“Also, I hear kids/parents use the term “dream school”. Curious out there who has kids with a top choice. D doesn’t seem to preference any of her choices over another.”
The so-called “dream school,” when it comes to reach schools, is largely formulated by prestige or popularity factor. Just count each year’s applications piling up sky high in the admission office of Stanford or UCLA.
Most 17 year-olds don’t have a clue as to what colleges are out there, how they differ from one another, and how to make a list for submitting the application. Like most 17-year olds, my son had heard of a certain set of “legendary” names floating around – “Ivy League,” “Harvard,” “MIT,” “Stanford,” etc. – all throughout K-12. When time came for drawing the list for application submission, though, it was all about finding those schools that’d be the best “fit” for him based on a set of criteria, starting with his GPA/test scores, teacher-to-student ratio, size of undergrad students, endowment per students, availability of specific programs and facilities (music-related, for instance), urban/bucolic settings, financial affordability (based on NPC), etc. This thorough process gave my son a great opportunity to learn to differentiate one school from another. Ultimately, when the drawing the list was completed, he came up with the list of schools with a few “dream fit” schools sitting at the top. I hope that all applicants learn to find their “dream fit” schools as opposed to their “dream school.” There are more “fit” schools out there than the “dream school,” resulting in less cases of “crushed dream.”