Vicious Spiral?

milee30
Mon, 26 Mar 2018 15:50:54 +0000

“I think it would be a brave and possibly somewhat foolish parent who took a stand and went the three reach, three possible, three safety route.”

Hm, not sure I’m brave so guess that puts me in the foolish category? DS’ original list was 15+. I helped him cut it down to 8. Don’t remember the distribution but it wasn’t 3/3/3, it was more like 1 safety (which did rolling admissions so he had that acceptance by October/November I think), 2 matches and the rest reaches. Few matches because he wasn’t thrilled about any of them and at full pay, he probably would have just gone to the safety if he hadn’t been accepted in the reaches rather than pay a huge price for a match school he wasn’t totally in love with.

Everybody looks at this differently and of course different students have personal strengths/weaknesses, but my theory was that for the reaches especially - most of the applicants have great grades and test scores; the admit/reject decision comes down to ECs (which you have little input into by the time the app is done), LORs (which, again, you’ve mostly handled by app time) and essays. Essays are a big deal for reach colleges, especially essays that talk about “why this college.” It’s very time consuming to do the research about what each particular college is interested in and what unique aspects of that college your kid wants to mention in the essays. Maybe it’s because my kid wasn’t an especially fast writer, but there was no way he could have done more than 4-6 top quality jobs with essays for reach schools. And even 4-6 was a “reach” for him.

When I read the posts of kids with outstanding grades, scores and ECs that are rejected everywhere, I always suspect that at least part of the issue was that their essays were too generic. Top schools want to know that the kid understands exactly what that school offers and is able to articulate why s/he would fit there. Hard to imagine how a kid could do that really well in apps to a dozen schools.

But yes, I agree with your overall premise that the spiral is self-perpetuating. Every kid is applying to many more schools than should be necessary, but they do it because admissions continues to get more competitive and the spiral continues…