<p>calmom’s strategy makes sense, though I would add an additional caveat: don’t NOT apply to a school that you love because you don’t meet an institutional need, no matter if it is a reach, match, or safety.</p>
<p>I agree – my point is simply that a person should not be falling into the trap of thinking that their chances are somehow enhanced because there are more schools on their list.</p>
<p>i agree that the research might help, but I very much question the targeting, if by that you mean that you can do better by narrowing your reaches down to two or three schools. It MIGHT be that some schools are dying to get somebody who’s been studying Old Church Slavonic, but it might be that Harvard will take your kid because he’s a high-scoring kid from Iowa, and not care at all about the Slavonic. To me, this is similar to the advice I often see on CC that some school (like Chicago, maybe) “cares a lot about the essay,” and thus that a good essay will get you in. Maybe. But there are numerous factors, and you just can’t know what they are. I think you can enhance your chances of getting into a school you want by wanting (and applying to) more schools.</p>
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<p>It is not a trap. Of course, there will be more chances for at least one admission, if you add schools for which you are qualified. </p>
<p>The point for the OP is that:</p>
<p>RULE#1
IF he specifically wants to get admitted to an Ivy.
AND he is qualified academically (around 50th percentile of stats for admitted students for an unhooked applicant)</p>
<p>THEN, his chances of a positive decision increases as he applies to more schools (all the way up to all 8)</p>
<p>RULE#2
There is no downside to applying to more Ivies. Cutting your list only eliminates opportunities. </p>
<p>RULE #3
Everybody has a low probability of admission to an Ivy. The only ones with ZERO chance are those who do not apply.</p>
<p>I don’t believe anybody can reasonably disagree with those rules, even calmom.
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<p>It is completely irrelevant if one has greater chances at some schools that are a closer fit or if some other student with stronger stats has even a greater chance of admission than you. That may be true by that is not the OP’s question.</p>
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<p>If the cost of each round is $50 (cost of an application) and getting an ace is worth $50,000 (getting admitted to an Ivy) , then playing 5 rounds is vastly smarter than just 2.</p>
<p>I think calmom and cellardweller are both correct. Assuming you are qualified - the more Ivies you apply to the more you are likely to get into. However since your chances of getting into an Ivy are very small you should be looking at other colleges that will want the qualities you offer. And finally in order to increase the likelihood of getting accepted at either the Ivies or the other colleges, you should be digging deeper into their websites to see what their institutional needs are and think about how you might sell yourself to make yourself more attractive.</p>
<p>And as we CC parents say often, students should be looking beyond the usual suspects - because there really are lots of great schools out there.</p>
<p>Enjoyed calmom’s analogy and cellardwellar’s response–but can’t help thinking that success–an Ace!–actually costs $50,000 . . . per year.</p>
<p>^Minus financial aid, especially at HYP.</p>
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<p>Bravo. I think you hit the nail on the head, and summed it up in a nutshell, to use two hackneyed phrases in one sentence.</p>
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<p>I disagree – the downside is application cost (over $100 per school, when you factor in ancillary costs like transmission of test scores and financial aid data) – and dilution. By dilution I mean that it’s difficult for an applicant to put 100% effort into one application after another. The common app creates the temptation for applicants to simply submit the same application to multiple schools – and I think that the more generic the application, the weaker it is against competition that is targeted to the specific school. </p>
<p>My d. was waitlisted at a match school where her “why this school” essay focused on superficial stuff, like the campus architecture when she visited. She was stunned and surprised by the waitlist, especially after she had been admitted to most of her reach schools. But I think that in a competitive and yield-conscious environment, the “why this school” essay can be a litmus test for the ad com --it is one very significant way that a student can improve their chances of admission. Harvard and Princeton might not care – but Dartmouth & Cornell ad coms know that high-stat applicants are often applying to HYP as well, and they might be more moved when it is clear that the applicant has knows more about their offerings than the mere fact that they are part of the Ivy League.</p>
<p>The point of diminishing returns in quality of research and application might not be the same for every student. I also don’t think there are too many things one needs to say differently in applications to, say, H, Y, or P. I’m pretty skeptical that any of the Ivies would care that much about what a student knows about their offerings (with the exception of special programs), but I suppose you might market yourself a bit differently to Brown than you would to Columbia, for example, even based on the same qualifications.</p>
<p>From 110 posted I learned that I am not the only one who is crazy to suggest my DS to apply more Ivy schools to increase the chance as one school originally planed.</p>
<p>This was the first time I stepped on a parent thread and it different from other one. I should be careful what I said.</p>
<p>Thanks all the post CC.</p>
<p>My main point is that you should have a well-thought-out strategy that includes safeties, matches, and reaches. I fully agree with calmom that you should carefully research the colleges to find the ones that are the best fit for you (and these may not be the most selective ones). You should carefully evaluate how realistic it is to apply to selective schools (if you are in the bottom 25% in terms of stats for a school, applying to more schools of that same level of selectivity is probably not the most effective strategy). I also think it’s not a good idea to apply to just one super long-shot reach “just to see what happens.” The very high probability is that what will happen is disappointment.</p>
<p>I can see the point of applying to “just one” super long-shot reach just to see what happens – its a predictable result, but no harm done to do it once – and the applicant in that situation is unlikely to get their hopes up. The part I take issue with is the idea of applying to more of the same on the rationale that the odds of getting into a super long-shot reach somehow get better if you apply to more of them.</p>
<p>calmom, we agree on that, for sure. I guess I do think that a teenager might get his or her hopes up too much even for the one super long-shot. What I’ve been saying before is aimed at the kids for whom admission to the reach school is a reasonable possibility (that is, they have the stats to be in the top 50% or so of applicants).</p>
<p>To soccer92boy: I think the answer to your original question is “it depends”.</p>
<p>It is not a random process. If a student is a strong candidate for Ivy league schools, then their chances of getting into one are probably increased somewhat if they apply to several. But if the students is NOT a strong candidate - then applying to 1 or all 8 isn’t going to make a difference – the student will still be rejected.</p>
<p>Going back to your original post, you asked:</p>
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<p>The answer is that we don’t know, because the “chance” of denial depends on individual circumstances. I would say that unless the “chances” on an individual basis are at least 1:3, its not worth applying to multiple schools. Obviously you can’t calculate that with accuracy, but you should be able to make a good guess. The 1:10 admission rate is NOT the same as the individual’s chances. In every applicant pool there are some students who have 0 chance of admission and some with a high likelihood of admission – and many who fall in between. </p>
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<p>If by “stats” you mean test scores, then the answer would be that is not relevant to the determination. At the top schools, having test scores in the top 25% is probably irrelevant – they turn away as many with those scores as they let in, and 75% of admitted students have scores below the top 25%. IF the test scores are the primary factor that you are looking at to evaluate “chances” – then you are making a mistake of attaching too much weight to the scores.</p>
<p>Other factors to look at:
- Class rank: If your son’s school ranks, this is very important. At the Ivy’s, there is a significant fall off in admissions for students who are not ranked at or near the very top of their classes.<br>
- ECs: It would be important that your son has some sort of EC or accomplishment that stands out. Merely being a member of the school’s honor society would not be enough – you want something that marks the kid as being outstanding in some way. There is no set rule as to what that might be – but this is the part of the application that helps draw attention to one applicant in a field of equally highly qualified applicants. </p>
<p>There are many other factors to consider. I would highly recommend the following two books:</p>
<p>“A is for Admission” by Michele Hernandez: It’s an older book, and I don’t agree with everything she says, but this book gave my son and I a real dose of reality, and helped use see why his high GPA and test scores weren’t going to make the grade for Ivy League. It will give you as sense as to how your son might be evaluated. The “admissions index” stuff in the book is very dated, but at the same time it would be a useful exercise to determine how he might stack up in the application process. </p>
<p>“Winning the College Admission Game” by Peter Van Buskirk. This is the book that I think will give you & your son the best overall strategy for improving chances – but part of that is to get past the idea of a “Ivy League” and realistically target the right type of schools for the student. </p>
<p>I would say that your son’s high school guidance counselor is likely to know a lot about the history of the school in terms of Ivy admissions, and how your son compares to applicants in the past from that school who were admitted or turned down when they applied to Ivy schools. So its very possible that the advice given to your son comes from experience: the g.c. may know that students from that high school with similar stats to your son who have applied to many Ivies in past years have been uniformly disappointed. </p>
<p>On the other hand – high school g.c.'s don’t know everything – the counselor’s advice is only one opinion. Your son is right to think for himself and question the advice he has been given – but his starting point needs to be a realistic assessment of his own chances, understanding that it is a holistic process.</p>
<p>Calmom, I totally agree your points and thanks for your input. I do understand the odds or myth of applying Ivy school. I don’t believe there is much hope anyway at the beginning in Sep. Since he got a very good interview and SAT II scores in Dec plus finished all supplements for music and athletic which were a lot of works for him and me. So I suggested to give it a try and wouldn’t hurt. As right now I am more hoping he can win the competition next month for a full ride merit scholarship for a LAC. For an Ivy school is a reach anyway.</p>
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Did you really mean this? My understanding is that the rate of admissions for people with top scores is substantially better than those with lower scores. Sure, 75% of the admits aren’t in the top 25%, but how may applicants are they competing against? Everything is important at the most selective schools, but scores–as the only really objective measure the schools have–are very important.</p>
<p>I think there are more or less threshholds. So once your scores are over 700 in each section - with some over 750 perhaps. The scores are “good enough”. At that point they look at the rest of the application. I don’t think they ever choose Susie over Johnny because she got a 760 CR and he got a 750 CR. But they may well choose Susie because she makes jewelry and sells it, while he does something more mundane.</p>
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<p>I don’t buy that at all especially among Ivy League schools. From my experience that is not how adcoms operate. At a second tier many colleges want you to “show them the love” but at the most selective college level they don’t care. </p>
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<p>Our D used the identical essays for Dartmouth and Cornell that she she used for HYPSM. She was admitted to some HYPSM schools as well as both Dartmouth and Cornell. There was no rationale for her to present herself differently to Dartmouth or Cornell.</p>
<p>Here is an extract from the Dartmouth Admissions Office in response to the specific question on how to increase your chances of admission. It could just as well have been written by the Harvard, MIT or Swarthmore admission’s office. This is the approach we took with our daughter when she engaged in the application process. </p>
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<p>In one word what they want is authenticity, not “show us that you have interests that match some specific need of our college that you have researched”.</p>
<p>You simply cannot make 10 different essays that emphasize different things and sound authentic.</p>
<p>Our D worked very hard over the summer composing two main essays: one over her passion for science and medicine and another over a particular interest of hers (painting) that showed another side of her personality. She literally spent hundreds of hours finetuning them to make them sound authentic. She used these two essays in virtually all applications from HYP to MIT, Middlebury and Smith College (her one safety). If there was a “Why This school?” questions, it generally took ten minutes to answer it. She had visited virtually all her school choices so she could easily come up with one or more specific points that reassured admission she had not picked the school randomly. She was extremely well prepared for he interviews and essentially presented the exact same person in all meetings. The consistency and authenticity of her presentation is what I think in the end got her admitted to a number of highly selective colleges. The identical application also got her several large merit scholarships at slightly less selective colleges, in large part because these colleges knew her application was strong enough for “Ivy Material” and that she would probably enroll at a more selective college without such an incentive. She did not try to claim that every school was her first choice or even to hide that she was applying to other selective colleges. The interviewers would have expected as much. She had the stats but more than that she provided a very clear picture of who she really was in her application and interviews. </p>
<p>College applications are like job applications. You don’t make a different resume for each job application. Your job experience does not change. It is what it is. You want it to be clear and to the point. You need to present your achievements and qualities so that somebody can quickly get a feel for who you are and what you can offer. Of course, you include a different cover letter, but that is far from creating an entirely new resume.</p>
<p>Cellar, Very good point, applying job v. school.</p>
<p>My DS has two main essays also. After all of hard works, supplement for art and athletic, had been done, there is no reason just apply one. Time to cross fingers now.</p>
<p>I did not aware that less selective college could offer more FA than most selective college. As a parent I more concern the FA than academic because very schools he applied are good any way. So the school that he is happy with and I can afford then there is not much I can ask for.</p>