Interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Top Colleges Should Select Randomly From a Pool of "Good Enough," by Barry Schwartz:

In the college-admissions game, both the applicants and the institutions are behaving like what I have elsewhere called "maximizers." Both believe that only the best will do. Research by my colleagues and I has shown that such maximizing is a self-defeating strategy, at least subjectively, in that it leads to stress, anxiety, frustration, regret, and, ultimately, disappointment with outcomes that are excellent but fail to meet either expectations or aspirations. Maximizers may do better than nonmaximizers (we call them "satisficers") objectively, but they tend to feel worse about how they do.

Maximizing is almost certainly a self-defeating strategy objectively as well. Many years ago, the social scientists Detlof von Winterfeldt and Ward Edwards articulated what they called the "principle of the flat maximum." The principle asserts that in many situations involving uncertainty -- and college choice is certainly such a situation, from the perspectives of both applicants and institutions -- the likely outcomes of many choices are effectively equivalent. Or, to put it perhaps more accurately, the degree of uncertainty makes it impossible to know which excellent school (or student) will be better than which other excellent school (or student). Said another way, there are many "right" choices.

Uncertainty of outcomes makes the hair-splitting to distinguish among excellent colleges or students a waste of time and effort. There is more uncertainty about the quality of the student-college match than there is variation among colleges -- at least within the set of excellent, selective colleges. So once a set of "good enough students" or "good enough colleges" has been identified, it probably doesn't matter very much which one you choose; and if it does matter, there is no way to know in advance (because of the inherent uncertainty) what the right choice is.