@me29034 Setting the 6 year college graduation rate with a floor of 70% really does take care of selectivity being a problem. None of the schools we came up with using this method had acceptance rates lower than 50%; we were looking for significant merit money, which necessarily entails looking at less selective schools.
Most of the schools were moderately to less selective. Buyers to use the parlance of Jeff Selingo. These schools will accept many many students, are often test optional (so test scores don’t matter) and give merit to almost all students accepted, on a sliding scale of student desirability.
Some of these schools also boasted about their articulation agreements with community colleges as a way for students with fewer monetary resources/less than stellar high school records to still be able to attend for their final two years.
Did we find schools that wouldn’t work as well? Yes, the parameters we inputted didn’t remove the top colleges from the lists, colleges we knew couldn’t be considered ever due to the finances not working for us at need-based aid only schools. We just ignored those results.