I have been noticing varying definitions of the word “safety” used on CC and was hoping we could finally come to an agreement on what it actually means. There are those that believe that a safety is only a college in which you are 100% guaranteed admission. However, I don’t think that a safety needs to have an 100% guarantee of acceptance. I think 80%+ is fine. For example, I am eligible for a full ride scholarship based on grades and test scores to SDSU, which only bases its admissions off of grades and test scores. Therefore, I think its very reasonable of me to call it a safety. Now this may not be the case with every student, but most students should know which schools they are almost certain they get into. Thus, I suggest we create another term to solve this issue. We can have “safeties” and “guarantees”. What does everyone think?
Unless there is an auto-admit program a person qualifies for, I don’t seen any “guarantees.” Strange things happen all the time.
IMO a safety is a school that one expects to be accepted into (ex. in the top 25% or so in academic stats), that one expects to be able to afford (run NPC), and that one would be happy to attend.
Every year there are unhappy surprises for some applicants at "reasonably safe"places. Only the guaranteed admits with guaranteed aid/affordability can ever be considered completely safe.
Provided students are clear about that, they can use whatever terminology they choose.
Looks like it is only for a “very select number” of applicants with the specified characteristics. I.e. a competitive scholarship where the specified characteristics are only the minimum eligibility requirements. If so, then it can hardly be counted on as a “safety” if you need the scholarship to be able to afford to attend.
@RoundGenius: Thanks for the information but @ucbalumnus is correct that it is not guaranteed since you have submit an application to be considered vs. an automatic scholarship. How many students apply each year and how many of these scholarships are granted? You cannot even apply until after the CSU Mentor application opens in October. Doesn’t sound like a guarantee to me.
We used Naviance to define safeties (which I prefer to call likelies, since no college admissions decision is safe until the letter’s in your hand.) For my kids a likely was defined as a school to which no one with their stats or better had not been accepted in the last 5 years.
For some kids this might be a school with a 30% acceptance rate, for some a school with a 90% acceptance rate. A 3.2 kid from St. Paul’s or Thomas Jefferson is probably going to have a different list of likely schools than the kid from a middling public school.
Of course your likely school has to be affordable or it’s quite unlikely.