Sorry, you might want to make a separate thread for that question.
did you consider VCUART? D attends after having participated in CooperUnions outreach and summer intensive and being heavily pursued to ED by Cooper faculty( by heavily I mean explicitly pulled aside three different occasions and followed with three personal phone calls to her) Absolute BLESSING she didnāt attend Cooper and instead top ranked VCUARTS. She has a over 3.85 gpa , has had worked sold for her with VCU faculty help, has found internships and viable employment while attending, and much more. Very happy.
Some overreach comes from the failure of applicants, their parents, and HS counselors to appreciate how much the applicant pool has grown at desirable schools. Just in the past decade, applications to Vanderbilt are up 144%, Brown 83%, Stanford 74%, Yale 71%. The same is true at some leading publics: Ohio State up 122%, Michigan 118%, UCLA 101%.
When applications are growing that fast, Naviance data from even 2 or 3 years sago may be outdatedāand the accumulated wisdom of parents and seasoned HS counselors may be even farther behind. And notwithstanding the much-ballyhooed shrinkage in the number of graduating HS seniors, the applications boom at desirable colleges shows no signs of abating.
You have to reach high sometimes, so you are bound to get disappointed. Successful people know how to use disappointments.
The problem is the verdict of overreaching occurs only after you are denied or waitlisted at the school. I thought my kid was overreaching too but he got in. Overreaching is alright as long as you have a few safeties on the list.
I overreached when I asked my wife out on a date. Glad I overreached.
OTOH let me think it over.
However, there is a difference between applying to a reach that you know is a reach, versus applying to what you think is a āsafetyā or āmatchā that really is a reach.
@ucbalumnus Right. The āoverreachā isnāt applying to a school with a low chance of acceptance. Its inaccurately assessing those chances in the first place. My daughter will be applying to a few programs with an absurdly low chance of admission. She will be disappointed if she doesnāt get in, but not surprised, or devastated because she is going in with eyes open.
Why do kids overreach? The answer to this is obvious. Most people in our society want to be the ābest.ā The more educated the parents, the more selective the HS, the more the need to be the best. Period. Every kid from this type of environment knows the rankings. Every school - especially private schools - push the ātopā schools. Lots of parents these days live through their kids. And, lots of them think their kids are āperfect.ā Not only donāt they want to say little Johnny is going to āno nameā school, but they really think Johnny will get a spot at the top. So, if the ābestā is commonly thought to be the highest ranked, thereās your answer.
And while lots of people on these threads donāt want to admit they care at all about prestige or rankings, I find that somewhat disingenuous. You see lots of āweād be very happy if Susie went to xyz, but it just happened that she ended up at [insert too school] here.ā And thatās even if Susie got an amazing merit award at āno-nameā school. Iāve seen Susie and her mom at merit days!
Iām not trying to put everyone on these threads down, Iām guilty of this myself. While we built Sās list based on merit aid (donāt qualify for FA, but with 2 younger kids, are hardly ārichā), he was allowed to choose a couple full pay options, and he applied to 1 ivy, last minute. (Wonāt get into reasoning). Shockingly (let grades slide 1st semester and had fair amt of Bs before that), he got a TO to the ivy.
Heās going to what we think is a very good liberal arts college for him, with merit aid, but which almost no one in our area has ever heard of. Iām sick of having to explain this school to people whose eyes glaze over the minute it isnāt HYSP or the like (yet they still ask, where is that? What is that?). I admit I have said to a couple of the helicopter, hyper-competitive parents at his school whose kids applied to every ivy/top school and didnāt get in, but he may accept his TO to ā¦
I know, petty. But, isnāt this why the kids overreach?
āTOā means?
If he does go to an expensive college, will the amount you spend more tightly restrict your two younger kidsā college choices? If so, how will you handle the questioning that will inevitably come from them about why they must work with a smaller budget than your first kid?
I would not be surprised if other CC posters know of students who were admitted from a waitlist, and then went on to be spectacularly successful at that college. I know of one (unrelated to us). If the admission from the waitlist had not occurred, one might well have thought that the student had overreached. But the outcome showed otherwise.
Iām guessing TO means transfer option?
Havenoidea- your experience is by no means universal. I live in an urban area in the northeast which is allegedly āElite College Fever ground zeroā and have never seen the phenomenon you describe. In fact- the opposite. A kid is going to Macauley Honors- folks get excited to see that one of the CUNY colleges is getting some love (even from private school kids). A kid going to Beloit- folks raving that someone who fell in love with Bowdoin or Middlebury or Conn College had the sense to apply outside of our region instead of getting shut out by the same 8 LACās that everyone else in town applies to. A student trying to decide between Marlboro and Juniata- and even people who have never known anyone to go to those two schools are curious about what makes them distinctive.
It is mean spirited not to be able to find something to rejoice about when a kid is ready to go on the next step in life- whether the military (yes, the kid who wants to be an Army Medic- boy, folks were happy for him!), college (all colleges), some kind of trade program/apprenticeship, or a gap year for the kids who arenāt ready to commit yet. It doesnāt cost anything to be nice.
What is a āTOā?
@ucbalumnus itās a Transfer Option (used to be called a guaranteed transfer option), where the school basically says if do your 1st semester somewhere else, take x classes (related to intended major), and maintain x gpa, youāll enter our 2022 class as a sophomore. Schools that use it either donāt want to report the applicantās stats and/or want to see if applicant will perform well in college, and are covering themselves from transfers out of the department. In our Sās case, we think they see a fit for the program for which he applied, but his Bs (and dropping 1st sem grades) with 99% standardized test scores likely read as an underperforming/not (currently) hard working kid, which is true.
Anyway, weāre not thinking heāll go that route unless he has a real problem with where heās going, which I donāt see happening, and also matures quite a bit and is 100% sure about the ivy program. But, if that happened, we wouldnāt be affecting the other 2. We could make the full price fly, but 1) felt regular price for undergrad is ridicuously high (but then if we did allow him to go there, wouldnāt we be buying into the prestge) and 2) thought it would be better to save some $ for grad school; that he wouldnāt get.
Weāre also hoping the other 2, who take school much more seriously, have more choices with merit aid.
āEvery school - especially private schools - push the ātopā schools.ā
No, not at my kidās private HS. Not at all. The GCs work hard to tamp down expectations and to make the students and parents realize that there are plenty of options out there - not just the ātopā schools. They donāt āpushā the ātopā schools, just the opposite. Everyone is happy for the kids, wherever they end up.
So, @havenoidea, your āeveryā claim is patently false. It takes only one opposing example to refute a truism like yours. I bet that there are lots of others on CC that can refute it as well.
In my experience, with both my kidsā private school and our local public, the pressure to reach for top schools - and the ensuing stress that comes along with it - comes from the parents/families not from school administration and faculty.
@doschicos agree with you 100%. My S15 attended an independent school considered one of the best in the country and it is absolutely a parent issue that spirals into a community issue that pushes pressure onto the high school administration and faculty. Until parents evolve, this will continue.
Some parents choose to send their kids to expensive private schools precisely because they think it will get their kid into a ātopā college, and they feel the school is not keeping its end of the bargain if they donāt obtain the desired result. Iām not in that campānever sent my kids to private schools. But I have acquaintances who most definitely are.
Have people noticed that virtually all top private HS have pages that show which Ivys and tippy top colleges graduates matriculate? I wonder if it is a form of advertising to prospective parents or admins trying to tamp down expectations.
My kidsā private and most of the top ones I know publish a matriculation list of ALL colleges. Parents would be wise to focus on the whole list not just the ivies.
Of course, if the cost of the expensive private high school drains the parental money so that the parents cannot afford to send the kid to a ātopā college, that ends up defeating that purpose.