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<p>Especially if they don’t even try.</p>
<p>What I see happening a lot is students being accepted to great schools, but schools that either don’t meet 100% of need ( &/or giving much merit aid), or students who have a larger EFC than their family can afford. </p>
<p>I was very aware of this & I am afraid my daughter was discouraged from applying to schools that I felt that we wouldn’t be able to afford. But I was also afraid if she got into her dream school, I wouldn’t be able to say no & we would go broke paying for it!</p>
<p>But still since grad school is in her future- I feel OK with the current expenditure.</p>
<p>She was middle of the pack for her peers- who attend schools ranging from Columbia to the local CC, even though you can guess who she compares herself & her school to.</p>
<p>My older d. went to a great school, with amazing assistance (that went up almost automatically when we were faced with two live-threatening illnesses in our family), and got a fantastic education. Now she is an Ph.D. program at an Ivy, where she has NO Ivy peers. Not one. Not a single one in five years. Dozens applied: none of them got in. There is ONE (in five years) from a top-three LAC.</p>
<p>One of our friends lived in a house off-campus at his flagship with a group of other like-minded students. They are now all in grad school – Duke, Cambridge, Caltech, MIT and JHU. They took the merit $$, made the most of their experience, took lots of grad courses as UGs and have done quite well for themselves. One of them got interviews at every school to which he applied – including H, P and MIT. The ones who didn’t go to grad school (the CS/math majors) are at Google, et al.</p>
<p>These were students who turned down these same schools for UG.</p>
<p>I think adding a lot of matches is a better idea than love thy safety. A student has a better chances getting into one of the matches if this student has stats to apply to HYPS. But that does not mean one should not add one or two safeties on one’s college list.</p>
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<p>I think that was kind of my point in the OP.</p>
<p>I think what people with ivy-level stats need to understand, though, is that those tippy top schools are a crapshoot, and you can put them on your list, but you have to have a well-developed list of slightly-lower-caliber schools as well. Have some reachy-matches and real matches in addition to the super-reach schools that no on can “count on” getting into, as the kids mentioned in the OP seem to have done. And yeah, have a safety you like too. But really, the problem was having a list of all reachy-reaches and couple of hastily-added safeties, with nothing in between.</p>
<p>I will add that even though my DS’s safety looked “well-thought-out”, it wasn’t truly a financial safety until my DS got confirmation that he was a NMF, and we didn’t have any true financial safety that didn’t include that assumption, which did make me a bit nervous. We knew there was no reason why he shouldn’t be (once we knew he was a NMSF), but… without the NMF scholarship it would have been a stretch (as our state U would also have been) – we fall squarely into the middle class “can’t afford our FAFSA EFC” category, so needed either substantial merit or especially generous need-based aid.</p>
<p>Would also posit that if one is a young woman with HPY-type numbers, this does not mean one can use top LACs as safeties. I have seen some East Coast young women who were interested in LACs not do as well as one might have expected, given their excellent records. Pay attention to the gender balance at some of those schools.</p>
<p>W&M is known in our area for being a very tough admit for East Coast OOS young women. (OTOH, they have good polisci/history/IR, really like IB diploma candidates, and with a 60/40 F/M ratio, it was on S2’s list til he got an EA acceptance from one of his top two choices.) YMMV.</p>
<p>My understanding from reading CC is that Ivies and any school ranked in the top 10 is a reach for everyone. But is there a threshold at which a selective school can be a “match” for a student whose stats are in the mid-range for the school, or even the top quartile, such as an admission rate of more than xx% or a ranking of less than xx?</p>
<p>Wrote this a couple of days ago and lost it in the ether…</p>
<p>Both my kids felt they could make the flagship work for them. S1 felt more strongly about that than S2, but S1’s major is very highly ranked there, and the advisor at the time cut through red tape like butter. He knew he could get the placement he needed, as we had seen his friends do so. </p>
<p>S2 strongly preferred a smaller school, so while he applied to the flagship, he also applied to a mid-size research U that had a ~40% acceptance rate at the time. The school also liked IB candidates and offered merit $$.</p>
<p>Neither one would apply to a school unless he could see himself attending and liking it. They both put a lot of research into it and came up up with lists of criteria that reflected who they are. Neither picked the “top ranked” school to which he was accepted. There have been times when I have questioned (to myself) their choices, but then there also times when I was VERY thankful they wound up where they did, and for reasons that had everything to do with who they are, not because of the perceived ranking, yada yada yada.</p>
<p>In retrospect, I am thankful that each of my kids tool the selection and application process seriously and spent a lot of effort defining what they wanted. I am thrilled each listened to his inner drummer. Should probably tell them how much I appreciate their efforts, because I have learned from my years on CC and from friends, nieces and nephews, that the experience we had was definitely NOT typical. 
(Am dealing with a niece right now with fabulous numbers, class rank, etc. and all she can say is “whatevs.” GRRR.)</p>
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<p>Well, I guess you’d be more familiar with Florida community colleges’ rigor or lack thereof compared to the state universities.</p>
<p>Here in California, community college students do transfer to the flagship-level state universities (including Berkeley and UCLA), do well, and go on to top graduate or professional degree programs (PhD, MD, etc.). Here is an [url=<a href=“Berkeley News | Berkeley”>Berkeley News | Berkeley]example[/url</a>] and [url=<a href=“Berkeley News | Berkeley”>Berkeley News | Berkeley]another[/url</a>], although there are others, including those in Berkeley’s engineering division.</p>
<p>Obviously, the California community colleges include a lot of relatively poor students, but a good student who goes to such a school can get a good lower division education to prepare him/her for upper division work at the flagship-level state universities.</p>
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<p>These days, a lot of private schools use “level of interest” as an admissions criterion, presumably to reject applicants using them as safeties under the assumption that they are less likely to attend (so that the schools can keep their yield rates up).</p>
<p>Originally posted by CountingDown:
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<p>Truer words were never spoken. I am already targeting schools for S’14 where women represent 55% or more of the student body. I feel that this might give him a slight extra boost that he might not have at a school where men/women are 50/50.</p>
<p>I have to agree with the majority of posters. Love thy safety. I have given up trying to figure out the college admissions game. Experience with my two D’s was so frustrating, confusing and eye opening. D1 and D2 have almost identical stats. Both had almost identical SAT scores and did have identical ACT scores. They had same GPA. D2 was valedictorian since she took 10 AP classes and D1 took 9 AP classes. D1 was ranked 3 or 4 in her class. D1 applied to 7 colleges and had a mixture of reach school, match and safety’s. She got into all of the schools except the one Ivy. She chose to attend a private LAC.
D2 applied to 13 schools. Once again a mixture of Reach, match and safety. She got into a couple of Ivy’s. D2 chose the Ivy and financial aid was generous with 2 kids in college at the same time. The first year D1 was at her private LAC was tough financially but she has received more aid each year. D1 graduated in 2009 and D2 2011</p>
<p>Alynor, we found that for my kids (super SAT/SAT-II scores, insanely tough specialized programs, less-than-perfect GPAs, fabulous essays) was that the sweet spot was schools that accepted 20-30% of applicants. Their scores were at/above 75%tile at every school to which they applied. </p>
<p>One got into a school with a 10% admit rate and the other got into one with a 17%. They both got into every school over 30%.</p>
<p>Mine focused on the schools they really wanted (which were not the most selective among their lists) and wrote their hearts out for those essays. They batted a thousand on those schools.</p>
<p>I spent a lot of time on Naviance reading tea leaves and making spreadsheets. The guys’ high schools had 7-10 years’ worth of data for how kids from their programs did at getting into various schools. I knew which schools accepted kids from each program at 2-3x their overall admit rate, who didn’t pick our kids no matter what, who wanted the GPA no matter what the awards/scores, and which low reach/high match schools liked kids from these programs. Their admissions results did not surprise us.</p>
<p>Help your kids find schools where they will thrive (and you can afford). College involves a lot more than just going to classes. CC is littered with threads of kids who have struggled socially, academically, and/or emotionally once they’ve gotten to school. It often has very little to do with how smart they are. Have dealt with it at our house, too.</p>
<p>ucbalum – tried to send you a PM, but your box is full!</p>
<p>Just be a little careful relying upon the percent admission rates of a college to determine difficulty. Some colleges make it very easy to apply and have free applications, which results in an abnormally low acceptance rate. Some colleges rely excessively upon binding early admissions, which gives them an abnormally low acceptance rate. On the other extreme, you have a university like Georgetown that is more selective than it appears. That is because it makes it hard to go through the applications process, which means they only get serious very well-qualified applicants.</p>
<p>^^^and if you are a DC-area kid looking at Georgetown, the odds are even slimmer. The school wants geographic diversity. Would imagine the same thing happens at other schools (Columbia is one that comes immediately to mind).</p>
<p>Georgetown also has students apply for specific schools, which may also heighten selectivity. </p>
<p>Stanford, Tufts and Chicago have more involved apps than most schools, too – our experience was that tends to be self-selecting to those who really want to attend. My kids found that if they didn’t like the app questions, it was a good sign they shouldn’t apply.</p>
<p>Charlie, Washington & Lee is a really good example of a school that has an incredibly high number of binding ED acceptances (on the order of 70%, IIRC), vs. the folks who apply there RD for the remaining spots. Quite a different rate there.</p>
<p>Some schools have a limit (or range) of what percentage of the class gets accepted ED/EA. Other schools want folks who are committed to attending and who feel like they are close enough to swinging the cost that they will take whatever FA they get. I’m sure the enrollment consultants colleges hire have detailed metrics for all of this.</p>