Reply to NY Times article on strategies for applying to elite colleges

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[quote=Anonymous]I think it is true that it is not as difficult to get into a good college as is generally assumed these days. And it is true that your odds of getting accepted somewhere increase with the number of applications you send out.

But it is definitely NOT true that applying to college is like flipping a coin.

When you flip a coin, each event is an independent one. What outcome (heads or tails) you get this time has absolutely nothing to do with what outcome you got last time.

When you apply to an elite college, your outcome at one school is not independent of your outcome at another school. If you have the qualities that are likely to entice Harvard to accept you, you have the qualities that are likely to entice Yale and Princeton and MIT and Stanford, etc. to accept you. In fact, if I knew you were accepted at Harvard, I could improve my chances of correctly predicting what will happen at Yale and Princeton, etc. And if you have qualities that will never in a million years get you into Harvard, you aren't getting into Yale or Princeton or MIT either.

The other thing to remember is that colleges are not equally selective. One of the reasons why your chances of getting accepted into good college increases if you apply to more schools is that you are increasing the range of selectivity of the schools you are applying to as your number of applications goes up. There are a limited number of schools that have super low acceptance rates. So if you only apply to 5 schools with <10% acceptance rates, your chances of getting into any one of them might be low, but if you apply to 20 schools, several of those schools are going to have acceptance rates much higher than 10%. You are increasing your odds not (only) because you are flipping your coin so much but because you are applying to some schools that take many more of their applicants.[/quote]

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