We never used the term safety - I do think it has negative connotations. We looked for schools that our kids would be successful at and enjoy. We then looked at admission statistics purely to determine the likelihood of admissions and did use terms such as likely or highly unlikely to describe percentiles. We worked hard to really separate a school’s admission statistics from actual fit of the school. It actually helped a lot for narrowing down the list - a ton of unlikely schools came off the list when they realized they really liked some of their likely schools more.
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