<p>My town along with towns in my county are part of the problem. 60 dollar application fees are chump change to what many parents pay to educate a K12 child. So, applying to many colleges is an easy a decision as spending an additional 30 minutes (with 5 of those minutes spent Googling relevant facts about school so that a kid can answer the supplemental ‘why X school’ and be done). You can hardly blame a kid for taking a flier at a school but now they take fliers on 10-12 with their parents encouraging them or even helping filling out their applications. Many are drinking the college Kool-aid believing that the ADCOM at the highly selective school will discover the hidden shining jewel that the kid really is. </p>
<p>Parents and kids are scared alike. When a kid gets rejected by a school, that sad news travels at the speed of the Internet. Being scared they talk their kid into applying to schools he/she would not even want to visit. Our high school is highly competitive even if it is a relatively small town. So, what you see is the same thing every year. For many kids his or her reach is a school like Brown, his meets may be Tufts or BC and his safety is BU. So, every year easily over 10 percent of the senior class applies to BC and BU with virtually the same SAT and G.P.A. so you know many are the same kids. So, each year around 30 kids apply to BU, they accept around 12 and on average one kid actually goes there. So BU throws a bunch of merit money at kids that still don’t want to go there while ignoring kids that would go there and are much more capable of doing the work than top kids at another school AND would pay more out of pocket to do so. Crazy? You bet. This is also a bit of a commentary on how well some colleges really know what should be key feeder schools in their stomping grounds. </p>
<p>I’m sure that Brown’s decision to go to the common app was partially driven by Alums upset about their acceptance rate versus peer schools. Problem solved but at what cost and what real benefit?</p>