Yes, we are. The interesting thing is that Cornell is not typically a particularly popular college at our high school, and I can think of many selective colleges that attracted more applications this year as well. But Cornell said yes to everyone who applied!
D24 said today that 1 of her classmates will be attending Georgia Tech to major in physics and āHeās super smart. Heās a good guy.ā 
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Somewhere up above (or in the prior thread) I told the story about how when a lot of kids in my S24ās peer group were deferred or rejected in the REA/ED1 round, it triggered a mass wave of these kids (including mine) adding more colleges to their RD list.
I really did not think it was a rational response at the time, and sure enough I am not sure any of those kids is actually going to one of those added colleges, meaning to my knowledge they all got into and preferred at least one of their original RD colleges (or in one case the college that deferred them then accepted them).
But I get it, that pervasive feeling of uncertainty for sure is pushing kids to applying to more colleges, even if in many cases it does not pay off in terms of actual final outcome.
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While both my kids had great results by any standard, there is no way we could have guessed the hits and the misses.
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Exactly this. My kid applied to a ton of schools. I couldnāt possibly have predicted the results he got back at the beginning of the year (nor could I have predicted what qualities in a college would end up seeming most important to him come decision time). We couldnāt have predicted them based on his ED/EA results, either.
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This is the exact opposite of what happened at our high school. For Cornell, ~50 kids applied, ~20 ED.
1 got in ED, 2 more in regular round.
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So the specific issue I have in mind is:
Suppose you follow the recommendations from our college counselors when forming a list of something like 2 Likelies, 3-5 Targets, 3-5 Reaches, so like 8-12 total.
In forming this list you do a lot of careful research, consult with our experienced counselors, and so on. Your goal is to make sure all your colleges make specific sense for you for particular reasons, but you also want to make sure that YOU make sense for THEM based on what is ascertainable about what they look for, and again our college counselorsā experience about who tends to get admitted where.
You then write your best possible applications to these 8-12 colleges, including as appropriate answering their supplemental questions that in one way or another are trying to get to whether you are in fact a good fit for them. Since you have been thoughtful about those issues when deciding to apply to them in the first place, you have a leg up on giving them thoughtful answers to such questions.
OK, then at the last minute you toss in like 4-6 more applications without anything like that sort of thoughtfulness. Indeed, perhaps some colleges get on this 4-6 list either because they donāt have any supplementals, or you look and see it would be easy to repackage the supplementals you already wrote for other colleges.
Of course some kids do this sort of list formation basically all at once, but there can still be a conceptual divide between the carefully chosen colleges they really like, AND think will like them back, and then the throw-ins they are adding due to fear.
OK, then you get admitted some places, and not other places, and you choose one to attend.
My question is how often does a kid actually end up attending one of the 4-6 throw-ins, versus the 8-12 thoughtfuls? Noting for this to happen, it is not just necessary to get into one or more of the throw-ins, but they actually have to prefer that offer from a throw-in to their favorite offer out of the 8-12 thoughtfuls, which were chosen part because they had reasons to particularly like those 8-12 colleges.
Periodically I have actually asked people questions like this, and in almost every case it appears to me the kid ends up attending a college that would have made a shorter list anyway. Like, they applied to 20+ colleges and they start off saying they ended up attending a college they were not at all sure would admit them, but when asked if they would still have applied to that particular college if forced to only apply to say 10 colleges, they have all told me so far well, yes, they would definitely have applied to that college anyway.
And Iām sure at some point I will come across a kid who was really thoughtful about that initial list of 8-12, and yet ended up at a throw-in anyway. But it really seems to me even if it happens sometimes, it is relatively rare.
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Well, if you donāt mind, let me then ask you my questions!
How many colleges did your kid apply to? And if they had been limited to 12 applications for some reason, would the college they ended up choosing have been on that list of 12?
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Twenty. He had a fee waiver, so he maxed out the common app. And for the second questionā¦I really donāt know. Iāve wondered that myself. On one hand, it was a total long shot, and we really didnāt expect him to get in, so perhaps not. On the other hand, he was able to submit an already written paper as his supplemental instead of writing another essay, so maybe so? He ended up choosing Amherst because it seems to combine the kind of academic experience he wants with unusually strong for an LAC music offeringsā¦but the strength of the music relative to a lot of his other LAC options didnāt become apparent until after he was accepted, visited, had a lesson (unavailable until he was admitted), etc. I will say that for my oldest kid, who applied to 16 schools, the school he ended up going to would almost certainly not have been on the list had he only applied to 12. His results looked a lot more like we expected S24ās results to look likeā¦he got into the places we thought of as likelies, and got into a handful of his reaches, but was waitlisted or rejected at most of them.
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Oh, right, I am sorry I forgot about your kidās particular journey with music as a factor.
I do think what I was calling the standard recommendation above can and should be modified in cases of real indecision at the time of applying about what matters most. Like, I think some kids end up not being sure about LACs versus universities, and so if their lists are longer as a result of wanting to have more chances to be choosing among several of both types, that is fine.
I guess the other thing to note is this:
I was also assuming in the hypothetical that you have the ability to completely investigate colleges before applying, and I recognize that is also not always practical in real cases for a variety of reasons. So I also think it is fine to add colleges that you think sound like possible fits but you have not had the means yet to fully investigate, planning to focus your efforts when you get your actual offers.
In neither of these types of cases, though (legitimate indecision about what you are looking for, or lack of means before applying to investigate fully all the possibles), are you adding colleges out of what I called fear, meaning a general concern about the uncertainty of admissions. The relevant uncertainty is on your end, about what you want or whether a college will give you what you want, and that to me is a different sort of reason to add colleges than what I was discussing.
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Our small school had a very noticeable bad year and I donāt know why. This year based on stats and NMF amounts was stronger than last and they had about half the T20 acceptances. Most came from REA/ED.
One other thing I told mine I wanted to track at end. Some schools the prompts just flowed, others even though school was a good fit didnāt as easily. He did better on schools that flowed naturally. Anyone else find this?
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Well, Iāve said it before, but I think uncertainty about admissions can be a legitimate reason to apply widely, too, if there are genuinely a lot of reach-y colleges that would be a good fit and at which you have a realistic shot at admission (which was certainly the case for my oldest). More applications meant more choices for him (and, as mentioned, the one he attended was not among his favorites when he applied).
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D24ās only throw-in was Penn. D24 had previously considered it, but it didnāt seem particularly high on her list, and I didnāt think she was going to apply until she decided a day or two before. That said, I think two of her ultimate top 3 schoolsāSwarthmore and WashUāwere also schools that were on her list in October, but they werenāt particularly high up and I never got the sense that D24 did any deep research into them. They were more āsemi-thoughtfuls.ā Given D24ās propensity to do her supplemental essays at the last minute, it was certainly possible that they could have been omitted because of time constraints, which is what happened to Stanford. But once D24 began to more seriously consider them in March, she recognized that they were better potential fits than other schools on her list. I think D24ās desire shifted a little from perhaps wanting a more rural experience last year to wanting more access to a city this year. So, I guess my advice is that not every school on oneās application list has be thoroughly vetted and super-shortlisted before applying in December/January. In fact, Iād worry that if oneās list was too focused, it could be too restrictive to the kidās changing desires.
That said, Iām sure there are many kids who know exactly what they want in the fall and it doesnāt change by the spring.
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The thing is, our (VERY) experienced councilors, are pretty much saying ābeats meā these days.
We did this, hence the overall excellent results. But its not so easy to pinpoint why someone might get rejected at Emory and accepted at Tufts, or WL at Williams, accepted at Amherst, denied at Swarthmoreā¦
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waitlisted at Brandeis and Macalester, accepted at Amherst and Grinnellā¦yeah. This year was a puzzle to me.
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I could have gone on with that list. I am thrilled for your kid. Amherst has been a favorite of each of my kids.
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While we really didnāt have throw-ins in the sense you are talking about the first choice right now (still down to two schools) was sort of an after thought. We are trying for tuition exchange so this was a school we hadnāt even visited. We knew we had to add a few more schools as tuition exchange can be hard to receive. So my daughter went online and found a few she thought she would like. Now it ends up it may the winner but we will see. 
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Off the subject but I guess I didnāt realize just how many universities are out there that I have never heard of.
Watching the softball selection committee pick schools for regionals and I was like, who?
It seems we really only discuss the same few schools over and over on here.
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I work at a private that no one has ever heard of, and we fill an arena with thousands of friends and family celebrating their graduates, who are all leaving happy, educated, often already employed and without exorbitant debt. I always take a photo of the crowd from the floor, because it never ceases to amaze me, and is a good reminder that what we do as staff is important to a lot of folks!
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I think the afterthought schools probably happen most often for these kinds of āfinancial reaches.ā Someplace just tosses you a bunch of money you didnāt expect and it moves way up the list.
My twins are both enrolled at a school they didnāt apply to until very late, after they saw what a mess FAFSA was.
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