Do odds increase when applying to more reaches?

citivas
Tue, 05 Dec 2023 16:46:21 +0000

Statistically, if your odds of getting into any given super reach are 5% and whether you apply to 1 or 10 your odds of acceptance to any of them don’t improve and remains 5% each. That would be true if admission were a pure lottery. It’s not. It’s not random. It’s a bunch of human AOs making subjective decisions. And there is not just one variable (a lottery ticket), but dozens or more variables that will all weight differently from school to school, student to student and AO to AO. One AO may be unmoved by your essay and it may be deeply reach another. So while average applicant X may have a 5% chance at 5 schools with a 5% admission rate, the reality is they may have a 0% chance at one, 5% chance at 3 and a 20% chance at another. Sure students/parents can do research and try and make an educated guess on which of those 5 colleges they have the 20% chance at, but its still a guess and they may guess wrong. So while the applicant pool as a whole has a 5% chance, individual applicants chances are all over the map, and they don’t know which schools its highest at.

As for the generally sound advise of focusing on a few and doing a really good job instead of diluting your energy by shotgunning at many, that too varies by the student and the circumstance. For one student focusing on 5 schools means they would put in the same energy and time they would in total if they had 20 schools. For another, they were going to do what they do and it they would not do better if they only did 5 instead of 20.

Here’s the reality. There are no shortage of kids who have shotgunned and said in hindsight that the school they ended up attending was not one that would have made their short list if they had been more selective in their they applied (and not because they coveted the school less than others on their list but more because they didn’t believe they would get in). There are also no shortage of kids who get completely shut out in shotguns and end up pretty devastated. And every possible nuance in-between – students who skipped ED to shotgun and ended up on a waitlist for the school they might have ED’ed to (and accepted to none), left wondering if it would have gone differently if they had ED’ed instead.

Part of what makes this process so stressful is both that the stakes can seem really high (though in reality in most cases we exaggerate this and students will end up just fine in whatever college they attend) and that there are so many “consequential” decisions – to ED or not and where, which to apply to, how many, who to get recs from, which essay idea to go the distance with, etc. For some, the decision of whether to shotgun is made for them by circumstance – they can’t afford to apply to that many places. For those that have the option, it’s like all those other decisions – there is no definitively right answer. You’re on the admissions battlefield with no ability to predict the outcome or the reactions of the enemy (the AO’s in this metaphor). For some shotgunning would be the right call, for others not. No way to know until the dust has settled.

So know yourself and go with your gut.