If she’s really that good, the chance of her getting rejected by 17 schools is probably small, independence not withstanding. Nonetheless, every year there are students with no place to go, and every year, there are surprisingly good colleges who came up short who are looking for more applicants. If getting rejected by 17 schools doesn’t tell you to lower your sights, then I’m not sure what will. Also, if you’ve written 17 applications, it shouldn’t be hard to recycle an essay to apply to more.
A forced gap year is rarely absolutely necessary.
My daughter would have done the same thing. Convinced her to apply to a few “non-ivy type” schools, and she was able to get a full ride at Southern Illinois. So waiting for the acceptance/rejection crunch is not life or death, but an inevitable decision to be made. Pressure about education often doesn’t allow students to understand balance.
If the person applying to 17 even has borderline elite scores and/or writes well, can see them at worst getting into 3 or 4 of the choices (not knowing all of them). But there may have been opportunity passed up by this strategy.
An argument could be made that no 17 yr old is capable of making college application decisions realistically, anyway. If you have top 1-2% stats, applying to lots of top schools has become the norm. My DS thought he wanted a top 20 school and applied to several. Ended up at a top LAC and loves it. Realizes now, as we did then, that he is much happier at a small LAC than he ever could’ve been at a top 20 U. But he had to find that out himself.
A 4.0/35 student has more actual potential safeties than a typical college applicant. But if s/he is picky and only wants to go to a super-selective school, s/he may not have any safety that s/he likes.
There may be no guarantee if the school does not state any automatic admission (or scholarship) criteria. But there are many schools which do state such criteria.
I applied to 2 schools with an acceptance rate between 30% and 40%. For my course (Computer Science) as an international, it would lie below 15%. The rest of my schools all had <15% acceptance rates overall.
FWIW, I’ve been accepted into 4 schools (2 matches).
McGill looked very appealing wrt having straightforward standards for admission and setting the bar fairly high. Also has a minimalist application (no essays or recs) due later than most US schools.
@ccconfid, you need to start your own thread when you have an unrelated question.
@MurphyBrown, that is baloney that it is beneath valedictorian/35 type students to go to the same school their classmates end up at. Likely they will be going for a much cheaper price, which could be the smartest move for them. And odds are that their academic skills will help them be near the top of their college class, which has obvious benefits. Believe it or not, my kid with a 2380 SAT and across the board 800s on subject tests didn’t attend the highest ranked schools she got into. She preferred a school that was a great fit instead – imagine that.
I think the fact that some kids are successful using this strategy leads to others doing the same. Just this week I read about two kids from one high school (in NJ if I’m recalling correctly) who will be attending Harvard this fall. According to the article, one of them only applied to Harvard, Yale and Princeton (or Stanford?) and was admitted to all three. I wish I saved the article and can’t find it now, but I immediately thought, wow that kid isn’t on CC! But it worked for him.
The problem is when people with high scores think they are better people than those with lower scores. The whole “I have a 35 ACT/2350 SAT, thus I am too smart to associate with those people with gasp a 2000 or a 28 or heaven forbid a 1500 or a 20” attitude is just ridiculous. Just because someone is technically “smarter” doesn’t mean they are the best team member and all the other jazz. Are kids really not able to connect with other kids over music, memes, social media, sports, and life in general just because of a couple tests?
I mean, statistically speaking, since she is a top student and such, she should be able to get into at least one of the 17 schools she applied to. The more top schools you apply to, the better your chances of getting into at least one of them. And your chances get even better when you combine them with good scores and a good GPA.
My D left a safety for RD to apply but she got several early admissions. So she did not apply to safety at the end. This may well be the case. With 17 schools that may include multiple matches, so safety may be not neccessary.
I think the point is, if this is how your son viewed the state flagship, it was never a safety. Yes, academically it was a safety but so were probably hundreds of colleges.
Not that he needs to know this now, but the trick is to find the safety he is happy to attend, not just pick the default “safety” school of one’s flagship state. That’s why this is often the most difficult part of the college search.