Here's a scene I've watched play out for 24 years.

Great grades. Great scores. The guidance counselor looks at the software and says that one's a target, you should get in there.

Denied.

The family is blindsided. They did everything right and the machine still said no.

Mistake number three is not understanding that college admissions is a marketing exercise, not a meritocracy.

Start with the software. Most high schools run Naviance, some run SCOIR, a few use something else. Whatever the logo, it does roughly the same thing. It plots your kid's GPA and test score against other kids from your high school who applied to that college, and tells you how you stack up.

That's useful. It is also badly incomplete, for two reasons.

First, the admissions decision isn't built on grades and scores. It's built on twenty-something factors. The software can see two of them.

Second, your kid isn't competing against the other kids at your high school. They're being compared to kids in your high school a...