Obstacle #2: The gamble

People wonder if rolling the dice too many times, hoping to get lucky, will land them at a school that is too hard and leave them worse off than had they applied to a smaller pool. But that is not what the evidence shows. 

In one experiment, economists Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner nudged high-achieving, low-income students to apply to more selective colleges and found that their academic performance was just as good as the performance of students in the control group, who attended less selective schools on average.