Do odds increase when applying to more reaches?

NiceUnparticularMan
Mon, 04 Dec 2023 18:17:08 +0000

Canuckdad:

The odds of you getting into 1 reach will increase with the number of applications you send to “reaches”.

While technically this is true as long as the marginal conditional probability is above 0, it might only be an extremely little amount above 0, enough to be negligible.

Part of the problem here is college admissions is not really a stochastic process. In a variety of contexts, people will use a stochastic model for a non-stochastic process because in some notable way there is a practical benefit to doing that. But whenever you do that sort of thing, you have to be cautious about exceeding the practical limits of the model.

In this case, part of what is happening when an applicant gets actual admissions decisions is you are actually learning something about the applicant and their applications, things that were not necessarily easy to know prior to learning those decisions. And so if we imagine an applicant not getting admitted to their best-bet reach, and then not to their second-best-bet reach either, and then not to their third-best-bet reach either, well, unfortunately, we are learning something about this applicant and the applications they are submitting.

So when we apply that knowledge to their fourth-best-bet reach, including the knowledge this was only their fourth-best-bet among their reaches, well, our model should be adjusted to incorporate that knowledge, and the conditional probability at that point should plausibly be getting very low.

And then if they don’t beat those odds with their fourth-best-bet reach, nor their fifth-best-bet reach, well, the conditional probability for their sixth-best-bet reach is going to be even lower.

My two cents is at a certain point, imposing a stochastic model on this situation is doing more harm than good. That sixth-best-bet reach college is not pulling balls out of a sack, it is processing and evaluating your application. And we are getting to a very high level of confidence about how that process will turn out.

Still, technically anything is still possible. But assigning a probability to such things is not really meaningful, and for the purposes of decision making, not necessary either.