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<p>That’s your choice how to spend your money. Southeasttitan’s parents made their own choices - to pursue fields for reasons other than money.<br>
If you want to look down at them for what they can and can’t afford, then be prepared to have others look down on you for what you can and can’t afford. Do you really want to play that game?</p>
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<p>However, a family making $60k a year would get free tuition at HYP, Dartmouth and Stanford and would be eligible for the loan loan polcies at a host of others. </p>
<p>IIRC, D1 received some very generous FA at the school she attended.</p>
<p>Southeasttitan’s story does make one thing clear: Legacy status, standing alone, is worth very little in elite college admissions, even for a student with excellent credentials. How else to explain “yeses” from Yale and Harvard, and a “no” from Princeton, the only one of the Big Three where she had legacy status – make that triple legacy status</p>
<p>OTOH, anecdata only - 2 kids I know who got pulled off waitlists for Penn and NU were legacies, and it makes me wonder if legacies get to the top of waitlists.</p>
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<p>HAFH - Sorry to hear about your results. I can’t believe it. Ranked 2nd in the class with a GPA of 4.2 and 2000+??? I guess things are much tougher for internationals. Did you take TOEFL?</p>
<p>PG: From what I’ve seen, at most schools the unifying factor for kids who get off waitlists is the family’s ability to pay full freight. By the time the college gets to the waitlisted kids, all the need-based aid has run out. (This is not the case at a handful of schools, which promise to meet full need for students accepted off the waitlist.) I’m no oracle, but I bet most of the waitlisted legacies that get the nod have not applied for financial aid.</p>
<p>I honestly don’t know for the families I"m describing. I suspect both did need aid, but don’t know for sure.</p>
<p>From my vantage point, the right number of applications seems very dependent on the student and their circumstances. The area that I live in sends a huge number of students to our state universities–and for those students 6 apps is plenty.
But after attending one of the largest high schools in the country, DS wanted to attend a small college and has learning issues that made that a good choice for him. But financial aid was an necessity for us, and our state doesn’t have any small public campuses. We had to worry about both safeties and financial safeties, and limiting to 6 schools could have ended up a disaster for us. Not all multiple applications are for vanity.</p>
<p>Thought this was interesting-- on this morning’s Today Show, Katherine Cohen, founder of Ivy Wise, spoke about the college admissions process. As she spoke, banner comments ran across the bottom. One of them was “Application strategy: apply to 10-12 schools”. Here’s the link [Today</a> Show Video Player](<a href=“http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/33342920#33342920]Today”>http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/33342920#33342920)</p>
<p>^^companies like that perpetuate the problem
i find 10-12 to be absurd
all it does is inflate application numbers and deflate admissions rates</p>
<p>I will be applying to 6 and see no reason for more</p>
<p>my school limits us to five schools. however we still have a ton of ppl applying to yale, harvard, etc…</p>
<p>Not a problem here. Both kids combined did not apply to six schools:)</p>
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Did you even read the rest of this thread? It’s exasperating to read such an arrogant statement.</p>
<p>I definitely wouldn’t like that. We’re full pay. That means that we can afford the application fees, but we’d really like to find some merit aid. And finding merit aid for my child, who isn’t at the top stats-wise, means casting a wide net. Since we’re in Illinois, where the COA at the state flagship for the majors my D is interested in is nearly $30,000, we don’t have the inexpensive state flagship option that families in some other states do. So she’ll probably be applying to upwards of a dozen schools. Her HS does charge for transcripts once you go over 8, but there’s no limit.</p>
<p>Our situation is quite the opposite of most of the posters I’ve read (and that’s been about 5 pages). Our S has applied to 14 schools, because he is on the borderline of the low end of average for most of the schools he wants to go to. We are hedging our bets that he will be admitted to at least 4-5 of them, figuring 25% or so. We are not looking for any financial aid, and he’s applying to OOS state schools. We are hoping that by not needing financial aid, being from OOS, and in some cases, being male will help him to be accepted to some of the higher match schools. I firmly believe that if you want to pay, you should be able to apply to as many schools as you want, be they Ivies or state schools.</p>
<p>Our school sends the first 4 transcripts at no cost, then charges $3 per for every one over that, but there is no limit. Its a very large (3000 students) public school.</p>
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This is really the same strategy as that of people who are trying to get into the very most selective schools. I hope those 14 include at least one true safety–as has been pointed out on lots of threads, a person who is on the borderline of the low end of average for multiple schools might get rejected by all of them, because they may all be looking for similar characteristics.</p>
<p>Yes, he’s actually already been admitted to Northern Arizona U, and will most likely be admitted to our local Cal State, having applied the first day the apps were up. Also University of Kansas appears to be a safety, with a minimum 2.5 in core classes - so I think he’s ok.</p>
<p>If I were limited to 6 schools, i simply would’ve picked the six best:
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Columbia</p>