family and a student to manage while still being a high school student.
The algorithms are useful- 2 reach, 4 target, 2 safeties as a minimum, and try to get excited about your safeties and your targets. Let your family know that you are excited about those, too! There are so many great colleges and universities in this country and opportunities to be found at and after all of them.
The challenge for high stat kids in the past couple of years has been that there are very few true match/target schools and they’re not always easy to identify.
Schools that used to be targets a few years ago are either reaches now due to a large increase in applications, or are protecting their yield by deferring and/or waitlisting lots of applicants.
I think it is unkind to use actual posts from actual people in this manner. The post could have made the point without.
In general, I think the discouraging responses to applications to top schools can actually go too far, and also students end up applying to far too many schools.
Research cost, financial and merit aid. Apply wherever you want, including top schools, as long as you have other schools you like that are affordable and will most likely accept you.
I always suggest the Colleges that Change Lives website for college ideas beyond the Ivies and little Ivies and state schools that are well known.
Note: the original post was amended, for which I am thankful.
I wholeheartedly agree. For some of these students, there’s really no match/target, especially as their odds of admissions become lower at increasingly more schools year after year. It’d be too easy to say that they should have safeties and love their safeties. They should. But as one of the threads mentioned by OP showed, their safeties often may not be able to meet their academic potentials. There’s a cost to the society, as well as to these students themselves, if their potentials ultimately can’t be fully realized as a result.
The other data point is affordability across the spread of targets. Our family doesn’t have a standard tax situation, as our income varies widely, multiple deductions and changes yearly. We had no idea what would be offered from some of the more expensive colleges, whether merit or aid. I would have suggested my daughter double the number of schools she applied to. She got into some top fifteen university options, but price was out of reach, and in the end we were wishful thinking. Fell back to the state school option that she honestly likes quite a bit, but it’s a comedown from two top university slots she was offered at full price.
Point is, if you have a nonstandard tax situation and are not sure of aid and or scholarships, assume you’ll get zero aid even with NMS and near perfect scores and resume with what you think is a fairly low income. All of this against the backdrop of just trying to get an acceptance. There are a lot of moving parts, and you will not know until you know!
I think the correct mix for top kids is 1-2 safeties, and the rest, possibly another 15-20 reaches. The target is a mythical creature that depends on your willingness to ED. Good private high schools strongly encourage the ED path.
Agree with @neela1 The only vital thing is a safety that you would be happy to attend and is a true safety, hopefully with an early admit date. Then the rest is a free for all in terms of reaches and matches and looking for merit. This is my main focus right now for S24, finding a true safety where he will be happy, then the rest is gravy.
The thread I’m linking below is old…but the ideas in it are so important. Every student needs sure thing colleges that are affordable that they also like…and I suggest having two…because it’s nice to have choices. Start your college search with those sure things…and then go from there.
Thank you to the admins for reformatting this old thread so it could be shared…and read. I think it’s a must read especially for students looking only at very tippy top schools.
And more importantly - an applicant’s ability to apply ED. Most donut hole families can’t ED - and this is another huge disadvantage for such kids when applying to the tippy top schools. Yes, they could apply REA but such families are also often chasing merit and need to apply EA to other schools.
And their students are typically from affluent families
Full pay gives a huge advantage in this process because it eliminates a variable that others have to consider.
You can ED wherever you want. You can pick a safety school just based on fit without worrying about financial considerations and whether they’ll offer merit aid.
Our experience with top private colleges suggests that if you are a strong STEM kid, you need to show a significant/equal footprint of interest in the humanities, validated by teacher recommendations and other accomplishments. This isn’t required for humanities/non STEM kids. Then the tippy top college moves from being a super reach to a (2 to 1) to a (4 to 1) odds situation. When you pool some 20 of them together, show authenticity through essays, the laws of statistics takes over (20 uncorrelated outcomes, each at a 2 to 1), and the odds of at least one hit over the pool become better than 2 to 1.
It’s also important to create subcategory of reaches.
Applying to HYPSM is different than Rice/Wash U/Cornell than UF/Northeastern/BU. Some you have a better chance than others even if they’re all statistically low.
Some people suggest that if you get waitlisted at a low reach school because of yield protect, email the AO and declare your commitment to the school.
Any schools that have an ED require an ED. If you apply EA, these school are unlikely to come through, or at least become much harder than they need to be – eg for Rice, Wash U, Cornell etc.
I’m not sure it’s all that important. Perhaps SHYMP has a 3% admit rate and Reach School B has a 15% admit rate. Yay, the student is probably 5 times likelier to get into Reach School B than into SHYMP! But a 15% chance still means that odds are very much against an admit. Students should find schools where they are extremely likely to be admitted, and there are many such schools across the country. Students just need to look for ones that are the right fit.
If that particular thread’s OP had a different list of schools, there would have been safeties that would have met their academic potential. The last-minute list was looking at schools in the last week of April to see who might still offer a full-ride. But, an application submitted in the fall by scholarship deadlines at schools with acceptance rates higher than 20% would have yielded many, many more possibilities. Even that OP’s current safety does offer courses through a PhD level in his areas of interest.
This assumes the kid likes the reaches. But I guess that depends on how you define “top kids”. There was only one reach my kid was even interested in applying to . His list was all safeties and targets since those are the schools that he liked and where he also had a decent chance at merit aid. He was thrilled with how his process turned out.
That goes without saying. I don’t know why it is the received wisdom on CC that parents force kids to go into top schools, and left to themselves kids would go into a community college, or better still, not go to college.
I just read the “rejected by 12/3 colleges” and after reading their list of schools, I felt terrible for the kid and thought “who is advising these kids on their lists?!”
Parents are great, but can be too close to the situation (my kid has a 1500 and 4.0 - they can get in anywhere) or have an “ivy or bust” mentality/pressure on the kid, etc. which can lead to a lot of disappointment.
. His list was all safeties and targets since those are the schools that he liked and where he also had a decent chance at merit aid. He was thrilled with how his process turned out.