The ratio of guidance counselors to students in US public high schools today is 481 to 1 on average. I’m guessing that many students never have a meaningful one-on-one discussiong with their GC regarding appropriate college choices. I also think many students don’t fully appreciate just how selective the top 20 colleges really are. They read about students who were admitted with such and such test score and GPA and if they have these stats think they have much better admission odds than they really do. It is also true that these top 20 schools carefully build each incoming freshman class -so many legacies, so many international students, so many URMs, so many athletes. In our case, D was a white female with an income too high for financial aid with no legacy, URM or athletic hooks. Since colleges are very mindful of the male / female balance she was, in reality, competing with students of a similar demographic. What percentage of the incoming class does this represent - probably about 25%, maybe less. What are the academic credentials of this 25% - higher than the overall pool. I think students make the mistake of assuming that the averages for all admitted students are the credentials that they need. A very common mistake is also not realizing how critical an exceptionally high un-weighted GPA and class rank are. The top 20 schools probably represent something like 50,000 admissions spots (Ivy’s are 14,000) out of a total pool of 3.1M US students and probably at least 500K international students applying to all colleges each year. 50K / 3.6M is 1.4%