For what type of stats would a 50% acceptance be considered a reach school? Not asking for me specifically, but I was just kind of curious what people thought about it.
It depends. Depending on the applicant, a college with a 50% acceptance rate can be anywhere from a safety to a reach.
Let us take, for example, OSU. It’s average acceptance rate is 52%. For an applicant with a 3.9 UW GPA with good class rigor from a top Ohio high school and a 1520 SAT, OSU would likely be a safety. For a students with a 3.70 GPA from a regular high school with decent rigor, and an SAT of 1350, it would likely be a match. For a student with a GPA of 3.1 from a decent high school with a mid-level rigor and an SAT score of 1150, it would be a reach.
In general, when the admission rate is around 50%, and it is a large public university, if an applicant’s stats are in the top part of the top 25% of admitted students, it is a safety. If the student’s stats are in the mid range of admitted students, it’s a target, and if the student’s stats are in the bottom 25%, it is a reach. For colleges with auto admission, it can be more complex.
If college admits by major, then a 50% acceptance rate means nothing since competitive majors can have lower acceptance rates in relation to the school’s overall acceptance rate so a Match school with a 3.7 GPA and test score of 1350 could turn into a Reach for a Engineering applicant or Nursing applicant. Care to share if you have a particular school in mind?
It’s not the acceptance rate that makes it a reach school, it’s the chance of your acceptance. The chance of your acceptance is likely to be very different from the overall average acceptance rate of 50%, and that chance of acceptance may or may not closely follow stats.
For example, Davidson had a ~50% acceptance rate for ED applicants in the latest CDS – 347 admitted out of 713 applicants. Davidson’s CDS marks the following admission criteria as:
Very Important – Rigor, LORs, Character, Volunteer Work
Important – Essays, ECs, Talent
Considered – GPA, Rank, Test Scores, Legacy
Note that numerous criteria are marked as more important than stats in the CDS. Davidson’s website instead lists the order as follows, from most important to least. I have no idea how accurate these CDS and website rankings are, but it’s clear that Davidson considers far more than stats in the admission decision.
- Rigor
- GPA in course of study
- Essays and LORs
- ECs / Leadership / Service
- Test Scores
One also needs to consider how the particular applicant compares to others within the reference applicant pool, as well as the acceptance rate for that particular group to which the applicant belongs. For example, it’s likely that a good portion of the 347 ED admits were hooked, such as recruited athlete. The average ED admit rate is probably substantially higher than ~50% average for recruited athletes and substantially lower than the ~50% average for unhooked kids. The larger number of hooked kids applying ED is probably one important contribution tp the large difference between ED admit rate (49%) and RD admit rate ( ~14%), but it’s not the only factor. It’s likely that Davidson also substantially prefers ED applicants over RD applicants, all other factors being equal. At Davidson and many other schools, looking at stats alone is too little information to estimate chance of admission well.
If you have particular schools in mind and more information about the applicant, I could go in to more specific detail.