Were BU, Michigan, and Tulane the safeties?
@jazzymomof7, a school for whom an applicant with that profile has a roughly 50% of acceptance.
I donât like the term âmatchâ because it can mean so many different things.
Iâd like to divide schools for an applicant in to tiers:
High reach: treat like a lottery ticket
Low reach: most likely a rejection but better than percentages in the single digits.
50/50: self-explanatory.
Likely: Most likely an admit.
Safety: 100% or 99/98% chance of an admit.
@Data10 yeah. Michigan not a gimme for anyone this year. Lots of kids in our neighborhood with 4.0 and 35s got deferred.
@3littlebirds Congrats on Villa Nova! Its a wonderful place. Thank you so much for sharing your list. I understand your reluctance to open yourself to hindsight criticism, but it is very helpful to me and I am sure to so many others who are trying to develop our own lists for the coming year. I have learned so much from the really generous people, like you, in this forum. I hope you donât get too much grief.
I have a question. Princeton, Cornell, Penn, Dartmouth are all so different from each other. Why would they all be on one studentâs list?
@homerdog I wonât presume to answer for the OP but sometimes a student may be pulled in different directions. Currently my Dâs two top choices are Muhlenberg and Umass Amherst. Very different schools, but she loves them both.
So glad to read about the accepts! Thatâs great. Itâs nice that youâve shared your list to âgive backâ, let future readers ponder. You did the right thing following advise from GC. But as youâve shown, throwing in a slam-dunk state flagship (often with advertised SAT/GPA grid) is good for extra Safety. In CO, those apps are easy and itâs ârolling admissionâ ⊠gives a warm fuzzy early in the game.
How would you determine the applicant had a 50/50 chance? What kind of acceptance rate would the school have? Where would the students stats line up? Middle 50? Top 25%?
Re: reaches⊠I thought reaches were schools where you have a decent shot, but still may not get in or may not be able to afford it. But from your descriptions it seems students should assume they will NOT to get into their reaches. Is that correct?
Just trying to get an understanding of how to catergorize schools for a particular applicant.
Congratulations to your D, Iâm so happy everything worked out for her. I know of 2 very high level student at my childâs school going through the same thing.
@jazzymomof7 - I think that these days high stat applications are often applying to reach schools with single digit acceptance rates â and in those cases it really is unpredictable. So yes, when the acceptance rate is, say, 8% â that student is going to have to act on the assumption that they probably wonât get in.
It might be different for a kid with less impressive stats whose âreachâ is a college with a 40% acceptance rate.
Iâm not a believer in the concept of âmatchâ or 50% chance school either â you are either almost certain to be admitted (and hoping for merit money)-- or not â and if the student is rejected or waitlisted,then it doesnât matter whether their chances were 50/50 or 20% or 5% â bottom line, that student hasnât gotten in.
So I think itâs better to think in terms of safety / reasonably likely to get in / some chance of admission.
I think that @3littlebirds DD could certainly have seen Tulane & BU as âreasonably likelyâ (so maybe thatâs 50/50) âŠthe acceptance rate of those schools is essentially the same as Boston College â but obviously just as likely that the student doesnât get in. So she did have a list with several âmatchâ schools but no safeties â which is exactly why I donât like the concept of a âmatchâ.
If I were advising a student, Iâd recommend 3 true safeties, and no more than 2 apps to the âsome chanceâ schools â and then concentrate the rest on the âreasonably likelyâ schools. I donât think anyone increases their chance of getting into a super-reach (Ivy or equivalent) school by throwing out more applications. The better course of action would be to dig deep before applications are submitted to figure out which among those is the most likely to admit the student.
How stressful for you and your daughter. As others have said, all hope is not lost yet. She still has not heard from a large number of schools. Itâs easy to understand why panic is setting in though as decisions start coming in around you, and the April 1 date draws near. Reach schools are just that. Focus on one or two wait lists. since your GC appears to be unhelpful, do your own research about wait list stats for the schools, and figure out which ones pull more kids off the wait list and focus on them. Also, University of Arizona has been sending emails about admission and pretty amazing financial aid availability until 5/1. Best of luck during this stressful waiting period.
âOoops! missed a page of posts. I see that she received positive news. So happy for you all.
@3littlebirds â if it is any consolation, years ago my daughter was admitted to Barnard but waitlisted at Boston U. And she also had a GC who thought BU was a âmatchâ for her. So my daughter was surprised-- I really wasnât, because I had a sense that my Dâs particular qualities would be more appealing to Barnard ad coms. My daughter was also a dancer â and dancers are highly valued at Barnard â but I didnât see it as a âhookâ. More along the lines of being one of several factors that I thought would strengthen my daughterâs appeal. I did feel that for a non-major, dance would only be a plus factor for a LAC, not at a larger university.
I donât think any school can truly be deemed a âsafetyâ unless the admissions rates are in the range of 70% or above (and the applicant clearly has stats in the upper range).
I think that my daughter did also undermine her apps to schools she considered safeties by not really putting effort into the âwhy this schoolâ part of the applications. For the schools that were true safeties for her she could get away with that â but for a âmatchâ school I think it is particularly important for the applicant to convey that they seriously do want to attend. Because one of the most important tasks for admissions is to try to figure out which student would really come if admitted.
@jazzymomof7, without knowing anything else, Iâd say a student who is between the 75th and 25th percentiles at a school with around a 50% admit rate is 50/50. Likewise, a student who is above the 75th percentile at a school with around a 25% admit rate (for their group, so in this case, UMich OOS, not just UMich overall) but with no hooks is 50/50.
For schools with an admit rate below 20%, youâd need hooks/tips/something for them to be anything other than reaches.
Very helpful! Thank you!
Congratulations, OP! What a relief and what great choices for a very hardworking and deserving student!!!
There are some exceptions where the admission criteria are formulaic or have auto-admit thresholds that the applicant easily meets. An example is UT Austin with a 39% overall admission rate, but where a Texas resident in the top 6% of his/her class and not applying to a competitive major can consider it an admission safety with a 100% admission rate. Of course, those applicants to UT Austin who are not in the auto-admit range should consider it a reach, since the admission rate for them is probably only around 15%.
Probably the most common admission surprises are situations like UT Austin where the overall admission stats are irrelevant because the school has different admission buckets of greatly varying selectivity (common examples are in-state versus out-of-state at public schools, auto-admit versus other, admission by division, admission by major, early versus regular admission). Another example school here is San Jose State University, where some majors admit at the CSU baseline (where a 2.5 GPA and 950 SAT score meets the threshold for a California resident) but others are highly selective (computer science would have rejected a 4.1 GPA and 1440 SAT score applicant this year).
Safeties are really schools where the student has an acceptance in hand (and can afford) before deadlines for other desirable schools have passed. For D16, Clark (EA), Beloit (EA) and Western WA (rolling) served that purpose. A true safety is hugely valuable to a kid who has any level of anxiety or doubt about the process. (We had no real safeties for S12 because I was relatively clueless and he didnât submit his app for Western until the final deadline. But we dodged that bullet!)
I donât agree that a safety requires an early acceptance. But an early acceptance (EA or rolling admission) does take the pressure off.
I just read every post in this thread. Congratulations on your daughterâs two fabulous acceptances!
Awesome. BC is a great school - a step up from BU. At this point your D has hand and can stop puckering up to the gods of college admissions who are mostly recent grads who couldnât find better jobs. I would tell the colleges that waitlisted her to pound sand.
Now your D has to reject at least one school. She is the prize.
Congratulations to your daughter on two great acceptances. What a relief!!!