I think I’d call schools that I deem to have 35-75% odds of acceptance “matches” and those below and above “reaches” and “safeties”. How about you?
Safety to me is auto admit based on stats (like meeting the requirements for ASU, Iowa or non-impacted CSUs) . I would put 75%+ as likelies. Semantics maybe, but I’ve seen people deferred and occasionally denied from their 75% probability “safeties”.
I’m conservative and would probably bump up matches to the 40-80% range. 25-40% maybe describe as low reach/hard target. I find it maybe not particularly useful to classify a 35% and a 74% chance in the same band.
Of course, it also depends on how you get to your probability of admission. For me, it’s some combination of where you fall in (or out) of the middle 50% + admission rate for your major (if looking at publics, also factoring in instate vs out of state admit rates where available).
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It depends on the strength of the applicant. A safety or target for one student is not a safety or target for another, so categorization is more nuanced than using acceptance rate (which is easy to manipulate.) There are some very strong and/or full pay students for whom I might not call certain low acceptance rate schools a ‘reach.’
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We defined a safety as over 80% acceptance, with our D’s profile above the 75th percentile, and that she would be happy to attend. Bonus points that the one safety had rolling admission so she knew she was in before October. I’d add for students that have financial limitations, the safety also needs to be affordable.
Reach, we defined as anything under a 30% acceptance rate (even if her profile matched the 50th%).
The targets were the “in-betweens”, with high, medium, and low targets.
IMO, the biggest mistake I see on CC is students not having a safety that they both really like and is affordable. If you’d hate going there or can’t afford it, it’s not a safety.
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Safety for my S meant almost a sure thing. In our mind, 90%+. He had a few of those to be extra safe. After that, he applied where he wanted and we predicted best we could whether he would get in or not. Past results from his high school increased confidence. I do not fully buy into reach, target, match talk tbh.
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I use these definitions for presumptive starting points:
The tricky bit is understanding how your numbers compare and the proper acceptance rate to be using, because as relevant you sometimes have to adjust all that for type of applicants (in-state, OOS domestic, or International), and special admissions (to a restricted major, specialty school, or so on). Sometimes that information is available, sometimes you have to estimate.
Still, I think the basic concept here is sound. You want to understand how competitive your numbers make you, and then how many competitive applicants they still reject.
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By the way, I really like the concept of a “Likely” as opposed to a “Safety”. In part, I just like the neutrality of the description. A “Safety” sounds like you should only want to go there if everything else fails, and sometimes it almost seems to me like kids pick a Safety to fit that description, as in they don’t even particularly like the school but think that is what a Safety is supposed to be.
A “Likely” is just about the odds, and in fact people sometimes choose a Likely in the end–visits persuade them, or merit/honors offers, or so on. So you should carefully choose your Likelies, since you might well end up at one not just by force, but by choice.
You can still distinguish autoadmits and such from normal Likelies, and you can also see the benefit of doing a rolling Likely. But in general I think it is a really useful addition to the Reach and Match/Target framework that doesn’t bias people against really carefully picking their Likelies too.
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Likely/Safety for us was McGill - they publish the cutoffs for each major (gpa/SAT) and S24 was well above that threshold so he felt confident he’d be admitted (and he was). He only applied to one safety - if he hadn’t chosen McGill (essentially an admit by stats school) a safety (for him) would have been any school with a 75% or greater acceptance rate. Matches (in my mind) are schools where your child has a 50/50 chance of admission. That’s going to vary depending on what kind of student you have - in our case it was schools with 25% - 35% acceptance rates. Reaches (to me) are schools that admit fewer than 20% of applicants. Super reaches are schools that admit less than 10% of applicants. In my view, if a school only takes 5-6% of applicants it’s a reach for everyone except for kids with a strong hook.
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I learned the hard way. A safety is anywhere your kid would attend that has rolling admissions. Getting that “yes” before you are all sick of thinking about, talking about, nagging about college is just a gift!
And one of my kids removed a bunch of schools from the list after getting that rolling admissions yes. Said “I’m happy with XYZ, I don’t need anything else if the “highly rejective” doesn’t come through.”
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Saying a safety must be autoadmit for the persons stats is a pet peeve of mine. Only a few states in the west have schools with this type of criteria. Does this mean nobody in the east has a safety? Also not every student in those states has the stats to be included in those auto-admit criteria so using that definition means students below that stats don’t get a safety. This is a useless criteria for most students in the country. Maybe it works in California or Iowa or New Mexico but not everywhere.
I think a safety is a school with a high acceptance rate (greater than 75%), where the students stats are above the 75% percentile, and is affordable.
To me, a match is a school where the student is in the top half of applicants and where the acceptance rate is greater than 50%. A match can also be a school which would be a safety except for affordability but where there is reasonable expectation of getting enough merit to bring the cost down.
A reach is everything else.
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Yeah, our HS in the East did not insist everyone have an autoadmit, including because our state flagships were not autoadmit.
However, it did encourage rolling admissions, which fortunately DID include our state flagships.
I actually don’t know of any cases where a kid who was considered a Likely for those schools and submitted a timely rolling application did not get admitted. My assumption, though, is if that happened it would trigger some adjustments to the remainder of the planned strategy, with time enough to do that.
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While D26 and I used a very similar set of definitions for a “safety” that a lot of folks here have noted (above a 75% or 80% chance of admission) when building her list, I personally think that a safety is a school that you wouldn’t mind attending that offers a decision early enough that you no longer worry about going to college. In D26s case, her safety per MY definition was Pitt, which we had classified as a target in her list. Her “safety” was TCNJ, which many would have said does not qualify as a safety. I agree that it doesn’t qualify as one even though she had relatively high stats for the school. BUT, the overall admissions rate in the mid 60s AND a decision that didn’t come back until end of Jan made this not much of a safety at all.
TLDR, a safety should be a school that you get a decision back early enough from that you can have some relief that you’re going to a college that you wouldn’t mind attending before a rush of other applications.
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Safety, as I use this term with my students, means that you know for sure you will be accepted after you apply. That’s a combination of auto admits (we’re in Texas), community colleges, rolling admission early acceptances, and the colleges where “everyone I know with similar stats as mine got in in the past three years”. We’re a magnet program. Vast majority of our students reach “CCMR”(career, college, military readiness) entering senior year and have at least one safety. I have a lot to complain about Texas public education system but the pathway to college (and the peace of minds it brings) I highly appreciate.
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I think what all this underscores is ultimately what you want is a safe process, meaning an overall process you know will end up with the kid going to a comfortably affordable college with any academic programs that they are considering and that they are actually excited to attend.
There is then more than one way to have a safe process, and that’s fine. As long as you are thinking in these terms and have some sort of reasonable plan.
By the way, one of my S24’s rolling options was actually St Andrews in Scotland. Definitely not a conventional part of a safe process, but it was for him. I also got a visit to Scotland out of it, although we were literally on that visit when he found out he was admitted to US colleges he preferred.
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A rolling option doesn’t guarantee an early acceptance. Both my kids went to Pitt. For kid 1 it was a match and she got in early. For kid 2 it was a reach (his stats were below 25% percentile). He was asked for mid year grades and eventually accepted in February. No school is a blanket safety for all kids except those that admit literally everyone.
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Calling @Mwfan1921 and @AustenNut, who have posted several excellent posts (threads?) on this topic. Perhaps they could post the links here.
Absolutely. If it is a Likely for you, then hopefully you do get an early offer, but you should still have a backup plan in mind in case that doesn’t work out. If it is a Target or Reach for you, then you need a different Likely plan, although in the event of an early offer it could help you trim your list. But in cases where it strings out like for your Kid 2, then that doesn’t happen, and that is fine.
Right, I didn’t mean I use general acceptance rate published by schools. I use various calculators/estimators/guesswork tailored for my kid.
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That’s a great set of definitions by collegekickstart!
Yes - and of course, as soon as you have an affordable admit in hand that you’re happy to attend, that becomes your safety regardless of any initial “classification”. This was the case for C26 for Pitt, which we had initially considered a target.
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