I have a friend looking to leave their dead end job via grad school. They took an entrance exam and did not score very well. They are retaking the test, but are still looking into going to a top flight school. How do I break it that they should probably aim a little lower in their search without coming across as a jerk?
-T.I.p.

As someone who went through the whole “applying to PhD programs” process last year (quasi-unsuccessfully, too), I can tell you that picking a good school is hard. Because you want to think that you’re smart enough to get into your first choice. So, this friend wants to go to Yale, and you think that Taco Tech is more his bag, and you don’t want the friend to get their hopes up if it isn’t going to happen. Well, I think the answer’s pretty simple. You just explain that in this kind of situation, with graduate school applications soaring due to our crap economy, that having a safety school (or three) isn’t the worst thing in the world.  You could tell him that funding is less competitive some places, that Harvard received an overwhelming amount of applications that year, that specific schools have different curriculums and you think that this other, smaller school has something better to offer. But ultimately, if dude won’t settle for anything less than the Sorbonne, whatever. It’s his dime, his time, and his inability to gauge himself that’s going to lead to that disaster.

Plus, there’s always the chance he’ll get in to Oxford, and then you can feel happy for him. Or sad for the state of higher education. To quote my roommate, “it’s a friggin crapshoot.” And sometimes, even in a top flight graduate program, there are schmucks who somehow wormed their way in. Hopefully, your friend will be so lucky.