A lot of my friends applied to what they considered safety schools and were rejected/waitlisted at many.
My son had American as a safety in 2010. I think even then they had some concern about demonstrated interest, but really as far as we could tell as a B+/A- student (depending on what grades you counted), according to our Naviance data he was a shoe-in. He did get in had got a big merit offer. The guy he did an overnight with turned down U of Chicago and some other big names because American offered him (a lot) more money. I do think they want you to sincerely like them, and my son liked them better than some of his reachier schools, but I still have a hard time believing that they are really turning down kids with higher stats than my son had.
But that is one of many reasons why I think rolling admissions and EA are the best safety. My son’s other safety ended up being U of Chicago because they accepted him early.
American is a great example. Back in the ‘80s American was where rich kids went who wanted to be in DC but couldn’t get into GW or Georgetown. Recently it was the only school both my D and my nephew didn’t get into.
My mom assumed we were looking at Connecticut College as a safety because it was that in the 70s for lots of kids in our town who favored LACs. Took some convincing for her to understand that DK would be lucky to be admitted.
And yes, Northeastern!
Yep. Connecticut College was one of my safeties. I never looked in Boston, but I remember BU and BC being total safety schools.
Growing up in NJ, I always thought of BU as a party school for well-to-do but not that smart kids from the NY area. Similarly, Northeastern. It has risen tremendously in the ranks. Very good strategic choices by the administration, I think. I also thought of Bowdoin, Bates, Colby as schools that good but not great. UMich Honors College and University of Rochester were my safety. Both seem crazy now, especially UMich Honors College.
Ok, mid 50 something mom here originally from the east coast: Bowdoin and Middlebury were for B+/A- students (at least from my high school). Many schools had only recently gone co-ed, so it took some guts to be among the early group of women attending Amherst etc. Bryn Mawr was considered stronger than Haverford (I had a heated discussion with a prospective employer during an interview, when I defended Haverford and he was quite insistent that BMC was the better school). Columbia wasn’t really on our list because NYC was still a little scary in the late '70s. Safeties? Probably Trinity or Conn Coll. It was shocking when one of the really good students went to Trinity, as it was considered “beneath” her.
Actually, Bowdoin may have been the most selective in the early 80s (as defined by percent accepted), and Columbia accepted more than 65%. Would have to go dig up that pre electronic age data. But given that it was hard to apply to schools, I think there was a lot of self selection involved in the applicant pools, so Columbia was hardly a slam dunk for a good student (willing to deal with what was then a very not nice location. …)
And many schools were far more regional. Even Stanford in the 70s!
Speaking of self-selection, I went to HS in NY in the late 70s/early 80s and there were lots of kids in my class who went to Columbia or Barnard. The location wasn’t scary for them, and it was super convenient for those who wanted to stay close to home. One of my Barnard friends said recently that the acceptance rate at the time was well over 50% (that 65% figure from @gardenstategal sounds about right) although I don’t know that for sure. Regardless of the actual numbers, based on our own world views and remembering how things were, we were both shocked to hear of the current acceptance rates. Edited to add that these were all smart, hardworking kids, so it’s not like any of them were over their head – but today of course that would not be nearly enough…
Columbia and Penn (which we used to call U of P) had very high acceptance rates. For a typical smart kid with good grades they were not at all hard to get into.
The two biggest shocks for me was Northeastern and UC-Irvine. My kid got waitlisted in both places. Those 2 were THE safety schools for my kid out of the 12 that he applied for. Especially since my stepdaughter enrolled at NEU 2 years ago with slightly lower grades and scores. Now granted, he applied for impacted majors (CS) but based on the school profile stats he should have safely been able to get in.
I’m also somewhat shocked at Santa Clara from reading all the CC threads. When I went there 30+ years ago, pretty much anyone with decent grades and average scores could get in. But I can’t say that I did any research on the school recently.
Your other posts suggest that he had an unweighted 3.75 GPA, which probably corresponds to a UC weighted-capped GPA of 4.0-4.1 if the grades are relatively consistent in 9th versus 10th-11th. At this GPA, UCI generally would be considered a high match (52% admission rate in 2017 for the 3.80-4.19 GPA range, according to https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/freshman-admissions-summary ), and probably more of a low reach for CS.
I’m shocked by what has happened with Barnard admissions in just the last three years! Everytime I blink, something changes.
My sister and two of her classmates went from central Wis an ‘airplane ride away’ 45 years ago (Middlebury, MIT, Harvard).
I’d moved to Denver for senior year of high school, and I’d guess more than 200 went OOS (class of 1000 students). Stanford and Pepperdine were the popular west coast schools, ND, Duke, Vandy., plus all the NE schools. There were athletes who went were they were recruited.
I wish my grandfather were still alive so I could talk to him. He got his bachelor’s degree from Texas A&M in 1917. He was on the ship on the way to Europe when WWII ended. I think he was the first person in his family to go to college. Then he went to UW-Madison to get his master’s degree! I would like to know the background on all of that.
During the depression, he had to sell eggs door to door to make ends meet.
My grandmother grew up on a farm in west Texas, the third youngest of 12 kids. She was the first to go to college. She got her bachelor’s from Hardin Simmons and then worked on her master’s degree in chemistry at UT. She quit to marry my grandfather. She taught high school algebra for years.
That’s a phrase we don’t hear anymore!
I graduated from a small working class Ohio Valley HS 25+ years ago and half of my friends went to schools which were an airplane ride away. My kids currently attend a highly ranked suburban school and we were at an event last night where it was announced where the seniors in attendance at that event are going; only 2 are leaving the area - one is going 4 1/2 hours away and the other is going to Liberty.
I don’t think American was a safety when I graduated but it was nothing like it is now. Nor were schools like Pitt or Penn State. I applied to both in late April when I was in a panic about being able to afford my first choice and got into the main campus of both schools. That would never happen now, those slots are long filled by this time of the year.
@bclintok-
It is possible that application behavior has changed more radically than enrollment behavior.
This would make sense given that the number of applications per student has gone up dramatically.
I’m skeptical.
The College Board publishes annual reports on which schools get the most SAT score reports from students in each state—probably a pretty good proxy for applications in SAT-dominant states… Even at the most elite levels it’s very locally skewed. In 2017 more Massachusetts students sent SAT score reports to Harvard and Brown than to any other Ivy. Connecticut students sent the most to Yale and Brown. New York students sent the most to Cornell and Columbia. New Jersey students sent the most to Princeton and Penn. Pennsylvania students sent the most to Penn and (a distant second) Cornell. Stanford doesn’t make the top 50 in any of those states, but it’s far and away the most popular super-elite private college among California applicants, unless you want to include USC in that category.
In fact, the 50 most popular among Massachusetts applicants are all school in Massachusetts or in a state immediately adjacent .(1 in Vermont, 3 in New Hampshire, 4 in Rhode Island, 2 in Connecticut, 4 in New York). And it’s that way in state after state… California has only California schools in its top 50, except 1 each for Washington, Oregon, Arizona, and New York (NYU). Even New Jersey students, who have a reputation for being willing to go anywhere so long as it’s not Rutgers, apply most often to schools in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.
Now I don’t doubt that the super-elite schools get more out-of-region applications than they once did. But it’s by no means nationally uniform, and the SAT score report data suggest their applicant pools, like their entering classes, are still heavily regionally skewed.
Though the University of Michigan was never really a safety school, my last-minute, handwritten, dash-off application after dropping out of beauty school in 1976 was accepted. In 2015, it was considered a reach school for my high-stats kid from a well-known New England boarding school.