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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes - private schools limit applications.  I have also heard firsthand that they also limit which schools certain kids apply to -- e.g., if they four stellar kids and one wants Harvard, another Stanford, the third Princeton, the fourth Yale, they will try hard to keep all those kids from applying to each other's schools to avoid what happens if one of those kids gets in everywhere -- but only really wanted one spot --- and the other three are left out in the cold.  [/quote]

This hasn't been our experience.  The counseling department at our school has taken the view that a regional, practical constraint is far more important than any mythical "cap" or "quota" from one specific school.  To understand this you need to look at the math of the situation; almost 1,000 kids from the DC area will apply to Harvard this year, with perhaps 75 to 90 likely to gain acceptance (higher than the overall 6% acceptance rate due primarily to higher than average concentration of legacies). This number has been fairly consistent year to year recently  If you look at the volatile acceptance patterns at any one school (in our school's case, 5 or 6 acceptances in one year and 1 or 2 in another), it becomes clear that the pool you are competing against is not your fellow classmates but instead the group of highly qualified kids in the region.  With the probability of acceptance for an individual candidate at a specific college very low, the college counselors would have to be [u]dopes not to encourage their best and most ambitious students to apply to several of the most competitive schools[/u], with the hopes that they might get lucky with one or best case a few.  Trying to overly engineer the process through aggressive steering of candidates is a formula for failure, even if it might avoid some of the intramural competition on the front end.

The exception to this might be in the EA or ED process where by definition the candidate must make a tough, narrowing choice. In this case, students are encouraged to consider strategies that improve their odds.  As it applies to the regular pool, expect a free-for-all.[/quote]

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