That’s true, but when a poster on here recognized that x, y, z is a safety, often they already took those good points into account. It’s never 1 factor, always a combination of a student stats, historical acceptance rate, yield practice, etc…
I’m going to disagree with a 50% admit school not being a safety for a top scorer, if affordable. Especially if the school has naviance, you can figure it out pretty well. Pretty much as in post #78, for the family member I mentioned earlier, her safety was around 40% admit rate, but there was no doubt it was a safety for her. Her stats were way above the 75th percentile, naviance showed her as a shoo-in, and she was in state and it was a public school. (Some of her matches, by the way, had similar admit rates albeit she wasn’t as high above the middle 50, but those were privates hence her considering them matches.)
Well, two of S19’s safety schools have a 30 percent overall acceptance rate but a 100% acceptance rate from his high school even for much lower stat kids. I was a little nervous about that but our GC was absolutely sure he’d get in.
And it’s not always easy to say you’ll find safety schools that are a good fit when a student defines his fit in a very narrow way. S19 ( and now D21) have a very specific list for what they think make a good fit school. Both of our kids give up quite a bit of what they really want for the safeties on their lists. And, believe me, we spent a ton of time on S19’s list and now on D21s. I’m certainly jealous of anyone who has a student who isn’t as picky. Location, size of school, majors available, specific ECs available, nice dorms, good food, campus housing all four years, strong career centers, academic fit and not big fish/little pond, travel to and from school not too taxing…it is not easy to find any schools that fit what they’d like let alone safeties.
I get that they don’t need to get everything they want but, because we are full pay, we are darn sure going to try our best to find the best fit. Not really interested in paying so much for less than that. That’s why all safeties on our lists have to offer merit.
I think some here are making this unnecessarily complicated. It doesnt matter to me what synonyms you come up with. What matters is that you have some apps in to colleges most likely to admit you, that you like, that are affordable.
All the considerations of “dreams,” crapshoots, who thinks what students “deserve” more, etc, go out the window. This is CYA, plain and simple. IF other apps fail, what’s your backup?
And yield is not the determinant. You first still need to match, whatever that means to particular colleges. Sure, some will be primarily stats based- have the grades and/or scores, complete the app…check, you’re in!
But other colleges will expect more. Your match beyond stats. You give that to them or you don’t. All of it.
You assume colleges arbitrarily exclude good kids who, from our own limited perspectives, “must have been” perfect applicants. But you don’t know their apps. For all we know, they bumbled through them.
The solution is to carefully build your backup plan, schools you would enjoy/can afford and show you match what they want. Put the heart into it.
You’re a whole lot smarter than me! Next kid, I’ll do better.
I think this is highly dependent on the area where you live and the specific high school. My kids go to a very diverse high school in terms of economic and social class. The GCs need to spend most of their time with the kids who are on the fringes to graduate, and the kids who want to go to college but come from families that don’t know anything about college admissions. They don’t have much time to work with the kids who might end up applying to 8 safeties and no reaches - the GCs see the kids are applying to college so that’s good enough.
Conversely, I have friends whose kids got a very UMC school and it’s more typical of people who post here - a lot of encouragement and pressure to apply to reach schools and not enough consideration of safeties.
I understand the disappointment you expressed in seeing kids not being encouraged to aim higher. At the same time, the “CC message” is just as bad when you see all the posts in April from kids and parents of kids who didn’t get in to any of their reaches or matches (that might not have been more reaches than matches), and only got into a safety they don’t like or nowhere at all.
It’s a great introduction to the real world. You’re usually not going to get everything you want so you need to learn to prioritize. Of course you want to find a good fit, but if they are going to be that picky, they aren’t going to be happy anywhere.
Better to have the student apply to 8 safeties and get 8 affordable admission offers, than have the student apply to 8 reaches and get 6 rejections and 2 unaffordable admission offers.
As long as they are affordable, rolling admission schools make great safeties. High stat kids around here often use Pitt. As food for thought, more than one has gone there by choice rather than because it was their safety. It’s a nice school.
My own high stat lad also used U Alabama, but not everyone is willing to go so far away. I put it out there for others looking.
Pitt ended up #2 for this lad. He went to his #1 choice, but if he hadn’t gotten in or it wasn’t affordable, he would have enjoyed Pitt.
Rolling admission schools give a nice baseline for less worry.
Amen to rolling admission. Nothing better than having an early acceptance to calm the nerves.
Another one who doesn’t think the safety school has to have a guarantee of admission. In my experience a STEM kid needs to be willing to look at the smaller tech schools for example. A humanities oriented kid might look at the second tier of LACs - especially if they are a guy. The best safety of all is the one that lets you know early. (It might even be one of your reachiest schools, as happened to my younger son.) Honors programs are also the other obvious way to get a better experience at a school where you are likely to be a top student.
But isn’t that the definition of a safety school?
For my S20, Penn State’s rolling admission gave him an early acceptance that removed a lot of the stress. He was subsequently denied at his ED reach, so it was especially nice to have the PSU admit in his pocket.
@Johnny523 Well, indeed, our S19 did find a perfect school for him. He’s really not compromising at all. It ticks all of his boxes. It was a reach, though, and he got lucky.
"But isn’t that the definition of a safety school? "
I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule on what a safety is (google it and you’ll get different responses), but I think safeties can include schools that are not guaranteed admission. You’d have to dig in a little to see how your past high school students have done, naviance, or maybe even anecdotal info if you h/s doesn’t get naviance.
Highly likely (for both admission and affordability) schools are best described as “likely”, not “safety”.
With S2, we started out looking at local schools where he had a good shot at admission, but focused more on developing his criteria for a schools where he’d be happy — large/medium/small, LAC vs research U, majors, internship opportunities, etc. Those schools became the benchmark by which he measured all the other schools he visited.
The Ivies, NYU, JHU, Syracuse and others flew right off his list.
Our family rule was that the only schools on their lists were ones at which they could see themselves attending. That meant spending a lot of time working on the essays, not only to build their case, but to better understand the merits of each school.
OP, your student has a limited time to get apps in at other schools. Time to get real and find some options that can accomplish the goals. This won’t be the last time your student doesn’t get into the school/internship of choice.
And be sure you can afford it.
IMO you apply to a “safety”. Once accepted you have an acceptance and wait until the rest of your decisions come in. If the school you are accepted to wasn’t your “safety” you will have at least 2 choices. Good all the way around. If your first acceptance was Harvard you won’t go around claiming Harvard is my “safety”. You might tell a lot of people you got accepted though.
We also found EA to be a great way to assess the strength of each son’s applications – and having EA acceptances in December made the rest of the process easy and stress-free.
Had they not done well in EA, they had already identified other schools where their odds would be better and had apps ready to submit (made much easier by the Common App).
I think it is okay to have ‘gap year’ as the safety. If the student really doesn’t want to go or couldn’t afford a school, don’t apply.
My kids were told to have 3 schools, including a state public school. They both had a top choice, applied early and got in on rolling admissions in Oct; they were done. I warned them that ‘something’ could happen, but they both decided they’d rather take a gap year and regroup than apply to schools they weren’t interested in. In the end the dream/1st choice/only schools worked out, but taking the gap year would have worked out too.