Addendum to Superb Student essay
I wrote the essay for parents whose kids have already applied to college, to be read between November 1st and May 1st. This sub-page is aimed at parents of juniors and sophomores who haven’t applied to college yet.
Now that you know the true odds that your superb child faces, the next thing to understand is: these probabilities of acceptance are not independent and do not add together. Applying to six schools where the odds of acceptance are 1 in 6 does not raise the odds of being accepted at some one of them to unity or even close. It probably does not raise the odds of any acceptance even as high as 1 in 3. All schools are looking for roughly the same thing.
You must understand: no university needs your bright, hard-working, suburban affluent kid. There are tens of thousands of such kids. Accordingly, your child’s value is depressed on the educational marketplace. Lots of children of affluent, professional couples do really well in school and on tests. Your child had every advantage: caring parents, safe neighborhood, good schools, resources for excellence, and rewards for achievement. And all they could muster was a superb academic record with extra-curricular evidence of a well-rounded life? No stardom? No story of triumph over hardship?
Conclusion: do buy your superb student one or two lottery tickets. But don’t waste your funds on half a dozen. Carefully examine the second dozen universities on the US News ranking: is there a good fit there for your child? Apply to a couple of these. Does your state, or a state where they’d like to live, have a flagship public university? Apply to several of these. The undergraduate classroom experience at a Berkeley is almost indistinguishable from that of a Cornell or Penn. In each case, in many lower division classes your child will be taught by Ph.D. students with zero teaching experience and slightly more English speaking ability. University research reputations are not built by miring senior faculty in large sections of required lower division courses. Once in upper division courses, the faculty qualifications are indistinguishable across the three, and Berkeley charges less than 1/3 the tuition, for state residents, and 3/4, for out of state.
If your child really is a serious student, I also recommend a couple of applications to the better liberal arts colleges. Other than HYSP, Brown, and Dartmouth, these are the only schools in America where almost all classes will be taught by experienced professors committed to teaching undergraduates as an important part of their duties. And in all cases, there your superb student has a chance to win the contest for admission, rather than pray for a lottery ticket.
Last, as should be obvious from the above, your superb student needs 1-3 safety schools: the local state institution, if you like where you live, and it’s at all good; or a small college compatible with your faith, if religion is important; or a big university, not in the top 20, that has an interesting specialty or a favorable location.
By my count, that’s 10-12 applications in all, just under $1000 in application fees. I don’t see how a superb student, child of affluent parents, can justify any fewer.