what happened to should they be ranked higher? 
in many ways - ranking has brought fun - whoâs the best baseball or basketball player ever, etc. BUT - itâs to the point where kids are measuring themselves on their school.
This just in - after your first job, youâll be measured on YOU. You canât hide behind a school name if you arenât good at what you do!!
The definition of safety on here should be redefined then. It should be 90%+ chance - and you apply to 3 these days. You can do the math better than I. The guarantee thing has people applying to schools that make no sense. Note the odds of getting into a school are increased by applying to 4 50/50âs and and 3 reaches.
A few comments:
-Safeties with virtually guaranteed admission based on stats have to also be affordable. If one is accepted and canât attend due to finances, itâs obviously not a safety.
-If one likes their safety and would be happy to attend, no reason to apply to more than one, unless the student ultimately wants a choice.
-College admission decisions are dependent, not independent events. (At least at colleges with holistic admissions practices, as compared to formula/rack and stack like Iowaâs RAI)
-Using overall admit rates at the individual level to calculate an individualâs probability of admission can give misleading results, as individual applicants may have very different chances of admission. Certainly at the highly rejective schools, like Tufts, there is some proportion of applicants who have a 0% chance of admission, to take one example.
I am sure @data10 can put some additional color /math on this, and perhaps it should be another thread.
IMO financial safety can be a different school as well.
Bad advice.
True, but odds are odds. If a person applies to 2 90% schools, odds are not 90% he will get into 1 of the 2.
Who is doing that?
Itâs nonsensical to separate academic from financial safety. Again, whatâs the point of applying to an academic safety that is unaffordable? The student isnât attending that college so it per se wasnât a safety.
Iâm confident that students can decide how many true safeties they want to apply to. Some donât need a choice, while others might prefer that.
Odds in a dependent vs independent situation are different. Your post in #123 seemed to be using overall admit rates, and putting them in an independent variable calculationâŠif you are saying something different than that, my apologies for misunderstanding.
FYI - I know who coined the term financial safety. More importantly, financial situations change and schools let you down, some surprise.
Yes, I am suggesting that people should be able to find colleges that are safe, and within range. If they apply to more than 1, their odds are better (not worse) than if they apply to a school they âthinkâ is a safety.
There should be no guess work in predicting admission to a safety. If there is, then itâs not a true safety.
Probability is not guess work. Harvard-types need not apply to schools that accept 90% of their students so they can apply to just one school.
For perspective, this Life article indicates how Tufts placed statistically in 1960:
Not surprisingly, many people in academia see the value of standardized test scores when considered in their greater context, as this carefully worded perspective, for example, indicates:
I agree than having a 90% chance of acceptance at 3 schools could be considered near guaranteed chance of acceptance at one of the schools (1-90%)^3 = 1 in 1000. However, students usually cannot estimate chance of acceptance precisely. A student may think he has a 90% chance, when his actual chance of acceptance is dramatically different, which can result in a dramatically different chance of get rejected everywhere. Even worse acceptance decisions tend to be correlated with one another, so over/under estimating chance of acceptance at one school likely means doing the same at other schools.
Rather than having a fixed rule about applying to x safeties or having y % chance of acceptance, I think itâs necessary to consider the individual student and circumstances. The end result should be very little chance of being rejected everywhere, and there are many ways to accomplish that goal. For example, a top 5% rank in state student might choose UT Austin as a safety and correctly assume he has a near 100% chance of acceptance. If he prefers UT Austin more than alternative safeties, it is not necessary to choose 2 additional safeties. When I applied to colleges, I was accepted to my 5th choice college EA, which some might consider a reach (my stats were probably bottom quartile). So I only applied to reach colleges RD. It was not necessary to apply to any safeties (or matches)
Regarding Tufts, it would be a poor choice for a safety for the vast majority of students, even though I donât believe they practice âTufts Syndromeâ anymore (although they do consider demonstrated interest). Chance of acceptance at Tufts is largely dependent on application criteria that the student on which the student is not aware of where they stand compared to the applicant pool, so the student cannot estimate chance of acceptance well . Just having high stats is not enough. Even among 4.0 GPA and 1600 SAT, there is a decent rate of rejection from Tufts.
No one would mistake the quality of teaching at W&M with UF. Itâs not even close. Not really a fair comparison as W&M, although a state school, functions far more like an elite LAC. Class size, classes all taught by profs, heavy focus on undergrad, etc. Two totally different animals.
I donât know the wording of the âmarginalâ / âdistinguishedâ USNWR survey in which college administrators rated W&M, UF, and Tufts all approximately the same , but I believe it involved asking them to rate the âundergraduate academic programâ. One can only guess about why they thought W&M, UF, and Tufts were similarly âmarginalâ or âdistinguished.â
W&M is no doubt much smaller than UF and has many differences. However, I donât see much difference in class size between W&M and UF. A class size comparison is below, as listed in the CDS. Among the 3 colleges, W&M seems to have the smallest portion of small classes. W&M and UF also have approximately the same portion of student body being undergrad (~72% of students). Tufts has a much smaller portion of students being undergrads.
2-9 Students â 20% UF, 18% W&M, 16% Tufts
10-19 Students â 33% UF, 32% W&M, 50% Tufts,
20-29 Students â 19.4% UF, 19.6% W&M, 17% Tufts
30-49 Students â 18% UF, 23% W&M, 10% Tufts
50-99 Students â 6% UF, 5% W&M, 5% Tufts
100+ Students â 3% UF, 3% W&M, 2% Tufts
Why would it reject someone with a 4.0 GPA and 1600 SAT ? There are not that many around. That does not make sense.
Sounds like hot air. If someone showed genuine interest with those credentials, it is very flattering to the school.
Tufts considers more than just a studentsâ GPA and their score in admission decisions. For example, in the CDS they mark things like character/personal qualities, essay, and recommendations at the maximum importance level in admission decisions. On Tuftsâ class profile page that lists stats of students, they give the warning, âOur students have strong grades and test scores, but we look for more than that when making a class. We admit students who are well rounded in all areas of their lives â academic, social, and extracurricular.â
They really do consider these non-stat factors and really do reject high stat applicants who donât excel in non-stat criteria compared to the applicant pool. Scattergrams show perfect stat and near perfect stat applicants being rejected. If your HS has Naviance with a good sized sample, I expect it will show numerous high stat applicants being rejected.
I agree with this statement and I think it further supports applying to more than 1 âperceivedâ safe school. Also, it supports applying to at least 1 school earlier in the process that will send you their acceptance early in the process.
We are at a time where kids on CC are applying to more than 10 schools. It would be wrong to not encourage them to apply to more than 1 that seems safe.
Yes, of course, holistic criteria.
But a 4.0 and 1600 are very, very rare. Hard to believe if a student has anything close to this and is a good kid, even without ECâs that he/she would be rejected. I just do not believe it with numbers in that band if the kid is pleasant as a person.
Further, a person can have ECâs and not be a particularly âniceâ person, while another student can have no or few ECâs and be a âvery niceâ person. I would rather have that ânice or very niceâ personâ.
Hopefully, any selective college values this factor.
Many on this forum seem to believe that highly selective holistic colleges primarily admit based on stats, and the other stuff doesnât have much weight and just needs to be standard. I donât know specifically about Tufts, but nothing of the sort is true for every highly selective holistic college I am aware of that has published information about their admission system.
For example, the Harvard lawsuit showed that Harvard rates applicants in a variety of categories including academics, ECs, and personal qualities. The academics rating does not appear to be given extra weight over ECs and personal qualities rating at Harvard. Getting a high 1-2 rating in ECs or personal qualities was just as influential in decisions as getting a high 1-2 rating in academics. These high 1-2 ratings were given out more rarely for ECs + personal than for academics. One of Harvardâs expertâs did a regression analysis to review how large a portion of decisions changed when a rating was removed, which might be thought of as how influential a particular rating category was in decisions. The rating category that changed the most decisions was the combined LORs (Teachers + GCs), rather than one closely tied to stats.
I realize Tufts is far less selective than Harvard, but they still have no shortage of high stat applicants to choose from. Their class profile page mentions admits had 75th percentile scores of (790,760) SAT and 35 ACT. So 25+% of admitted students have scores than fall in to âanything close to this.â Such scores do not appear to be especially rare. Considering their 11% acceptance rate, Iâd expect the acceptance rate to be low for students with scores in this range. Unfortunately Tufts does not publish admit rate by score, but other colleges that do, show this relationship. For example, back when Stanford had a ~11% acceptance rate in the early 2000s, the dean of admission said Stanford had a 65% rejection rate for perfect stat type applicant. Back when Brown had a ~11% acceptance rate, Brown reported a >70% rejection rate for the small handful of perfect 36 ACT applicants.
I agree. Further, it seems that many students/families equate Best Academic Stats to Best Applicant For Student Body. Universities, even those not nearly as selective as top20 unis, donât always agree with that simplistic parsing of an application.
At some point, every student that meets certain academic thresholds is a capable student for a particular university. Universities understand this, thus having a higher academic record may not necessarily increase the odds of acceptance if the other factors donât measure up.
Based on other factors, a 3.6GPA/31ACT applicant might be a better student for a campus than a 4.0/36ACT applicant. The students who donât understand this and become irrationally angry at their rejection may actually be proving this point by their reaction to being turned down. That lack of awareness and self-awareness, if writ large, could create a very uncomfortable campus.