Emotions are running high this time of year. And not just for high school seniors. The night of December 14, I couldn’t sleep, knowing that several of my students who had applied Early Action or Early Decision would be getting their decisions the next day. I don’t know which of us was more thrilled when my student who’d applied to Stanford was accepted. Sharing a student’s joy is one of the best moments in this work.

The tough part is helping students deal with the disappointment when they don’t get that acceptance letter. When 80 to 90 percent of applicants are well qualified and a school can only accept 20 percent of them, a lot of excellent students are going to be disappointed. Luckily, none of my students has been rejected so far this year, and the ones who have been deferred can take some comfort in knowing they are in very good company.

An admissions officer at Boston College reported that their Early Action applications went from 5,300 last year to 6,300 this year, an increase of 19 percent, which is huge for one year. An admissions officer at Elon University told me that the students they accepted early have an average 4.0 gpa, a record for the school. These increases are great for the colleges, but hard on good students who have worked hard and find themselves closed out of schools they would have been admitted to a few years earlier.

Because so many students who can no longer count on getting into highly selective schools are now applying to colleges in the next tier, those schools are also becoming more competitive. This trickle-down competitiveness means that all students need to examine their list of colleges to make sure they have included at least one school where they are sure to be admitted. A college that would have been a “safety” school three years ago may be much more selective today.

It has become more difficult to predict admissions decisions, especially at very competitive schools, where a student might be admitted to one but not another similarly selective college. I don’t want to suggest that families get caught up in the competition and ignore the importance of making a good match. There are certainly many less selective colleges that offer wonderful educational opportunities.

In this intensely competitive environment, I want to reassure students that even if they don’t go to the most elite college, they could very well go on to a top graduate, medical or law school. The list of students enrolled at Harvard Law School in 20032004 includes six who did their undergraduate work at Arizona State University, two from Cal State San Bernardino and one from Cal State Sacramento. These are just a few of the less selective schools that are sending students on to prestigious graduate programs.

While only a few students can attend a highly selective college, all students can get a good education and have opportunities for great success. Keeping this in mind will help students and their parents cope with the increasingly competitive and stressful college admissions process.

Audrey Kahane, MS, is an independent college admissions counselor in West Hills. She can be reached at (818) 704-7545 or at audreykahane@earthlink.net.