It’s because kids get way too exotic with their school choices, and a lot of guidance counselors give bad advice to these kids. The results are very predictable. Either they get a list of rejections, or a list of acceptances to schools they can’t afford. If you have your heart set on Harvard, UNC is NOT a safety school. A safety is only a safety if it’s an auto-admit, a scholarship, or a very high acceptance rate for your stats.
In this admission cycle there are fifteen schools with acceptance rate below 10%, an almost unthinkable statistic just a few years ago. That’s why there is NO such thing called “overreach” for accomplished unhooked kids trying many of the top schools and hoping for the best.
I know an example of a kid this year who was a close friend of my DD and had perfect stats and national awards too. On Wed, Mar 28th she found out that she was rejected or waitlisted by all ivies she applied to. At that point she had only one school left-- Stanford which she put in an application at the last minute, and you can say that she definitely overreached with her list of many tippy top schools. On Friday Mar 30th she heard from the last school and was accepted. Now you would probably agree that she didn’t overreach after all. But nothing has changed between Wed and Fri.
Quite the contrary, I would say she definitely overreached and was extremely lucky that with such a foolish high-risk strategy she didn’t get shut out completely. I’m happy for her that she got into Stanford, but any student who adopts that strategy is a fool, and any adult who advises or supports that strategy is a knave.
@jzducol I would argue that she absolutely overreached. She got insanely lucky with the last minute Stanford acceptance. Results are not what define overreaching. Overreaching means creating a list without reasonable matches and safeties. It is also convincing yourself that you have a high chance of getting into a school where no one has a high chance. Overreaching means you are shocked and devastated by being rejected from schools where you had no business expecting an acceptance.
Yes @gallentjill! And no one should be “expecting an acceptance” to a school that reject 90%+ of the applicants. My daughter had a school on her list with a 9% acceptance rate. She knew it was a long shot, especially since she didn’t apply ED (it wasn’t her favorite), and just shrugged off the rejection when it came. It was kind of a “whatever” for her. We’ve been grooming her for YEARS to not tie up her self esteem with the college process since balancing a college freshman class, often means nothing about a candidates ability, and more about an overrepresented major, gender, ethnicity, state, EC, or whatever. College rejections don’t diminish a students’ smarts, work ethic, and most importantly, potential. I wish all kids heard that message and believed it!
^^Fully agree. The diagnosis “overreach” usually is delivered with hindsight bias.
I suppose a lot of you are not aware that many admits to those highly selective schools have only ONE acceptance by those schools. Whether a Stanford acceptance comes at the beginning of the cycle or at the end of the cycle should not matter, right? If that’s the case, is one out of five success rate defined as “overreach” or one of nine? And where do you draw the line?
I guess Stanford was a fool admitting her and the AOs should have sensed that she “overreached”.
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Quite the contrary, I would say she definitely overreached and was extremely lucky that with such a foolish high-risk strategy she didn’t get shut out completely. I’m happy for her that she got into Stanford, but any student who adopts that strategy is a fool, and any adult who advises or supports that strategy is a knave.
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Jzd, we are disagreeing on the meaning of overreach and the point of this thread included the subsequent disappointment. Not Hail Marys, lol.
This notion that you “won’t know unless you try” is part of the problem. Kids with an attitude that lightning may very well stike them, so “I’ll get out into as many fields as I can.” Lightning doesn’t strike that often…and an anecdote doesn’t change that. Nor should kids estimate their shot because someone somewhere got in.
The overreach comes with the whole strategy of applying to only super selective schools. If she had a handful of sub 10% acceptance rate schools on her list in conjunction with reasonable and affordable matches and safeties/likelies, than I doubt folks here would call it an overreach. As it was, her strategy was an overreach even if it did pan out in the end. It’s not about looking at one school in a vacuum ignoring the whole list.
@jzducol, I’m perfectly well aware, as I’m sure are others, that it’s not uncommon for an applicant to get only one acceptance out of nine highly selective schools. But the point is, for anyone to apply only to nine highly selective schools with no true matches (schools where acceptance is highly likely but not guaranteed) or safeties (where acceptance is virtually certain and the school is affordable for that student) is just too risky a strategy. For every student who succeeds with that strategy, there are probably many more with similar stats and achievements who get shut out completely. It’s like playing Russian roulette, but perhaps with 4 or 5 bullets in the revolver instead of one. You might survive, but do you really want to play that game?
Overreach and underreach. Do both. Then, it’s not overreaching. If you apply to just Ivies, well then, that’s being dumb. A real definition of overreaching is applying to only “reach” schools without any real safety.
@mackinaw that sounds like the second at Stanford. There was an interesting thread in here by someone who went to Stanford about how awful it was to be a normal person with normal goals. He wanted to get a job with a regular company. I forget the discipline, but his point was he didn’t have an idea for the next big start-up, he wasn’t interested in working for the next big start up. At some point, all the “quirky, lopsidedness” becomes onerous if you are actually a regular person.
It’s fine that there are places like that, but at some point it becomes a little too precious. Who really wants to go to a place so chock full of “uniqueness” that the very quality is no lonelier unique at all?
@momofsenior1 “College rejections don’t diminish a students’ smarts, work ethic, and most importantly, potential.”
^^I think this quote is worth repeating.
I think if someone is fully aware of their options and honestly makes each choice knowing the risks, then I am not sure if that it is dumb or not. It might be really dumb to apply to a safety, just to have a safety, attend that safety, not put in effort because it isn’t challenging, has a commuter atmosphere, or doesn’t have the desired major, or whatever the reason. The important thing is going into the process with a realistic knowledge of the chances of each school and coming up with a plan if you get all “no’s” The best option for some might be to regroup, take a gap year and reassess. As a parent I have learned from the list to avoid using terms like “safety” because they might be perceived as lesser colleges. Just try to have a list of possible schools and wait until the decisions come in to rank the choices.
A safety is a school you knew you would get in and would have been shocked if you did not get in. Two schools were definitely safeties for our kid because school reps told us our kid would be admitted. If some others think those schools were lesser schools (they were different options, not lesser schools), so be it because many kids would not be accepted at Honors Colleges.
Not nearly as many as end up with ZERO acceptances.
Did that student also apply to some schools with admit rates in the 20-40% range? and some that take 75% plus.? or a school that guaranteed to admit her – or maybe an early application to a rolling admission school? Where would she have gone had Stanford said no?
Even if admissions was a random process - which it is not, the odds of getting rejected from all the schools with single digit admit rates would be greater than the odds of being accepted to one.
Back when I was applying to college everyone had a “safety school”. Sometimes they only applied to one college- our state flagship or one of the branches, but those were the days of auto admit so if you knew your GPA and SAT score you could figure out without too much difficulty if you were getting in or not. Some kids (like me- I was lucky) applied to a bunch of schools. I think 5 by the end. I had a reach (which I got into) plus the matches. I knew a few kids who applied to 6. I don’t know anyone who applied to more as far as I recall.
Nowadays, guidance counselors seem to be suggesting two “safety schools” because “everyone loves having a choice”. True for some kids, not for others. Ok- two, so you have a choice. And then things get really complicated. You’ve got kids applying to 12 and 15 and 18 colleges; some are not well thought out (the NPC’s show that half the schools on the list are not affordable, so to me that’s a huge waste of time and money) or represent delusional thinking.
And yet I know kids who only get in to one school… and sometimes the safety is not that safe.
To me it’s not a question of overreach or underreach- it’s a misplaced use of time and effort, applying to WAY too many schools and likely not knowing much about the schools from the git go. I’ve heard “but he needs merit aid so it’s “worth it” to spend the money to apply to 20 schools”. Sounds like crazy math to me. I’ve heard “Kids change so much in senior year so she needs lots of options” which again sounds crazy but people know their own kids better than I do.
What is indisputable is that a kid can only attend one college at a time. Build the list from the bottom up- schools where your stats put you firmly in the “will be admitted” category that has something wonderful and exciting which are affordable. And then go wild if you want.
I was not supposed to get into my reach school. This was before Naviance of course, but my guidance counselor told me I didn’t bring much to the table and I should set my sights lower. And I did- I would have been happy to go to any of the other schools on my list where I was more or less on solid ground. But I took one flyer and it paid off.
Now I see kids taking a chance on 9 or 10 colleges and it just seems like a lot of money with low odds. But what do I know?
I don’t necessarily blame the kids. It’s the adults in their lives who should know better and rein them in. If you’re 17 or 18 and you’ve gotten all A’s throughout HS and you ace the ACT and/or SAT, you’re probably going to think you’re pretty hot stuff and any college in the country will be more than happy to have you, bar none. Especially if you’ve done some ECs and won some awards and honors for them, and you think you write pretty well and your teachers seem to like you so you’re counting on good essays and good recs; and your parents and extended family members and HS peers are all telling you you’re brilliant and you can go to any college you want. It’s pretty heady stuff, and you might fall for it and set yourself on the primrose path to overreach—not realizing there are tens of thousands of applicants just like you or even more impressive, so that you should temper your expectations.
This very nearly happened in my own circle of acquaintances. Someone I know quite well had a son who had done very well in a highly regarded competitive HS in suburban DC, had a 4.3 weighted GPA and very strong test scores. The mom called me to tell me that her son’s HS GC thought her son was Ivy material, so they visited some Ivies and the kid really liked Yale and Princeton so he was “trying to decide between the two,” as if it was his call. The mom called me because she knew that as an academic I’d had significant interactions with both schools. So I obligingly gave her my impressions but stressed that at that level it was a matter of personal preference as the two schools are really quite different, although superficially similar. I then grilled her on the kid’s qualifications. Turns out the 4.3 weighted was more like a 3.7 or 3.8 unweighted, and the test scores while very strong were not exactly out of the ballpark, and the ECs were four years of band, some church activities, and Eagle Scout. I told her these were good, solid credentials but not anything that was likely to bowl over the adcoms at Yale and Princeton, and suggested that while these schools were worth a shot they were definitely reaches, and the kid should focus more on matches and safeties. He ultimately was accepted and enrolled at UNC-Chapel Hill OOS, a terrific outcome at a school that I would say was still a bit of a reach given their low OOS acceptance rate. But without my intervention he might have very easily fallen victim to overreach due to bad advice from naive parents and his HS counselor.
Gee- ya think so? We’ve come to realize that it’s all a numbers game, and I’m not talking about the applicants numbers. Colleges recruit students with the full knowledge that they probably won’t get in- create huge waiting lists and reject thousands, all so they can up their ranking. BEWARE!