I’m sure this has been discussed before, but with a new crop of juniors entering the fray, it seems worth discussing. What makes a school a “match”? I’ve read several “chance me” threads lately where I see posters telling OP’s that schools like Tufts, Georgetown, Pomona and Claremont McKenna are matches. (Those are just my examples but there are obviously lots of others that are similar) Those schools’ acceptance rates for 2014 were: Tufts 17%, Georgetown 16%, Pomona 12% and Claremont McKenna 10%. In the threads I read, I would’ve said the OP had a shot at those schools. But I’m not sure what is meant by match. IMHO, any school with an acceptance rate under 20% and holistic admissions is unpredictable. So what do and what should posters mean when they tell someone that a school is a match? It seems to me that the posters are giving the OP’s a false sense of security in drafting their college lists if they think match means something like 50% chance of admission. Often I would say that the OP’s list really consists of high reaches, reaches and a safety or two, and they really have no matches.
Oops somehow my title got cut off. It was supposed to say, Can Schools with less than 20% acceptance be matches? Nevermind, I figured out how to fix it.
I think it depends. For Tufts, I think that someone who applies ED and has stats that are well within Tufts’ range can definitely call the school a match. The acceptance rate ED is ~30%, so you have a greatly improved chance by applying ED (I know from experience). If someone applies ED to a school that is normally very selective and has stats within their range, I think that most of the time it could be considered a match or high match. And unlike other schools (like Duke), Tufts’ ED applicant pool isn’t really inflated by having tons of recruited athletes.
When you get down to it, there just aren’t that many schools that can truly be considered matches once you get to a certain point. If you have near perfect stats, most schools are either a safety/low match or some kind of a reach. Someone who has a 2250 SAT just doesn’t have a lot of schools where they’d realistically have a 50/50 shot of getting into. There are a lot of schools that they’d almost certainly get into and a bunch of schools where it’s impossible to predict either way, but there’s nothing that is close to a 50/50 chance with a 2250. Often, schools in Notre Dame, Tufts, Georgetown, WashU, Johns Hopkins range are considered high matches/low reaches with those stats.
Past a certain point, it’s near impossible to know what factors are affecting admission. On this site we don’t really talk about it, but admissions can be truly random, much more random than many people would admit. How do we know what students will get deferred or rejected to protect a school’s yield and which ones will get accepted? A school may have a lot of female applicants one year and a lot of male applicants another, making each group harder or easier based on the individual year. I agree that certain schools shouldn’t be called matches in almost any circumstance, but once you get to a certain level it’s hard to come up with schools that fall into the 50/50 category. At any rate, what’s the definition of a safety? I don’t think many people agree what a safety is necessarily. Is it a school you’re more than 90% sure of getting into? Or do you need to be guaranteed admissions to call it a safety? In my state, there are no public universities with guaranteed admissions, so you can’t really call any of them true “safeties” in that sense.
The terms are purposefully ambiguous and everyone will have a different definition of each of them. The only one that almost everyone can agree on is reach, which is a school that has such a low acceptance rate that nobody can be more than 10-15% sure that they’re going to be accepted, unless they’re a recruited athlete or have some other kind of special circumstance such as being related to a huge donor or famous or something like that.
Typically a school will be a match for you when your stats are in the 50-75 percentile range. But, again for schools like JHU, CMU, MIT and so many other top tier institutions just having high scores is not enough. This makes the admission to these schools very unpredictable, as someone with a lower score can still get in, while you might not, if he has any ‘Hooks’. So, these kind of universities are always reaches for everyone, irrespective of their scores. Acceptance rates also do not tell the whole story. As with the growth of the common app, students are applying to way too many universities lowering their acceptance rates. Some Universities also reject very high stat students to preserve their yield.
If you’re talking about some small colleges, like the Claremont Consortium schools, Reed, Bard, et al, it’s very difficult to determine whether they are “Match” schools, even if a student falls comfortably within their Common Data Set. Conversely, some large universities do not break down their acceptance rates by department. A kid with exceptional stats in California might be a match for admission to Letters & Science at Berkeley, but their Engineering programs are as selective as any Ivy League college. Tulane has an acceptance rate of about 25%, but I think most people view them as a Match, or even Safety, for students who have the academic chops to apply to HYPMS. Colleges that are very stats-driven in admission can be deemed “Matches” for students whose stats fall above their median range, in most instances. To answer your question: yes, in many cases, a school with a 20% acceptance rate can be deemed a match for students in the top 1-5% of applicants.
I guess what’s important is that the OP’s understand what is meant by match. And it makes all the difference when the person doing the chancing really is knowledgeable about the school, as @micmatt513 is about Tufts. Applying ED definitely affects the odds (that also varies from school to school). But I think there are a lot of posters out there who say “match” almost anytime they see a fairly high stats candidate (eg SAT 2200+) asking about a school that’s not HYPSM. That’s oversimplifying and most of the time I’ll bet the person doing the chancing knows almost nothing about those schools, especially the LAC’s. I just hope that everyone takes these chance threads with a grain of salt and creates their college list with more reliable information from their GC and the Common Data Sets.
I wouldn’t consider a school with less than 30% acceptance rate a match for anyone, no matter what their stats. But safety is a term no easier to define, for high-stat kids who don’t have a flagship option. Traditionally, kids are advised to have 3 reaches, maybe 4 or 5 matches, and a couple of safeties. Increasingly, what I’m seeing for kids whose scores place them above the 75% at almost every school is what OP sees: high reaches, low reaches, and safeties. That is, essentially acknowledging that matches, as “schools I am pretty sure but not dead sure to get into,” don’t exist any more for such kids. That’s ok, as long as it’s understood that low reach does not equal match, and even a safety, unless it’s a get-in-through-stats given, isn’t as safe as all that. My own kid applied to ten schools, most of which were reaches; identifying safeties was by far the hardest part of the whole process, when safeties means “schools I am sure to get into, but also, that I would attend rather than take a gap year and try again.” I repeat, my state doesn’t have a flagship, and the honors college isn’t a safety but a separate campus (on CC, many people assume that the obvious and viable safety is a flagship university, with the option of honors college if you have the stats; it’s hard for them to understand that not all states offer that option). With a flagship safety, especially one that might offer merit, a kid can have the luxury of applying only to reaches, and feel pretty sure of a decent choice in the end.