“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.”
For us the issue was the tradeoff of adding significant stress in return for a small chance that a “big name” or more physically convenient LAC (ie, in this country) would end up being affordable. The application fee didn’t matter at all.
My daughter had straight A’s (had one B+ once on a midterm progress report), and very strong SAT scores. However, very little in terms of ECs and APs. She wanted to go to a small school such as an LAC, and has dual citizenship. As such, with straight A’s she was pretty much certain to get into any small university in Canada, and all were very affordable. However, to afford to go to a top LAC in the northeast of the US she would need to get a significant merit scholarship (I am retired and don’t want to blow up my retirement funds on university).
Just doing the applications would not have been enough. She would have needed SAT preparation. She would have needed to work on essays. She probably would have needed PSAT preparation to become a NMF (she was close without preparation – which we had expected). She would have needed to go through the national merit process (whatever that is). She probably would have needed to think about and get involved in ECs three or four years ago. She would have needed more APs.
There is already too much stress on our high school students. She got into the top 4 small primarily undergraduate universities in Eastern Canada with basically no stress at all. I think that she will do very well there. Somewhere in the back of my mind there has to be a bit of “should she have done all of the long list of things that would have been needed to make Bowdoin or Colby likely” but the answer is pretty clearly no, the stress isn’t worth it.
If you want to go to a reach school,then there is some merit to the notion of playing a numbers game - i.e. applying to a lot of reaches as sort of “taking more shots on goal.”
D1 had excellent stats and so applied to 6 reaches, 3 matches, and 2 safeties. She would have been happy attending any of these 11 schools, but she really wanted to go to a high-end school if she could. Her results were she was accepted at 3 of her reaches, wait-listed at 2 and rejected at 1. She did not pursue any of the wait lists, making the final result of her reaches 3 yes and 3 no.
Now if she had followed the advice to apply to only 2 or 3 reaches, and those happened to be the 2 or 3 that rejected her, she would not have achieved her goal. And many on CC would have sagely consoled us that it’s just impossible for an unhooked kid to get into a top school. But as it was she had 3 fine acceptances to top-end schools to choose from.
Of course this works ONLY IF YOU HAVE THE STATS in the first place. If your stats don’t put you in realistic contention at your reaches then it doesn’t matter how many shots on goal you take, it’s not going to happen.
I am not into the ‘apply to as many as you can’ plan. This year there were several posts on CC about schools changing the FAFSA , and then the parent had to contact all the schools to ‘unchange’ it. There is a lot of follow up to do even
Also, rejection hurts. This isn’t like buying a lottery ticket where you are taking a chance anD hopine your numyers wI’ll be drawn. They are rejecting an actual person. They are judging you, your record.
@Scipio, I agree that if you profile take shot, but if you don’t it’s just punching in the dark. While chances are very low at top-15 universities or top-5 LAC’s, maybe 1 out of 5 applications turns into a WL chance that then becomes an acceptance. If not, the applicant likely has acceptances at other top-25 schools and all it still works out in the end.
Because why settle for 2 rejection letters when you can try for five?
Admission to reach schools isn’t “random” – it is just highly, highly competitive. It seems “random” when some kid with impeccable stats and a slew of awards is turned down… but it is not at all random when a student whose stats and credentials are unremarkable for the reach college doesn’t get in. No one can increase their chances at a long-shot merely by casting a wider net.
A smarter strategy would be more target or match schools, given that the “target” schools are the ones where more applications increase chances of admission.
A “safety” should be one where admission and affordability is virtually guaranteed – so two would be generally be enough.
A target school would be one where there was a reasonable likelihood of admission, so more targets would tend to mean more acceptances.
A reach is one in which the odds are against the applicant – so like any other gamble, more attempts generally means more losses.
@calmom, I do agree that’s where most of the energy should be. No, my DD’s didn’t apply to 15 Ivy/Ivy equivalent LAC’s only to be sitting with a pile of WL and Denials and then wondering what to do. So, they ended up with 7 great top-30 LAC choices with 4/5 target acceptances, 3/3 safer acceptances and then picked from there.
Doing apps takes time and energy, which may be in short supply when school starts.
So I would suggest doing the hard work of identifying safeties/near-safeties you would be satisfied with who have EA or rolling admissions (there are actually a bunch of little LAC’s that not many people have heard of but may be appealing for various different reasons such as NCF, Hawaii Pacific, Illinois College, William Jewell, and Ursinus, among others as well as some big publics) as well as the hard work of determining whether you will want to ED somewhere. Prepare those EA apps (maybe with some reaches and definitely with some safeties) and maybe an ED app.
Then work on the RD apps that you want, but hopefully you’d have some acceptances under your belt and won’t be under so much pressure when the RD deadline rolls around. Possibly fire off an ED2 app as well.
@PurpleTitan, agree that having EA or rolling admission safeties in your pocket could be a good place to start, but those applications take time as well. So for my DD’s, it was about having a reach ED and then a realistic mix of reach, target and safety RD applications.
I think the key is realistic for you, which I don’t think CC projects easily as it’s full of overachievers and is very skewed towards putting schools into reach, target and even safety buckets that are arguably all hard to get into for most students.
Was it stressful that they got deferred in ED and then denied from their dream reach school - yes, but I don’t think they were ever going to buy into what would have been a super safety acceptance for them anyway.
That’s why I said people should do the hard work of determining if there are any safeties/near-safeties that are hidden gems. No, William Jewell’s Oxbridge Honors program isn’t for everyone, but you get to study in an Oxbridge tutorial style, the average ACT of students in that program is decently high (30), and students in that program do get the chance to study at Oxford and some win awards there.
Likewise, NCF, which is kind of like grad-school-lite, really punches above its weight when you look at the proportion of grads they send on to grad school/professional school given their student body test scores and also offer tutorials.
And Sarah Lawrence isn’t terribly hard to get in to (though also doesn’t offer EA or rolling admissions) but also offers tutorials and sends a lot of students to study abroad at Oxford.
For those who don’t mind or like big unis, both UMich and UVa have EA and both are Near-Ivies when you look at their alumni achievements (though granted, may not be safeties).
Meanwhile, for those who are inclined that way, a ton of little LAC’s have 3-2 engineering partnerships with Columbia and WashU.
Now maybe none of these fit your kids, but from what I observe, a ton of kids just blindly apply to only schools in the top 30 or so without doing the work of discovering if there are some neat opportunities at other places.
I’ll admit that I kind of understand the OP’s feeling. We started our college tours with universities where D would be guaranteed very large merit awards. D found one she loved so much that she decided not to apply to any elites. After all the CC talk about how even top students are likely to get rejected at the elites, it seemed like a very wise choice. But then I see threads like “Where are the top 10 students from your high school going?”, and… wow. My kid is #1 at her large high school. Maybe she had more of a chance than we thought? I will always wonder a little.
@PurpleTitan, agree that this shouldn’t be viewed as shooting fish in a barrel. I think USNWR and similar ranking systems make it really hard for an average smart kid to feel good as they scroll through several or many pages to get to their target schools - the idea that a #50-60 ranked school is just ok is crazy.
@Chembiodad: Agree that USNews has done the disservice of laying all schools down on a single dimension.
Once upon a time, a kid may have looked at a NCF/William Jewell/Sarah Lawrence and said “Wow! This school is really unique and has some really special benefits to it” and felt good about themselves by going there. Now they almost have to fight the tide and convince themselves that a school like that really among the tops in terms of opportunities offered even though they are LACs ranked 90th/154th/59th while their peers go to top 20 schools.
Doing the effort for reach school can make sense if it would open the door to significant need-based FA. The tippy top schools are pretty generous with FA.
It only makes sense to apply to those generous meets full need for all reach schools…if you have a chance of being accepted. And your kid wants to go there.
My kids would have surely benefited from the generous need based aid…BUT…they had NO interest in these schools…and didn’t have an ice cube’s chance in hell of getting accepted. So really, it would have been a waste of time to apply.
@thumper1, agree that it needs to follow that sequence - you have a chance of being accepted and your kid wants to go there. Otherwise, it’s just wasted time on applications.
If your S didn’t get into either of his 2 reach schools then chances are he would have had the same end result even if you spent additional time and money having him apply to more reaches.
When my S was rejected by his one reach his attitude was “that is fine – now I know I applied correctly.” I think that if he got into every school he applied to he might have wondered if he should have aimed higher. But the one rejection made him feel confident that he spent his application time and money wisely, reached high enough, and ended up at the right spot for him. And in retrospect, he was correct.
Time to look ahead and stop looking behind. As I said in another post Lafayette is a great school and I hope he has an amazing experience there.
This is slightly off topic, but I noticed a few parents comment that this year was a particularly brutal year for admissions. Is this really true? Can anyone name a recent year when it was better? We keep hearing there are fewer 18 year olds graduating from high school these days, especially in the northeast, so I thought college admissions was going to begin to favor the applicants. Is that day ever going to come?
I think the strategy can vary, for my oldest, a comp sci kid who was the tippy top of his class, had great tests scores, and what seemed like competitive ECs, everywhere that seemed like a reasonable place to apply was either a reach or a safety. So he applied to 6 reaches and 2 safeties. He got into 2 reaches, was waitlisted at 1 and got into both safeties with merit offers.
Younger son was more like the OP - a match heavy list could easily have made sense. However he found a safety he liked better than any of the match schools he considered, so his list also ended up reach heavy. Interestingly he got into a super reach EA much to his and our surprise. He chose another slightly less reachy school to attend.
As to the OP, regrets and second guessing are normal. There’s no way to know if the particular combination of what he had to offer would have been attractive somewhere more reachy - but he’s going to a great school. So good luck to him there.