<p>Can you and your family afford full list price (up to $60,000 per year) at each school? If not, have you run the net price calculators to see if they will offer sufficient financial aid?</p>
<p>If the need-based financial aid is insufficient, then the school’s reach/match/safety is determined by the chance of getting a large enough merit scholarship. If that is not possible (e.g. if no such large enough merit scholarship exists), then the school is out of reach and is not worth applying to.</p>
<p>For example, New York University is known for poor need-based financial aid. Generally, a student who needs financial aid should consider New York University a reach, since s/he is aiming for the large merit scholarships, not merely admission.</p>
<p>understand the schools (reed, nyu) are different. Looking for a school that isn’t overly conservative that appreciates a creative, non-mainstream thinker, preferably in a city.</p>
<p>we can afford all the schools on the list. we haven’t visited a lot of the schools, first honing this list, then we’ll visit east coast schools.</p>
<p>Not to start some arcane statistics discussion but let’s just be clear on a couple of points. Admissions decisions are independent of each other, one school’s actions in no way influence the thought process at another school. So the number of schools you apply to has no impact on the likelihood of being accepted at any individual school. I agree that you’re likely to get into at least three of the schools on your list but that’s a guess based on your academic statistics, the profile of the average admitted student and a school’s admit rate.</p>
<p>Second, the point about 1-in-a-1,000 odds of getting shut-out of 50% probability schools is correct IF admissions decisions were random. But admissions decisions aren’t coin flips, they’re based on how your profile matches that of the school’s as well as how it stacks up against the rest of the applicant pool. Stronger candidates can reasonably expect a higher admit rate than the average, but that’s not a guarantee. For example, if you apply to a school that’s looking to admit 3 Aleut-Oboe playing-Etruscan Pottery majors you’ll be out of luck if your profile is 4th best regardless of how well you stack up statistically. The inverse is also true.</p>
<p>Obviously I’ve created an extreme example but here are the points to remember. Admit rates are not odds, you’re the one coming up with the odds and you’re doing it with incomplete information. Second, if NYU, Reed and SUNY-Geneseo reject you it has no impact on your Michigan application. That’s why you want a full range of schools and why, though highly unlikely, it’s possible that you could get shut out of an entire list of schools.</p>
<p>We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.</p>
<p>"… the point about 1-in-a-1,000 odds of getting shut-out of 50% probability schools" was merely an attempt to alleviate general fears (not of the OP) of not getting in anywhere. When applying to enough true match schools the chance of being rejected by all is quite small. “Simply by the numbers” should perhaps have been “In theory!” :)</p>
<p>"…Admit rates are not odds, you’re the one coming up with the odds and you’re doing it with incomplete information. Second, if NYU, Reed and SUNY-Geneseo reject you it has no impact on your Michigan application. That’s why you want a full range of schools and why, though highly unlikely, it’s possible that you could get shut out of an entire list of schools."</p>
<p>Thanks for your post and the time it must have taken to write. In the end, I think the only rational way to look at this problem is to assign a probability of admittance to each school and calculate the overall probability of acceptance as well as the probability of acceptance to each category (safe, match, reach and far reach). </p>
<p>For example, based on naviance data, geneseo and vermont have never rejected a candidate from our school with similar credentials. Let’s be conservative and assign 75% chance of admission to each school. The overall chance of rejection is .25*.25= .0625. One more safe school with similar probability would drive this to .02. We clearly need one more safe school.</p>
<p>assigning a 75% probability of admission to 2 safe schools = .06 rejection
assigning a 35% probability to admission to 4 match schools = .18 rejection
assigning a 10% probability to 6 reach schools= .53 rejection
assigning a 5% probability to 4 far reach schools = .81 rejection</p>
<p>overall chance of rejection = .004</p>
<p>yes, the naviance data might be flawed, but in the end, you use all the data available, assign probability and roll the dice. Is there another way to look at it?</p>
<p>btw, I haven’t given a lot of thought to the probability assigned to each category. (perhaps a reach is 2%, far reach .05%) but have included them for illustrative purposes. In the end, I’m we’ll assign each school a conservative probability.</p>
<p>definitions:
safe school - using naviance, stronger stats than 90% of all accepted candidates
match - using naviance, no one shown with same stats has been rejected
reach - using naviance, 20% acceptance with same stats
far reach - using naviance, 10% acceptance with same stats</p>
<p>the danger of this approach is that some of the schools (eg emory) have less than 10 candidates in naviance from our school (small sample size).</p>
<p>I’m fairly certain that BC and JHU are harder than Wesleyan to get into (might be off about BC, basing that off what my counselor said). If you’re going to apply to Brown/Amherst, which I personally think are the furthest reaches, why not ED one of those? Unless you really can see yourself at Wesleyan over those two, haha (which I doubt because you’re not certain about it). Maybe cut down on some reaches and safeties too; you have a LOT of colleges on this list. What are you trying to study?</p>
<p>Check the common data sets of your proposed safeties; those which consider “level of applicant’s interest” in admissions (section C7) should not be considered safeties (e.g. American University, which considers “level of applicant’s interest” to be “very important”).</p>
<p>You may want to check the Naviance on them to see that there is not a higher density of rejections and waitlists for your stats or higher at your proposed safeties.</p>
<p>nyc - bc takes a quite a few candidates from our school, wesleyan does not. specifically, for bc (and jhu), stats are better than 30% of accepted candidates. wesleyan just 10%. </p>
<p>the reason to not apply to brown ed is very little chance of success…probably less than 10%. cornell, believe it or not, would be just about a 50-50 ed, as they admits what looks to be a crazy number of candidates from our school.</p>
<p>Well, I’m just going to say that you shouldn’t apply ED to a school to up your chances; you should apply because you’re 100% in love with it. I found it a little odd how different Brown and Wesleyan are from some of your other schools… Michigan is huge, CMU/Lehigh have different strengths, BC/NYU are huge and in cities, and you have schools like Emory and Tulane being in places completely out of the typical northeastern area.
Maybe consider Vassar?</p>
<p>IMO, you should have used an “and” instead of a “not”. One applies Ed to a school because you’re 100% I’m love w it <em>and</em> you want to up your chances. </p>
<p>Agree, it’s a diverse list of schools. Brown, Wesleyan are best fits but also looking for a school in a city, hopefully with a campus. </p>
<p>I suspect when we’re done with 3-4 schools per category it will look more homogenous. </p>
<p>Plan to update this thread with final list and results.</p>
<p>Mm they’re all pretty liberal, but it’s a different kind of liberal haha. Poughkeepsie is slightly larger than Middletown, albeit not being as colorful and happy. It also has a more defined campus; Wesleyan doesn’t really have defined borders. Vassar also has easier access to public transportation, so it’s much easier to commute to New York (but it’s further from Boston and you probably won’t leave campus much anyway). </p>
<p>I don’t think sticking sticking Vassar, Bard, and Wesleyan on your list is a good idea… Vassar’s hipsters are really similar to Brown’s/Bard’s in the sense that they’re artsy and stuff; Wesleyan is more of activists, I believe, and more similar to Grinnel in that sense. It’s also bigger than most LAC’s. I’ve visited all the schools except Bard for overnight trips, and that’s just what I got out of it. You have enough reaches, I think pick two out of the four and slim your list down.
Of course, I like Vassar so I’m kind of biased but yeah, definitely consider it (shameless advertising) hahaha. I think it’d fit better than wes or bard! Might help if you told us what you wanted to study though.</p>
<p>Hmm, maybe consider UChicago or GWU? They have stronger political science than any of the others, they’re further, and slightly easier than Brown to get into. Not certain which is better between Vassar and Wesleyan (i’d assume vassar because wesleyan is known for economics and science, i believe). Good luck, anyway!</p>
<p>uchicago is probably as hard as brown at this point and, looking at naviance, it looks like a zero chance of getting in. also probably not as liberal as the other schools. gwu lacks campus, also fairly conservative.</p>
<p>thanks for your posts/advice and good luck to you!</p>
<p>Certainly from our high school, applying ED to your reaches (and some high matches) would make a big difference. Perhaps your school counselor can tell you which of the naviance acceptances were ED.</p>
<p>Oddly, ED admissions and deferrals started showing up in naviance last week. If they added dates to the scattergram it would be just about perfect.</p>
Of course, it’s impossible to know the actual probabilities, but we do make some rough guesses.</p>