<p>The thing about sports recruits is that they DON’T apply everywhere. They usually wind up applying only to one college, early. So their dream-crushing ability is limited.</p>
<p>Some can’t-miss candidates do apply everywhere, and I can be critical of that. Two classmates of my daughter’s applied to seven or eight other colleges AFTER having been accepted early at Harvard. Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a way to get more financial aid out of Harvard, but it didn’t work. Mainly, it was being jerks to their classmates. But most of the colleges to which they applied accepted at least one other classmate, other than Harvard. In my college travels with my kids, I met one girl who had applied to 27 colleges and been accepted at 24 of them (and the 3 were almost random). In her defense (a) she seemed legitimately clueless as to why her applications had been so successful, (b) she was from the Southwest and hadn’t been able to visit anyplace in the East before applying, and (c) she essentially hadn’t made any decisions, assuming that the colleges would make some for her, and they didn’t. I hope she didn’t freeze out any classmates, but maybe she did.</p>
<p>I agree with T26E4 that there are no school quotas. (Or, if there are, they are high and apply to very few schools. Harvard may be unwilling to take more than 20-30 people from Andover or Stuyvesant, for example.) Still, I suspect that one great candidate from a school can make everyone else at that school look a little worse. The great candidate shows how much it’s possible to achieve there, and other applicants come up short.</p>