<p>I don’t understand why POIH is in a hurry to narrow the field just yet. This is not an appropriate use of planning time. In fact, if a student is lucky enough to have time & money, one of the best uses of this time is for visits to colleges of interest. In some cases, visits do not help to narrow or broaden the list, but in <em>most</em> cases, they <em>do</em>. Favored Universities are often eliminated, while previously dismissed U’s are sometimes added.</p>
<p>You keep focusing on results, when the focus should be on the effort and the student. You cannot control results. (Or haven’t you been reading college confidential for very long?) How would you feel later if you eliminated some choices now, based on some abstract probabilities, and after the fact you learned that your daughter developed other academic interests in highschool but didn’t want to divulge that to you, due to fear of disappointing you after all your research & independent decisions, & due to the fact that now-more appropriate colleges had been removed from the list?</p>
<p>Stanford is definitely not Yale; Princeton & Penn a far cry from each other.</p>
<p>ED is not bad. But the point is, use this time to choose an ED college based on your daughter’s fit & enthusiasm for the school, not based on likely results. You do not know what’s “likely” 1.5 years from now, nor does anyone know on college confidential. Statistics do not make for likelihood; they make for abstract trends not related to the individual students in question. The likelihood of one student being admitted to Yale from her high school may even be 100%, but the likelihood of your daughter being admitted may be one divided by the number of applicants from her school, divided by the number of applicants of similar background in her particular region. (And you don’t know how many of those there will be in 1.5 yrs.)</p>
<p>At the last minute, my daughter applied EA to one Elite, and was accepted. Until senior yr., it would not have occurred to her that she had a chance there. And at the last minute she also applied to an Ivy that she previously had dismissed for one particular reason. That reason vanished in her senior year, with greater maturity & more considered thought. She was accepted there over her classmates & ultimately chose that University. (Because I let her take charge of her own preferences & her own feelings.)</p>
<p>As to relying on a college counselor, “rely” on no one exclusively. Feedback & guidance are fine, but no one else can know the student’s “insides.”</p>
<p>There is a strategy that needs to be applied if the goal is to get into the highest ranking schools. Harvard and Princeton are doing away with early action and decision, so that’ll take a lot of pressure off. If you go to a private school, find out how many kids are applying to each school and figure out where your kid is relative to other kids. If your kid has a specialy talent (sports, dance, drama, writing), find schools that are looking for that type of kids. For the past couple of years, Princeton has been expanding its arts department and looking for female engineers. My daughter didn’t know that and did not apply there for early decision this year. She applied to Columbia for early instead, and 5 athletes were recruited from her school for ED, and she was deferred and eventually rejected. RD for Columbia this year happened to be extremely competetive. In this case, she threw away her option at Columbia. That option would have been better used at Princeton with her profile (not to say she would have gotten in either). </p>
<p>ED/EA is to be viewed as a free option, use it wisely. Many top shools treat ED/EA for their legacy applicants as “use it or lose it.” My daughter’s good friend had the kind of grades that could get into HYPS. But instead of applying to those schools ED/EA, she chose to apply to Georgetown EA. Her strategy was that with her safety in hand she would be free and less stressed during the RD round. She was waitlisted at Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Stanford. She is going to Georgetown and wish she had applied EA to Harvard. Another boy with A- GPA applied Dartmouth ED, worked hard on a Dartmouth professor in film making(?), got in, while many kids with much better stats got rejected during RD.</p>
<p>OP - I understand perfectly well where you are coming from. You are doing the right thing by doing the research now. The only advise I would give you is to look at getting into HYP as a bonus and not as a given. According to my D’s counselfor, my D had the kind of grades and ECs to get into those schools, and was surprised that it didn’t happen. Our biggest mistake was not to prepare our daughter for the event of getting rejected by those schools. I wished we did not take it for granted or emphasized it so much. At the end, my daughter had a few nice schools to consider (Cornell, Duke and Tufts). But going into the process, she thought top tier ivies or nothing. We do take a lot of responsibility for her disappointment and maybe unrealistic expectation. We have another daughter, and we hope we’ll be better second time around.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone the last many post have been wonderful and very constructive in suggestions. I would be concentrating more for the time being on getting my D spend fruitful summer and helping her prepare for Standardized testing.</p>
<p>I’m sure driving her and her friends to the mall for some carefree shopping courtesy of your master card would definitely unclutter her mind to prepare her for standardized testing. You know what they say about all work and no play :-)</p>
<p>Thanks Vin2l, she has her own gift/credit cards all set for shopping with her mom and list of movies chalked out to watch with me for the two weeks in June prior to her summer course.</p>
<p>I’m planning a 8-10 days vacation in August to Japan/Australia. That should refreseh her and us too prior to the rigoros Junior year.</p>