Hello,
Maybe this is a dumb question but how do you determine what schools to designate as Match vs Reach vs Safety on a college list? I realize GPA averages don’t really tell you much for very competitive schools – everyone has a UW 4.0. Do you rely on Naviance (or other school-provided platform) or how to you make your own assessment to make sure you are covering bases?
Everyone is different.
The most important is that assured or near assured school, that’s affordable, that you like.
In other words, you need a safe, assured home. Better if it’s 100% assured but you can tell which ones you’ll definitely get into. That’s your safety.
People will call a match/target differently. Some think 50/50. Others get mad they don’t get into targets which tells me they think it’s 100%.
Some will say a 25% admit is a target.
It’s really matching your stats up - and you’re not assured but you’re still in good shape or 50/50 - because you can have a low target or high target.
A reach is one you don’t expect to get into (yet people get upset when they don’t).
Most base things statistically.
But you don’t need safeties, matches and targets.
You need an affordable safety that you’d like - and then wherever else you want to apply.
But these are made up terms - and they can be whatever you want them to be.
Good luck.
We used a combination of Maia (like naviance) and school data (middle 50 and admit rate - if admit rate is low it’s a reach for everyone). Maia was useful in that we could see applicants from our high school had done significantly better at some schools than the overall admit rates for those schools - example one that looked reachy on paper looked like a target on Maia, and one that was still a reach showed almost no one with my kid’s SAT from our school getting denied (kid got into both). If your school admit rates are in line with overall admit rates/middle 50 from a particular school it may not add much extra info. It is also major-specific - at a school like Boulder for example, some majors may be safeties but others like OOS engineering might be reaches
Also depends how you define “target”… some people have that in say the 30-70% range, I’m more conservative. And safety some would go for 70 or 80% chance of admit, I would really only label a safety as one that is auto admit on grades or where it is a high admit school and your grades/test scores are above the middle 50. Cannot tell you the number of posts I’ve seen on Reddit and here “I was denied or deferred but I thought it was a safety”
I should add my kids didn’t have Naviance or Scoir. So we based it on stats. And were conservative.
For my daughter, I got 16 of her 17 apps right. There was one reach I though she wouldn’t get into that she did - thus making it a safety (after you get in, it turns out it was safe).
I think you can tell from the student profile and CDS where you stand. If you have data from school and solid counseling, that’s a bonus. And you have to then analyze things like rigor, etc. as typically students are different from one another, even at the same school.
As it turns out, both chose safeties over reaches they got into so it was all for not 
This is a good question. Unfortunately I am not sure that there is a good answer.
We sort of guessed, but guessed in ways that seemed very highly likely (and it worked out).
One safety was an in-state public university with an acceptance rate a bit over 50% where the stats for the student were well above average for all accepted students. Another safety was an out of state public university, but where a large proportion of the admitted students are out of state, again with stats that were well above average, and where the NPC predicted merit aid (this was UVM, so there just aren’t all that many in-state students because Vermont’s population is so small). This was not really a safety however because we needed the predicted merit aid for it to be affordable (fortunately the predicted aid was spot on in our case).
The other safeties for our daughters relied on the somewhat unusual situation that our daughters were born with dual US / Canadian citizenship, and we live fairly far north in the US and therefore not all that far away from Canada. In Canada admissions is very largely stats-based, and both daughters had stats that made Canadian universities mostly safeties.
Frequently the guidance counselors at your high school will be very familiar with admissions at in-state public universities, and possibly at some popular universities nearby. They can frequently help to identify safeties.
And a student can use whatever tools your high school uses to show acceptance rates among previous year’s graduates from the high school at various universities (I think that Naviance might be one example if I am remembering this correctly).
Occasionally here on CC we see students whose proposed list includes a long list of reaches and some likely schools, and no safeties (or at least nothing that we think would be safeties). We frequently recommend that students add one or two in-state public schools even if they do not intend to go there, just to make sure that they have a safety on the list. We also frequently see students underestimating the quality of their in-state public universities.
For graduate programs frequently there just isn’t a safety. In our family, out of the four of us, we all went to a graduate program (three completed, one graduate degree still in progress). I do not think that any of us had any safety at all among the graduate programs that we applied to. Our safety was just to keep working at our current job for another year. Perhaps we all just got lucky.
There are a lot of cases where a school that is a safety for both admissions and affordability is also the best choice for a student. In our family, out of the four of us, three of us got their bachelor’s degree at a school that could reasonably be considered to be a safety. All nonetheless did very well, got a great education, and went on to a very good graduate program. There are a lot of very good universities in the US, more elsewhere, and you really do not need to attend a fancy hard-for-admissions university to do very well in life. The safeties sometimes are also more likely to provide merit aid, which of course can help with affordability.
If you have Naviance, Scoir, or any other database that has recent applications history from your school, that’s a good place to start. If your dot is in or above a slew of acceptances and there are no to few outliers, that’sprobably a likely.
You can also look at the CDS. This can be trickier if admission is by major or if preference is given to in-state students.
If the admissions rate is 70% or higher and your stats fit theirs, probably a likely. Match would be where admission rate is 25 -70% and your stats are better than 50%. Obviously, some of these will be stronger matches than others. And reaches are what is left, again with some being more lottery-like than others.
I’m a huge fan of getting something that is likely and affordable in hand as early as possible, through rolling admissions, EA, etc. At that point, there’s no reason to bother with anything you like less “just to be safe”.
We mostly looked at the acceptance rates. Any school with a less than 20%-25% acceptance rate we considered a reach. Schools with 70%+ were safeties. Everything else in between was some level of match (low match, match, high match). We also did a deep dive on schools that admit by major and the acceptance rates of those major. For those schools, we use the acceptance rate for the major.
We did not have cost constraints.
This was for a 4.0 UW/top decile/highest rigor kid.
First step for me is try to estimate the raw acceptance rate for your type of applicant, which can depend on residency and/or specific undergrad program. Sometimes it is published, sometimes you might have to guesstimate.
Next get the best information you can about the basic “numbers” of enrolled students. Ideally it would be for your type of applicant, but again that can be very hard information to get, so again you might have to guesstimate a bit.
OK, then if the acceptance rate for your type of applicant is low, say 25% or less, that is presumably a Reach. If it is in the higher end of that range and you have good reason to believe your numbers would put you into the top 25% of their enrolled students, you can maybe upgrade it to softer Reach or even harder Target. But if a college has a really low acceptance rate for your type of applicant, or just in general, then it is a “Reach for everyone” (at least everyone unhooked).
OK, if a college has something like a 25-50% acceptance rate for your type of applicant, and you have qualifications that put you into at least the middle range of their enrolled students, then that is a core Target to me. If they enroll very few students with qualifications as low as yours, that is still a Reach. If their acceptance rate is in the high part of that range and your qualifications are in their top 25%, it is a softer Target.
Then a college with an acceptance rate of over 50% for your type of applicant, where your numbers would be in their top 25%, is a core Likely.
All of these are provisional categorizations, and you can change them if you have sufficiently reliable information. But I would caution about treating things like Scoir data for your HS as very reliable. Maybe if there is a LOT of data points from the last couple cycles. But often the number of recent data points is really too low to be very reliable, so I would tend to stick with the provisional categorizations.
I completely agree with this categorization. This is really close to what we did as well.
The one additional element that I might add is if you’re looking for merit aid, you might handicap that a bit. So, if a school is a target for admissions, but gives out relatively little in merit aid, then you might make that a hard target or even a low reach if you need the merit to make it work. One personal example is we did this with Skidmore. This would have been a good target for our D26, but the level of merit aid available is just incredibly low. It ended up coming off the list because there were already enough reaches and she didn’t need another. Just something to think about as you build the list.
I think it is very hard to tell so I agree with gardenstategal, find schools with EA that you are a likely for, could see yourself going to and try to get one or more in hand – core targets as described by NiceUnparticularMan. Admissions is so capricious, you have to apply widely if you can see yourself at a number of schools, since you really never know which admissions team will be moved by your application. So if you are in the middle 50 for testing and have a high gpa, that is a target for you. IMO schools like Harvard don’t care about minute differences in GPA among applicants since they know schools grade differently and teachers in schools grade differently. But if the admit rate is sub 10% you need about eight, I think, plus your five EA core targets if you can find that many. And if you need aid it is also good to see early what packages look like. Our first non-merit package at a school known for good aid is scaring us so we are glad DC applied to 17 schools. One EA gave great merit pkg, so DC has that to fall back on which is a relief. A note: we didn’t really care how past students at DCs rigorous HS had done. You never know who had alumni parents, who wrote weak essays, who applied to the most popular major, or who had lackluster ECs, so numbers aren’t really that reliable.
We took a totally unscientific approach with our daughter (college freshman now) as her strong public hs didn’t use Naviance/Scoir and she was a solid/strong student 3.55 UW GPA in challenging courses (5APs, 9Honors, 14d/e) but not top 10% of class type kiddo so she applied EA and test optional at all of the schools on her list and we based her loose categorization of reach/target/safeties mostly on the school’s published acceptance rate. Her profile may have been assisted by the weight of her college coursework as she earned her associate’s degree through the local college along with her hs diploma so her acceptances at schools where she fell below the published median hs GPA suggested she benefitted from reporting that coursework on her SRAR. She also did have substantial EC, varsity captain, leadership programs, civic engagement in arts so she presented as a well rounded candidate imo.
As a parent, it was difficult to see her decline admissions from schools with “tougher” admit rates which were among her “reach” schools in favor of a target/safety but she didn’t care about stats and choose for fit and strong programs in her intended field of study.
My daughter applied to 13 schools with in our opinion 3 reach, 2 safeties and 8 targets - I think interest + having a general sense of the admission rates (esp. looking at in state and out of state rates) is the first step to establishing your students grouping of reach - targets - safeties.
Of the eight you deemed targets and the three you deemed reaches, how many did she get into - in each categorization.
I’m glad she chose the best school for her and not the most selective. Of course, in her case, the Associate degree would be seen differently by different schools, as far as credits being granted.
I agree - it may have factored in her merit packages at some schools as well. She received substantial merit at many of her acceptances and even some merit at the notoriously stingy ones 
She absolutely knew best in her decision and is thriving at her school and has a great work/play balance and off to a great academic start there.
She got into all “targets” Pitt, PSU - UP (fall start), Delaware, Tampa, Charleston, Maryland, Syracuse
In at 2 safeties: Univ of Scranton and St. Joe’s Philly
In at 1 of 3 reach: In at Lafayette, denied Villanova and UVA
*She applied EA or RD at all schools, no ED
UMD shows you the benefit of rigor. I’d think the rest were safe/likely - except maybe Syracuse.
But different people evaluate differently.
The beauty is she ended up at the right place…..so that’s awesome.
We may have been cautiously conservative in our determinations interestingly, Syracuse was among her highest sticker price schools and she received the most merit there. She received a 1/2 tuition leadership scholarship from the Falk school there and then also received the 2nd wave May merit, +20K annual merit to stack so we had a hard time declining there as well. Her approx COA was around 30K/per year there (we are full pay apart from merit). I’m encouraging my younger daughter to target Syracuse as well but I’m not sure that merit deal will ever come around again!
Note that if there are price limits that make some colleges affordable only if a large enough merit scholarship is gotten, then the reach / match / likely / assured safety must be based on the large enough merit scholarship, not admission.
Many colleges are getting desperate so looking to buy kids. SU can likely afford it but not all can.
With respect to private colleges, even a top student might find formidable competition for admission at about 25 universities and a dozen undergraduate-focused schools. Outside of this group, admission prospects may range from realistic to likely. Defining a safety may require more specific analysis.
One other thing to consider is decision timing. A likely school that notifies you at the end of February isn’t as useful as one that notifies you in October. Same for targets, a couple that can give you an early indication can be hugely valuable in getting a more “real world” assessment. Pitt, for example, was a target for my D26 and the early acceptance was pretty useful both psychologically and in terms of figuring out if she was on the right track. And then getting honors college there early, where the essay does have a component in the assessment, can also provide some insight if tweaking is needed in either the list, the essay, or something else.
We used Naviance for any school that had a good number of students applying from our high school. On the GPA-test score graph for students from the school, if my kid’s point was surrounded by solid green, it was a safety. If it was surrounded by a mix of green and red, it was a match, and in the majority were rejections, it was a reach.
That is how we knew that, say, UIUC was a safety for her, as was UMN, even though UMN has an acceptance rate of lower than 50%.
As a rule, students from the same school applying to the same colleges, generally have equivalent applications. The outliers in acceptances, i.e., higher level ECs that bring attention, athletes, and legacies, are fairly obvious on the graphs.
Now, for may East Coast LACs, too few applied to have any ideas, but we were mostly priced out at any which did not have merit aid, so it wasn’t relevant. Aside from UIUC and UMN, to which she applied EA, I cannot remember which colleges were on her list for RD (she never applied), so I cannot say which we considered the matches or reaches. I think that Macalester was there as a reach.