<p>There's this term that has been floating around lately - overqualified - and it implies that if you apply to a school that has a much lower objective criteria than what you have (their average GPA is a 2.9 for instance, and you have a 3.8) - they'll reject you because its clear that you're using that school as a safety net.</p>
<p>I wanted to know if this was actually true. Our Valedictorian last year got accepted to Harvard and Brown but was rejected from Boston University and Northeastern, and a lot of people presume it was because she was overqualified.</p>
<p>I'm worried because a lot of the schools I'm applying to are considered safeties - one in particular reports that only 4% of their accepted students had been in the top 10% of their class, and only about 19% had been in the top quarter - while I myself am in the top 2%... should I anticipate rejection letters?</p>
<p>I think it’s less about overqualified and more about uninterested.
If you don’t display enough interest in a school, and treat it like a safety,
they are more likely to reject you. I don’t think “overqualified” generally
exists, cause those kids may just be looking for merit money…</p>
<p>That’s why I’m applying - I wanted to see if I could maximize the amount of merit aid I could get because I’d much rather go to a lower tier school for less than 5k a year as opposed to go to BU for 40k a year, ya feels me?</p>
<p>I feel like they do that only because the “overqualified” applicants come off as uninterested. Schools obviously want to protect their yield, so it makes sense for them to reject some applicants that don’t show much interest and have that school as a safety. Why would someone choose the state/local college when they could go to Harvard? No one would, and admission officers probably take that into account.</p>
<p>As far as I can tell from reading stuff on here, Tufts syndrome doesn’t exist as much as people think it does. But some colleges care about demonstrated interest, as others have said. If you’ve demonstrated interests, they’re not going to reject you because your stats are too high.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that not all colleges care about demonstrated interest…many large state schools don’t, and often that’s what people have as safeties.</p>