They were really helpful for us when S24 was doing his initial investigations.
Toward the end of the process, we shifted over to using more information from Scoir, advice from his college counselor, and so on. Some Reaches became softer Reaches based on stronger indications for his specific profile. Some Targets became borderline Likelies.
Other colleges would have moved the other way, but those were largely cut from his list anyway. Not a coincidence, the basic question underlying this is whether the college seems to be particularly looking for kids like this individual kid, and usually the reason it is doing that is it knows kids like that thrive at that college, which is a good reason in turn for that kid to prefer that college to others which are not so confident this kid will thrive at their college.
Edit: Oh, and he got into all his softer Reaches and Targets and Likelies. Only the harder Reaches on his list generated rejections and waitlistings. So it was a freakishly good categorization in the end. Obviously it doesn’t always work out THAT neatly, but I was very pleased with the guidance he got.
Except that they are different and not mutually exclusive.
Safety means 100% assured admission and affordability (including a college that one has already been admitted to and knows one can afford).
Likely means a very high likelihood of admission and affordability, but not certain.
Of course, all of these definitions depend on the student. What one student may have as an assured admission and scholarship safety may be a reach or even out of reach for another student.
So personally, I would use specific terms like “autoadmit” and “affordable offer” respectively, instead of Safety. I understand that is trying to hold back the tide, however.
College Kickstart was also pretty accurate for my D26, who was accepted to all of her targets and likelies and two of her reaches (according to their categorization). Their web site uses a major-specific or OOS acceptance rate if one is available, so in her case, it used the lower Engineering acceptance rate (and Engineering student stats if available) for categorizing most of her schools, the lower OOS rate for GA Tech, etc.
One advantage to using Kickstart’s categorization method is that it is very simple, and you can do it yourself with just your kid’s stats, combined with posted acceptance rates for the college or university with as much specificity as you can get for major, etc. Our HS does not have Naviance.
scoir and kickstart both looks great – now, if they can let you filter out unaffordable colleges based by running NPCs for you, or, better yet, list all colleges where NPC is within your budget … that’d be awesome.
For us safeties were schools with high acceptance rates where our kids were pretty much guaranteed to get admitted. Every safety school our kids applied to were also affordable and were places our kids would’ve been happy to attend.
I generally avoid those terms, but since I’ve posted in this thread, I should answer the original question.
Safety ≈ Extremely Likely = 80-99+% for the particular student. I generally advocate for having at least two schools in this category, but if they’re not auto-admit schools, then I think there should definitely be two schools here. So maybe 2 extremely likelies (that are not auto-admits) = 1 safety, or 1 auto-admit = 1 safety. And any school that has already admitted an applicant, is affordable, and a student is happy to attend would fall into this categorization bucket, but that’s obvious only after results start to come out.
Match: I pretty much hate this term because it’s so nebulous. But if I had to define it, I’d either have it be a toss-up category (40-60%) or maybe something like a 35-65%, but I really, really, really dislike this term. Essentially, it’s a school that is not a high enough probability to put as a definitely likely acceptance or a definitely likely rejection (and understanding that schools that are definitely likely rejections are not certain rejections…i.e. they’re reaches, if one’s application is of the caliber of typically accepted students).
Reach = Low Probability = Less than 20% for the particular student or the school’s admit rate is below 15-20% overall. This should not be confused with theVirtually Impossible, a school where one’s application is far below the typical caliber of accepted students, and the school accepts a minority of its applicants. On Chance Me threads, I might term those as Very Low Probability.
Our DD was a very strong student. She applied to three colleges that were deemed safety schools…and got accepted to all of them before the second week of December (one rolling ,and two EA). These were not surprises. Acceptance rates were 40%-60% ish at the time.
She added one reach school that had bout a 10% acceptance rate…and didn’t get accepted.
DS was a music performance major. There is no such thing as a safety school for auditioned BM music performance programs. He did take advantage of three early audition dates, and had those acceptances before mid December. However, his school of choice didn’t release admissions until April…and neither did his second choice (admitted there too).
My oldest kid’s auto admit safeties were VCU and Slippery Rock, in two different states states in the East. One of my middle kids is thinking about Iowa State which is Midwest, not West. Marymount, outside of DC has auto admissions.
I don’t think that a school needs to be auto admit to be a safety, but it is nice to be 100% sure.
I don’t have a definition in my mind, but I hear kids from my kids’ schools saying that a school is a safety or a reach like it’s a characteristic of the school. Other than something like MIT which is a reach for everyone, safety/likely/target/reach describes the relationship between the kid and the school. For my 3 older kids, our flagship was a reach for one, a target for one, and a likely for the third. This is both because they have different majors and because they have different stats.
My other thought is that schools can be a safety etc . . . In terms of both admissions and affordability. For my third kid, for example, WPI is a likely for admissions and a reach financially. Princeton is a reach for admissions but a safety financially meaning that if he gets in we know it will be affordable. Of course it’s important to have schools that are safeties for both in one school.