How do you determine what is a match vs reach?

[ucbalumnus]

@MWolf

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.

If the school admits by division or major, could those green and red indicators be misleading if those applicants applied for different majors from your student’s major?

[ali-ice]

Assume everything with an admittance rate of less than 20% admission rates to be a reach for everyone. I’ve seen people make lists almost entirely of these and one ‘safety’ they don’t want to go to – that doesn’t always work out great.

We considered it this way (admission rates)

95%+ admission safety
75-94% likely
74%-40% match
39%-20% Reach
20% or less ultra-reach

We also had to consider finances so I ran a ton of net price calculators. So far -those have been accurate. She applied to some that didn’t meet the NPC because there were scholarships that might have come through -but we tried to limit those.

I think you need to consider match at 50/50 chances - act as if you aren’t going to get into all of them so make sure to have a few that you would like to attend. And it’s not always perdictable! For example, my daughter has gotten into schools in the 40% admissions range and deferred from two in the 60% range.

Feel free to take your shot at high reaches -but assume they won’t be admissions and have other options at lower tiers that you really like.

[MWolf]

@ucbalumnus

@MWolf

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.

If the school admits by division or major, could those green and red indicators be misleading if those applicants applied for different majors from your student’s major?

Good point, especially since our flagship was UIUC, which has very different acceptance rates among colleges. I don’t know how that worked with the big differences in admission rates between colleges, especially engineering. It should have resulted in rejections in that space on the scattergram. I also remember similar areas on the UMN scattergram, and they admit by college as well.

However, most applications were for engineering and LAS, and since LAS has the higher admission rates and lower stats, any area which has a lot of applications and all of them are green is likely a safety for any LAS applicant, like our kid. If she was applying to engineering majors, I likely would have had to be more conservative. This pattern of application is true for UMN as well, and for other local universities that were popular with my kid’s school.