| Delaware!! |
Spot on. So many make their list in summer before senior year classes start and the workload piles on. |
| Why do kids not want to apply to Williams today? So many posters on here can't get their kids to apply. Genuinely curious. It isn't my DC's type of school so she didn't look at it. |
| Macalaster. Love the idea of a small walkable city, midwestern nice, and size. |
| Many kids don't want rural areas. My kid immediately crossed out Dartmouth and all northeast LACs. Cornell is hanging on a thread and has become "I'll work other essays first and do Cornell if time permits." |
| Holy Cross |
+1 |
An 800 word essay is a big ask |
If a pipeline would be an acceptable substitute for a pipe dream, I’ve got a cozy little school in Pennsylvania you might be interested in. |
| same poster saying williams 6 times lol. like we cant tell you have multiple personality disorder |
| My DC is a freshman in college. I made my kid add more safeties last year and I would probably take that back if I could. People made the process seem much more fraught with uncertainty than it really was. For example, if there was a reach, I had them pick a target backup and then sometimes a safety backup for that target. Luckily, more of the safeties were essay-free so it was just the app fee. I did have them pick a rolling school and they did, but there was zero chance my kid would go there. And then a backup for a reach was another forced app, but my kid would have picked gone in a totally different direction if they didn't get that reach. I did not force any urban or small schools b/c they weren't into them. |
| Bowdoin or Brown |
My child added Stanford as his final application,"pipe dream" school last year. He attended a top private high school with grade deflation but had a 4.0 UW under Stanford's flattening of grades (A minuses are viewed as As).1580, top rigor, very strong extracurriculars but not an Olympian or international award winner or anything jaw-dropping like Stanford tends to like. He wrote the most beautiful essays and the application was just AWESOME. It told a story, it made him seem incredibly appealing, etc. It was his best college application work by a mile. REJECTED. Not even waitlisted. So much for the dream. |
Sorry, your son sounds amazing and I am sure will thrive. While I think in theory we all understand the lottery aspect at the "highly rejective" schools, the fact that it means for every 1 accepted there are literally dozens of equally qualified applicants who are rejected is still emotionally devasting for every one of those kids. |
| Michigan |