Neighbor of mine just got rejected from a school he never applied to.
This is not a joke. Did his piece of the application, HS never sent his transcript and College Board never sent his scores. He got a rejection letter and it wasn’t until the GC called to find out why (nobody with his stats from this HS had ever been rejected) they discovered the incomplete application.
Moral of the story – they can’t accept you if you don’t apply.
“Likely” is not a substitute for “safety”. “Safety” would be a 100% certain chance of admission (including to division/major if applicable), based on stated policies (e.g. automatic admission for stats). “Likely” would be an almost certain chance of admission (based on Naviance history or other data), but because of the use of subjective criteria and/or lack of transparency in admissions history, cannot be 100% certain. Note: a college using level of applicant’s interest should not be counted as a “likely”, unless the applicant applies ED.
I.e. instead of “reach/match/safety” or “reach/match/likely”, the assessment could be “reach/match/likely/safety”.
A student with at least one “safety” is covered. A student who cannot find actual “safeties”, but can only find “likelies”, needs to have more than one.
I realize there is no way of knowing without seeing the whole application. But I think “did not apply early” and “UW-Madison received 20% more applications” probably have something to do with it.
@ucbalumnus You’re right that Likely is not a guarantee and we were comfortable playing without the safety net of an auto-admit safety. There are other strategies you can use to diminish your risks.
“Note: a college using level of applicant’s interest should not be counted as a “likely”, unless the applicant applies ED”
I strongly disagree. One can use demonstrated interest to one’s advantage. There are many ways to show sincere demonstrated interest. As long as you recognize it is important and tackle that part of the equation, you’ll be fine. Do it very well and I’d argue you’re golden for a Likely and even a match, especially if you crafted a list based on fit and you can demonstrate that fit. I’m not saying that everyone can or does accomplish this.
@blossom : A lot of colleges send rejection letters as part of closing out partial admissions files, even when it should be obvious the kid never applied. My daughter got a rejection letter from a college where she had done nothing other than create an on-line account and visit with her parent (me) for three hours. No application, no scores, no transcript, no nothin’. Makes you wonder about the application numbers they report I’ve heard about this from other kids as well.
Re: “likely”/“safety” : Any college that has already accepted you, and that you can afford is a safety. That’s why EA and rolling admission are so important to this question.
Concurring #54. The year D applied to college, we heard that UMD-CP filled in their 95% classes for in state students from EA applications. So if a students with very high state applying to the RD, the chance to get accepted could be comparable to the top universities. I also saw first hand from a student I was friend with who applied to UMBC with good state and applied on time to only got a letter from the school had already fill in its class by late March-early April, but not rejection letter.
“My neighbor’s child was waitlisted at UW-Madison (for which we’re in state) with an ACT above Madison’s 75% and a 4.0 GPA from one of the top-ranked high schools in the state. Madison accepted 53% of applicants for the 2017 entering class. This student didn’t apply early but she didn’t miss the deadlines, either.”
At top public high schools on the east coast, many students are wait-listed at their state schools until the top students in the class enroll in out of state public or private schools and withdraw their acceptance. Often the interested student has put down a deposit at an out of state public, chooses to enroll in their state public at a much lower cost but looses the out of state deposit.
But you have to guess which ones the college looks at.
The point is you don’t do just one, right? If you operate under the assumption you are creating a list of schools you’d be happy to go to regardless of selectivity, you’re not just engaging for show. You’re not treating them like a safety. You visit, you interview, you engage with AOs in other settings (visits to college fairs, email contact, any chance to meet and greet), you follow their social media and get on their mailing list, you possibly talk to a professor or two, sit in on a class, talk to current students, write supplemental essays that reflect why you and the school are a good fit, etc, etc. It’s more than just submitting an application. I don’t think it’s challenging. I just think many students don’t do it, especially for their likelies/safeties.
JHS- yes, that’s my point. The buzz around the HS was that a high stats kid was rejected from a “true safety”. But since you can’t be rejected from a place you didn’t apply to… that urban myth died a slow death.
I like the ‘reach’, ‘target’, ‘likely’ approach; as well as ‘safety’ for any school with guaranteed admissions based on stats that one can also afford. For any school with a 15% admission rate or lower, I call it a wild card as so much comes into play beyond academic stats. All schools within the 15%-30% are reaches, regardless of stats.
And here I’d thought I’d made progress by substituting “safety” for “back up” in my vocab – I agree, “likely” is much better designation.
@gallentjill your definition of a safety in the first post: “So I was wondering if we actually have any evidence that kids are being shut out of extremely likely schools. By that I mean, schools that admit over 60% where the student is in the top quartile. My guess is that those schools are still actually safe” sounds a lot more like the definition of a match.
To me a safety is a school where Naviance shows every single applicant from your HS with stats equal or below yours (or your child’s) was accepted.
I’m also in Wisconsin and every year since my oldest started high school I have heard about high stat kids getting waitlisted and rejected. We did not consider it a safety.
I am pretty sure that I originated the definition of the True Safety, so I was baffled by the use of this term in the title of a thread that is really about admission to places that are merely reasonably safe. To be a True Safety, the place has to meet specific standards, and yes, for many students the local CC will be the True Safety. Some applicants with extremely rare majors, and some with criminal records, will not be able to identify a True Safety. Transfer applicants from a CC may have no True Safeties for financial reasone even when guaranteed academic admission.
I consider a “safety” to be a college where the student is guaranteed admission … or that the likelihood of admission was so great as to be the equivalent of a guarantee (such as a school that admits 95% of its applicants).
To me – “safety”= sure thing, both in terms of admission and affordability.
I can see a casual reference to other schools on the list that are less selective as “safeties” - but I if there is a possibility of being rejected then it simply isn’t and couldn’t be a “TRUE” safety – as suggested by the thread title.
If it was a 'true safety" then by definition you wouldn’t have been rejected.
The error was in your projection, not the results.
I think the “guarantee admission” statement might be a regional thing. For my state is an absolute overkill and I do not thing is needed. I am looking online now and none of our state schools offers that. They have minimum requirement stated but they do not guarantee admission. Yet, I am not aware of single case of a student of good standing that had trouble getting admitted and I am in a position to know since I am involved with our high school admissions. And in general from the nearby communities and friends I do not know a single student that applied to a guarantee admissions school and they all made it to colleges.
@happymomof1 I don’t want the thread to get bogged down in semantics. If I could change the title I would. I would call it “ultra-likely” or something similar. I agree with @am9799 that applying to an auto-admit school is probably overkill for most. In my personal experience, I have never seen a kid with reasonable stats (Not straight A’s or 99% ACTs) rejected from a college with a 60+% admit rate school. The idea that ANY school with holistic admissions, regardless of admit rate, is suspect seems like a bit of unnecessary pessimism.
But, I don’t know this for an absolute fact, which was the reason for starting this thread. Of course, the best advice is to secure an admission somewhere reasonable through rolling admissions or EA. Nothing on this thread should suggest that I disagree with that excellent advice.
^^^How about GFAA (Guaranteed, Fit and Affordable) school. This doesn’t imply its a backup. A Match is one that is a great fit but may not be guaranteed or necessarily affordable and with a Reach all bets are off.