Reply to How do you deal with your child's disappointment for not getting into their "dream" school or highly ranked one?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I know several girls who felt this way. Slways girls. Both because they worked so hard and have a harder time differentiating themselves in admissions, and because they care more than the average boy about external validation. They have been socialized to care a lot about external approval by our culture and it makes it harder.[/quote]

But doesn't the whole ED process encourage kids to pick a school that they would choose above all other schools?  The one school where, if they got in, they would love to go over any other of the 1,000 plus schools out there?  I feel like it does and back when we were applying to college, ED was not considered to be providing the advantage that it does now.[/quote]

It's important to have a layered strategy, typically including EA safeties, EA targets (if any), ED, ED2, and RD (reach, target).  [b]ED and ED2 should be DC's dream schools, they could be low reach or high target.[/b]  In RD, DC should have a good mix of reach and target, providing that DC got in at least one safety in EA.  OP's DC didn't get in any target indicates their strategy was flawed, probably there is no enough targets in the RD round.[/quote]

Agree this is key. Vanishingly few get into high reaches ED or EA.[/quote]

Are "high reach" "low reach" "high target" etc. able to be defined? As in with %ile for GPA/SAT? If a student is at the 75% for both GPA and SAT, does that make it a target? [/quote]
There's no "official" definition, but this article — https://support.collegekickstart.com/hc/en-us/articles/217485088-Differences-Between-Likely-Target-Reach-and-Unlikely-Schools — explains it well. The general idea is that, yes, if your student is in the top quarter of a school's CDS values, you'd place it in that right column, but the school's selectivity would determine which vertical section it would go in.

DCUM people are overly confident and overly optimistic, so you'll probably hear people saying this matrix is too conservative. But I'd rather set expectations low for my child and then have a pleasant surprise. In fact, what they call a "reach" I framed to my kids as "unlikely". (My kids' stats put them in at least the middle 50%, and usually the top 25%, so the pink "unlikely" section on the example chart didn't really exist for them. Nevertheless, I used the words "unlikely", "target", and "likely".[/quote]

Hey, I love that matrix and had not seen it before. Thanks for linking it![/quote]

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