Is there a reason that kids should keep their college list secret?

Parents Forum
61

Regarding post 56:
The bigger problem (i.m.e.) is that those 28 or 45 applicants actually delude themselves into believing there’s a serious possibility of all (or even most) being accepted. Typically, if any get in, it’s a handful (1-3; 5 if the school has historically been a “feeder,” and it’s quite rare to have represented in admissions all elites applied to; in the last 10 years I have not seen that at any one school ). I have much, more greater problem getting parents and students to understand that Yale, etc. are not choosing from the universe of that school but from the universe of Planet Earth. They somehow can’t imagine that, which to me just flat-out defies logic, not to mention math. (Wait, I thought these were math geniuses.)

Post 59:
Of course it’s possible, and normal parents do exactly what you suggest, but there are particular schools where the abnormal rules. In those situations, keeping silent about one’s lists and plans is the best response. And by the way, in those situations, everyone is lying, anyway – to throw the competition off. Those students & parents are, no, not going to be “happy” for the tiny fraction who met their goals.

62

…to put it another way, all of them are convinced that college admissions is a Zero Sum Game, and that the possible addends are few.

63

Yes, there is a lot of magical thinking, but the kids are in county-wide selective public HS programs which had <15% acceptance rates. They ARE qualified – but part of the price of going to these programs is that everyone has mega grades, APs, IB and scores. At my older son’s school, acceptances at each of the Ivies, MIT and Stanford were represented every year. They also did VERY well in MIT admissions (averaging a dozen admits a year). The program S2 attended did very well with Ivies, LACs and T-20s – but not as well with MIT, as the top STEM kids mostly headed to the program S1 attended.

S1’s program tried to defuse the tension about college acceptances by having a bulletin board where everyone could post their rejection letters. Hard to be too upset over getting turned down by a lottery school when Intel, Siemens and Olympiad finalists post their rejections and waitlist letters! I thought this was a brilliant way of normalizing the rejection among a group of kids who have succeeded at very high levels for a long time.