Should I apply to other schools?

JHS
Thu, 14 Dec 2017 22:48:42 +0000

A fair number of the kids I know who were admitted to Harvard EA have applied to other colleges. Some because they legitimately wanted to consider what other colleges had to offer, some because they wanted to compare (and to bargain over) financial aid, and a few because they were somewhat jerks and wanted to brag about how many high-prestige colleges had accepted them.

Out of seven such people, however, I know only one who didn’t ultimately go to Harvard. He was accepted everywhere he applied, and his family was poor enough that he was effectively going to get a full ride wherever he was accepted, so money wasn’t really the issue. He got a named scholarship at the University of Michigan which gave him a little more cash than Harvard could, and some non-monetary benefits, and he preferred the somewhat more democratic version of elitism at Michigan to that at Harvard. As you may imagine, he was a very mature, very self-confident kid.

None of the kids – including the one described above – got a better aid offer than Harvard’s from a college Harvard was prepared to match (i.e., Yale, Princeton, Stanford, probably MIT). I know several who got better offers from Penn, and when they tried to get Harvard to match them were told, “Congratulations! Have a wonderful life at Penn.”