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The issue is your perception that “relatively competitive” means that a school is a “safety.”’ At a SAFETY school, you are not “relatively competitive,” you are essentially ASSURED of acceptance with your qualifications.</p>
<p>To use Berkeley as an example, your excellent GPA and test scores put you in the middle 50% of accepted students. <a href=“http://admissions.berkeley.edu/studentprofile[/url]”>http://admissions.berkeley.edu/studentprofile</a> Typically on college confidential such a school is called a “match” or a school at which you are relatively competitive, but NOT a safety. To be a safety you must be in the tippy-top of accepted students, not in the middle 50%. To further complicate matters at a school like Berkeley, the low acceptance rate (~21%) and vast number of applicants (over 60,000) means that even when you are relatively competitive, and even if 60-ish% of match applicants are accepted (this is not a stat, just a wild unsupported guess), that leaves, literally, thousands of match applicants just like you who will receive bad news.</p>
<p>In addition, a SAFETY must be a school you know you can afford.</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>