Can someone give me well worded definitions of safety, match, and reach schools…
would be helpful in my organization of a huge college list
<p>reach schools: Schools in which the chances are stacked against you in terms of admission (typically very selective schools). Usually, the applicant’s average test scores will either be higher than yours (in which you will have small chance unless you’re a URM, VIP, or legacy. In those cases ur chances r increased slightly, significantly if ur URM and disadvantaged) about the same as yours (this is when you need to stand out from the crowd, or else they’ll either reject u or stick u on wait).</p>
<p>Match schools: Usually somewhat/very selective, but your test scores match up to their middle 50% range nicely, your rank is more than adequate. In order to guarantee acceptance, you still need something to distinguish urself from the crowd. Basically schools that you should be able to get into without too much of a problem.</p>
<p>Safety: Their applicant averages r generally lower than urs. compared to u, the applicant pool is not very competitive, and u stand out very easily in this crowd, a high chance of acceptance, sometimes even almost guaranteed acceptance. after all, it’s ur fallback plan in case everything else bombs.</p>
<p>One more thing, usually when applying for colleges, u should have a nice balance of reaches, matches, and safeties. a typical applicant who’s successful in getting into the right college usually has something along the lines of:</p>
<p>1-3 reaches, 2-4 matches, 1-2 safeties, although some very competitive and ambitious students have been known to pull something like 3-5 reaches (generally Ivies or other top notch schools like MIT, Stanford, Northwestern, Georgetown, etc.), 2-4 matches, 1 safety</p>
<p>The concept of safety, match, and reach schools is a useful concept. In reality, it is often very difficult to tell which are which. You end up trying to approximate the impossible ideal.</p>
<p>When you look at the 50% SAT ranges for a school, you have to be more than just in the range. If you are a non-legacy, non-URM, non-athlete, non-etc applying during RD, then you have to near the top of the range to be a good candidate. For example, if the 50% range is 1300-1500, then you need to be around 1450 to be a strong candidate.</p>
<p>Make sure your safety schools are colleges that you would actually find acceptable to attend.</p>
<p>There are two kinds of safeties, academic safeties and financial-aid safeties. Have a safety that you not only get you can almost definitely be accepted to, but also that you can attend without much financial aid being offered.</p>
<p>awsome, thanks for responding</p>