Taken from Kristina Dell’s Daily Beast/Newsweek article on 4/4/11
Sure, almost any student would love to gain admission to an Ivy right off the bat, but many have become next to impossible to get into. “The super-reach schools are completely out of reach,” says Montesano of College Match. “You’re looking at a 6 percent admission rate for Harvard.”
So more families have started to take a long-term approach to the college admissions process. For many, the endgame isn’t college; it’s graduate school. Some are considering sending their kids to top-notch state schools to save tens of thousands of dollars with the idea that Stanford or Yale will make a great graduate school. Others are searching for programs that allow a student to go to school for six years and gain a B.A. plus a J.D. to save a year of time and tuition. Whitman, Hamilton, Occidental, and Bowdoin have such programs.