How do you handle a college rejection?
Understand first that at schools admitting under ten percent, rejection is the normal outcome for excellent applicants, not a judgment on a student's worth. Let the disappointment be real for a few days rather than arguing it away. Then move attention to the schools that said yes, deliberately and out loud.
What a rejection actually means
That a committee shaping a class of a fixed size did not find room. Institutional needs, intended major, geography and the rest of the pool all bear on it, and none of that is visible to the applicant. The most common mistake is reading a rejection as an evaluation of the person, when it is closer to an outcome of arithmetic.
What helps
Naming it plainly. Something along the lines of: this is disappointing, you did the work, and the outcome was never entirely in your hands. Then giving it a few days. Rushing to reframe it as a blessing before the student has felt it usually reads as dismissal.
What parents should avoid
Visible disappointment of their own, which a student will absorb as having let the family down. Comparisons to what classmates got. Post-mortems about what should have been done differently in tenth grade. And any suggestion of contacting the school to contest it, which does not work and costs the student dignity.
Then move the attention
Deliberately. Visit the schools that admitted the student if you can, get them talking to current students, find something specific to be excited about. Where a student ends up matters far less to how their life goes than what they do once they are there, and that is not a consolation, it is what the research on this consistently shows.