To the extent that it’s a numbers game, it ain’t personal. And you’re certainly on the mark asserting that you can do great things without a highly selective school. Most every thoughtful student can.</p>
<p>I’d urge you not to equate deferral with rejection. Personally, I equate being waitlisted with rejection, and I believe that the numbers support that thinking.<br>
I’d suggest that deferral is more like not being able to seal the deal early, but still being in the running – a huge difference.</p>
<p>Both my kids were accepted to all the schools they applied to. Did that mean they didn’t have enough reaches? Maybe, but since they both had good schools to pick from, it seemed a better situation than the reverse.</p>
<p>No one needs reaches – they are optional for a student who has an affordable safety. If the student’s first choice school is an affordable safety, s/he may need only make that one application.</p>
<p>But how do you determine a safety?
We didn’t understand about safetys and reaches, however we did use common sense & looked for schools with admittance rates above 25%
;)</p>
<p>A safety is a school that the student is certain to be admitted to, certain to be able to afford to attend, and able to fulfill his/her academic and other needs at.</p>
<p>Is anyone else finding it difficult to convince your student to not take these college decisions personally?</p>
<p>Highly competitive college admissions may be the child’s first exposure to such low acceptance rates. For the past 12 years, few kids experience situations where 80+% are rejected.</p>
<p>Some of the frustration is the lack of apparent consistency in the decisions. It is easier to explain when the kids that did get accepted have done something better. However, frequently that is not the case. </p>
<p>There are many good things about holistic admissions, but one negative is that it seems to provide admissions offices with carte blanche to pick whoever they want with impunity. As long as the aggregated metrics look reasonable, no one asks any tough questions. </p>
<p>It would be nice to see the admissions officer’s performance critiqued in detail the way they critique all of the applicants.</p>
<p>College rejections of stats-appropriate applicants might be a big tragedy if there weren’t so many good opportunities for students. It’s very rare that a student cannot find a reasonably good fit somewhere, even if dream school A said no. A student with a well-crafted list is going to end up somewhere fine.</p>
<p>There are many reasons why adcoms pick some students over others: geographical diversity, gender diversity, racial diversity, diversity of academic or extracurricular interests, ability to pay, etc. The college has institutional needs and preferences that the applicant will not necessarily know about or understand. I think adcom performance is subject to a market-based critique over the years because their decisions affect institutional reputation and desirability. The school is not looking at this year’s crop or even an individual student. Fairness depends on where you’re sitting at the table. That is why it’s important not to take admissions decisions too personally, although being disappointed is only human.</p>
<p>^People on this site talk about geographic diversity so much… In my experience as an applicant from Kentucky, knowing my school’s general results as well as my friends’ and acquaintances’, it is hardly a factor at all.</p>
<p>^^^
Not our experience. My son has lowish stats for our region, but better stats when compared to the U.S. overall. The further we go from home, the better he seems to fare with admissions, all other things being equal (and, of course, they never are).</p>
<p>That said, at a certain point (once a candidate clears the ‘minimal acceptable’ threshold), there is indeed an arbitrary element to holistic admissions. A student could well be a desirable candidate at a school one year, but not fit the target demographic the next.</p>
<p>I’d agree with NJSue – ‘rejections of stats-appropriate applicants might be a big tragedy if there weren’t so many good opportunities for students’.</p>
<p>The more competitive a school’s admit process is…it’s like a funnel, not everyone will squeeze through the narrow end. That simple. You need to put your best foot forward in the apps because that’s all they have to go on. It’s not about what the applicant wants or how much he dreamed of this school or how “big” and successful she was in her own high school. It’s about how you project what that college feels works there, how you show them you fit there, know what they offer and made a considered decision to apply. I don’t see disparity between making your best app and knowing there aren’t enough places for every kid out there. When my kids hit the submit button, I told them, now the ball is in the colleges’ court. Our responsibility was for them to do the very best they could in picking colleges and representing their worthiness in their apps. D1 got into all but the Ivy. I know folks there and still hope they regret the reject (as if) now that they know more about her successes.</p>
<p>Yes, geo diversity is a threat. Or a benefit. Depending.</p>
<p>*^People on this site talk about geographic diversity so much… In my experience as an applicant from Kentucky, knowing my school’s general results as well as my friends’ and acquaintances’, it is hardly a factor at all.
*</p>
<p>Has it become harder for students to find safeties these days? Seems that more schools have gotten more opaque and holistic with admissions, and have started considering “level of applicant’s interest”, so the universe of potential safety schools is smaller. It also seems that students (and sometimes parents) posting here are getting pickier than students in the past, ruling out potential safeties.</p>
<p>Financially, net price calculators should help, but it appears that few students and parents actually use them before being suggested to on these forums.</p>
<p>I think so. Once upon a time, the safety for many was the state flagship.
The relentless rise in tuition, particularly at private institutions, has driven
more students towards the in-state flagship. Intelligent students with less exemplary records have a harder time getting in.</p>
<p>Further, I suspect that, for privates, more places are increasingly being allocated to full-pay students (domestic & foreign) and, for public schools, OOS students.</p>
<p>Lastly, the ongoing rise in tuition increasingly disenfranchises students for whom affordability is the key criterion of a ‘safety’ school.</p>
<p>Mom2, I do think there are slight differences east to west. My kids while accepted at some schools in the east were consistently accepted at more selective colleges in the midwest and west than in the east. I found that interesting. But maybe it’s a sheer volulme thing in the NE - so many kids, so many “small” colleges. Fortunately, none of my kids were really upset about rejections. My middle one pinned his reject letter to his locker because it was his only rejection (a NE college). None applied to colleges in the south so can’t say what would have happened in that region. My last was alittle upset about a Bucknell rejection because he really liked Bucknell, but he’s at a better engineering uni anyway so no loss and he might have picked the better engineering school anyway even if accepted at Bucknell. I think kids that play sports might handle rejections better because they spend their life getting picked (or not picked).</p>
<p>We can have this debate one more time… just because a college considers level of interest does NOT mean it can’t be a safety. It DOES mean that you can’t just tack on a school at the last minute that you have never visited, never talked to the rep at a college fair, have not asked to be on their mailing list, haven’t gone to any sessions they held in your city for prospective students, make sure you don’t put another college’s name in that college’s essay, etc. I don’t think it makes it any harder to find a safety, but it does mean you have to actually at least ACT like you are interested. That is not very hard…</p>
<p>As has been said, it is personal. When the applications are holistic, and they claim to evaluate the whole person (how clever, how much of a leader, how dedicated to public service, how talented), it’s just dishonest to say that a rejection is not a reject of the person.</p>
<p>But I think people have to realise that it’s comparative. The rejection doesn’t mean “we don’t think you are a good person”, it means “there were other people who are better than you”. And that can be tough to take, but nobody should be able to make it to 17 or 18 years old without realising that there are other people better than them.</p>