Ok, I understand what people mean when they talk about a “match” or a “safety”, but I don’t get the difference in chances of getting in. I assume safety means no questions asked you are getting in and a match is there is small chance you may not?
<p>match = school where your academic stats are similar to those of the students who already attend the college. you should probably get into the school, but there's a slim chance of being rejected. </p>
<p>safety = a school where you are theoretically guaranteed to get accepted into. your stats are above their average... they may even offer a scholarship to attract you to their campus to boost their status</p>
<p>No, at a match, especially at a highly selective school, means your chances can be 50/50. Match means your stats are right in there with those accepted, but there's no way of factoring in equally important things such as recs, essay and EC assessment.</p>
<p>A safety means you are so above the averages it would be shocking if you were not accepted.</p>
<p>There is no hard and fast rule. Even if there was, you would still have trouble classifying the colleges into the fixed categories. The goal is to have enough safety built into your list so that you will get accepted to at least one school no matter what. Also, every school on your list should be a college that you would be satisfied/happy to attend if it turned out that way.</p>
<p>It is too much like a lottery to have any college be a total safety or a total match. Your stats may match HYPSM exactly, but for every applicant who is accepted, four or five statistically identical applicants are denied simply because they don't have room for everybody. Your stats may say that you are a total safety for a school, but then there is "Tufts syndrome". This means that your safety school will deny you because they realize that you are using them for a safety and turn you down because they want to keep their yield up.</p>
<p>I'll say something about the 50% SAT ranges. The range is based on everybody including ED applicants, legacies, URM's, athletes, development cases, and VIP's. If you aren't in any of those categories and are applying RD, then you need to be towards the top of the range. If the range is 1300-1500, then a strong candidate is 1450 and above. Don't think that you are a match because you are in the range (or close to it).</p>
<p>A school with rolling admissions is a good safety because you can apply early and they will let you know about four weeks later. That way you have one under your belt even before you apply to the other schools.</p>
<p>There are both academic safeties and financial aid safeties. Try to have a school on your list that you can afford even if you don't get any financial aid.</p>
<p>zagat's reply is correct. Match means that the backgrounds of the previously <em>accepted</em> students match your background. But that equivalency is not predictive for your acceptance, because it's based on history, & even recent history will not predict which applications will land on the committe's desk for the application year you are applying. (Last year's matches turned out to be surprising reaches for hundreds of applicants for '05-'06.) It's important to research your match colleges well, so that you will know how to tailor your app to reflect just how matched you indeed are with that college. Do not assume that the committee will just "see" that fit in your numbers. Talk about the programs there with which you fit well, etc. It might be a good strategy to treat your matches as IF they are reaches. (Give It Your All, etc.)</p>
<p>Safety means your qualifications are comfortably above what the higher ranges of the accepted applicants tend to be.</p>
<p>This all applies to private colleges, because publics have different categories of eligibility & preference, & may weigh diff. elements of the application more strongly. (For example, Univ of Cal. weighs the essay more heavily, because there are no teacher recs & because some UC campuses are so enormously popular, so a high-stat in-state Californian cannot necessarily consider U.C. a safety without a convincing essay. Certain other publics of other States are more numbers-driven, & it may be more predictable to those residents if the in-state public is a safety -- i.e., "automatic admit" for a certain threshhold.)</p>
<p>The standard advice is that you should apply to 1/2 safeties, 3/4 matches, and 1/2 reaches. It is just difficult in actual practice to know which schools are which, and so you end up using the standard advice as a general principle, but one that can not ever be achieved in actual practice. This is especially true when your match schools are the extremely selective schools where the lottery system is in place.</p>
<p>As an addition to what epiphany said, some of the highly selective public schools such as UNC Chapel Hill, UVA, and UCLA have a requirement to accept 70% of in-state students. A school like UVA is much easier to be accepted at for in-state students, but close to being HYP for out-of-state.</p>
<p>It's also important to check out the stats for the particular program you're interested in. For example, the stats are higher for UIUC engineering than for UIUC in general, so if you're planning to apply to the engineering school, then use those stats to determine your chances.</p>
<p>As for me, I have a variation of a "match" school that takes on a little bit of each of what everyone else has previously said.</p>
<p>A potential match for me is a school that I am relatively close to the median/average SAT range, either slightly below or above. A match-match is a school whose selection criteria (you can find it on Pton Review) plays to my strong points, whose application fits my strengths, and whose "needs," such as socioeconomic or racial diversity, includes an applicant such as myself. For example, a minority applying to Middlebury College (if I remember correctly) has a 65%-75% acceptance rate, as opposed to the school's total admit rate (which is amongst the lowest for liberal arts colleges- 22%?). Therefore, a white applicant to Middlebury might call it a reach school, whereas a minority (Asians included) can easily call it a match simply because of the minority status (and giving standardized scores less emphasis).</p>
<p>A safety school is a school where you should get in and if you don't, then it's occasion to curse and throw a fit. You shouldn't get mad/disappointed if you don't get into a match or reach school, but you can curse out the world if you don't get into your safety.</p>
<p>TTG</p>