The prevailing wisdom in these uncertain times seems to be that a safety school is one in which your child’s test scores are higher than the 25-75 percentile range and GPA is greater than the average for a given school.
The standardized test information is easy enough to find, but I’m having a difficult time finding consistent GPA information. Some schools don’t report average GPA, some report only weighted GPA, and no state schools break down in-state vs OOS.
Anyone have any bright ideas or want to tell me I’m thinking about safety schools the wrong way?
find good fits first and foremost! do not look at rankings and other things people use for some sort of validation.
I personally have a list of schools I think everyone should look ate.
muhlenberg college
hendrix college
butler university
lafayette college
dension university
college of wooster
uniiversity of pittsburgh
and
ball state
they have different acceptance rates and do not appeal to every one but they all have something to offer unique or special (IMO).
toss a wide net and visit as many schools as you can. some schools may pleasantly surprise you (or more importantly your child) and some of their “dream” schools might get crossed off the list before you even apply.
A safety school should also have a high admission rate and be affordable. Schools with competitive admissions reject kids with 99th percentile scores all the time.
A true safety is a place where the student is flat-out guaranteed admissions (because of their stats or because it is open admission), that the family can afford without any aid other than guaranteed federal/state/institutional aid, that offers the desired major, and that the student would be happy to attend if all else goes wrong. Does your child have anything like that on the list yet?
What you are looking for are reasonably safe places. For that, start with the high school’s own application and admission records. The guidance counselors there know where students like your child have been admitted in the past few years. If your child is only considering places that are off the radar at that high school, bring the specific interests, stats, and budget here, and let our CC experts give you a hand with the list.
Colleges all have their own way of recalculating gpa, so that data is not going to be available readily. But you can check naviance for an idea of applicants from your own school. But even if you are in the top 25% stats wise, a school with a low admit rate , say sub 25%, can never really be called a safety.
re post #1 NONE of those schools were on our radar!!! I see no reason to consider them for most students, especially the top students.
There doesn’t see4m to be a uniform grading system, one reason colleges calculate their own gpa and use more than just stats for admissions. I am surprised at the Tampa area list of top two students’ gpa’s each spring. Some will have around a 5, others better than 7 for the same county wide school district plus privates- 4.0 scale. I suspect the number of available AP/IB courses influences things. I would love to know unweighted grades. And- even with unweighted grades a better student who knows more (not learned more as the student could already know material) may not have the highest gpa.
I expect colleges are reporting unweighted academic (as they define it- a perennial question is which courses are/are not academic) grades. Posted stats give you an idea, not a certainty. After all, 25% of the students were below that midrange and yours could be one of them. You also know if your kid’s stats will place him/her far above the peer group. Flagships are different because they cater to two peer groups- the better students plus those who are elite college material but choose (for one reason or another- even the only school got into) it because flagships usually offer honors caliber courses on par with elite privates.
Short answer. If the school has a gpa much higher/lower than your kid’s the other students may not be a good peer group. Of course, your kid may want to be the big fish in the small pond or take on the challenge.
I’m excluding the outliers here. Such as the gifted kid whose grades aren’t perfect like the test scores- why a 4.0 isn’t the only measure of knowledge.
Adding…for some students…the colleges in post 1 would NOT be safety schools…because really…they either would not be able to afford to attend…or the student wasn’t almost guaranteed to be accepted.
In my opinion…a safety school has to have all three of these components.
A school where the student is highly likely to be accepted...very highly likely.
The school is either affordable or the student is guaranteed enough merit aid to make it affordable.
The student would be happy to attend the college.
Find two safety schools FIRST. Build your college list from the bottom up.
To be honest…it’s easy to find unaffordable reach schools.
And I agree with @wis75… none of the colleges in Post 1 were on our radar screen for either of our kids…and really…they Would not have met the criteria for our kids. They are fine schools…but for everyone? No!
Many schools publish the average stats of the entering class. That way, you can see who is actually attending the school out of all the acceptances. There may be a difference between the school’s wish list and its actual numbers.
I pretty much ignored GPAs or at last figured there was huge margin of error when trying to figure out what might be a safety school. I believe the Common Data Sets are supposed to use the same formula for GPAs so you might find that helpful. Do you have Naviance at your school? I found that the most useful tool.
None of the schools on that list were on my sons’ list either. My older son’s safeties were RPI and WPI. At the time RPI had a 60% acceptance rate (which plummeted to 40% that year when Newsweek had it on their “New Ivies” list.) Naviance made it clear, that no one with my kids grades and scores had ever been rejected. They had a priority application that he got sent (maybe for being a NMF) and by Thanksgiving he had an acceptance letter along with a promise of merit money to come. My younger son had American and was going to have Syracuse as safeties, but when he got into U of Chicago early - he decided that was his safety instead. Early acceptance is my favorite kind of safety.
I’ve sinced been warned that some top students get rejected from American. There was no sign of that in our Naviance data. This particular kid was as tippy top as his older brother either. My problem with GPAs for him was that the school reported GPA seemed to me much higher than what any college was likely to consider his GPA.
Many many schools publish the Common Data Set (CDS) numbers for their students. The CDS is usually posted either on the admissions office page or the “Institutional Research” page of the college’s website. You will have high success if you just Google something like this: “Reed College CDS,” “University of Michigan CDS,” or “Dickinson College CDS.”
When you look at the CDS take special note whether you or your student is in the top quartile in SAT and GPA. I always considered that as defining an admission “Match” – but not a guarantee. You can’t count being in the "middle 50% (i.e., percentiles 26-75) as a “match”.
@mathmom Naviance is of limited use for us because my kids go to a small school where there is a concentration of interest around a small group schools. In other words, not enough data to feel comfortable relying upon. That’s why I was digging around for some source of standardized, national gpa data, but it seems like none exists. I suppose that’s one of the reasons people focus on standardized test scores - much easier to use for apples-to-apples comparison.
@pantha33m, Naviance was useless for us for the same reason. My son was the first kid from his tiny private school (about 70 students per class) to apply to and attend Oberlin. And everyone knew it. So now his little dot is there, telling everyone exactly what his grades and scores are. He didn’t care, because his stats were excellent, but for students whose stats are mediocre, Naviance can be pretty painful. There’s no way to not know who each dot represents.
As far as your safety goes, it’s going to be different for every kid. There is no universal safety, because in addition to getting in and being able to afford the school, the student has to be really excited about going there. So for a rich, high-stat kid with Ivy hopes, a school like UMass Amherst might be a safety. But for a decent, non-stellar student who needs financial aid, it might be a match or even a reach.
@Massmomm At my kids’ school, they actually withhold Naviance data for a college unless a minimum threshold number of applicants are available to protect against situations like that.
I agree defining a “safety school” is subjective. Just struggling to find consistent data other than test scores.
@Massmomm at our high school they also withhold data when there are less than 5 applicants to a school. My daughters were both looking at smal liberal arts colleges, so for the most part Naviance was useless because hardly anyone applies to these types of schools, especially if they are outside of our region.
@pantha33m
I was in your shoes last year and I decided to ignore reported GPAs because they did not make sense to me. First of all as you figured out a lot of schools don’t even report them. Second, I found that reported GPAs for the schools we were looking at were inflated. That was evident in Naviance. For example a school that reported 50% UW GPA of X never ever rejected students with X WEIGHTED GPAs from our school. I looked at a lot of schools and it looked like that was true in general. Now I am talking for schools with acceptance rates of 40% and above. Some of the schools that my son applied to had no data in Naviance but still found it helpful to look at other schools that had a lot of data and I perceived them as peers. I just used a bit of common sense.
You may be better off looking at info on percent in X% of class, then the actual GPA. Even if you school doesn’t rank, the school profile will show where you fall. Clearly, a school where a high percentage are from the top 25% of their HS class is not a safety for a kid in the bottom half.
The GPA reported by the college is not directly comparable to a kid’s HS GPA. I have seen people think that their kid is in range for a great school, because he has over a 4.0, only to find out that the actual GPA is closer to a B+ because the school gives a 1.0 bump to a lot of AP classes. That kid would not necessarily be competitive at a school that is looking for mostly As in tough classes.
No college which admits fewer than 30% of applicants in the round in which you are applying can be considered a safety for anyone. So, if you are applying in the “regular” round to a college which admits 40% of applicants overall, but fills half of its class by December, it isn’t a safety for you.
More colleges have data for class rank “for high schools which report it” than for gpa. The exception seems to be public colleges which enroll most students from a single state. So compare your kid’s class rank with the data.
A safety is only a safety if you can afford it. Run the NPC.
No college which indicates that “demonstrated interest” is “very important” is a safety if you haven’t demonstrated that interest.
