<p>I see a number of students who have reach schools and safety schools with not much in-between. Please, do not be that student. If you have a high gpa and a good SAT or ACT score and are only applying to the ivies and a local community college as a safety with nothing in-between, please rethink your list and add some intermediate schools. </p>
<p>I know that 8 ivies seems like a lot and it is easy to think that you are bound to get into one of them, but that is not correct. A very significant percentage of students are rejected from all of the Ivies they applied to. With a list like that, you should add at least 3 or 4 more intermediate schools where you believe that you would actually be happy and that also offer the major you are interested in. This will require a little time and effort to investigate schools, but you will be glad you did later.</p>
<p>Please consider this advice! It is much better to be safe than sorry.</p>
<p>Perhaps more importantly, make sure that your safety is a college that you would be happy to attend if you are not admitted anywhere else. In other words, it should not be a let-down to have to go there because you got no other admissions. Of course, it needs to be a school that you are certain of being admitted to and certain of being able to afford to attend.</p>
<p>It is obvious that too many students here did not choose safeties that they like, or chose “safeties” that were not really safeties (as evidenced by getting denied or waitlisted by their “safeties”), leading to let-down situations.</p>
<p>Good point. A lot of people apply to a ton of reaches and kind of assume they’ll get into at least one. Then they throw in an application for a state school or some random college with a high acceptance rate and sit back and wait. If everything works out, yay, but if not, then they’re stuck going to said safety–one that they might not even like very much! </p>
<p>Match schools definitely need to be considered when putting together a college list. Off the top of my head, here are a couple of good match schools to think about for Ivy applicants and the ilk: </p>
<p>Also, consider some top State schools: Cal Berkeley, UVA, Michigan, UCLA, and Illinois. No, Cornell does not count. </p>
<p>State schools are helpful to have on your list because they are excellent choices and they are more predictable. You can get a higher degree of certainty about the outcome if you look at Naviance data for your High School, than you can when considering Ivies.</p>
<p>One should first identify their matching schools first and that should be the main target. A safety is essential but you may not need to apply at the end if you got admitted by one of the matching schools in EA already. That is the case for my D. Then you can apply to any number of reaches as long as you don’t need to compromise the quality of multiple essays and you can afford all the associated cost (application, score report, transcript, CSS profile, etc).
You do want to have at least a few matching schools if you want to compare financial aid packages. A couple low match would be great if you have a chance to get merit scholarships from them.</p>
<p>For applicants from non-wealthy out-of-state families, most of these (except for Virginia) would be considered reaches due to insufficient need-based financial aid and few large merit scholarships (not sure how Virginia’s selectivity differs between in-state and out-of-state, but such selectivity differences also need to be considered at state schools). The same would go for other expensive schools known for poor financial aid, like NYU.</p>
<p>^ At least those are good options for in state or students without need. At the same time, many mid to upper middle class students cannot afford Ivies even they are accepted.</p>