<p>So I have a good idea of what schools are safeties for me, but I'm having trouble deciding which ones are matches and which are reaches. What's a general good strategy for differentiating the two? Besides "I have a hunch" :)</p>
<p>Does it really matter?</p>
<p>What matters is that you have the safeties. Even if you get rejected by all the other schools on your list, you will have somewhere to go to college. And that’s the important thing.</p>
<p>I would say…</p>
<p>A reach is a selective school that often/sometimes rejects kids with your stats.</p>
<p>A match is a school that often accepts kids with your stats.</p>
<p>A safety is a school that you’re certain to be accepted **AND **you know that you have the funding to pay for it.</p>
<p>A reach could also be a financial reach, meaning you can’t go there unless they offer you a substantial scholarship, and your scores happen to be closer to the top 25% mark than to the top 5% mark.</p>
<p>I think it’s tied to the probability of getting in. </p>
<p>Reach: 0-30%
Match: 40-90%
Safety: 100%</p>
<p>I don’t think you can estimate your probability of getting in to more than 1 significant figure anyway, so that covers everything.</p>
<p>I agree with Marian. Matches are overrated. It’s critical to have a safety and I prefer two safeties so that you have choices in the spring. The best safety is a school you get accepted to early whether it’s via EA or rolling admissions. Chicago ended up being one of my son’s safety schools when to his astonishment he got in early. (Up until then it had been in the reach column.)</p>
<p>It is easier to determine safety/match/reach at colleges where the acceptances are closely tied to stats. For top students applying to the top colleges, it gets murkier.</p>
<p>Agree with mathmom on having more than one “safety” come spring – we know some very talented kids who applied to the flagship as a safety without thinking too much about it, and a bunch of reaches. Come April, some of them were less than enthused about not having more options, whether because the FA packages weren’t do-able or because they were rejected/waitlisted.</p>
<p>Both of my kids focused on schools they considered “targets” – schools that were somewhat reachy, but feasible, and that they really liked. Spent LOTS of time and energy on those schools’ essays. This approach worked VERY well for them.</p>
<p>Also agree with EA/rolling admissions. One of my kids was accepted EA at two of his top three schools, and the other was accepted EA at his co-#1 choice as well. All three of these were “target” schools. The other good thing about EA/rolling admits is that 1) you can get a sense of your strength in the applicant pool and 2) you may be able to modify/remove some schools from the list. (Caveat: if you need FA, let the applications play out and see what the $$ looks like.)</p>
<p>Both my kids felt they could make the flagship work for them, and they had the stats to be in the running for merit $$. S2 preferred a smaller school than the flagship, so he had a couple of additional schools on the list where he had a good shot at getting accepted, and he dropped a couple of them after getting his EA acceptance.</p>
<p>How to pick a match – Stat-wise, I’d say a match is where you are in the 75th%tile on scores and GPA, and the school accepts more than 30% of applicants, and assuming you write good essays and have been involved in life outside the classroom during HS. </p>
<p>However, there’s more to a match than stats. Do you like being at the top of the class? Can you handle being in the middle of the pack? Do you need the competition of others to spur you on? Are your As based on solid knowledge vs. classes where teachers give extra credit and other things to boost grades? Are you self-motivated to manage your time and workload, or do your parents have to bug you to finish your assignments and get out of bed in the am? </p>
<p>Ultimately, the real question is – what do you want to do with your life? What schools can help you achieve that goal? It’s not just getting into the school, it’s <em>graduating.</em> Look for schools where you will be able to manage the academics AND your personal life/work/daily living responsibilities.</p>
<p>*A reach could also be a financial reach, meaning you can’t go there unless they offer you a substantial scholarship, and your scores happen to be closer to the top 25% mark than to the top 5% mark. *</p>
<p>I agree…</p>
<p>A lot of “match schools” are actually “financial reaches” because match schools often don’t meet need and have competitive merit, so it can be an unknown whether the school will be affordable if you need aid or merit to go there.</p>
<p>If a college practices holistic admissions – i.e., there’s no easy GPA/SAT formula that determines most admissions – and admits fewer than 30% of is applicants, then it pretty much can’t be anything but a reach. Nevertheless, a college that only admits 7% of its applicants is a reachier reach than one that admits 29%.</p>
<p>My daughter’s school offers Naviance, so she can view scattergrams that compare her GPA and SAT score against those of previous applicants from her school who were accepted, rejected, or waitlisted. When there are enough prior applicants, this gives a pretty clear picture of what her chances are.</p>
<p>Naviance was a good indicator for us too. Son was in the crowded green for Safety and scanty green for match. He got into all of these except GTech.</p>
<p>From the Reaches he got into 1 as well (there were NO greens there).</p>
<p>P.S. Green means the intersection point of GPA/SAT of similar stat kids from his school who got accepted.</p>
<p>How to tell?</p>
<p>Hindsight. A match is a reach that accepts you ;)</p>
<p>Google the schools you are interested in with “stats for class of 14”. Many schools actually post the stats for their admissions.</p>
<p>You can see how you “match” up with the most recently admitted students.</p>
<p>Honestly, use this site too. Go to the actual school forum and say chance me. Give the most facts you can, that includes ECs, hooks, legacy, IS/OOS, etc. besides your academic stats. Most posters there are either parents or students who have already lived through the admission process. If it is a true reach, where they are LTAO they will be frank and tell you so. If it is a low reach, they maybe able to tell you how to strengthen your application so you can overcome the weakness.</p>
<p>Here’s an example of VA Tech <a href=“http://www.admiss.vt.edu/forms/snapshot.pdf[/url]”>http://www.admiss.vt.edu/forms/snapshot.pdf</a>
The snapshot shows not only the gpa and the SAT scores, but how many were accepted for each group.</p>
<p>The interesting thing with Naviance is to look at clusters, not necessarily the avg GPA and SAT/ACT score. We look at these with our son and readily see a random green ‘x’ with a very low GPA or SAT/ACT that can throw off the avg and be misleading. We laugh and wonder…data entry error?..athlete? We also look where there may be one acceptance on the opposite end, a 4.5GPA perhaps, that is wasn’t necessary for admissions but is pulling the avg for that school higher than it really needs to be. We also notice when a random red ‘x’ (rejection) shows up within the cluster of green ‘x’s’. We wonder if the student had lousy EC’s or a crummy essay.
Scattergrams are a wonderful tool when you can take everything into context, and understand it’s limitations.</p>
<p>I agree, naviance is a great tool, but you need to understand that what it misses is things like athlete, URM, hooks, and those special issues where the essay brings them up and over.</p>
<p>Going on to a college thread on here will probably give you a stronger idea of your chances.</p>
<p>It is important to state to every student, remember nobody on these forums sit on the admission boards. It is a personal opinion, and the only true way to be accepted to any college is to apply.</p>
<p>We can all guarantee only 1 thing. You have 100% chance of not being accepted to that reach if you don’t apply!</p>
<p>Of course scattergrams only tell you a limited amount, but as long as you realize there’s often a story behind the outliers, it’s by far a better predictor of your chances than any chances thread on CC. The most important piece of information is how colleges view a GPA at your school. I didn’t ask for chances on any of the CC college threads, but I’m quite sure that if I had, I would have been told my son’s GPA was too low, his math score was unacceptable and his ECs were unexceptional. Our Naviance data told a different story. The schools which accepted him had all accepted at least some students with similar stats. He realized that his job was to present himself in his best light which he did admirably.</p>
<p>We also found that for our older son that Naviance worked quite well, including which elite colleges were more likely to take him because they seem to have more regard for our high school than others.</p>
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<p>This strategy can be extremely misleading.
At least at the very top schools, you may find that your stats position you very well among the “admitted” pool, but you will not know that twice as many students with identical stats ended up in the “rejected” one.</p>
<p>I like the scattergrams on Naviance for a starting point, but it’s not like you would take it as a black and white thing. That is, if my son/daughter has this GPA and that SAT, they will definitely get in.</p>
<p>For my D’10 Naviance was not a help at all. She graduated from a private school where the average SAT was 2100 and there were lots of legacies and athletes. As a result the Naviance scattergrams were generally tight little clouds of green and red. Only place it was helpful were for safety schools where virtually everyone with her stats got in.</p>