If we understand that the “Reach/Match/Safety” schools are too often conflated with the “Dream/Second-choice/Undesirable” schools, then we can also understand why April is the cruelest month here on CC.
I think some of it is mindset.
Many years ago I was talking about marriage with a friend who was much older than me and had been married for about 50 years. I asked her why she thought so many marriages from her generation lasted so long. She said she just didn’t expect so much from her husband. He wasn’t perfect, his job wasn’t perfect, her kids weren’t perfect. But she liked them. They had 2 kids, they had a house, they’d been on a few trips. She wasn’t always looking for more, for better, for perfect. They enjoyed the things they had and didn’t yearn for more or worry if they’d missed something.
People are unhappy with a ‘safety’ because they somehow think they are missing something better. People are unhappy if they got into all 10 of the schools they applied to because they didn’t apply to that ‘one rung higher’ school so don’t know that there wasn’t something one step higher.
I feel sorry for those who can’t accept (and rejoice) in the schools who accepted them. The grass isn’t always greener at the next school.
Everyone should get to feel bad and whine a bit on an anonymous forum. There are so many disappointing things about the college search/selection process. It should be okay to vent a bit. I know that I probably would have vented had there been an internet back in the dinosaur days when I was looking at schools.
At least there is a way to gather some info now. I spent so many hours going through those thick college guides - only to come back to reality, knowing I couldn’t afford those cool schools. My counselor was awful - had he been at all helpful, I might have realized that with 4 kids in college and my parents’ income, I may well have had significant aid … and may have been able to get into some of those awesome schools I dreamed about. (It didn’t ruin my life, though.)
But in the end, no matter how much we know, it can still be disappointing when all is said & done. Tuition is expensive, schools are competitive, it’s hard to decide, etc. I say let 'em feel bad, and if they seem to be requesting comments from the peanut gallery, be honest but kind.
Very well said! Thank you.
SouthernHope says it so well. A little empathy is in order, I believe.
I play poker as a hobby. It is a game full of expected results and as a result full of disappointment. It is also a game of incomplete information. You usually don’t have all the information when you have to make a decision. There is plenty of hindsight is 20/20.
Even the best who play and know all the percentages will still get disappointed. We are human and we have feelings. Being able to move on from a situation is strong and most of all the kids and even parents will move on and move forward.
Hmm. Seems that a savvy parent could short-circuit a lot of the potential disappointment in the process described in #35 by making the admissions process more a hunt for merit.
- Visit only those schools that offer automatic and competitive merit awards.
- After the PSAT and NMS is possible, focus on those schools that give money for that.
- Apply to EA schools (OOS if it is affordable), scholarship schools, as well as ED and EDII if they want.
- Note to them that if they didn’t get in ED to their top choice (and they are an average excellent kid), their chances in RD to Ivies/equivalents are between slim and none anyway so RD is really for scholarship hunting.
It seems to me that those families/kids that go merit-hunting during the application process end up much happier than those kids that go prestige-hunting.
Purple- my observations don’t jive with yours AT ALL.
The hunt for merit hunting can be just as capricious as the holistic admissions process as practiced by some of the top need-only colleges. I know kids who not only did not get merit at a college where they were at the top of the applicant pool, some weren’t admitted at all.
I think merit-hunting leads to as much disappointment and hurt as everything else. A neighbor of mine is heading to a non-flagship campus of our state system (it’s the only affordable option from what the parents have told me). She got a LOT of merit awards- 10K here, 15K there, to some schools she was REALLY excited about. But 10K off a 65K price ticket, with younger children in line? Nope, not in the family budget. They were not chasing prestige at all-- but there are some bruised feelings that even after doing “everything right” in terms of a balanced list, showing the love, showing up at the big scholarship weekends with her best foot forward- even the Chancellor’s Award or Presidents Scholar wasn’t making these schools align with her budget.
In retrospect- a “prestigious”, need only college might have been the better bet. But so it is- she’s a hard worker and a sweetheart and will do just fine where she is.
But I’d rethink your advice. You’re making it seem as though every A student in America is going to have merit awards of a significant magnitude being thrown at them- and you know that’s not accurate. Many colleges are really showering kids with these 7K “awards” as window dressing. They aren’t making the college affordable.
A lot of the disappointments come from areas where there are a number of kids who do go to the most selective schools. We have a second home far from the selective school centers and going to State U is the big deal. A small number of kids going to some private schools within a few hours, another smattering going to OOS public colleges , the rest going to community college or the small state school 45 minutes away. If 3 kids go to top 25 schools in any one year, it is unusual. This is more typical than not.
NYC suburb highly ranked high schools or private schools in that area, a whole other story. One year, ,a dozen kids applied to Harvard and 9 got in. Half the kids get into the top 25 US News universities or top dozen LACs. So what are the college names that are bandied around? Many of the parents are paying full price and it’s often the case that Yale costs as much as a private school with a lot less panache, prestige and name recognition. A lot of the parents are alums of these schools or have close family members who are.
If you are looking for good financial aid from a school, the top ones tend to be more generous. There is that respect and feeling of great privilege and accomplishment to get into a school with a name and rep so well known.
So if you have a child who is a top student, great kid, leader among peers, test scores up there , always grabbing top achievement goals , it makes sense to reach for the these schools and figure s/he has a chance of acceptance at one of them. Unless one has been in the college admissions roulette in the last 25 years, one might not know how competitive things have become. I think some of this has actually abated in the last 10 or so years as the demographics have shifted and there are not as many kids applying to colleges, but it seems that there are more applications to the very top schools. There was a time, one would apply to a reach or two, a few matches too close to decide which one to pick, and then the safety in case things didn’t work out. Now it’s time unusual at all for kids to have a dozen, even two dozen schools to which they’ve applied. The list is often peppered with reaches, super reaches, a match or two and then the safety. Among the reaches there is a pecking order and anyone stuck with s match school is devastated.
That is a scenario often seen in highly competitive areas and families where academic name recognition is important
I think it is because for many students, what they think of as a “match” might not necessarily be a “match” given the huge numbers applying (I am thinking of the UCs for instance). You might fit into the box of the 75% GPA or ACT/SAT, but the sheer number of kids applying to some colleges really makes it a crapshoot.
And I agree with @Jon234 :
" I’ve never truly got the safety school that you love concept. I think it’s maybe the hardest thing to find in this whole process. It sounds like good advice but I’m not sure it truly exists. A safety you are prepared to attend if all else falls I understand but one you love?"
@blossom: Where did your friend look and what figure did they need to make finances work?
I can see that a 30 ACT (with 3.5 GPA for 'Bama; 4.0 GPA for 'Zona) knocks the OOS tuition+R&B costs at those 2 schools down to $23K and $20K ($25K without the 4.0 GPA) per year respectively. Ursinus knocks off $35K (leaving direct costs of $30K/year) for an ACT of 27.
For the UCs specifically, it is likely that overreaching is common for a few UC-specific reasons:
A. Students compare their exaggerated weighted GPAs to the UC weighted-capped GPAs on UC web sites. I.e. their high school may give them a 4.4 weighted GPA, but their UC weighted-capped GPA may be 4.0 from an unweighted 3.7. But, using the 4.4, a student may think of UCD as a “safety” when it is really at best a high match.
B. UCs emphasize GPA more than test scores, and some students assume that high test scores will overcome GPA below the UC campus’ range.
C. Some majors, like CS and engineering majors, are significantly more difficult to gain admission to than the overall campus admission stats may suggest. It would help if UC showed frosh admission stats by major, like it does for transfer admission stats.
A common type of UC disappointment thread involves a student with a ~4.0 UC weighted-capped GPA (but higher weighted GPA calculated by his/her high school) who applied for CS or an engineering major to UCSB, UCI, and UCD and gets surprised by not getting into any of them.
People do not understand probability. They think that 20% = “good chance”, 50% = “almost sure thing”, and 85% = “sure thing”. Maybe we should start looking at rejection rates, rather than at acceptance rates. If parents and kids would look at “reach” as an 80% chance or rejection, “match” as 50% chance of rejection, and “safety” as 10% chance of rejection or less, they wouldn’t be so disappointed.
If kids and parents understood that “reach” means that they almost certainly will be rejected, and that “match” means that they are about as likely to be rejected as they are to be accepted, they may have a clearer view of their actual chances.
Of course, as others have said, when you start looking at the top 10%, these are kids who are used to being the highest achievers, and they really cannot conceive of the fact that there are that many kids out there who have achieved just as much.
At the same time, ironically, they are absolutely certain that every top kid in the country MUST be applying to, and entering, these high-prestige colleges, and every other college is full of kids who simply weren’t “good enough” to be accepted. It seems almost an article of faith that “all the best and brightest” are at an “elite” private university, and the rest of colleges and universities are peopled by kids who weren’t smart or accomplished enough.
So, when these kid are not accepted into one of the “elite” colleges, they feel that they have demonstrated that they evidently aren’t one of the “best and brightest”. This is a terrible blow to the self image of kids who have seen being “one of the best and brightest” as a central part of their identity.
Our high school invites graduates back to the school at the end of the school year when most college students have finished their semester. The college students talk about how they approached the application process and how they made decision where to attend. What stuck me the most was how important the financial package was to most students. I was naive. The students who got large merit scholarships described how they wrote many more essays and went through an interview process. My kids go to a nationally ranked public school and many students are very happy at very fine colleges and universities which are not universally well known.
I spite of this learning experience, I was still disappointed when my son didn’t get into his reach schools and was waitlisted at some of his matches. In spite of this, he got into and will attend his first choice school. He did get into all of his safety schools but probably would have felt a bit deflated if the safeties were his only choices. Next time around we will encourage our daughter to invest more in finding the great likelies/safeties. We’ll also do more merit hunting.
I will say that the need to start the application so much earlier nowadays is a tough compared to when I applied to college. My kids are both on the young side of their graduating class so college decisions were and will be made before 18th birthdays. This is ignoring the fact that I turned 18 shortly after arriving on campus.
High schools seem to be doing a good job now of getting kids to apply to at least one safety school.
A few years ago, many of these same kids would have been panicking because they had zero acceptances. The fact that they’re upset about having to go to their safety is a weird sort of improvement.
“It seems to me that those families/kids that go merit-hunting during the application process end up much happier than those kids that go prestige-hunting.”
Yes and no. The reactions of others are not the same at all. You go to events for the graduating seniors and you hear all the “wows” about prestige school admissions, but a dead silence about the lower ranked school (because no one knows you got a prestigious merit scholarship) or sometimes even a “why is she going there?” (with a subtext of “couldn’t she do better than that?”).
And who wants to say “we didn’t apply to X because we couldn’t afford it”? So even those with excellent results from merit hunting may feel a bit disappointed that they were forced by financial constraints to go in that direction. But at least your bank account is a lot happier 
@Twoin18 - this is our situation. My S was capable of getting into “recognizable “ schools, but even with some merit they are unaffordable. He has friends who are like “I can’t believe you’re not going to X - it’s worth the debt”. Are you paying his loans?
We had discussions throughout the process and he understands, but it doesn’t make it any less disappointing.
I think disappointment is fine. Bitterness comes from kids who think that college is a right and not a privilege and acceptance is a check the box thing.
@Leigh22 and @Twoin18, hmm. You could keep a running total of merit scholarship amounts racked up. You could also play up the honors program and strength of the program they are entering.
@Twoin18 Our high school does recognized scholarships on the graduation program. We’re in Texas so the seniors will understand that getting a Presidential Scholarship at SMU and a McDermott Scholarship at UT Dallas are full rides with extras. It is true that similar awards outside Texas may not be recognized by the general populace at graduation. On a broader scaled, I’m often shocked how few colleges and universities are recognized outside the regions they are located. I just need to content myself with the knowledge that those hiring are aware of the strong programs.