Someone upthread mentioned auto-admit. I understand that some states have that but ours does not, and I believe many others don’t have this. The only place that kids here absolutely have a guaranteed acceptance to is the local community college. There is no guaranteed acceptance at any other level of public university for anyone.
@gallentjill I agree. I think those who say they were rejected from a “safety” are not defining “safety” correctly. The best advice I can give any prospective college student is to apply to a rolling admissions school that is an acceptable safety. Having that admission offer in hand before RD comes out will reduce your stress level!
Ditto @sahmkc - the value of an early rolling acceptance is priceless. My daughter and the majority of her friends had at least one acceptance by October. Made the rest of the waiting process so much less stressful.
Yes! This is one of the reasons I brought this up. Families are being advised that the only safeties are auto-admits for their stats but many families don’t have that option at all. It doesn’t mean they have no safeties.
Also, I completely agree that EA/Rolling admissions are your best friends. Absolutely everyone who can should try to get an acceptance or two in hand early.
The answer is none. Rejection (or waitlist) is by itself proof that the college was not a true safety for the applicant.
Perhaps the more interesting question is what colleges or situations lead to incorrect assessment of a college as a “safety” when it really is not.
I’m a big fan of applying to a safety school (and maybe a match school or two) EA or rolling (as long as it is allowable by any SCEA/ED school that is a top choice) so hopefully at least one positive decision is in hand by December. This was a helpful strategy for both of my kids.
@ucbalumnus that is circular reasoning. I defined “safety” for the purposes of this thread to avoid that problem. Greater than 60% admit rate and the student is in the top quartile. It would be interesting to expand t he definition to 60% admit rate and student is anywhere above the 25%. I just haven’t seen rejections at this level. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.
@ucbalumnus So what do you think would be a “true” safety school for a B student with corresponding test scores from around LA or San Francisco who wasn’t allowed by parents to leave the state? How does that type of students find an affordable safety? I don’t think any of the CalStates would really qualify, right? I don’t fully understand how to interpret the common data sets.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/san-jose-state-university/2064099-didn-t-get-accepted-in-sjs.html is an example that seems surprising at first glance. But the rejected applicant applied to a major that is much more selective than the school in general.
Note also that the parent poster mentioned only a high school weighted GPA and apparently initially did not realize that the college recalculates GPA in a way that probably gives a lower number.
If we assume that the “B student” has a CSU recalculated GPA of 3.0 or higher, then any non impacted major at a non impacted CSU would be a safety for admission. In some areas, local area preference would give equivalent safety status for non impacted majors at the local CSU.
https://www2.calstate.edu/attend/impaction-at-the-csu can be used to find non impacted campuses and majors. Surprisingly, SFSU is not impacted at the campus level, but has some impacted majors.
Circling back to the neighbor’s kid who did not get into UW – UW has pretty fixed percentages for instate/MN and OOS, so they are really not looking to increase revenues by denying an instate student for an OOS full pay student, as those are not fungible groups.
A high stat, strong rigor, instate kid is usually pretty much a sure thing at UW (I’ve been following its admissions for about 6 years, as my kid attended). So it sounds like something was not adding up for that student’s application – UW only looks at unweighted gpa and then looks to see rigor, so maybe that 4.0 was not in the most rigorous curriculum. It also does not superscore so it is possible that the single date score was not as high as what the family calculated as the superscore. Perhaps the essays missed the mark? And with the two rounds of admissions at UW, early and regular, the spots might just get taken up in the second round. So, the decision not to apply in the first round could mean that there just aren’t enough spots left by March, hence the waitlist.
D2 just completed the admissions process and didn’t get rejected from any safeties. She’s a nursing major so there weren’t really any safeties. She did get denied from a match school TCU which was somewhat surprising but fortunately vs 15 acceptances.
My understanding of a safety was that it was “very likely” my twin Ds would be accepted, not that it was a sure thing. Our local university has a 65% acceptance rate that has been dropping over recent years. They have rolling admission, and we applied early - because we viewed acceptance as likely but not guaranteed. We also applied to a few LACs with EA that were probably also safeties, although we considered them match schools because of perceived fit. We then focused on other match schools and a few possible reaches via RD, knowing we already had solid choices that were financially reasonable. It certainly made things a little less stressful for us.
Based on this thread’s responses and other discussions on safeties over the years, you’re not even going to get consensus on what a safety is.
My kids’ HS college counselors preferred to use the term Likely rather than Safety, which builds in the premise that you are likely to get in but no guarantees. I think it also removes the stigma of Safety that many applicants seem to have. So, working with their college counselors, my kids built a list of reaches, possibles and likelies. Many of the likelies had acceptance rates less than 50% but but based on my kids’ profiles and naviance, they were still very likely to be accepted. We never approached it as a guarantee and my kids did not apply to state schools or auto admit schools. Having 3-4 likelies on the list provided some breathing room in case you didn’t get in to all of them.
I agree with other posters who recommend EA or rolling for at least a couple schools. If you get a yes from one of those, you can often pare down the application list having that school in your pocket. If you don’t get in, you can expand your list if needed.
I’ll say that UMD-CP has a Early Notification deadline of 11/1, and if you want merit $$, you have to submit by then. That said, I know of situations where in-state students with 30+ ACT and 4.0+ weighted who applied in February (not past the deadline at that time) were rejected. The counselors at my sons’ schools were very clear that if you were applying from a selective HS program and didn’t apply by 11/1, you were jeopardizing your chance at admission. UMD knows these kids will have the opportunity for some great admissions results (or would qualify for big merit at UMD), but they want some respect for the process. Acceptance rate at the time was in the low 50s.
We used the term “likelies” at home with our kids as well. We all need to have some humility, and one never knows how acceptance rates, FA packages, family situations, health and jobs might change from one year to the next. S1 graduated in 2008 and S2 in 2010; the numbers of kids heading to the flagship from their programs increased significantly between those two years as the recession hit families hard (or at least made them stop to think about the wisdom of paying $55k/year for private college).
Both my sons applied to a couple of schools EA; it was terrific to have some great acceptances in hand in December, and both dropped several schools off their list as a result. Many of their friends were applying to the same schools, so S1 and S2 wanted to take themselves out of the pool so their friends could have a slightly better chance. If FA is a concern, I’d play out the string and see how the financial packages work out. The school where both of my sons got in EA gave a FA read in December, so we had a pretty good idea of what to expect.
My high stats son didn’t apply to any safeties that had over a 60% acceptance rate, but he was accepted to all of them. Maybe he just got lucky?
@doschicos “My kids’ HS college counselors preferred to use the term Likely rather than Safety, which builds in the premise that you are likely to get in but no guarantees. I think it also removes the stigma of Safety that many applicants seem to have.”
I love this! I will stop using “safety” and use “likely”! My DD’s “likely” school happens to be a major university and many top students from our school go to this school. The top students go to the “Honor College”, so while the college is a “likely” for DD, the “Honors College” is highly competitive and would be a high reach school for DD. So I hate referring to it as her “safety”. Many schools that are referred to as “safeties” are excellent academic institutions and I hate the stigma of “safety”. I’m sure there are many of the match schools on DD’s list that would be “likely” for other students.
@doschicos My school did the same thing. We had reaches, targets, and 'likely’s. I was actually rejected by one reach, one target, and one likely. Everyone got into at least a couple 'likely’s. There were no safeties.
I like the term likely and have started using that and/or “probably” with D. I don;t like to use it to much at all yet because I feel like some that we thought were likely might become closer to maybe once the new data comes out for this year!
Concerning the girl that didn’t get into UW, I think we often get pieces of information and are stunned that someone didn’t get in, but the truth is unless we can see the whole application, there is no way to know. The application could have had a major flaw, maybe she mentioned looking forward to a major that they don’t have, that she talked about when she started in a club her junior year and the stats list her as starting her sophomore year, or that her high school letter was from a teacher that talked about the students quiet confidence and the student talked about her energetic enthusiasm. What I learned at one of the “why some people get in” sessions by an admissions counselors is the concept of holistic review is that all the information is interconnected. There might be a glaring mistake, or that the reader is seeing something “between the lines” and something doesn’t add up. There might be several spelling or grammar errors. We just don’t know.