<p>I would just like to add a few points here. First, I think the idea that the top schools are fundamentally different from each other is something of an exaggeration. There are many, many students who would be perfectly happy at just about any of them. Certainly, a student might prefer Brown over Dartmouth, but he still might prefer Dartmouth over a lot of other schools. Second, there are students who are very interested in going to colleges with high standards and very high-performing students–and this factor may be more important than climate, size of school, etc. For a student like this, 2 or 3 reach schools may not be enough. As several people have noted, while the admissions process is (probably) not random, its results can look random to us, because we don’t know what factors are being considered. You can hedge against that apparent randomness by applying to more schools.
In sum, I think every applicant should have safety, match, and reach schools–but I continue to think that for students shooting for reach schools with low admissions rates, it makes sense to apply to more reaches. What the point of diminishing returns is might depend on your ability to write all those essays, and on the patience of your GC.</p>
<p>To reply to Cardinal Fang, #60, I see your point that pH and pY can change after the application has been submitted, based on subsequent accomplishments and updates. In fact, there might not be a particular time when both pH and pY have had their final updates. However, just before the decision is reached at Harvard, pH is definitely fixed. So, suppose that pH reaches its final value first. The decision by Harvard, if not communicated to Yale in some way, does not change pY, for that applicant. The key here is the decision, and not the rating of the applicant.</p>
<p>It is also possible that we don’t agree, because you have the same view as Hunt, that the process is (probably) not random.</p>
<p>What I am trying to do with pH, pY, and pP is to separate out the effect of quality of the applicant, factors which would influence the decision in the same direction at all schools, vs. the remaining effects that I think are best represented as random.</p>
<p>So GPA, SAT I, SAT II, ACT, rigor of high school courses, Intel, Siemens, IMO/IPO/IBO, published books, . . . all go into determining pH, pY, and pP.</p>
<p>The “left-over” variables, that I treat as random, are all the happenstance factors that may influence a student’s application at one school but not the others.</p>
<p>There have also been instances of kids who had fantastic apps and were rejected everywhere.</p>
<p>Some examples of what I group as randomness–these are a bit comical, but I think you will get my drift:</p>
<p>a) The student is a math whiz who plays the French horn in the all-state orchestra, has 4 years of varsity lacrosse (leading the team to the state championship), and volunteers at a food bank, where he has found a way to ensure food safety while getting donations onto the shelves three times as fast as before. At one Ivy, the applications happen to be stacked up, so that all 5 applicants who are math-whiz-French-horn-lacrosse-playing-food-bank volunteers hit the admissions representative’s desk on the same day. The student’s application is last in the pile. At another Ivy, the student’s application is the first of this type, or they are spaced out over several weeks, so the ad rep has not grown tired of students of this type.</p>
<p>b) The student shows chihuahuas and has two Grand Champion chihuahuas. Stereotypes about chihuahuas and dog shows apply across all schools. But at one school, the student’s two ad reps (who read the full file) have a Mastiff and a Great Dane.</p>
<p>c) The student’s last name is Torquemada, Quisling, or Petain. The ad rep does or does not recognize the historical figure and is or is not affected by the coincidence. Or the student has the last name Cavendish. One ad rep connects this with the Cavendish Physics Laboratory at Cambridge, and has slightly positive associations with the name. At a different school, the ad rep thinks this is an old-money, too-WASP-ish name.</p>
<p>d) The student has founded a business. It’s called Acme Something-Or-Other. One ad rep cannot get Wiley E. Coyote out of his mind, when looking at the file.</p>
<p>e) Events occur that are particular to one ad rep at a specific school: The ad rep’s team won/lost the Superbowl, the ad rep spilled Pepsi on his keyboard in the morning, the ad rep filled out income taxes the night before and discovered that he had a large refund coming/owed the IRS a lot, the ad rep received an unexpectedly nice Valentine’s gift from a significant other/received nothing, the ad rep got stale croissants at the local bakery . . . All minor, and it’s professional to ignore them. But have you never found your mood and the quality of your work influenced by minor things such as this?</p>
<p>f) Personal interactions in the admissions committee affect the outcome. At one school, the student’s ad rep has just finished successfully arguing for another candidate, and it’s hard for the ad rep to push a second person immediately afterward. Unfortunately for the student, he/she is the “second person.” At another school, the student’s ad rep has just lost 8 arguments for admission in a row, and the committee feels it’s time to give the ad rep one–and that’s the student. This sort of thing does happen.</p>
<p>All causal in a sense, but not really connected with the quality of the applicant and application, which should go into pH, pY, and pP.</p>
<p>Quant, I don’t think we’re disagreeing here. I agree that one part of the process is random. I like your examples too.</p>
<p>And to return to the original question:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Any counselor who tells a student this is an idiot. There is definitely some element of randomness in admissions to very selective schools, and colleges acknowledge this. The only way applying to a second school would not increase the odds of admission would be either </p>
<p>1) The student is so amazingly cancer-curingly Olympic-medal-earningly world-hunger-solvingly wonderful that he is a shoo-in at the first school. His chances, already 100%, cannot be increased.</p>
<p>or 2) The student, despite his great stats, has some terrible disqualification-- the small matter of being a mass murderer outweighing the perfect grades and scores, say-- so that he has a 0% chance of being admitted to any Ivy. Zero plus zero is still zero.</p>
<p>I guess it’s a quibble to say that random isn’t the same as unpredictable, or unrevealed. Thus, for example, if Harvard has some idea of how many people it wants to take from Iowa this year, that isn’t random, but it may be unpredictable from the point of view of an applicaant. Perhaps a way of putting this which would incorporate things like this, as well as QuantMech’s examples, is that it seems highly likely that colleges make admissions decisions, in part, based on numerous factors that do not directly relate to the personal academic qualifications or accomplishments of the applicants, and that applicants are unable to fully know what those factors are. If this is true, and if the factors vary from school to school, then applying to more schools will increase, by some unknown amount, the likelihood that an applicant will be accepted by one of the schools. After all, in hindsight, we see that there were some applicants who had 100% likelihood of getting into one top school–because they did so–and 0% chance of getting into another–because they were rejected.</p>
<p>
Only if the applicant has a reasonably good chance of getting admitted to an Ivy at all. We don’t know the context.</p>
<p>Quite possibly, the student is a nice kid who gets mostly A’s and wants to attend an Ivy League college, but simply isn’t what the counselor sees as Ivy material. Maybe the kid has good stats, but not much else – no EC’s, a flat and unengaging personality, a prosaic writing style – so its unlikely that he will get strong recs or write a dynamic essay. Maybe he also has few APs, so even though the GPA is high, the colleges will look at his transcript and conclude he avoided challenge. In other words, the raw GPA and test scores look good, but everything else needed for Ivy admission is missing. </p>
<p>So the counselor is trying to gently tell the kid that there is no chance whatsoever of getting admitted to an Ivy League college – but being gentle, uses phrases like “it would be pretty tough for you to get in”, rather than being more blunt. The kid responds by wondering whether the chances would be better if he applied to several Ivies – and counselor, to emphasize the point that 0 x 4 = 0… says no.</p>
<p>Even if there is a 2% chance of getting in, and one commits the fallacy of merely multiplying the chances – 2% x 4= 8%, which is still an almost negligible chance for a weaker candidate. </p>
<p>I think that a student has to be a very strong candidate relevant to the applicant pool before more colleges will realistically increase chances. On the upper end – the kids who seem to have it all – then I do think applying to more schools would increase chances, simply following the same rationale that I use when I assert that a kid should apply to at least two true safeties. In other words – more as a failsafe than as as a way of boosting odds.</p>
<p>calmom, I agree with you that the scenario you describe is a possibility. On the other hand, though, I have heard again and again on these boards and elsewhere that three or four reaches are enough. I just don’t think this is true if the reaches we are talking about are the most selective schools. People who are very, very qualified–superstars–get rejected from Ivies and other top schools all the time. You can research what they are looking for all you want, but that isn’t going to give you confidence in narrowing down a list that contained, say, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Duke. All of these schools are looking at factors you can’t evaluate adequately.</p>
<p>I think it’s fine for top student to apply to 6 to 8 reaches and 2 safeties. Both my kids are doing that with fine results for the first and so far promising results for the second. I think for a kid that is qualified (great grades, great scores, great recommendations) you up your chances at the reaches schools the more you apply to - assuming you don’t bomb supplements from overextending yourself. I also agree that for most kids applying to all the Ivies, plus Caltech, Stanford and MIT is silly - you probably wouldn’t like all of them.</p>
<p>ist DD applied to 9 schools several years ago, 3 very high reaches, 3 reaches, 3 matches. rejected at 3 , waitlisted at 3 and accepted at 3. all not the schools we expected… bottom line after all the numbers and predictions- she went to the highest reach on paper (i almost protested the application because i thought it would just be a horrible disappointment) totally not predictable! and did just fine!</p>
<p>
Then I would feel that the person isn’t doing adequate research. </p>
<p>If the student can’t figure out what each college wants… then how is the student going to manage to tailor their application toward each school? And if the student doesn’t do that – if the student merely submits the same materials to each school – then in a sense the student is reducing their “chances” across the board, because at each school they are competing against high-qualified applicants who have submitted carefully crafted, targeted applications.</p>
<p>calmom, you must live in a region that is information-rich, when it comes to figuring out what each college wants. When QMP was applying, we knew a just few of the outcomes of applications from three years’ worth of a handful of top students, applying to random (excuse the word choice!) selections of top schools–plus the hints that can be gleaned by inference from the schools’ web sites and other materials, and from tours. We generally didn’t know the actual GPA’s or scores of those students, to say nothing of the full scope of their extra-curricular accomplishments (though we knew of a few), their essays, or their recommendations–just general impressions of strength. Not much of a database to go on! No Naviance. I doubt that it would have permitted reliable predictions for local students anyway, based on the few data points we did have. Local guidance counselors with thirty years of experience made public comments such as, “Who knows what the schools are looking for?”</p>
<p>In the years since QMP applied, I have gained a much clearer view of what various colleges do want, from the collection of comments on CC–enough to actually be of some help to later applicants. CC was in a comparatively rudimentary state when QMP was applying. But beyond that, there is no way QMP would have spent the time reading CC to figure out more about the college’s preferences!</p>
<p>I think we are both agreed that the point is not for an applicant to structure his/her academics and extra-curriculars to suit the colleges, and definitely not to be phony about it, but rather for the applicant to take his/her authentic experiences and future plans, and highlight the aspects that a particular school would be looking for, rather than other aspects.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well said. That is what I’ve been working with S1 on. In addition, it is important that essays are specifics to each of the colleges one applies to. The overall application has to give the reader the feeling that the applicant is specifically applying to the reader’s school and that the applicant knows what draws him/her to the school beyond the school’s name. I think this is where the application fatigue may kick in — it is time consuming to do thorough research on a college and craft a tailored application.</p>
<p>I think research can tell you a lot about what schools you may want (i.e., whether you’d rather have a core curriculum or not), and that may help in terms of what to say in your essay. But I think it’s a lot harder to claim that research will tell you which schools, out of a list like my imagined one (Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, and Duke) are most likely to want you. I agree that your applications should be targeted (one reason there is probably a point of diminishing returns with respect to numbers), but if you’re a student with good stats and good ECs, interested in a fairly standard major, lots of tops schools *might *want you.</p>
<p>
I think my younger son did this to an extent. My older son (who was more one-sided in his interests) just crafted an application that said this is who I am (computer nerd who loves to read) and sent it off. </p>
<p>For my younger son the process was more crafting an application that showed him off as worth having despite a less than perfect GPA. He applied to schools he liked, knowing that some of them were iffier because there was no way to massage his application (especially within the format of their particular applications) to make them accept him. I’ve got my own predictions about who is going to accept him, it will be interesting to see if I am right!</p>
<p>My younger son has schools with and without core curriculum. He figures he’s interested in taking a variety of courses any way so he doesn’t mind a core, but he’s not looking specifically for places without cores.</p>
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</p>
<p>There is plenty of evidence of this being the case, especially at the most selective colleges. </p>
<p>The biggest hint is the uniformly high yields at HYPSM averaging 70%. Many top students apply to more than one of these schools and if there was high correlation in admission the number of cross-admits should be high. In fact, it is not. How do we know this? If there were large numbers of cross-admits among HYPSM, it would simply be IMPOSSIBLE for all these schools to enroll the vast majority of their accepted applicants. Some yields would be high and some low. They can’t all be be high unless the number of cross-admits is very low.</p>
<p>Another data point can be obtained by perusing the admitted threads of the most selective colleges here on CC. CC skews heavily to applicants to the very selective colleges and provides therefore a better window on admission to selective colleges than a single high school could provide. It is very common to find students on CC with perfect stats rejected from top schools. It is also not unusual to have students admitted to a highly ranked college and also be rejected from a number of lower ranked colleges. Even among admitted students the number of reported cross-admits to top schools is actually staggeringly low. Each year, the HYPSM cross-admit contest on CC includes only about 60 STUDENTS TOTAL admitted to more than one of HYPSM. And this is from a pool of many hundreds of applicants admitted to at least one of them. There are far more students admitted to Harvard and rejected by Yale than admitted to both even though the schools have very similar admissions profiles. </p>
<p>With acceptance rates in the single digits, the process is becoming increasingly similar to admission to med school where even the best applicants need to apply to over a dozen schools to gurantee admission to one medical school. Even the very best applicants, on the basis of academic achievements are no longer guaranted admission. At best, a highly qualified applicant (over 50th percentile of admitted students) may only have a 25% chance at Harvard, MIT or Stanford. Valedictorians with perfect SAT scores are routinely rejected at these schools. High stats just gets you considered in the same manner that high MCATs and GPA may get you considered for a top med school. But because the supply of academically talented students (or athletes and legacies) is many times greater than any of these schools can admit, the final selection will depend on factors largely out of the control of the applicant. </p>
<p>In our case, our D appled to 16 highly selective colleges including 7 Ivies, MIT and Stanford three years ago. She got in to 3 reaches out of 9, (and 5 matches out of 7) which made sense statistically. Had she cut the list to 4 or 5 reaches she may not have been admitted to any of her top choices. I don’t believe she compromised her chances by applying to that many schools as she worked extremely hard on her application to present who she really was. She appealed to some schools and not others and we have no way of telling why, even after the fact. We didn’t believe in “packaging” her for any particular school as such attempts are generally very transparent and often backfire. For her, there was no downside in applying to more schools. She would also have been genuinely happy at any of the school she applied to. Her primary interest was top notch academics in a mid-size research university environment and all her choices offered that.</p>
<p>^That. </p>
<p>(10 chars).</p>
<p>^Ditto. Very useful post by cellardweller. Good point about the high yields. I should probably revise the hypothetical table I posted earlier, to reduce the number of cross-admits at H and Y and increase the number of Yes/No outcomes.</p>
<p>Agree with cellardweller. Good post.</p>
<p>And I <em>do</em> think it is possible for students to fall in love with both Dart and Brown although they <em>are</em> very different. They can be loved for different reasons.</p>
<p>Since the Ivy league are great schools, I don’t see why a particular student should not apply to as many as strike his/her fancy and the application budget can allow.</p>
<p>My S refused to apply to HYP because he thought his chances were too low. He eschewed Columbia because he felt very familiar with NYC and wanted something a bit different. But he did apply to Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, and U of Chicago (rest were LAC’s.) His acceptance rate: 50%. More applications did yield more acceptances for sure and more choices.</p>
<p>
So, if he had applied to only three of those, his admission rate would have been either 66% or 33%, If he had applied to only two, it could have been 0.</p>