After helping more than 3,000 kids get accepted to college, our counselors are pretty good at predicting where our students will and won’t be admitted. That skill helps us guide families to make balanced college lists where kids can take some educated, focused shots at a few reach schools, yet still have plenty of colleges that are both good fits and good odds of admission.
But every season, a handful of admissions decisions arrive that just make us ask, what the hell happened?
Sometimes it’s a good surprise, a student who takes a wild swing at a college that was a huge reach and ends up accepted, even though the school denied lots of seemingly more qualified students. And sometimes a top student, one who seems to have done everything right, gets a rejection from one school that admitted a lot of seemingly less qualified applicants. That’s a frustrating surprise, especially when it’s a school the student really wanted to attend.
The admissions surprises get a disproportionate amount of attention and discussion during the college admissions process. Students and parents are a lot more likely to talk about the “B” student who got into Northwestern than they are the valedictorian’s predictable admission to Michigan State. Focusing on the surprises makes college admissions seem unpredictable, almost random.
After watching so many kids go through this, I still think the majority of colleges’ decisions are fair and consistent. The more admissions officers I’ve met and had the chance to work with at Collegewise, the more faith I have that applicants are evaluated by smart, compassionate people. At the most competitive schools, they’ve got to turn away a lot of kids who were qualified, but they do their best to be fair and deliberate. It’s not a perfect system and there will always be surprises. But those surprises are the exception.
If you get a good admissions surprise, be thankful and don’t second guess yourself. Nobody just slips in—you presented something that made the admissions committee vote to admit. And if you get the bad surprise, just remember that what feels like a terrible injustice today won’t matter at all in six months when you’re loving your life at a college someplace else. I know it might feel like that’s never going to happen, but you’d have a hard time finding any freshman in a dorm still lamenting a rejection from a college. You’ll move on, too.