Can Northwestern Be a Saftey for me??

WCASParent
Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:44:07 +0000

GG- No “most competitive” school can be considered a “safety” FOR ANYONE. That is because all such schools have more qualified applicants than they know what to do with, can only offer admission to a certain number of students, and will therefore often not offer admission to someone who has sterling credentials but who they think is likely not that interested. For example, consider a student who has 2400 SATs, a 3.9 UW GPA in a hard curriculum, has taken 3 APs as a junior and gotten all 5s on the exams, and is taking five more hard AP courses as a senior, with demonstrated leadership and commitment in great ECs. That student is a strong candidate for HYPS, and everyone can figure out that’s probably where s/he wants to go. If a school like NU, Duke, WashU, or JHU reviews this application, they might figure that the applicant is not that interested, so they focus more on other applicants.
I know a kid who had comparable credentials and looked like a shoo-in for HYP. He got in to none of them, and Duke rejected him too. But he’s going to MIT.
The calculus of college admissions at top schools is far too complicated - and they have far too many qualified students for the limited number of acceptances which proven formulae tell them to offer - for ANYONE to consider NU or similarly competitive schools (e.g., Duke, WashU, JHU, Tufts, Cornell) a “safety.”

So I think that elsijfld is right: the odds of admission are strong, but to me “safety” means something else entirely.

And Majman, NU isn’t “4 times the size of an Ivy.” Dartmouth is probably the smallest Ivy, with something like 4000-4500 undergrads. The other Ivies are larger. Cornell has the most, at about 13,000 undergrads and Penn has almost 10,000, with the others being in between. NU has about 8000 undergrads, so it’s not even twice as large as the smallest Ivy.