Loyola Marymount is another possible option. We have not visited yet, but she has liked other Jesuit schools. She visited American-- she may apply and “express interest” but definitely not apply ED as GWU was highly preferable to her. I could see her doing ED2 at GWU.
If AU figures this out, that seems to be the exact profile of an applicant who will get waitlisted or rejected there.
I don’t disagree-- but she’s not going to apply ED to a school that far down her preference list. That wouldn’t make any sense.
Agnes Scott in Atlanta as a safety, since she is open to women’s colleges. Bryn Mawr (Philly) IMHO has too low of an acceptance rate to be a real safety but would be reasonably likely.
When you’re looking for true safeties among smaller schools, you pretty much have to shoot low relative to your stats.
Emerson? GMU? Drexel? Temple?
In that case, do not consider AU as a “safety” or anything close.
You have Elliott as a safety. I would move more to a match. Elliott is a top 10 school in IR. Although the rest of GWU is a very good school, it isn’t Elliott. I don’t think I have seen the by college split at GWU( Georgetown shows it). I would assume it is above the rest of the University.
Thank you everyone for your feedback. I have revised our list-- moved several schools from safety to match and added some new safety schools: Loyola Marymount, Seattle University, and Univ. San Francisco. She has really resonated with the Jesuit philosophy and I think the academic quality of Jesuit schools often outpaces other schools with similar stats. I attended a Jesuit university myself for 3 years. She will of our course need to tour and decide for herself. (I know she is being picky in her preference for urban schools, but she’s the kind of person who will get much out of what city living has to offer and maybe that’s part of the education?)
I disagree with your classifications:
USC (match) – No way is a Match – a Reach
Pitzer (match) – No way is a Match – a Reach
Scripps (match) No way is a Match – a Reach
George Washington Univ./Elliott (safety?) No way is a Safety-- a Reach
Univ. Washington/School Of Environment (OOS) No way is a Safety-- maybe match - only 16% is OOS
Occidental – No way is a Safety-- maybe match
American U - not a safety
Your daughter’s stats are fantastic, but so are many others. Any school with <18% acceptance rate cannot be a match or safety.
I think we have different definitions of “Match”. Mine: If you’re in the middle 50% range you’re a match— you’re app will be taken seriously and not immediately rejected. When the AR are below 20% I agree you need to apply to a LOT of matches. GWU is not a reach-- especially since you can designate a fallback school if you are not accepted to first choice (Elliott). Thank you for the info on OOS at UW. I’ve been looking for that data-- 16% is low for sure, not a safety. I think she needs to think seriously about using ED1/ED2 wisely.
I agree with @Longhaul that you need to consider the overall acceptance rates first and foremost.
For schools with lower than 20% acceptance rates, it doesn’t matter if the stats are higher than the mid range, the acceptance rate is still low enough that they should be considered reaches.
OOS applicants have to really dig deeper for acceptance stats because overall acceptance rates can be very misleading. Same with schools that admit by major.
I have daughters at two of the schools on her list. They got a lot of money at and would have been happy to attend their safety schools- LMU, Chapman, and U of Denver. My D18 had inconsistent stats- very high English and low math. Because of this we had no idea how application season would play out. She liked Denver the best of her safeties so focused on making the school as appealing as possible. She applied to their leadership and honors college.
USC’s acceptance rate was 11% this year and I believe Pitzer’s was 13%. Reaches for everyone no matter the stats. My oldest D had stats around the same as your daughter and was told that anything with a 30% acceptance or less should be considered a reach for everyone. Admissions are so unpredictable. My D has a friend who was waitlisted at George Washington but got into Berkeley.
It’s a matter of sematics. As long as I know (which I do) that for those types of matches, there’s still a limited chance of acceptance, then our list is good. Basically-- I think she should apply for every match she is genuinely interested in, but only pick 1-2 actual reaches, b/c they are likely a waste of time/energy. It is not a waste of time to apply to a school for which you fall in the middle 50%.
However, if the admission rate for applicants in the same stat range as your student is low, then it should be considered a reach, not a match.
The problem with just seeing middle 50% ranges of enrolled students is that you do not know whether the rejects significantly overlapped stats with those ranges, or if they were generally lower stats than those ranges. Overall admission rates may not help that much either, but few colleges show admission rates by stat ranges.
Also, colleges with different admission buckets may have very different admission rates for each bucket. Such buckets could be in-state versus out-of-state at public universities, major, division, etc…
I agree that your kid is in the range where you might look at it as “there are no matches,” particularly when you’re looking at smaller schools and OOS publics with holistic admissions. When I was trying to categorize schools for my kid, my cuts were that a women’s acceptance rate <20% was a reach, 20% to <35% was a match, 35% to <50% was likely, 50+% was a safety.
Will she be a senior next year, so she needs to get testing and visits all done before this upcoming application season? Or do you have time to see how those play out?
Since she’s thinking IR, what would you think about St Andrews Scotland? Can be more predictable because not holistic.
I agree that it’s not a waste of time as long as there are a couple of true safeties that they would be happy attending. I think with higher stat kids, it’s hard to find true matches. My daughter’s list was comprised of safeties and reaches. I think there was only one true match. She did end up getting into a reach school so it’s possible. But she had friends who only got into safeties that they didn’t want to go to and were quite upset last spring.
35-50% is “likely”? Tell that to legions of disappointed applicants with 3.80-4.19 UC weighted-capped GPA to UCSB, UCI, UCD each year (recent admit rates for that GPA range were around 50%, presumably worse for CS and engineering applicants).
“Safety” should be 100% chance of admission and affordability for the applicant.
I think BU is a match not a reach, but GW is definitely not a safety for IR - Eliot is very competitive. A match at those stats , but not necessarily an easy one.
As noted Fordham can be tricky. I wouldn’t consider it a safety.
@ucbalumnus Yeah, now that I’m looking at the actual schools falling into each category, I think my color-coding really meant more like high reach / reasonable reach / match / likely. I’m certainly not overjoyed to have a kid who really wants to apply only to one yellow school, one light green school, and one that suddenly moved from dark green to light green in the last admissions cycle. But for OP’s kid, who like my kid has pretty high stats compared to the overall applicant pool, the plight of the 3.8 weighted-capped kid is not necessarily relevant.