<p>Is it actually possible to be rejected from lower tier schools for being overqualified? For example, what if someone applied to rutgers with 2350 SAT, 4.0 GPA etc.?</p>
<p>Just curious. My friends joke around about this all the time.</p>
<p>Scads of people with those stats are at Rutgers. It is one of the top public universities in the US. In some fields, it is THE top public university. Don’t be hatin’ on it just because it is in New Jersey.</p>
<p>I personally am not sure how true this is, but I have read numerous times on this site that Tufts, among other schools, defers or even rejects a number of its top applicants in order to inflate their yield statistics.</p>
<p>That’s not possible, you might still be rejected from lower tier schools (which Rutgers is not!) but it won’t be because you are “over-qualified”…</p>
<p>When my son applied to colleges three years ago - he got accepted (ED) at Caltech and MIT. He also applied to four of the UCs (because their deadline is before EDs are announced.) UCLA, Berkeley and UCSD all accepted him. They are the 3 most selective of the UCs. His ultimate safety was UCSC, which is one of the least selective. They turned him down. We still tease him about that.</p>
<p>I have heard WashU is well known for turning down people they think are applying as a safety.</p>
<p>My daughter applied ED to her favorite school because we were worried about that same thing.</p>
<p>It is true that some schools who “know” they are fall backs for much more prestigious schools do defer or reject people they think will not attend. Rutgers would probably not be one of them.</p>
<p>Turning down applicants whose stats make it appear unlikely that they’d attend not only inflates a school’s yield rate, it stimulates chatter such as “UCSC is really hard to get onto - I know a guy at MIT who couldn’t get in there!” which can be overheard by the following year’s applicants. 
Schools that have been cited on CC as being notorious for this include Tufts, WashU, and GWU.</p>