Can a top college be a safety school?

AAt highly selective colleges such as Stanford, readers use grades and test scores to decide which applicants stay in the running, and something else to decide who is admitted. Every spring a family is outraged that a valedictorian with perfect scores was turned down by a college that admitted a classmate further down the rankings. The outrage assumes the numbers were the decision.

That assumption does more harm than a bad week in April, because it also shapes the decisions a family makes the previous fall, long before any letter arrives. Seeing where the numbers stop working begins with how readers sort the files from a single high school.