<p>^ The idea is not perfection. The idea is improvement. :)</p>
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<p>Why? To double your chances of getting in to at least one of them, that’s why.</p>
<p>How this works is very simple. My D1 is a perfect example. She did in fact have “top grades, stats, and scores” and had a “dream to go to a top selective school like Harvard or Yale.” And she applied to both. Yale rejected her and Harvard accepted her. If she had applied to only Yale her dream of attending a top school like Harvard or Yale would not have come true.</p>
<p>The number of students at my daughter’s school on waitlists is astounding. Many of them were waitlisted at their top choice as well as several others, so they plan on waiting it out. It’s as if this has turned into a third round of admissions where students have to demonstrate interest, etc. yet again to still be considered. </p>
<p>If this is a trend going forward, we’ll have EA, RD and WL.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl: While at this point in the process, a waitlist may appear to be anathema to you, your perspective (or, more importantly, the perspective of one of your kids ;)) may change next year if one or both of them gets put on the waitlist at a favored school. It’s hard to know exactly how you’ll react until it happens. </p>
<p>Yes, some colleges are using absurdly large waitlists. But kids do get off them. Opt out if you lack the stomach to weather the uncertainty. Or stay on and take the steps you can to increase your chances of getting off the waitlist. As long as you understand that the odds are poor and you carefully choose a school from among those that admitted you, I see no grave injury.</p>
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<p>Perhaps that’s why the one-size-fits-all RD-only process is so frustrating (to some). Add in some flexibility with early apps, and perhaps more may end up satisfied. (Of course, that also raises objections as JHS has noted.)</p>
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<p>Totally agreed. </p>
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<p>I think the keyword is “understand that the odds are poor.” Anecdotally only, I worry that people who should be thinking of waitlists as “the long shot, maybe you’ll win the lottery but don’t count on it” are thinking of waitlists as “hey, they’re just waiting for a few people they accepted to tell them no and then you’re in.” Does that make sense?</p>
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<p>YES. Exactly. In which case - let’s push the whole thing back. Have EA/ED as planned, get the RD over with by say, March 1 instead of April 1, and then do the melt / WL thing. But it can’t drag on like this. Won’t anybody please think of the Myers-Briggs J’s!! lol</p>
<p>I’m not sure there’s any good answer - I empathize with both parties. When schools cost close to a quarter of a million, it is imperative the student has all the facts before choosing where to go. Unlike the medical residency program where you can have a clearinghouse and each candidate lists the sequence of their preference, and the colleges do the same, and a match can be made, it’s impossible to do that because a safety with good money may trump a reach with little. </p>
<p>HYPMS may not need a lot of options through the WL process, but tier 2 and below really can’t get a solid estimate of how many of their RDs will accept, which drives how much tuition is locked in, how much aid they need to commit, and how many more seats to fill. The schools need real time modeling systems with a dashboard showing their acceptance figures of the profitable and loss-leader students so that they can decide which and how many WL should be offered next. </p>
<p>Maybe the process will get more complex with priority waitlists becoming something like ED phase 2, with a significant number of students decided well after April 1. I suspect this will tip the scale a bit more towards full pays.</p>
<p>Well, I feel pretty much under mass attack, and I succumb.</p>
<p>If you feel it’s wise to apply to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, 12 hardcore east coast LACs, and your state flagship school, I say “knock yourself out, and good luck to you.”</p>
<p>It makes me no nevermind, and I appreciate all the nice comments I received. Yet some were pretty vile, and to you I say “whatever gets you through your night.” I was through with the process a year ago, and it was very simple. My philosophy worked very well, and maybe I was lucky; maybe I was just wise. We’ll never know, but the end result was awesome, and I can only speak from my experience.</p>
<p>If the waitlist bugs you, I won’t read about it. I’ll just sip my wine and say "well alrighty then."</p>
<p>I’m sorry to offend you, heyalb, but I’ve seen some real-life kids who took advice similar to what you expressed who are pretty sad right about now. Sure, they’ll get a fine education at the state flagship, but that’s not what they were led to believe was likely. I think the problem may be the concept of the “reach” school as a longshot that a student includes in the portfolio. That’s really not what it is for really high-stats kids. In terms of academic abilities and accomplishments, there are students–probably tens of thousands of them–for whom Harvard and its peers are really matches. Where they aren’t matches is in the ability to get accepted.</p>
<p>Does anyone have any idea how many kids, total, everywhere, change places based on the waitlists? A couple thousand? Maybe. Ten thousand? No way.</p>
<p>It seems like a big deal now, and will for another few weeks. But it’s not even a medium deal.</p>
<p>A couple years ago, when Harvard went to RD only and wasn’t sure what that was going to do to its yield, it under-admitted RD and then took a lot of kids off its waitlist – like 250. I heard the enrollment VP at Chicago talk about it right after Harvard announced what it was doing, and he was sure there was going to be a whole series of displacements throughout the elite college world, reverberating all summer. Except . . . it didn’t really happen. The Harvard waitlist admittees were scattered all over the collegiate world in onesies and twosies, and lots of places were overbooked and didn’t bother to replace them, and the whole load was digested by June.</p>
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<p>Thanks for your good wishes. That’s pretty much what my daughters did except add Stanford and MIT and take out the 12 LACs and replace them with another match school to go with the flagship school and two safeties to bring up the rear, and it was a pretty useful, manageable list. And it worked out great for both of them. They got rejected at several of the high-end schools but accepted at others and went off to their respective reach colleges and loved it. I’m glad that you now see it’s a sound strategy.</p>
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<p>Can we pretty please not refer to any school that is not HYPMS as “tier 2”? This is a parents forum / board, not a board of unknowledgeable and naive high school seniors!</p>
<p>green678 - Your second “quote” should have had a slash in it, i.e.
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<p>Two years ago my son applied to only 2 reach schools, plus the state flagship, 3 OOS publics, a match uni and a local LAC. He got into both reaches, no waitlist. He would have been OK if he hadn’t gotten into either of the reaches, because he truly didn’t want to attend any of the others, which included all the Ivies. He is kind of an odd-ball, in the best possible way. I’m guessing that the strategy of applying to few reaches works for only a lucky few, and my son was one of those.</p>
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<p>It’s a college board phenomenon, the pile on effect. Nothing personal.</p>