College Admission Process- How to avoid messing it up for your child?

Don’t compare your kid to other kids applying from her class. That will drive you crazy. All is not fair in this process. It is quite possible that a classmate with ‘lower stats’ but some type of hook will get accepted to a school your child gets denied at. You tell your kid, that they are not in competition with each other, that they are looked at in separate pools.
Or you could have a kid that is in the same pool with lower stats getting in because of some intangible special thing that holistic admissions is all about. You can’t try to apply rational thought to a lot of it, because again it will drive you crazy. The point is, focus on your child, not anyone else’s.