<p>@DA: You wouldn’t be the first to say that I’m the sensitive sort (maybe overly?) ;-)</p>
<p>I think, had we loved everything else about School A, we would have gone back for a second visit (which we did for other schools we initially visited over the summer). But there wasn’t enough of a positive vibe for anyone in our family to warrant that.</p>
<p>These are wonderful and insightful responses. It’s hard to figure out how to find the one place your child would love, and the school will love him/her back. I swear, I have already put much more thought into this than any other decision in my life…Not career, spouse, etc. Scary, eh :)</p>
<p>@GladToBeHere: I should have noted somewhere in my ramblings that it seems a lot depends on your local options. If you have a local option (day/day @ BS/public/magnet/etc.) that could work for you…there’s less of a must to get admitted to BS — optimal match or not. In some cases, it may be that BS is preferable to any local option…so these families might add schools (maybe including some with higher admit rates) to their “apply to” list to increase the likelihood of at least one acceptance.</p>
<p>The better your child matches the school, the higher her chances of getting in, in my opinion. Applying to many schools which aren’t matches don’t increase the chances of acceptance. On the other hand, if there are many schools which could be matches for a student, applying to more of them will increase the chances of acceptance. </p>
<p>Say there’s an applicant who’s a nationally ranked squash player in 8th grade, with acceptable grades and test scores. The schools with squash teams would be better fits for her. The schools without squash courts, or which offer squash only as a club sport, would know that other schools would be better matches for her. Why accept a student who’s not likely to enroll?</p>
<p>Also, to be really geeky, an admissions rate doesn’t say much about any particular candidate’s chances of admission. Some candidates might have a 90% chance of admission at every school they visit. Some might have a 5% chance of admission. So much of the process comes down to personality, and a school’s current needs, that it’s like trying to forecast the weather. Yes, it’s possible to be right more often than not, but on any particular day the forecasters could be totally wrong.</p>