If you're a student who is desperately attached to a handful of those schools, you need to pull back and think about how quixotic your quest is, recognizing the roles that patronage and pure luck play. You're going to get into a college that's more than able to provide a superb education to anyone who insists on one and who takes firm charge of his or her time there. But your chances of getting into the school of your dreams are slim. Your control over the overcome is very, very limited, and that outcome says nothing definitive about your talent or potential. To lose sight of that is to buy into, and essentially endorse, a game that's spun wildly out of control.