How commonly is a student's "safety" school a poorly considered throw-in?

Applying to College
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<p>How commonly is a student's "safety" school a poorly considered throw-in?</p>

<p>Examples (from these forums):</p>

<ul>
<li>Does not have the major(s) that the student is most interested in.</li>
<li>Is not assured to be affordable.</li>
<li>May not be a safety even just for admission.</li>
<li>Non-academic characteristics (location, size, fraternities/sororities or lack thereof, etc.) do not match the stated wishes.</li>
</ul>

<p>In some cases, a student (or even a parent) lists some match/reach schools in the first post of the thread, and seems very reluctant or embarrassed to even mention any safety, mentioning it only when someone asks "where is the safety in the list?".</p>

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<p>I think for top students, the default safety school is more often than not the state flagship. For students who might not be cut out for the state flagship, the safety would be another campus/school within the state’s primary university system or a separate public college/university in-state. </p>

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<p>In most cases, I don’t think the safety is poorly considered–
Affordability, guaranteed admission, and availability of major may be the main or only considerations. An in-state public school usually works. Non-academic characteristics are not going to count as much for a safety–just the fact that the student is willing to go there if he/she has no better options. Besides price/admission/major, “Don’t hate it” is probably good enough to make the safety list.
People may not want to mention their safety–especially if they think it is very unlikely they will go there. They want to emphasize the higher-ranked schools they are applying to, not the “less prestigious but adequate” safeties.</p>

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<p>Funny you say people don’t mention their safety. My D and I were in a store yesterday and we ran into several people we hadn’t seen in a while. They all asked D about college. She’s applying to eight schools - we believe six are safeties. (We’re willing and able to pay up to the cost of our state flagships and have put it on her to find a school that fits the budget).</p>

<p>Her safeties are all ranked in her mind and Pitt is at the very bottom though it is probably one of the more prestigious schools on her list. Pitt is also where she received a full tuition scholarship. Full tuition. I heard her say repeatedly yesterday, “well, I got into Penn State Main so that’s good but I won’t really know where I’m going until March or April.” No mention of Pitt at all. </p>

<p>She liked Pitt enough to apply - she could go there if she had to but she really doesn’t want to so it’s just sort of left her mind. </p>

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<p>We toured S1’s safety school. After the visit he said he could see himself there.</p>

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<p>Add us as a family who are using the state flagship as the “true” safety, one which D will most assuredly be accepted and one that albeit at the very top of the budget, most likely the most affordable (Umass Amherst Com Coll is $30K, yikes!). Because D really wants to go to a smaller school, she also applied to another 4 academic safeties, one of which we know will also be affordable, but again, only second to last from the flagship :(</p>

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<p>As far as Pitt vs PSU, there was never any question D would get into both Penn State Main and Pitt. D understands that the full price of each is the top of our budget. The more our costs come down, the freedom she’ll have to travel, intern, etc. In the unlikely case her final choice is between these two schools, I think we will have her attend the accepted students day at both even though PSU is clearly ahead. </p>

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<p>Love thy safety…and choose the safeties (yes, two…nice to have choices) first. </p>

<p>DD applied to three fine colleges initially. All were safeties really, and all were schools she loved, and all were fine with us price wise. People thought she was nuts, but she vetted schools well before applications. And we had visited them all.</p>

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<p>I don’t know how common it is, but I can tell you that too often, the time in picking colleges is spent on cherry picking right from the top, the way some kids and familes do it. They just love to loll the names of the top schools of their tongues and ponder whether Brown or Dartmouth should get the ED app, and whether they should include Duke, or a lottery ticket to HPY. These are upper middle class and well to do families, whose kids are good students, close to 4.0s in great school, difficult courses, and high test scores. But not the tippy top, and even they are not shoo ins for these schools. Some of these kids are really skirting the edge of getting into ANY highly selective school, banking on the fact that they are attending a rigorous high school, taking tough courses, getting great recs and writing wonderful essays, and thinking that their ECs are something special, when really, on a scale of 1-5, in that applicant pool they are solid 3s. Average for the pool. </p>

<p>For such students, to just throw in a school as a safety just to do so, is very dangerous in terms of dashed expectations. The fact of the matter is that a match is really a 49-75% admit, and it is possible when the list only has a couple of them on there, with the rest reaches, to get shut out, and that safety that was so just added with no thought or research is where the student may end up getting is only acceptance. The same goes if you throw in 3 safeties just to do so with no thought of going there.</p>

<p>The fact of the matter is that no time really was needed to pick those reach schools, since everyone would have been just as thrilled if the kid got into any of them. More care needed to pick the matches that would truly be a match and serve the place of a safety instead of being reaches. The safeties were where the work was needed.</p>

<p>My kids always worked from bottom up because we always looked for low cost schools that were sure to accept them and would still meet their needs and wants. My son this year pored over the guaranteed scholarship lists and picked a few schools as well as checking out the SUNYs where he could get free tuition. If he did not get into any of his reach and match schools, he knows his safeties well, probably better than some of the more selective schools because we checked them out more carefully. As it’s turned out, he already got acceptances EA from three match schools and half cost awards for two of them, so he’s home free. We’ll see how it will go with his reaches, but the sting of rejection from them will be mitagated due to what he already has in hand. His friends, on the other hand, are rolling their penciis between their palms, waiting for that lottery ticket win, with little idea where to turn next if it doesn’t work out, and frankly, the odds are against many of them. But they had not gotten the mind set to safeties yet, and just have some sort of scrawled on their lists to apply to them if the ED/EA season does not go as planned. </p>

<p>I see too often, kids getting stuck on certain specialty majors, often just available at few schools, often OOS publics at a premium cost, and the onus becomes on getting in there. It’s not always a good idea to focus on that. The kid is 17, 18 years old. The likelihood of changing his mind is high. I’ve seen over and over again, parents who break their necks finding some obscure program that has caught the kid’s attention and he changes it within a quarter, and he’s in some school that was picked for just that. In one case, GATech was one of the few schools with the major, but the family got some consideration for the OOS tuiton for that reason, but once the major was changed, the price was jacked back up. Better to look for more general programs that can lead to a specialty when money is of major issue than borrowing to get into the few high priced programs. Also picking a school that will work out if that major is no longer wanted is important. I 've known brilliant kids at schools just for their BA/MD program, that decided being a doctor was not for them, to others who switched from some good career direction programs that might have been worth the extra cost to some general degree program that was not and could have been gotten at other school for much less. Not an issue if the family can afford it, but if not, it it’s the only thing making the cost worthwhile and it’s dropped, it can be an issue. </p>

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<p>I think most top students are not interested in going to their safety schools, and they also do not believe they would end up there. It was certainly the case for D1. Her true safety was our state school because it was rolling admission and her stats well qualified her for it. She cried after her visit, so it wasn’t really a good safety. Our alma mater was a good safety for her, but the size was too small, even though I think she could have been happy. D2 had 2 EA schools, but no real safety on her list. Again, she would have applied to our alma mater if she wasn’t admitted ED. </p>

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<p>“She liked Pitt enough to apply - she could go there if she had to but she really doesn’t want to so it’s just sort of left her mind.”</p>

<p>I don’t get this. If D didn’t want to attend a college, she didn’t apply.</p>

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<p>I like reading the decision threads on CC in March and all the irate students who get rejected by their “safety” school. Sometimes the school pegs them as using the school as a safety. Other times their stats are in the bottom 25% of accepted students. Some people don’t get the meaning of “safety”. </p>

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<p>My S threw in an app at the last minute to his safety school( with a little nudge from me because I thought it was a good fit based on his other choices). He got admitted with a huge merit scholarship and said after his admitted student visit that if he had known about that school earlier he would of applied ED. He LOVED it and is a very happy, thriving Sophomore at the moment. </p>

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<p>One of D’s safeties was her EA school (Lewis & Clark). The fact that this was the first application she completed, and she had to write a supplement about why L&C appealed to her, etc., meant that she had to consider whether or not she really wanted to attend. If she secretly hadn’t wanted to go there, I don’t think she ever would have finished that application.</p>

<p>She has one guaranteed-admit in UC Riverside (she applied to all UCs except Merced and Irvine) but that’s one that I really don’t think she would ever want to attend. I almost didn’t send in the form for the guaranteed admission over the summer because it seemed a bit silly. She really doesn’t want to attend a big state school in the first place; it’s highly unlikely that she would really get shut out of every other school she applied to (7 UCs and 6 private LACs); and if she were, depending on why that was, I might recommend a gap year to her rather than have her attend UC Riverside – there’s really nothing about the school or the campus that seems like it might appeal to her. However, I ended up sending in the form because in the end it’s not my decision, and if she really did get rejected everywhere else, it certainly would be better for her to have that option rather than not have it. It was a “no reason not to” decision.</p>

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<p>For my son, the safety was the state flagship, which offered him a merit scholarship to enroll the honors college. In reality, it was probably #2 or #3 on his list because of his focus on life-style and intellectual style as much as strictly academic opportunities. He did not stress about his applications at all, and we the didn’t stress because he had that guaranteed admission. He got into an outstanding university.</p>

<p>For out daughter, there wasn’t a satisfactory safety from our perspective. There were a couple of art school throw-ins, but we were very uncertain about the odds of admission. In the end, she got into all the colleges she applied to. More stress in this case than for our son, but the outcome was fine. She got into one of the top art schools.</p>

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<p>@NEPatsGirl‌ - I too thought UMass Amherst Commonwealth Honors College would be a safety for me but they offered me a whopping 800 dollars in financial aid (+2000 in merit). A total of 2,800 from a nearly 30,000 price tag. :frowning: Friend of mine who got accepted to MIT and Princeton was also only given 2k in merit and a measly need based award. </p>

<p>I ended up attending a different UMass which gave me a full ride. It’s a shame because I really did like UMA but even pricier, stingier schools like BU and Northeastern gave me nearly 40k, so the financial aid package from UMA CHC came straight out of left field. </p>

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<p>Agreed preamble. The NPC takes $3K off for us and significant merit aid is nearly unheard of for in state students. It is however the measuring stick for us. I laugh because $27K is not affordable but apparently it is “our” affordable.</p>

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<p>If the young woman referenced has a full tuition scholarship to Pitt it made perfect sense to apply even if she didn’t really want to go there. All kinds of things could happen between now and May (knock on wood) which could necessitate a compromise on her part. A school that works and it financially possible even in potentially straighten circumstances is a gift.</p>

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<p>@NEPatsGirl That is awful. Can she look at a cheaper location? Dartmouth or Lowell? Or go to a CC for two years?</p>

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<p>We looked at ULowell but didn’t like the area so its a no-go and the others just don’t offer the things she wants. We have agreed to use the $27K as our budget. She has applied to several academic safeties in hopes that the merit aid offered will put the cost below that of UMAmherst because in reality she’d rather go to a less selective school that is smaller and I’d like to keep the budget at $20K lol. UMA offers a great education and I like the 5 school consortium ~ one of the things I hope to do today for her is to run lists of courses at the other three (doesn’t like Hampshire) schools that she could take in her major/minor. She did spend last weekend there to get a better idea of fit but came home saying “it’s not as bad as I thought but I’ll only go there if it ends up being my only choice”. OTOH, Smith, MoHo and Amherst (one of her 3 reaches) are all on her list.</p>

<p>FWIW, I want her to go away to school for the experience (which I never got) and I’m willing to make sacrifices for that. She also will be making sacrifices but in the end, its what she wants. The local CC will NOT challenge her, I’ve taken many classes there and alot of the local kids go there. While its a great stepping stone for some and its fits a purpose here on the Cape, its not the right place for her. </p>