Hi all
I was wondering what your opinions are on attending reaches, rather than match and safety schools. Let’s say that you get into a match or safety and get a full ride or a lot of money and can excel academically, rather than going to a reach school and have a hard time with work and he drowning in debts, yet gaining a better education. What do you think?
Drowning in debt would be a bad idea.
You may be able to avoid or minimize such a dilemma. Admission selectivity is not perfectly correlated with either academic quality or net cost. Many students attend reaches with manageable work loads and affordable net costs. Many others take on heavy work loads at high quality safety schools.
It is very hard to answer this question without specific names of universities and specific dollar figures in terms of which each would cost. Based on the results that my daughters had with various universities, for us there was almost no correlation at all between the academic strength of the schools and the cost of schools. For example, some of the academically strongest schools also have a large endowment, so that for some students they don’t have to be super expensive. Also, some students have very strong in-state public schools, or like us live close enough to the US/Canada border to make schools on the other side of the border reasonable options to consider.
However, @ucbalumnus is entirely correct, “drowning in debt” is in general a very bad idea. Also, there are a lot of very good universities in the US, more outside the US, and most students shouldn’t have to take on a lot of debt to get a good education.
There is another issue, which is that attending the academically most demanding and stressful university that it is possible to get into is not always the best choice for each student.
This is not a popular opinion here but to me if it is a “reach” it is by definition not a fit. Choosing a school because of where it fits on someone’s list of rankings is not a thoughtful criterion.
-
Effort – as well as attributes such as genuine intellectual curiosity – can depend on a student’s ethic as much as that of the college attended.
-
The categorization of a reach/match/safety hierarchy – at least perceptually, if not statistically – can depend on socio-cultural factors rather than on the intrinsic attributes of the schools themselves.
-
I agree with @snarlatron that “reach” as a concept (rather than as a possible indirect consequence of a considered approach to college selection) would seem to conflict with the ideal of fit.
Whether “reach” conflicts with fit depends on how reach is defined. Highly selective colleges may fit academically but may be reaches for everyone due to low acceptance rates. If a student’s stats cross the threshold of the 25th percentile, shouldn’t that be a fit? Is being within the bottom 25% necessarily not a fit if a quarter of the class is similar?
As others have indicated you have some false premises:
[quote[rather than going to a reach school and have a hard time with work and he drowning in debts, yet gaining a better education.
[/quote]
A ‘reach’ can have more to do with the % of acceptances than the degree of difficulty of the work. Based on the feedback from cohorts of students who have come from the same teachers / secondary school, the work at Harvard is not necessarily any harder than say, Vassar or UVa- schools that are selective, but much less ‘reachy’. The student experiences seem to indicate that the degree of difficulty varies more by subject/ course load than by absolute difficulty. Nor is it clear, from either these students perceptions nor their post-graduation outcomes that the overall education at (say) Harvard is per se better.
Whether just carrying debt or drowning in it, debt is more likely to inhibit your post-graduation outcomes more than a less famous name, because servicing the debt immediately will be a big decision factor in choosing your post-graduation path. Even the exceptions usually cited (such as management consultancies and investment banking) do recruit at more than just the tippy-tops- schools like Vanderbilt and Bucknell (again, selective but not super ‘reachy’) get visited as well.
Is the reach school going to help you earn more money out of college to offset the debt? Is the safety school that lacking in the major? If the answer is yes to either then maybe the reach makes sense.
A university can be a “reach” for two reasons. First is because the school is truly an academic reach. The student will be at the lower end of the standardized tests scores, GPA and academic rigor for the university. The challenge for those students who might be accepted is that they will need to work harder and smarter than they have in the past to keep up and may require some catching up. There could be an argument that that school is really not a fit for them.
Second, is that the school receives a large number of applications from qualified applicants. Most of these students are likely to have the skills necessary to be successful at the universities. For students in this situation the school might be a fit for them even though it is also a reach.
The question of fit is important whether the school is selective or not. I wouldn’t recommend that a student apply to a reach if it did not meet their needs. On the other hand if the reach school fits their needs and they feel they could be successful there is no reason not to consider the school.
^^exactly- the simple piece of what you actually want. One of my Collegekids knew where she wanted to go, which the GC told her was “just” a match and that she had a very good shot at ‘reachier’ schools (tippy tops). But she knew what she wanted and to the GCs frustration applied to, was accepted by and attended the match school. It was an exceptionally happy 4 years, and now she is very happily in grad school at one of those tippy tops- and even clearer that while it is a great place for her as a grad student, she is glad that she didn’t go there for undergrad.
The same school can be a reach for some OOS students and a match/safety for other in state students even with similar performance. The engineering school in many public colleges are like that. So using the term “reach” here does not make much sense. Perhaps one may compare between attending schools with above mid 50 stat and scholarship or below mid 50 with full pay.
good point on that, @billcsho- engineering (assuming ABET) is relatively ‘flat’ across universities, and some of the strongest programs are public universities.
It’s awfully difficult to get a good education if you’re struggling academically. It’s easier to get a great education if your mind is at ease regarding debt (ie, the future) and if you are comfortable enough with the workload to want to explore subjects in-depth rather than just treading water hoping to keep afloat.
But as others have noted, the correlation between academic difficulty and school selectivity is tenuous. Exceptions would be schools like CalTech and MIT, or maybe majors like math, where being towards the bottom of the curve coming in could lead to feelings of isolation for some students.