Depends on what your consider a safety. They only schools that are safety’s on my DS’s list are state school which do admissions based on stats. For those I can almost assuredly say that DS will get into his safety unless he fills out the application wrong.
@curiositycat333 Wow… are kids really applying to 20? Back when I was in high school, the 80s, the norm was more like 3-4. I do think that the move by most schools to the Common Application has made it worse. Yes, it makes it easier to apply… but now almost every student applies to 10+. And since each can only attend one, each applicant ends up rejecting every other school that accepted them. It creates a vicious cycle, leading to lower and lower acceptance rates … at least to America’s top 50-100 schools. Last year, 54K applied to USC, for example. UCLA got over 86K. Among the 1,258 ranked schools reporting numbers to U.S. News, admissions departments received 7,172 applications on average. That’s sort of insane. But that is what happens when every senior now applies to 3-4 times as many schools as they did 20 yrs ago.
@curiositycat333 - You made me chuckle. That was the UC system back in the 70s and 80s. You applied to the UC SYSTEM and ranked your top 3 schools. If you qualified for the UC system, you typically got into one of those 3 choices. Now a days you would likely need to rank your top 8 or 10 UCs because the competition is much greater.
@curiositycat333 I agree. The only safeties for us are Automatic Admit schools based on GPA and test scores.
One additional condition for safeties - the schools that DS is willing to attend if all else fails.
Matches for us have the acceptance rates > 50% and DS’s stat is above > 75% of stats school reported.
Everything else is reach.
DD received the following today.
“Dear ,
Your accomplishments have caught our attention at Olin College.”
It’s pretty clear that that’s just a blatant lie.
Have any of you / your children ever written back, something to the effect of “Thanks for your nice email. Can you be more specific about which of my accomplishments have caught your attention?”
For extra sarcasm points, you can add "Was it my accomplishment of entering my email address on your web site?’
** demonstrated interest ** My S14 was accepted into schools where the only interest demonstrated was the application (Case is one.)
awards I guess the irony of the night is that dd has a lot of academic type awards, but not much else! 
Was my accomplishment the right zip code from west of Mississippi?
I applied to seven or eight plus SUNYs, I think.
I do agree about the vicious cycle, but probably won’t be doing anything to break it this year.
@CT1417 https://apscore.collegeboard.org/scores/ap-awards/ap-scholar-awards?ep_ch=CO&ep_mid=11273001&ep_rid=272142099
@payn4ward —Thank you for that, but could they make it any more confusing?
It appears more of a rush to quantity than quality.
D17 qualified as AP Scholar with Distinction: Granted to students who receive an average score of at least 3.5 on all AP Exams taken, and scores of 3 or higher on five or more of these exams.
I guess that’s cool. I mean it’s better than a stick in the eye.
I’ve noticed that the quality of college mail has increased quite a bit in the last few days! Gone are the days of postcards and back are the fancy catch your eye packages. Today my D17 received a package from Miami of Ohio which included business cards with her name and title on them from various career paths she could follow with a degree from the school.
@itsgettingreal17 I also remember the 8 page resume comment at one of the schools we toured. They use an expanded resume so they wanted as much information as the students could provide. For this school, it sounded like more was better. They told us to include links to you tube videos, imgur images, zeemee pages, etc. DS’s expanded resume is longer than the typical one page job interview type resume. He also has a shorter resume to use for Common App where appropriate.
@CA1543 Our GC told us to send them since the private schools what do look at them. We also self reported.
Indeed… and I wish that they would not all waste the paper and postage. Someone think more ecologically. Last time we checked the po box, received 48 college solicitations for my daughter, and she ended up throwing away 44. There are literally schools sending out mail that I have never heard of before…
UMD app is open.
oopsie
Thanks @itsgettingreal17
lol Maryland wants a resume :))
And I have to physically mail the transcript to them, since as a homeschooler I do not have access to Naviance or other electronic submission means 8-|
I did some more online research and discovered that the average yield at colleges has been dropping 1% each year since 2007. The average is now 41% and falling. That has got to be troubling to colleges.
Also found that the record for applications overall, according to Naviance, is 86. A student actually applied to 86 colleges recently. Wow!
Anyhow… this was the best & most comprehensive article I found online discussing a # of these topics about applying, yield, trends, etc…
Note taking and transferring to a cloud:
Just saw this one. I don’t anything about it, either. Just starting to make mental notes about different types.