College List vs. GC

mathmom
Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:03:16 +0000

alynor, both my top stat kid and my not not quite top stat kid could never have made the effort to get 15 applications out. They preferred to find good safeties and then have 6 or 7 other schools that were reachy. That was especially true for my younger son whose stats had issues and felt he really needed to hit it out the ballpark with essays.

As to the question for what is safe or not safe - I found Naviance to be the biggest help here. But I also put together a spread sheet and I put in the info about SAT scores, selectivity and percent in the top 10% of the class and resorted the lists a few times to see how things worked out.

For my younger son (790 CR/690M, top 6% of class, ca. 9 APs) we figured schools with acceptance rates of at least 40% and where his math score was in the top 25% were safe. These schools claimed to have 25 to 65% in the top 10% of the class. (Keep in mind that 1/2 the schools in the US don’t rank, but since ours does, I figured it was worth keeping an eye on the number.) I figured matches were ones where his math score was in the middle of the range and selectivity was between 30 to 40%. Reaches were anything below that. For him it turned out that selectivity was the biggest predictor of whether he got in or not. The schools that accepted him all had acceptance rates of at least 20% that year maybe closer to 25%. (And for Chicago that was only in EA and at Vassar that may well have only been for males.)