How about this (assuming that any school has a good or at least acceptable academic and non-academic fit):
Safety: assured for admission and affordability
Likely: not explicitly assured for admission and affordability, but as close to that as can be without an explicit guarantee
Match: more likely than not to be favorable for admission and affordability
Reach: unlikely to be favorable for admission and affordability
Note 1: admission means including to major/division if school admits to major/division.
Note 2: if a merit scholarship is needed for affordability, the assessment must be based on the difficulty of getting the needed merit scholarship, not admission.
The only TRUE safeties are schools with open admission. The admissions at every other school in the country will depend on how ,any spots they have and who else applies.
@bjkmom Are we just talking about semantics or are you suggesting that every student needs to apply to an open admission or auto-admit school? If its just about terminology, I’m perfectly happy to use the work “likely” or “Highly-likely” rather than safety.
Since everyone is guessing - here’s my guess. A safety is probably a college in your region that is very familiar with your school and often has some or many kids enrolled from your high school that are similar in caliber (e.g. top 25% or whatever criteria fits the student) and that you can afford.
Anecdotally for my #2, NAU (Northern Arizona) was his “safety school”. That is along way from Michigan, no one from his high school in the history I don’t think has gone there and NAU took a looooong time to admit him. Granted he didn’t attend but it was one of of those safeties he could have attended because it had everything he wanted including some depth to this particular major and interest… We visited, talked to admissions, he talked to a prof…don’t know what more a kid can do. NAU has auto admit at his caliber and they still didn’t admit him until spring despite an October application…so much for getting your safety under the belt early. I think it was his higher than the autoadmit GPA and out of the area that stalled them off admitting even with rolling.
Second Anecdote, the year he graduated from the school her chose (in 4 years) he started getting info from NAU on their graduate programs so they definitely use a CRM system that tracks applicants.
About looking for a 60% plus admit rate: you realize your kid could be one of the 40%, right? I think you want the criteria to be primarily stats or a rack and stack. Not holistic.
I guess my point is that I’ve seen so very many kids-- more here than at school, but some in both-- who are positive that a school is an absolute safety-- until they don’t get in.
I think that “safety” is a fluid thing, and that it changes radically from one admissions cycle to another depending on admissions.
In general, I think the only real safety is a school that has promised you admission before receiving your application, regardless of how high your scores are or how many wonderfully unique EC’s you have.
Additionally, it’s not a safety if you can’t afford it, though that’s not the point behind this thread.
But I think there would be a lot fewer heartbroken kids if we didn’t have so many kids absolutely positive that they would get into a school before even applying.
Schools will fill their seats with the “best” kids they can find-- and how they define “best” very likely changes from one semester to the next depending on the applications they receive.
@lookingforward I understand the math. That is why I put a statistical threshold in the question. I originally defined a safety as a school that admits 60% where the student is in the top quartile. However, I have actually not seen a rejection from a 60% school where the student is above the 25% in stats. But, of course, my experience is limited which is why I posed the question. Are there any actual real world examples of kids getting rejected under these circumstances?
For fall 2017, San Jose State University admitted 21,340 out of 31,909 frosh applicants, a 66.9% admission rate.
Top quarter GPA in the CDS was around 3.7, and top quarter SAT was 570/610.
If 3.7 is the CSU recalculated GPA, the eligibility index would be 4140, which would not have met the admission threshold for animation (4200), computer science (4500), general engineering (4200), or pre-nursing (4150) that year.
(Yes, this is a case where overall college admission stats obscure differences in admission standards for different majors.)
@ucbalumnus Yes, but we already discussed that the stats need to apply to the actual program/major, not the college as a whole. My daughter applied to a school that has “nearly” open admission, but only 10% acceptance rate to her program. It clearly didn’t count as a safety.
UW Madison, in my mind, isn’t a safety for anyone, especially someone from OOS. I know they wanted to keep more instate kids (see below) because they were losing some of Wisconsin’s best to OOS publics and privates ( and I am sure they don’t want to become like Illinois). VT and FSU used to be considered safeties for some high stat kids, but that’s not true anymore. VT’s acceptance rate this year dropped from 70% to 56%. FSU’s apps were over 50K with middle 50th numbers of 28-32 ACT and gpa’s of 4-4.4.
@tdy123: “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.”
Based on your criteria, the Naviance data for my older S’s HS would indicate that UChicago was a safety for my S. Every applicant over the previous seven years with higher or lower grades/scores was accepted. This was ten years ago, but still…we did not consider it a sure thing!
For us, UMD was the admissions/financial safety. The question would be if they got into Honors and if they got merit $$. UMD offered some autoadmits w/scholarships for certain math/CS competitions that they sponsored, and while S1 didn’t win those, he was already on their radar through other competitions. Both our kids would have been good with attending UMD. They also spent a lot of time selecting their lists. No throwing apps at the wall to see what sticks. Their favorites got significant extra attention and that strategy worked well.
A lot of kids in our neighborhood were rejected by UMD. Those with strong stats tended to get in at VT, Penn State, Ohio State, Temple, WVU, UMBC, Towson, & Salisbury. Our local CC also has a very strong reputation and a lot do the guaranteed articulation to UMD – but they need to keep a pretty decent GPA to qualify for that. S2 did a post-BA TESOL certification program at said CC and is now teaching overseas. He was quite happy with the program.
I think safeties also need to be what options your child will be positive on attending. To me, each and every option needs to be something that your child will accept with enthusiasm. It doesn’t do any good to have a college that accepts 100% of applicants that your child will not go to or is not at least minimally positive about. Maybe it is better to say My plan is to attend school #1 if accepted. If not, then I will attend school #2, etc… It might get to a point that after school # 8 or #10 on the priority list, which might be considered a high match or one that has a 60% acceptance rate and your child is well above the 75%, but not a gimme 100% safety. After a certain desired school, the plan may be to take a gap year and work or volunteer and take a few college courses to enhance your resume. The important thing is to not just have a list of schools, but a priority plan.
I don’t think a “safety” or “likely” school is any less so just because it may not be affordable or even desirable. Obviously it makes more sense to choose schools that are appealing, both financially and otherwise. But I don’t know why one would consider that part of the term’s defining characteristics.
@tdy123 Not all schools use Naviance. Thanks goodness for CC as our hs’s admittedly overworked guidance counselors provide no assistance to students in coming up with a good college list, other than telling students they should have a list.
In the Naviance states for American University for my child’s high school (2,000 student public suburban high school where 80% of students go to 4-year schools), almost all of the AU acceptances were around their 50% admittance point and ALL of the higher-stats kids were wait-listed, I’m sure because they’re doing enrollment management and figure the high-stats kids aren’t going to attend as it’s their safety school. My DD’s guidance counselor told her that demonstrated interest was very important at AU.
Ironically, my DD is a fairly high-stats student who is genuinely interested in AU because of their (small) honors program and the possibility of merit aid; it also has the programs she wants and she likes the campus. So we’ll have to go out of our way to convince them that she really IS interested.
@DragonBoatGirl American is an extreme case. I believe they have an 80% acceptance rate for ED and about a 20% rate for RD. That makes them pretty much a safety for one round and a real reach for the second. That may be another factor to add to the definition of “likely.” You really need to understand the round in which you are applying.