Not Reaching High Enough

This thread has provided some interesting perspectives and feedback. I agree I need to grieve a little bit about this and let it go. In some ways it may be less about the college process and more about me providing the support and encouragement my child may have needed at the time of applying to college. He did have his choice of a few competitive colleges which he felt great about being accepted to. The two reach schools had acceptance rates about 15%. I am sure he will have a great experience at the college he has selected. Thank you all for your comments.

I have a slightly different story about unreasonable applications.

When my S was applying, he knew that with his stats (good but not excellent) he has no chance in the very top schools. He decided to apply anyway (“what if…”) but called them “donation colleges” - his app fees were surely a “donation” :slight_smile: . We set the limit at 5 (I know, way too high and unreasonable!) and told him to dream away. To our surprise, he got waitlisted at UChicago. Of course, he never got in, but to this day it’s a pride and a highlight of his application process.

Oh, yes, he surely applied to the appropriate schools as well, got in one of the better state flagships and is doing great there!

My point is IF you can afford all those fees and the kid understands the consequences, why not to let them dream? At least they will know that they tried and it surely didn’t work.

@pantha33m: Your S should apply to a bunch of schools EA or rolling. Then he can fire off whatever apps he wants to.

BTW, if paying isn’t an issue, I think he and you may be surprised by his success rate at good LACs (and some unis) just below the Ivy tier.

This was my concern and where my guilt comes in. I wish I encouraged him to apply to more than 2 reach schools. At the time he did not think his grades would have been competitive enough. I think he would have liked to know for more than just those two.

D threw in her favorite Ivy (Brown), even though they did not offer the program she wanted most - just b/c her stats were in range, and she wanted to give it a whirl. She was denied - not a surprise in anyway - no hook, and did not spend her HS years creating the king of “package” Ivys often look for - but it was fun to be looking for an email on decision day. She got into other schools (NYU, Boston, Syracuse) that did offer the program she wanted, so she picked one of those (NYU) and has been happy as a clam.

@pantha33m , I hear you. A tiny bit of me is still super annoyed (if and when I even think about it, which your post just made me do) at the “super uninteresting kid who definitely isn’t as good or as smart as my kid,” who somehow go into the tippy top school my kid applied to.

My D did get WLed at a tippy top LAC and is very proud of that, like @koshkas kid. But there was no way we were going to pay for a bunch of apps to tippy top schools. If she had wanted to do it for a lark, she could finance those extra apps with her own cash. It’s far too easy to keep adding reaches. When my son applies, he can apply to reaches that are actually within the realm of possibility. Harvard isn’t within the realm of possibility for most kids, but they apply anyway. I guess a lot of people like to dream.

@Regretful – you can’t determine whether a student was “competitive” (likely to get in) based on stats alone. For a reach school, it is stats plus – the “plus” being whatever the student has that distinguishes him from all the other students with similar stats.

The fact that your son got rejected from the two reach schools where he applied but accepted everywhere else is an indication that he targeted well – he correctly identified match & safety schools. A “reach” by definition is a school where the chances of rejection are higher than the chances of admission. So simple math (probability) tells you that more “reach” applications would probably have yielded more rejection letters.

You’ve expressed regrets that your son didn’t apply to more reach schools, but not offered up any fact or circumstances that gives any reason whatsoever to believe that he would have been accepted at any of the reach schools where you wish he would have applied. All you have said is that you are seeing some posts on CC that indicate that some students who got accepted had similar stats. But that is meaningless – you would need to see the EC’s, LOR’s, Essays - and know something about the quality of the schools the other applicants were coming from, and the significance of their GPA’s & class rank within those schools. You wrote that your son’s stats were on the lower end of the distribution for the reach schools – so by definition he would have needed to have relied on something other than his stats to make the cut.

You wrote that “I wish I encouraged him to apply to more than 2 reach schools.” but don’t reference anything other than your sons grades & test scores. I don’t think you have anything to be regretful about, but if you could go back in time then you would have needed to do more than encourage him to apply to random schools based on ranking. If your son has unusual interests, talents, or accomplishments, perhaps you could have helped him find schools that would value those attributes — that is the criteria that makes a “reach” school start to look more like a “match”. You can call that a hook or simply good research and targeting… but without those attributes admission would have been unlikely.

“At the time he did not think his grades would have been competitive enough.”

And I’m 99% sure he was right.
There’s nothing to regret here. Any more than you should regret spending hundreds of dollars on lottery tickets.

For most applicants, the odds are about that low.

@Regretful I can understand your regret. You know your child better than anyone, and I think you did what you thought was best for him. My kid did not enjoy the process. At all. The process is harrowing for the kid. She did not like riding the emotional roller coaster of self-doubt. Being told that you’re “not good enough” is a scary prospect, especially for kids who are “average” excellent students who have done extremely well in school and who struggle with the burden of expectations that come from always having been “more than good enough” when it comes to school. There is no way to prepare for bad news or know how your child will react to the bad news until it actually happens. Even in hindsight, you can’t know whether applying to more reach schools would yield more prestige or just more heartache. You and your son created a thoughtful, healthy strategy and it delivered great options! His future happiness and success will have less to do with where he went to school than what he did once he got there. You’ll have plenty to brag about then!

You are a good parent. Your son is a good student. These two factors will contribute to future success no matter where he attends school.

D16 applied to 10 US schools as a US citizen living abroad. She also applied to several schools in her country of residency and second citizenship. Because her safeties were in Canada, she applied to 9 reaches and 1 match in the US. In the end, she was admitted to one match and waitlisted at one reach (which I had thought was more of a match, but their acceptance rate plummeted last year). She was straight out denied at 8 others, even though she had 99th percentile scores and good ECs. She now attends a Canadian school. The whole experience was very expensive, stressful and time consuming. In the end her result was no better than if she had just applied to her safeties.

There are several ivy league grads in my extended family. Their lives are no better, and in some cases worse, than other members of the family.

Reaching high enough should be for one’s self and not measured against others - everyone has different Target, Reach and Safety schools which is great because everyone is unique.

“What’s wrong with having regrets?” - Well it’s not particularly constructive since there is no “do-over”

Nonetheless I’ll admit to regretting that we let DS apply to MIT. We really didn’t feel comfortable with full pay, and we were unlikely to get any FA (unless older DD resumed college, and we were unsure if she would). However a good friend was an MIT grad encouraged us to let him apply so there would be no regrets… then make the decision in April in the small chance he was accepted.

Acceptance rate was around 9%. He had near perfect stats, many interesting EC … so I really though he probably had about 15% chance. Well that dang application had FIVE essays, with no exact overlap with the others he spread across apps for 8 other schools. AND there were two special MIT-only teacher recommendations. It added a lot of stress to a semester already overloaded with IB classes and ECs. The extra app fee was a drop in a bucket, but the time/stress factor is hindsight regret. Silly, I know.

Sure, there’s the “what if?” factor, but a lot of kids lack the resilience for that many rejections. If he ended up with a good outcome, be grateful and try not to look back.

@hannuhylu couldn’t have said it better spot on#

My oldest D talked about applying to MIT. It was completely out of the geographic area she had set for herself and frankly didn’t fit some of the other criteria she had set. I asked her if she were accepted would she consider attending and she had to honestly say “no”. I suggested she not bother. I’m not a big fan of my kids applying somewhere just to get a potential ego boost.

@Ivvcsf, yes, can’t imagine going down that path; all of the schools my DD’s applied to, from Reach to Safety, they would have been happy to attend.

This deals with application strategy. Given the very random nature of reaches, you’d want to apply to more of them. If one applies to ten schools, I’d go with five reaches, three targets, and two safeties.

Our DD’s applied to 7 reaches, 6 matches and 3 safer schools - as all were top-20 universities or top-30 LAC’s we felt that amount was warranted.

Unhooked applicants to top 25 schools are rarely admitted if their stats are below the median for accepted students. You really want to be in the top quartile if you are an unhooked applicant to top 20 schools.

I think the best mix of applications is 3 reaches, 4-5 matches, 2-3 safeties.

@dtrain1027, agree and I should have clarified that both DDs profiled at or above the top-25% which is why their list made sense for them.