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.
There is no one answer; it depends on the applicant’s stats…
I look at a mix of SATs to published, and rough GPA (though that is soooooo hard as published GPAs are often weighted, and you don’t know how.) and acceptance rates… but you also have to adjust for major if school accepts by major (or even might).
A 35% admit rate school isn’t a ‘target/match’ for most students -you’d need mostly As, in a high-rigor set of classes and scores in range of published.
Our D is a rising junior, so our current definitions are based on research not outcomes fwiw. BLUF is that especially in the realm of targets my sense is that it depends on the student and the school rather than simply a set of stats.
Anything below 20-25% is (almost) always a reach, and then you get into the sub-15% which basically are far reaches (“lottery”) for everyone. From there, it depends on the mix of kids’ stats, holistic story, the school itself and maybe even the Naviance/Scoir indication of their HS relationship to the college.
As an example, Holy Cross shows something like a 60% admission rate for ED, which probably includes a ton of athletes, but their RD rate is far far lower. D is at what appears to be a HC feeder, and based on Naviance above a certain gpa and SAT the school has tremendous RD success. For her, therefore HC could end up a target or a weak target for her rather than a reach given the scores plus a very pointy story.
Agree also that let’s say a college with a 35% admission rate could be a target for one kid and a serious reach for another depending on the overall application package and needs of the university.
Right. Which is why I titled this “how do you….” I thought it’d be interesting to hear about people’s individual thought processes, even if it can’t be universally applied.
My opinion, there should be some universality to reach/match/safety designations. Too much subjectivity/uncertainty risks disappointing results, though I suppose the solution may involve a larger number of schools on the list across a broad range of selectivity.
So hypothetically, say from a typical “good” suburban high school, suppose applicant A has a GPA in the 3.8 range, and a high 1400s SAT, with an upward trend after difficult freshman year for some real reason, all As junior year and excellent rigor. Applicant B has the same unweighted GPA and test score, started strong freshman year but has a downward trend, worse grades, only a few APs. One might expect their admissions results to turn out differently. Do you categorize reaches/matches/safeties any differently? Is the transcript review too subjective to do so?
I think there is a difference between defining matches/reaches/safeties versus determining whether a school is a match/reach/safety for an individual applicant. My definitions in post 28 were definitions of those terms which I related to the odds of acceptance for a particular applicant. But the process of determining the rough odds of acceptance for a particular applicant is something different, and that’s where things like academic record, trends, test scores, ECs, etc. come into play, along with the college’s acceptance rate.
I laugh at the term match - because anyone who doesn’t get into a match is dumbfounded - as if it was a safety.
Or they say low or high target - but either way, it seems like people assume an in so maybe we should call a match a safety because it’s how the applicant perceives it.
The other thing is - for privates especially, if you removed the international applicants at many, you’d see your chances differently because the domestic rates are much higher.
Many are surprised they got into reaches - but if they know the admit rate was 30% and not the 18% published, they might have rated themselves differently up front.
I’m not sure how you get universality if we are talking 4yr universities. Even auto-admit schools have some element that triggers an acceptance. I’ve seen schools with an 80% acceptance rate but personally have never seen 100%.
I guess the question, then, is how would you calculate an actual % number for a particular applicant? That’s why I lean toward a more universal way to categorize via a combo of acceptance rate and test score. A high stats applicant may seem relatively straightforward, but other students less so. We can eyeball overall acceptance rate and eyeball what rough quartile the test score is in, but GPA is more difficult to assess.