Ive dealt with GCs from different public, independent and catholic high school A very unimpressive, highly unsatisfactory bunch. Everyone of them have said things blatently untrue out of ignorance. I no longer correct and just do it myself with my kids After the first two doing nothing and worse, I stepped in. And I watch them give false info to peers. THey get away with it because most top stats kids will do just fine where ever they go and this is a fleeting thing. BUt they have cost a lot of families a lot of money, that I can tell you. If a parent is not on top of these things, that is waht happens.
The problem is the students who apply to 15-20 top schools, and get into none of them, because they didn’t realize that they weren’t quite as good as the students who were accepted. A student looks at the stats of accepted students and thinks he is in range, but doesn’t realize that all the other applicants are in range. Schools should publish the average stats of rejected students. The average stats of Stanford’s rejected students must be sky-high.
The kid of a family I know insisted on applying to Stanford as well as a few other top schools. Good kid, great scores. I didn’t say so to the family, but this kid might as well have set fire to a hundred-dollar bill as pay the application fee for Stanford. His dad said, “But there’s a chance.” No. There wasn’t a chance. This family did not understand how to play the game.
Another family I know did understand how to play the game: the son has top scores, perfect grades, a zillion APs, and is a Siemens winner. And he was still rejected by Stanford. He has to decide between full pay at Yale and full ride at UCSD-- and Dad will give him the money Yale would have cost if he goes to UCSD. Poor fellow 
@Cardinal Fang it was precisely because of all the warnings about how small the odds are, and how seemingly random the process is, that D almost decided not to apply to Stanford. But she did, and she got in. She was only outright rejected from Harvard. She is still astonished about this (not the rejection, but all the other acceptances).
We have impressed on her for years that she is a special student, not because of her freakish academic talents, but for how she treats her fellow human beings. She became aware at an early age that she was perhaps a better student than some of her peers, but we stressed to her that the goal is to learn for herself, not to compare herself to others. We helped teach her that being a better student doesn’t make her a better person - just like being a gifted athlete doesn’t make someone a better person. She puts her pants on one leg at a time like everyone else.
She did a lot of research, and she understood the fact that because the top schools meet 100% of financial need, it would be very difficult to get into them.
With our encouragement, and her GC, she aimed high, despite preparing herself for the realistic expectation of failure. Perhaps she was underselling herself in her own mind, but the fact the she was rejected to Harvard confirms her initial expectation. Now, she is wondering if she would have been better off applying early at Stanford, and not “wasting” the application fees at the other schools. She well understood the fact that our spending $1000 on application fees meant we had to make other sacrifices as a family - in our situation this means much more than to families that have been able to save big amounts for future college expenses.
Six months ago, I probably would have said the process is too complicated, too unfair, and biased to the privileged. Not sure now if I would still say this given how well things have turned out for D. Since we will never know how much of her success at this game is truly dumb luck, and how much was hard work/talent - clearly there was a lot of both, we resolve just to be grateful and know she will make the most of this awesome opportunity. After discussions with current Stanford students, I suspect she will spend some time accepting for herself the answer to “Why me?” is that even though other kids “deserve” to be there that aren’t, she deserves to be there too, and ultimately what will matter is that she will get out of it what she puts into it.
The troubling point is, as this thread discusses, that some kids don’t deserve to be there and apply anyway, and too many other qualified students don’t get chosen.
If, as you suggest, colleges report the average scores of those rejected, don’t you think applications would plummet, and selectivity would drop? There is no incentive for schools to do this.
Gosh, I’m no statistician, but seems to me that if my stats were in the bottom quartile of a college which accepts single digit applicants, and I knew that I wasn’t a football player, an award winning composer whose concerto was being performed by the Cleveland Symphony, or had just won a Tony award… I’d understand that my chances of acceptance were pretty much close to zero.
How much transparency do you need in an environment where colleges are taking 8% of their applicants? Which means 92% of kids are getting rejected? Who doesn’t understand these odds?
Right. Frankly this is pure refusal to stare admit rates in the face.
Here’s the problem that may applicants seem to have in understanding the odds, Blossom. They look at the GPA and SAT score distributions of admitted or enrolling students the previous year, see themselves safely above the mean, and say “Hey, I’m as good as those kids.” It never occurs to them that if the college is selective they should never expect to be competitive for admission if they’re not at least in the top quartile (at minimum).
On top of that, they have no sense of what makes a good hook. Serial joiners, even leaders of prosaic organization after organization, Candy Striping hundreds of hours, but without real distinction in initiative or achievement or recognition just doesn’t cut it. Never mind legacy status.
The larger issue is that many applicants have the false sense that if they apply to enough highly selective colleges, their odds of admission to at least one of them increases dramatically. So instead of focusing on finding the best matching schools within reach-match-automatic admit (coupled with rolling admission), they load up on super-reaches. They don’t realize that even for “matches” if they want to have a good chance of admission their stats should be in the top quartile of (this year’s) admitted students.
While that might be the case for those interested in uncommon majors (or perhaps the more common nursing major) that are only offered at schools which cannot be safeties (admission or financial) for them, is it really that common for a good student with parents willing to contribute a reasonable amount (by college financial aid standards) to be unable to find a safety that they will be admitted to and will be able to afford?
Or is it that some of the students are so caught up in the idea that any school which could possibly by a safety is too “lowly” for them?
To some New Jersey students and parents posting on these forums, the thought of going to Rutgers seems to be horror-inducing.
I was thinking about numbers last night. I can’t remember if it was a thread on CC or a news article, but they stated that there were 12,000 freshman Ivy spots. I don’t know if that number is correct but it sounds plausible at least. There are around 4 million US high school seniors, give or take. Not sure how many international applicants. So just as a thought exercise, 1% of 4 million is 40,000. Not everyone is applying to Ivies for whatever reason, but I think this kind of puts the odds in perspective in a different way… the Ivies could limit themselves to the top 1% and still not have enough slots.
Anyway, it’s a chicken and egg thing with the top schools… the more people care about getting into a most selective school, the more selective that school will get (more applicants for the same # of slots). If we could hammer into these high school kids the fact that selectivity isn’t the most important consideration, it would get slightly easier for qualified kids to get into these schools.
Daunting odds. Why this is tough to understand is perplexing.
I have sympathy for a kid who has zero family resources and needs to figure out the entire college mess (including the finances) on his/her own. I have less sympathy for the kid who is convinced he “belongs” at Yale and can’t find a safety that he or she could attend, assuming that finances are not the controlling issue. I have sympathy for the kid who needs to be close to his/her medical team (kidney? lymphoma?) and therefore the list of safeties is a short one and may include some places that are not a good fit academically or intellectually. I have less sympathy for the kid who doesn’t understand that if half the HS class is applying to Penn (reach) Middlebury (match) and Muhlenberg (safety) that perhaps looking at Beloit or St. Olaf or Carlton or Rice or Earlham or Lawrence-- indeed anywhere except in the Northeast corridor, might be a more successful strategy.
Certainly, there are some kids that just don’t accept the realities and then post how sad they are that they worked so hard and got rejected by 4 or even 7 Ivies. Just a glance at our Naviance shows that kids with SATs below 1400 were routinely rejected at Princeton, even with GPAs above 4.0 (weighted). In fact, except for one that clearly must be an athlete or other hooked student, the only admits had GPAs that were just about perfect (all As in as many honors or APs as possible) and SATs at or above 1500 (one with SAT in the 1400s). Yet kids with SATs below 1350 and GPAs that were barely 4.0 (weighted which definitely means some Bs) continue to apply. Same with other super reaches. Not all of them could have hooks from our mostly upper middle class town with few URMs and only the occasional top level athlete.
But below that level it seems like things have gotten even more competitive so the data on past admits may not be all that helpful. If your high school stats show that kids like you regularly get into Middlebury or Lehigh in years past, it makes sense to apply. So the reject or wait list may be more of a shock. But as schools like Lehigh report a sub 30% admit rate, it is more difficult.
There is also this continuous mantra that financial aid is aplenty and that merit money is out there for the taking. Families need to really understand that merit is only coming from a school that is likely much farther down on the ranking list than the kid may want to attend.
Love thy Safety (financial and admit).
3puppies, I imagine that your daughter’s LOR made the difference, or possibly her essays. If she got into so many top schools, it was not completely random!
We are fortunate here. The GCs at DS’ HS are great. It’s a large suburban public school, so they have a large workload. We’ve had a couple of meetings and the information/advice that we’ve gotten is consistent with what I’ve learned over years on CC. DS (11th grade) has been told that he might have a chance at a certain top school, for a specified reason, but the attitude and tone of voice made it clear that it would be a crapshoot. He’s also been told that certain other schools would be “solid choices” - and it was clear that this meant that he’d be competitive, not that admission was guaranteed. He’s been handed a list of LAC which the GC went over, and checked the ones that he should be thinking about. The school has a lot of data available, beyond Naviance, that includes information on course rigor and SAT2 scores for applicants. The GC has spoken of refining the list as time goes on, and more grades and scores come in, and of talking about an ED strategy if we want to go that route.
I think it’s a function of age. It’s the same “It will never happen to me” way of thinking that has new drivers driving too fast.
Every single valedictorian in this country has spent 12 years just knowing he/she was the smartest kid in the school. The problem is that that particular school, no matter how big, is one very teeny tiny little fraction of a percent of all the schools whose valedictorians are also the smartest kids in their schools.
I just googled and found that, as of 2001, “•Across the United States there are 26,407 public secondary schools and 10,693 private secondary schools.” So that’s 37,000 valedictorians. And almost every one of them aspires to an Ivy League college. Then throw in all the salutatorians, and all the NHS presidents and all the other high achievers, all vying for those spots at the Ivies.
A huge percentage of them are bound to be disappointed when acceptances go out.
Sorry, this is long, I’ve apparently been ruminating for a while!
Doting parents, encourage their child to pursue their strengths and their interests. Kids are already ego centric, and this is intensified by the parents belief that * their* child is intelligent/capable/deserving of the very best that life has to offer. Which is true, but then * every* child is. 
Many adults don’t have the perspective that just to be living in the 21st century is pretty amazing. To be living in a country where education is available for all, where there are countless opportunities and paths through life for their children to choose, knowing that oftentimes they may even change their minds and do something completely different is downright shocking, but they take it in stride as their birthright.
While I have read multiple times on CC that parents & students have heard that " money is out there", I admit I * never* took that seriously. It meant as much to me as the words “the check is in the mail”, " lightly used", or " trust me".
What kind of lives must these people be living to think that they will not be obligated to pay their own families educational expenses? They have the ability to move to the area with the * best * schools, for their kids to take multiple AP/IB/SAT/ACT tests, to apply to multiple colleges- usually more than 5 or even 10, and they start researching colleges as soon as they enter high school, perhaps even visiting ones that are 300, 500 or even 1000 miles away. But when it comes to paying for admission, it suddenly is unaffordable, and unfair that the school isn’t giving them a bigger discount.
They hear other families and students talking about the same 200 schools, perhaps even the same 30 schools, and they don’t see any reason why their child should need to * settle * or even seriously consider a school not on that list. They are too supercilious to realize that professors and students at less known schools are likely to be very indistinguishable from " top ranked" schools, with the lights off. They will do anything to prevent their kid from attending a directional university or even in many cases, the state flagship university, especially if it is instate.
The more something is seen as unattainable by the hoi polloi, the more convinced they are that it is where they belong.
Instead of taking advantage of the myriad opportunities that await, they have constrained their options, and are stymied when it doesn’t play out as they expected.
While this is the overall gist that I have gleaned from CC, I also have observed it IRL, despite mild encouragement to broaden their viewpoint.
I do realize that the common app has made it too easy to apply to many schools, which I think has exacerbated the problem of wait lists that never move, and blown holes in the expectation that in March, students will have several acceptances to consider.
My kids have their undergrad degrees, but if I was doing it over again, I think I would do exactly the same thing.
( except, I would have hired a math tutor so that they could keep up their skills over their gap year).
They each applied to only a few schools, ( 5 & 2), were accepted to all, then took a gap year before they entered college.
I admit, I have never attended university, so I am not hampered by my experience with admission or affordability.
But when a student applies to 20 or more schools, especially when the similarity between them seems to be " prestige", they are not able to show an investment in attending any one of them. They can’t, they have spread themselves too thin.
Even if they are admitted to 3 out of their 20, they are disconsolate. They focus on " the ones that got away", not the ones they have in their hand. They resign themselves to attending one, but before mid terms, they are already planning to transfer.
The above are the families and students that we often hear from on CC, however- a small portion, of students who have resigned themselves to attending schools that they weren’t excited about, come back to share their experience.
( mods-we really need a stickied thread for students to relate their positive experiences with their safety schools)
It isn’t unusual for them to come to the realization that this was really the best thing that could have happened. 
That they became very invested in their " last choice" school, and realize they have developed new skills and a broadened perspective, that can only serve them well in the future.
IMO, life isn’t about attainment, it is about perseverance.
I don’t think it’s the kids in the bottom quintile for a competitive school who are surprised when they don’t get in; it’s the ones who are in the top quintile, or the top decile, or even the top percentile, who still don’t get in, because, as everyone here points out, the schools are accepting <8% of their applicants. And, when these trends creep down to schools that used to be a sure thing for the top 1% who were not unreasonable in applying to Stanford/Harvard/ they are surprised.
And, I would be sorry to hear that the child who needed 100% aid, and could get it at Harvard or Stanford didn’t apply because they weren’t willing to take the risk, or thought they afford the $75 application fee. I think the facts require a careful balancing of encouragement and discouragement (take the risks, but not in a way that you don’t have a safety net) when advising.
In our case, we tried really hard to find LAC safeties where my son would be happy both socially and academically and we visited several, only to be disappointed. The problem we encountered was that once you lowered the selectivity enough to make a school a legitimate admissions “match,” you found yourself with schools where the STEM programs just weren’t weighty enough. So my son was left with big state publics as his safeties, and although it worked out in the end because he completely changed his mind about what he wanted very late in the game and he’s happy to be be at a big public, it would have been a huge disappointment if his heart had been set on a LAC and his only affordable choices were schools that didn’t really “fit.”
My rule of thumb after 3 Ds is as follows: Reach, low reach and match. If you were to assign 3 for reach, 3 for low reach, and 4 for match. Is that your should come out to 5-6 admissions; or 1 one acceptance to a reach, 1-2 to a low reach, and 3-4 with your match schools.
Totally anecdotal, but it does span 10 years, and 3 different kids, and includes schools from Ivies to LACs and UCs. Obviously, how you equate your chances or lack thereof, will influence your numbers.
Yes, I agree that kids for whom the big publics aren’t a good fit and who are interested in serious STEM have a difficult time finding a “likely” fit. I think the key for some of those students might be to figure out ways to make the large public a reasonable fit, as they are starting their search (for example, honors programs, dorms, frats/sororities, other social groups, . . . .).
Or to look at Us farther down the list or technical colleges that are smaller but STEM focused. Many Big State Us have engineering schools that are much smaller.
There are many kids who have to “settle”. If you want merit money, you usually have to go to a school that is below your reach admit. As the NYU vs Temple thread points out, as well as some here, the difference in quality between students and professors may not be as big as we all think between the number 31 school and the number 60 school. Many other kids will take the money and run. IMO, there is a point at which colleges do not provide a quality education and kids are partying almost every night and not studying, but that is also farther down the list than many at CC look.
Students who do not want to attend big schools may have a harder time finding good academic fit safeties, if being an an academic outlier at the high end is bothersome. A big safety school may have enough outliers around to find a group of such (or have an honors program to help them find each other), but there may not be that many such outliers at a small safety school.