Ivy league: Inside the subreddit that predicts your chances of getting into top schools.

“Female, Caucasian, FL, medium-sized public high school, middle class.” A description like this starts almost every post in the subreddit r/ChanceMe. The demographic one-liner is usually followed by a cryptic string of letters and numbers like “ACT: 31 4.651w/4.000u; 2/317” and lists of schools labeled “Safety,” “Match,” and “Reach.” Finally, posts typically end with a variation of the same two words: “Chance me.” For the average Reddit user, these numbers and words don’t mean much—but to thousands of high schoolers applying to college this year, they are everything. One of the moderators of the subreddit told me that r/ChanceMe was “initially created to get toxic chance-me’s and associated users off of r/A2C,” referring to the million-member subreddit r/ApplyingToCollege. Inside the forum, which churns out posts every minute, what students thought was a collective of hopeful peers has become a counterproductive “brain rot.” There’s a deluge of self-deprecation, with posts with titles like “Chance A Rising Senior,” “Chance Me a mediocre,” “Chance a below average Indian girl,” and “Tell me how bad my odds are for MIT lol.” Many posts encourage “ruthless” and “brutally honest” comments even though “it does hurt,” resulting in a positive feedback loop of vicious negativity. “It’s really nerve-racking because you go online looking for advice on how to write essays and you see students your age doing Science Olympiads and starting nonprofits,” Tobi, a rising senior from Texas, told me.