I got rejected from 15 out of the 16 schools I applied to

Applying to College Admission Stories
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100% agree with econpop that students need two true safeties. Schools that you are guaranteed to be accepted and are affordable AND you would be happy to attend. If you have a safety that is rolling admission, even better.

I had a high stats kid. Her list was 20% safeties, 20%reaches , 60% matches. Acceptance rates ranged from 10% to 78%. She had a full tuition scholarship with honors college and study abroad stipend from a safety in early October. Took a lot of the pressure off.

IMO focusing on matches makes more sense than having a list that is all reaches and two safeties.

Don’t underestimate how many essays are required from individual schools. My D applied to 8 schools and wrote 19 essays. The more competitive the college, the more those essays matter.

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I totally agree and will have my younger son apply to more matches. What were matches for your high stat child?

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I think part of the problem is that for us, Naviance skewed these categorizations. My very high stat daughter believed Naviance when it told her that Richmond, Wake, Smith and Davidson were all safeties (I too believed they were all “safe” for her, except Davidson maybe).

She also applied to our neighboring state school and several T-20’s (which all were “match” in Naviance). This is our first experience with this and we stupidly trusted a software program.

Luckily for her, she got into all schools except the T-20’s (waitlisted at one), two with significant money. But I see all these results and I know it could have gone differently. I am thankful and definitely sharing the definition of “safety” and “match” with my friends with younger students!

Hugs to you, OP. It’s just been a rough couple of years for so so many.

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Check out @TheBoldedFranklin ‘s thread about the reject train full steam ahead. He had the same problem - no citizenship, needing lots of need based aid, which forced him to focus on reaches with deep pockets. He had NO viable acceptance and had to take a gap year. In his case, he managed to get a green card just in time for the next application round, with dramatically different results.

It really isn’t you. Stop worrying and move on. Congrats on Miami of Ohio - you’ll be okay!

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I will private message you!

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appreciate the feedback on Naviance categorization of safety and match. i wonder how accurate and reliable that has been for families while shortlisting and building college lists. that is what we have started looking up

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We didn’t thing Naviance was particularly accurate for our D either. It doesn’t pull out hooked applicants or controls for schools that admit by major.

IMO, you are better off looking at the common data sets for the colleges you are interested in and digging deep into the stats if they admit by major. You can find the common data set for almost all colleges by putting “common data set (insert name of school)” in your search engine.

For schools with under 25% acceptance rates, we considered them all reaches, no matter where our D fell with her stats vs the average student.

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I think tools like Naviance are most accurate when there are many, many students included in the plotting (for example for UMass Amherst at our school) and you can narrow down the criteria by year and type of application (EA, ED, RD). At our school (we actually have SCOIR) they show 10 years worth of decisions and you really need to look at just the most recent 2-3 to get a more realistic look given the change in the landscape. And of course for the most competitive you should pretty much disregard it since you just can’t know.

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Glanced at the thread and probably already been stated, but it’s just sooo important to create a realistic list of safties (that you would be happy to attend / can afford), matches and reaches. I would think 2 safeties (perhaps 3), 6 or 7 matches and the rest reaches. You essentially selected all reaches accept the Miami which was a match.

I know that sounds harsh, but each yr, literally hundreds, if not more, students with perfect scores and grades get denied from many of your schools listed. It just is.

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Not a just outcome. I’m sorry. As people have mentioned, several factors made this year very unpredictable and for some people every break went the wrong way. I think having looked at the numbers, a big factor was all the students who deferred to take a gap year. In really tight pools (such as the schools you list) having 100 or 200 or more seats effectively filled before the admission cycle began was bound to create a distortion. The more affluent the school, the more likely a good portion of its class chose to defer and despite their generosity with financial aid, the schools you list have a very healthy number of highly affluent students.

Not all schools were particularly forthcoming about how many kids deferred and most downplayed the impact as they collected applications, but you can see the pattern pretty clearly in hindsight. The deffered students became, in effect, additional EDs reducing the seats available at RD even as the number of applicants ballooned.

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Every (or at least many) break going the same way may not be as uncommon as one may think. Remember that college admission decisions are not independent events. For example, when using The Common Application, a poor essay on it can diminish the likelihood of admission to every college The Common Application is used to apply to. But an applicant with outstanding essays, recommendations, and extracurriculars, in addition to outstanding stats, may impress multiple highly selective colleges.

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True. But this year I have seen cases of kids rejected from high reaches, only to be wait-listed at matches or even safeties that are protecting their yield particularly aggressively this year. So, for example, this was not a good year to have Princeton as your high reach and a couple of middle of the pack LACs as your match.

When your safeties and matches are smaller schools, the gap year crowd has an even bigger impact. Consider that 100 kids deffering a year from a smaller college or LAC means as many as 300 fewer acceptances (more if the yield is lower) go out, because those 100 kids are sure things akin to ED.

So, I give a strong candidate the benefit of the doubt. People always want to comfort themselves that bad things happen to people for a good reason, and sometimes that’s just not the case.

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Colleges that are aggressive yield-protectors should not be considered to be “safeties”.

However, another reason that students get rejected or waitlisted from “safeties” is that they overreach, and their “safeties” are really reaches (sometimes because of division or major differences).

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It depends on how you use Naviance to determine reaches, matches, and safeties.

Their search function designations do not do a good job at all. So when you are asking Naviance to generate a list if colleges, ignore what they call a college. The methodology that they use is to compare your kid’s stats to those of accepted students, and if the kid’s stats match the mid 50% of the college, they call the college a “match”, if the kid’s stats match the top students’ stats, they call it a safety. There are a number of other college search sites which do the same. This method is, of course, useless, since it does not check how many other applicants with similar stats were rejected.

The way to use Naviance is to look at the figures which present the stats of kids from your kid’s high school as a scatterplot (GPA on one axis, SAT/ACT on the other axis), with each data point representing a student, and each data point also stating whether that students was accepted or rejected.

The figures should also place your kid on that graph. If your kid’s point is surrounded by solid acceptances, then the college is a safety, if your kid’s point is surrounded by a mix of acceptances and rejections, then the college is anywhere from a target (around half-and-half), while in the majority are rejections, it is a reach. If nobody has been accepted from your school in the time range that the graph covers, it is a very very high reach, or they hate your high school (making it an impossible reach).

Naviance tends to present mostly recent data, which is good.

If there is only data from fewer than five kids a year for the past three years, it will likely be unreliable.

Because acceptance rates to the most popular colleges are dropping, it is also wise to downgrade everything. So treat a safety as a low target, a low target as a target, a target as a high target, and a high target as a reach.

Finally, while stats do not take holistic admissions into consideration, the fact is that there are almost no colleges which can be considered targets or safeties which are truly holistic. All public universities, even the most selective ones, put extremely high weight on stats, and most will accept students with really good stats, especially in-state students, even if their ECs are pretty sparse. This can be true even for places like UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, or UNC.

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The Naviance scattergrams are often problematic too, as many don’t show round of admission, school within a college, major, or identify hooked applicants (legacy, URM, recruited athlete, et al). Not knowing that data can lead to bad classification of reach/match/safety (and of course a safety has to be affordable to be a safety).

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Agree to disagree. This year I saw some strange outcomes.

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Definitely. That is why it is only useful if there are large numbers, and they should be taken as a very general idea.

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I agree in general but note this student is international so all the usual predictive and naviance data points don’t apply in the same way.

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This response is really late, and probably repeating many others. You didn’t pick a big enough middle tier of choices. Most of your choices are extremely competitive, and even if you were to think of them in terms of odds of success, the odds are all highly correlated, so simply increasing the number doesn’t help much.

I don’t know very much about Miami University in Ohio, but it appears fairly selective, and nothing to be disappointed about. But it’s not comparable to MIT or Princeton. If you had limited your “reach” applications and picked more that were similar or somewhat more selective than Miami, you would have gotten more acceptances.

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I wasn’t really addressing Naviance. Maybe you were replying to someone else? I