<p>“You can’t attend a Christmas party without listening to alumni parents whine about their high-quality kids not being accepted ED, and RD applications are very, very competitive. Certainly a kid near the top of the class at Lower Merion, Masterman, Haverford School, Baldwin, or Penn Charter who applies to Penn ED has a pretty good chance of admission, much higher than average, but that’s very different from being a safety.”</p>
<p>Penn sounds very Philadelphia-centric (and I’m quite sure it is; it was kind of the center of my universe when I grew up in Philly). It would be interesting to know of similar caliber schools that are situated in an urban area, what % of the applicants and what % of the accepted pool come from within that particular urban area (Philly/suburban Philly/NJ for Penn, Boston/suburban Boston for Harvard, and so forth). Knowing what % of the accepted pool alone doesn’t really tell the story – the % of the applicant pool from its own catchment area is what would be interesting. Are some of these schools more inherently “local” than others? And before someone tries to do this at the state level, the state metric won’t work, because the kid from Erie who applies to Penn or the kid from Syracuse who applies to Columbia or the kid from East St. Louis who applies to the U of Chicago isn’t a local kid.</p>
<p>And within that, there’s a difference between outreach efforts at the urban level, and what’s permeated the suburbs. I have no doubt all of these schools have “Good Neighbor” outreach efforts to the inner city kids in their cities, but JHS is talking about affluent suburbia here. </p>
<p>My son currently in college had several “safety” schools on his list. One was a local private college, rarely if ever mentioned on these boards, that offered him a full tuition scholarship, as they did for a number of local kids. it is the school nearest to where we live, and had he gone there, he could have lived quite well, and ended up with a lot of money in the bank,as we would have turned over the savings for going there to him. But at the time, as a high school senior, a teen ager, the idea of staying local, of commuting was abhorrent to him, as honored as he was to getting the award.</p>
<p>Well, now three years later, he’s older and wiser. He knows quite a few kids who took up that school on the offer, others going there without the award, and a number who transferred there after things were not to their liking with they ended up going. Many of them from affluent families. They are doing quite well, and are happy, as a group. Though, son has no regrets about his choice, he acknowledges that the local option was not as bad as thought it was, and he could have flourished, maybe even better than he has away, and enjoyed himself immensely. Even as a commuter. Many of those kids are enjoying Manhattan, NYC activities much more than kids we know who went to NYU to enjoy the city, because going local and commuting, yet being so close to the city allows them to really take advantage of it, and they have MONEY, something that many who stretched that budget do not have, nor do their parents. Things can be tense when the money gets tight. Very nice to have a big budget, not have to work and be able to enjoy NYC. </p>
Harvard accepts more kids from Boston than it should as a percentage. It’s part of their mission to give back to the community - or maybe to placate it. :)</p>
<p>Right, I know all these schools accept more than they “should” under a good neighbor policy. I’m curious which of them have applicant pools that are most localized to their city / immediate area. (Because none of these are truly national schools. The Ivies index in the 200-300 to the northeast, just like every other top 20 uni and LAC does to its home region, Duke being the only outlier.) </p>
<p>Even though I went away from NYC to a small rural Midwest town for college, I found I was still able to enjoy the Boston area and NYC as if I was still a college kid if I so chose. </p>
<p>Best of all, I had no scheduling, academic, or financial constraints holding me back as a college graduate. </p>
<p>I’m not sure if Columbia had much of a policy for local NYC area students, but they admitted around 90 students from my graduating class for the College and SEAS. Then again, Cornell Engineering and Arts & Science admitted more 118. If you added Cornell’s Ag school which falls under the state land-grant auspices and has lower admission requirements…especially for in-staters, that number would be higher. This was out of a graduating class of a little under 690 graduating seniors. </p>
<p>The only truly national schools are Army, Navy, AFA (and maybe the Coast Guard and Merchant Marine academies; not sure if you need to be nominated to go to those).</p>
<p>But I understand. Many alums from all over the country are proud of their state land grant university and believe that it provides an experience that just can’t be duplicated elsewhere.</p>
<p>Our suburban NYC school has by far the biggest Ivy acceptance rate at Cornell. A little easier to get into that Columbia, further from the parents without being too far away.</p>
<p>The OP asked for parents to discuss their safety schools and that intimates to go back three decades. He also defined safety schools as schools that offered guaranteed admission. </p>
<p>I find the discussion interesting to ascertain how things have changed. I think they have changed in the past decade, and perhaps the OP should extend the scope to include students who made the decisions in the past decade. </p>
<p>I also believe the term safety is a fluid one, I happen to think it is a poor term that comes with a negative image. I prefer the term highly likely in terms of admission and truly affordable in terms of finances. I also think the school should be one the student is HAPPY to attend. Too often in April, we get to read … Nowhere to go and then read that the student prefers to try again later rather than attending one of the safeties. </p>
<p>Anyhow, a decade ago, my first post on CC was to share how happy I was to attend my “safety” school and how I did not understand why people looked down on state schools such as UT at Austin, even when the Honors colleges were highly competitive. By the third post, I had learned with a LAC meant and that there was more culture in a jar of Dannon than in the entire Lone Star State and that ASU was a college for extreme lightweights. Courtesy of my good friend, TheDad! </p>
<p>Still, I would have been ecstatic to attend UT. But, if I had a mulligan, I would follow the same path and pick the exact same schools for UG and graduate schools. I also would have the exact same list of applications. Seven in total! And not a single more because of great safeties at the UG level. No safeties at the grad level! </p>
<p>Hmm. Back in the mid-80s I had safeties and called them that - they were 3 SUNYs (you could pick 3 and put on one app). I didn’t visit them or research them, my mom made me apply and she picked what she considered the 3 best ones (Buffalo? Stonybrook? one more…). </p>
<p>Those were financial safeties, I had private safeties too - Oberlin and Emory both of which I got into and neither of which I really wanted to attend. My reaches were Yale (no go) and Brown (WL’ed). My match was Vassar and when they gave me the best FA package, that is the one I chose.</p>
<p>I actually didn’t like Vassar at all, once I got there, and left after only a semester, wound up at CUNY Hunter and liked it fine. Hunter was not a school I even remotely considered in HS, not sure I even really knew what/where it was. But I overestimated my ability to be even an hour and a half from NYC and was glad to be back. I had some great profs at Hunter.</p>
<p>To be honest until now I never considered what it might have been like to go to one of those SUNYs. I’ve still not seen them.</p>
<p>I would have been at Babson. Interesting that it came out recently as #1 in the Money Mag rankings for value. I would have been more employable out of Babson than the fine liberal arts school I went to. Maybe I’d be able to really afford sending my kids to school now! But I loved college in any event. </p>
<p>Hmm, my safety was where I actually did go, for financial reasons – Bryn Mawr College. It was fine, and I did a lot of my academic work at Haverford, and really appreciated the BiCo community. In hindsight, I don’t think I was as jazzed up about attending as some of my friends, and it showed in my experience. Great education for sure. </p>
<p>Back in 1980, I didn’t apply to any safeties - coming from NYC that would have been a SUNY school and I don’t think I even looked at them. The reasoning was if I didn’t get in anywhere I really wanted to go I would take a year off and reapply. My parents were not involved in my college process. Luckily I ended up getting into Oberlin and luckily, it was a great place for me.</p>
<p>This question is unanswerable because I can’t say whether I would have been happy in an environment I didn’t experience. But people are adaptable and most students tend to like where they end up, so maybe I would have been no exception that that general rule.</p>
<p>On the other hand, my “safety” in the early eighties was a giant state flagship in an urban location with 50K students. I’m sure I would have functioned adequately and graduated. However, at 18, I was still tentative, shy and insecure. I don’t know if the environment would have been such a great thing for me, or whether being in classes that were mostly large lectures for the first two years would have developed my intellectual or social skills and confidence very well. It’s hard to say. The accepted way to find community at the large school was to join a sorority or become a big sports fan, neither one of which was my thing. I also had a burning desire to get out of the region at the time, which would have stoked dissatisfaction. </p>
<p>There was no way I was going to the local 4-year school. I desperately wanted to get out of that community. Applied to three flagships (UGA, Texas A&M and Missouri – had instate status at each of them thanks to my dad being in the military) and Duke. Duke didn’t give me enough FA. Wound up in the honors program at UGA where I could work 20 hrs/week and pay my own way (zero EFC, was able to go independent back then). I was not happy there. Never found my peeps, was left out economically, and was not into the big rah-rah SEC party environment. </p>
<p>DH worked in admissions as part of his W/S job (doing data analysis, so he had some basis for knowing) and says that I would have gotten into his Ivy without a problem back then (3.97 UW, 1360 CR/M, 2 APs taken self-study because school didn’t offer any, tons of leadership and writing/polisci-related state/national awards). He was also a zero EFC student and they gave him an excellent FA package that got him through with only $7k in loans (which is what I had coming out of the flagship).</p>
<p>In retrospect, I don’t think Duke would have been a good fit. If I had to do it over, I’d look at places like Swarthmore, Northwestern, Columbia or even UChicago (was looking for journalism programs then). Back then, though, the counselors at my HS were focused exclusively on the local schools – out of my class of 300, 30% went to college, and of that, ten students total went to UGA or GT. One went to West Point. There were not people in my universe who could show me a way out, and I was not savvy enough to figure out how to make the $$ work (or that top schools could help me make it work). </p>
<p>You can bet I was going to be a resource for my kids (and nieces/nephews and other young adults) when the time came. :)</p>
<p>My understanding is that the flagship’s honors program is now vastly improved because automatic scholarships for strong HS students means that more folks are staying in-state. My niece is there now and is having a fairly good experience, though she faces some of the same issues I did.</p>