Hello, this is something I’ve been thinking about lately and I wanted to ask some advice.
I applied to a lot of schools, there wasn’t really anyone to guide me on what made a good match, safety, reach or whatever. Some of these schools I had no intention of going to (CSU’s and privates like Santa Clara and Pepperdine in particular) and only applied because I wanted what I believed would be guaranteed acceptances and a variety of financial aid offers. I wanted some kind of security in my stress. Now I’ve gotten into schools I don’t care about anymore while people who had them as dream schools have gotten rejected.
It was just so easily to apply at the time. I was stressing out and got overzealous. Now I feel incredibly guiltly about it. People ask me where I applied and I don’t even want to answer. I didn’t think at the time that I would have a chance at schools like Northwestern or UCB, but maybe I still should have thought ahead to reign in the amount I applied to.
What does anyone else think. Did I do something wrong in applying to schools I was overqualified for, even if I didn’t think so at the time? Am I just another symptom of what’s wrong with college admissions or part of the cause?
- You are one person in a pool of thousands upon thousands of applicants.
- Schools know not everyone who is accepted will attend, so they accept a larger number than they want their freshman class to be, based on how the school's yield percentage generally turns out.
So you’re fine. Schools expect this, and you didn’t “take anyone’s spot.”
@bodangles Thank You for replying!
Absolutely not! You were smart to apply to a range of schools and to have true safeties.
no, but you could pull your applications from schools that you haven’t heard from yet that you know you wouldn’t attend. At our small high school our college counselor encourages us to do that.
I agree with stemmm above. You never know who might get off WL as soon as you let them know you won’t attend. Then you will feel better, because someone else’s dream might come true.
Your larger question is interesting. You obviously did buy into the hysteria a bit, but it isn’t as though you caused the hysteria on your own. I am seeing more and more stories of kids applying to 20+ schools, which is just nuts. Where does this stop? 14 applications is the new norm. No one needs that many, and yet, the niggling question of “what if…?” makes people irrational. What if I might just get into Harvard if I throw in an app, or what if I get shut out, I will just throw out another app. I blame Common App, who could stop the madness if they would simply limit the amount of applications a student is able to submit. It might just mean that stduents who want to submit more apps might have to do so using the college’s own application.