“the only way to not getting anywhere is NOT to apply, and encourage them to separate themselves via their essays”
Making a reader cry isn’t what gets an admit. And a top holistic is looking for a full match, not just one element.
Apply all you want. But if you don’t match the whole a competitive holistic looks for, you’re spinning your wheels. It’s not just applying but the matching. If you can’t figure out if you match, maybe those other matchy colleges are the better options. Plenty of kids would be happy without the lemmings rush for prestige names.
^^^ No one is disputing everything you said, nor did I. The point is the balance, reach for the stars but prepared for the worst. Scaring kids too much to a point of not allowing them to reach their max potential is just not cool, in general.
And of course, making one cry isn’t the criteria for essay, but THIS essay got her in to Harvard.
“There should be a pinned announcement somewhere (and maybe there is): Do NOT visit your reach schools first.”
That’s very hard to do if you actually live near reach schools and/or you’ve gone to the reach school for the summer program or competitions, like at Stanford and Berkeley. I’d imagine it be impossible in a place like Boston and maybe even NYC.
Along with starting the college search at the bottom and building the list up from a solid, desirable safety, I recommend the following strategy: 1) Talk a lot about your kid’s safeties, both to them and to anyone who asks about their college search. 2) Set up a Google alert for those schools and share stories about interesting news items. 3) Follow them on social media and share items of interest with your child. The point is to genuinely find reasons to like them. Every school has something special. Find it and celebrate it.
My kid ended up at a reach, but choice number 2 was a safety. We genuinely loved it and I think she would have done beautifully there. We hope to follow the same path for our next two kids.
Sometimes one needs to be diplomatic what you talk about though, and certainly how, so not necessarily to “anyone who asks”. The two safeties my daughter most liked were targets for one of her best friends. She was very careful that we never refer them to as safeties around her or her family, and indeed, preferred that we didn’t mention them at all around them.
A safety means 100% chance of admission and 100% chance of affordability for the applicant. A college with 50% admission rate is not necessarily a safety even for a top-end student.
Note that a college with a 100% chance of admission may still be a reach if a reachy merit scholarship is needed for affordability. It is entirely possible that a student under tight financial constraints applies mostly to what appear to be safety / likely / low-match colleges when looking at admissions, but is really aiming for reach / match competitive merit scholarships to be able to afford college (of course, s/he still needs to find one that is actually assured for both admission and affordability).
Part of the problem may be that parents wait until the kids are in high school to visit college campuses. My kid was on several college campuses for class reunions, vacation time visits to check in with old grad school professors, random community events at local colleges and universities, photo-op at Grandma’s Alma Mater, etc. while still in elementary school. Granted, those visits are different from formal tours focused on potential applicants, but she had a baseline to work from. By the time we accepted that budget would determine where she could attend, there was no need to visit anywhere except the places that would work for us.
There’s already so much emphasis on adding colleges because, “Why Not?” It’s more than stats and the essay that make one a viable candidate.
So if the point is to explore more and better, fine. But imo, matching a top holistic is more than stats and essay.
This thread began with concern about kids who don’t have adequate safeties and/or dont like them enough. Some want more kids to focus on that, schools with the right chances, affordability, and interesting.
Part of the problem for high stats kids is that the top schools are actually matches, in terms of numbers. So it’s easy for a kid with a 1580 SAT and a 4.0 GPA to think, “Don’t I have at least a small chance of getting into Harvard?” These schools are only reaches because most of the kids applying to them have similar scores and GPAs and there are tens of thousands applying.
And thus they begin the process of thinking of HYPS as the reach, and maybe Bowdoin or Haverford as the high match, and maybe Claremont-McKenna or Wake Forest as a match, and so on, until they come to choosing a safety. And then they get stuck, because it really is a challenge to fall in love with a school where they are likely in the top 1% of students. Most kids just don’t want to be in that category.
It requires a mental adjustment that many 17 year olds aren’t ready to make.
There are plenty of safeties where a top student won’t be in the top 1%. We are rarely talking about Harvard v. Worcester State (just an example) and yet posters always make this argument.
Absolutely agree with this! My high-stat D would say she wanted to go to a school where she was at the middle or toward the bottom of accepted students because she was tired of being the leader all the time and needed to be in a place where she could learn from others for once. That sounds snotty or whatnot but we got her point. She declared she didn’t want to go where “everyone” from here goes and set out to make a list of unique schools, most no one here had ever heard of. Her school has the philosophy that all vals and sals go to Harvard and are stunned when they don’t get in.
I looked at college searches and selection as a big investment. A college education costs more than twice what I paid for my first house. I didn’t buy the first one I saw and I didn’t buy what everyone else thought was best. I researched, budgeted, planned and bought what was right for the family. Too many people aren’t informed and make individual choices by committee.
Many 17 year old high school students are in the top 1-5% of students there, so attending a moderately selective college would probably put them in the top 3-15% at such a college. Is that a big mental adjustment?
I’m not sure I follow all this. If a safety isn’t even a college with a 50% admit rate for a top stats kid then isn’t a top stats kid going to definitely be in the top 1-5% of a real safety? Is a real safety a 75% admit rate? I’m not even thinking of prestige but if you have the stats for Harvard I guess I don’t get what your safety options really are where you won’t be at the tippy top.
I think next time I’m in a conversation with someone about college selection I’m going to tell them to be sure to spend time finding their “guaranteed fit”. It sounds less like your settling but would mean the same as safety. I really think many students (and parents) give this the least priority. Unless you wealthy enough to send your child anywhere I think it’s the most important.
Absolutely! We didn’t refer to schools as safeties. When folks asked what schools DD was interested in, she/we would say “she is really excited about X type of school such as X school.” No need to characterize it in any way that either your child or someone else might perceive as disparaging.
To me a safety is a school that is largely stats driven and doesn’t practice yield protection. If that’s the case then for a tippy top student it can certainly be a relatively low admit rate school. Many state flagships don’t have yield protection, at least for instate students, the problem is that a growing number of schools, particularly private ones, do because they are (overly?) concerned about rankings. For example at our HS in CA, UCSB (admit rate just under 30%) would certainly be a reasonable safety for the top 2% of kids in the class (who are all NMF or NMC). Though they may still find themselves in the top 10%-20% of the class if they do attend.
Depends on the student and college. For example, for admission only, a top 1-5% rank Texas student can consider UT Austin to be a safety. But a similar rank student outside of Texas should consider it a reach.
Some colleges do not like to be used as “safeties”, so they waitlist or reject “overqualified” applicants who do not apply ED or otherwise convince them that they will attend.
Colleges that admit by division or major may have some majors that are much more selective than others. For example, UIUC CS is much more selective than UIUC general undeclared admission.
Also, admission rate alone does not tell you how strong the applicant pool is.