<p>Is there a generally accepted rule for the reaches, matches safeties...</p>
<p>say students GPA, SATS etc must...be higher, lower, middle of a range...</p>
<p>I see alot of kids being deferred or rejected when they have very high SATs/GPA (self reported) on the threads...</p>
<p>but as a parent I am wondering how to advise our kiddo. Kiddo will meet with the GC in the coming month I think--but until then--hoping to whittle this list of 39 down a bit.</p>
<p>fogfog, there are some schools which are simply reaches for everyone no matter how high your stats are. Anyone applying to the Ivys and other schools that accept less than 15% of their applicants can assume they are more likely to be rejected than not unless they are positive they bring something especially desirable to the table.</p>
<p>In my spreadsheet I sorted first by SAT score, then by percent accepted, then by rank (percent in top 10% of class).</p>
<p>This was more or less my division:</p>
<p>Reach - any school with less than 15% acceptance rate
Reach - any school for which my child’s SAT scores were in in middle 50%, but acceptance rate was less than 25%, and less than 20% were not in top 10% of class. And GPA or rank falls short of reported averages.
Reachy match - SAT scores in 50% (but perhaps one score in top 25%), 35% or less not in top 10%, acceptance rate of about 35% And GPA or rank falls short of reported averages. (Son got in EA to one of these)
Match - students GPA and SAT scores in 50% range. Acceptance rate better than 35%.
Safety - student in top 25%, acceptance rate 40% or better</p>
<p>You may want to adjust things depending on your kid. My son’s SAT CR score was in everyone’s top 25%. His GPA was low, but his rank was pretty good. (top 6%) In the end we put together a top heavy list. He found a safety he felt very comfortable with, added another safety just in case and then sent out applications to 7 reaches. (Some more reachy than others.) He heard back EA from one college and didn’t bother with the 2nd safety or one of the reaches he’d been less sure about.</p>
<p>You’ll see a lot of kids rejected who are in the top 25% of stats at schools that accept 15% or fewer of applicants.</p>
<p>Generally, I think of a school as “safe” if they accept at least 50% of applicants and you are in the top 25% of their stats range.</p>
<p>I’d think of that school as a “match” if you are clearly in the top 50% of their applicants.</p>
<p>I’d think of it as a definite “reach” if you were in the bottom 50% of their applicants.</p>
<p>The required statspercentages to be safe, a match, or a reach change as the selectivity goes up or down.</p>
<p>A school that accepts 15% or fewer of applicants probably shouldn’t be considered “safe” for anyone. </p>
<p>All of this assumes that the student is unhooked, of course.</p>
<p>I think everyone has a gut feel about it. (I should add that my kid did not apply to a single school that accepted 50% of applicants. I think that 35% or so was the most. Talk about nervous…)</p>
<p>Oh fog fog…our list this time last year was 33, so I feel for you :)</p>
<p>I had put together a document for some friends going through the process who had no idea of where to start (and hadn’t spent all the time on CC that I did 
I just looked at that again, and I’m pasting in my comments about reach, match, safety that I pulled together from my time on CC:</p>
<p>How do you figure out if a school is a safety, match or reach?
There are two types of safety, match & reach schools: financial & academic. And the first rule of college admissions is Love Thy Safety.
Heres what I use to figure out where a school falls:</p>
<p>Safety: A school with a 40% or higher acceptance rate where your GPA AND SAT scores are both in the top 25% (i.e. above the published 25-75%) </p>
<p>Match:
<p>Reach:
<p>Super reach:
<p>I’m a little conservative in my safety definition, but I figure better safe than sorry.
Hope this helps!</p>
<p>I’ve been advised that for high stat kids their “Match” schools may be irrevelant.</p>
<p>Logically, a match would be where the student is in the 50-75% SAT/GPA range. However, for high stat kids many of these schools will have acceptance rates under 25-30% and this is where the “Match” ideal is thrown out because the acceptance rate odds are against the student. In this case, the students would reclassify to Safety, Low-Reach, High-Reach.</p>
<p>I was advised Safety is when the student is at or above the 75% range in stats of SAT/GPA.</p>
<p>And of course, don’t forget the financial safety.</p>
<p>The GC, if using Naviance, should be able to find ‘Matches’ based upon the schools experience.</p>
<p>I’ve found that on cc, everyone has his/her own ideas, depending on risk tolerance. There are lots of threads on this, though I’m not sure how to find them. I low-balled it and used this rule of thumb:</p>
<p>Safety: School accepts more than 65% of kids and/or ds is in top 25%, statswise
Reach: School with less than 25% acceptance rate and/or ds in in the bottom half of the stats.
Match: Everything else. :)</p>
<p>Adjust accordingly when taking hooks into account.</p>
<p>This is helpful. Our kiddo has a nice unweighted GPA with a very rigorous curriculum (and some of those AP teachers are notorious for grade deflation)…
Kiddo’s school doesn’t rank - however - they publish deciles of graduates–
It is far to early to know where kiddo will end up --as this yr kiddo has 4 APs, 1 Honors and 1 reg, and next yr kiddo will take 5-6 APs…
kiddo did 2 of the highschools math courses and one science course in middle school—
Yet is not in the top 10% since there are a fair # of Bs on the transcript in these honors courses even if they were taken 2 yrs in advance…</p>
<p>Of this list of 39, some are absolutely walk-ins… kiddo far exceeds the GPA etc…
…a large portion are “matches”…
… and a top heavy portion are reaches as they are the most selective…</p>
<p>sigh</p>
<p>I want kiddo to be happy at a safety…not just settled for it if things don’t break our way…</p>
<p>Kiddo has a varsity sport and there are some coaches at the most selective schools that are expressing subtle interest…but we cannot have real conversations until after kiddos jr yr is complete…</p>
<p>I think I have to work on this spread sheet a bit…I have SATs listed but not acceptance rates…I was tracking yield (as I hear high yield means less bounce with EA/ED)</p>
<p>What if your scores are just at the top range? (e.g., the CDS says the ACT range is 28-31 and you’re at a 31)</p>
<p>RobD,
I like your definition. My son is already done with his apps and is waiting for results. But I have several friends with juniors who kept asking us questions. I will pass along your wisdom. Thanks.</p>
<p>^^^ Then I’d look at the other factors working for/against him/her. Girl who wants to major in engineering at a school across the country? Big points. Think along those lines.</p>
<p>fogfog, I didn’t even look at GPA stats, just acceptance rate and middle 50%, but I felt comfortable doing that because I was so conservative in how I determined a safety, etc.</p>
<p>Thanks BusyMei :)</p>
<p>Pizzagirl: I’d assume you’re at the 75% since they usually only publish the 25-75% range. So then I guess it would depend on the selectivity of the school. </p>
<p>Fogfog: I had a word document that I made DD fill in for each of the schools she was interested in along with a spreadsheet. When she was slogging through all 33 original schools, it really made her think about each school. PM me if you want me to send you the template.</p>
<p>The college counselors at my high school were former admissions officers, and we used Naviance, so classifying schools as safeties, reaches, unlikelies, and probables (as the terms were for my schools) was a bit more intuitive and less numeric. What we were told, however, is this:</p>
<p>A Probable is a school where you have roughly a 50% chance of acceptance. A Safety is a school where you have a much higher than a 50% chance. A Reach is where you have more than a 10-15% chance but less than 50%. An Unlikely is a school that you have a 10% or less chance. Obviously, that doesn’t always help one to determine what one’s chances are, but the more access one has to historical data from similar candidates (particularly through something like Naviance), the easier it is to tell. It’s really important to know how stats-based the admissions of the colleges you’re considering are, as well. Top LACs don’t <em>have</em> to be reaches/unlikelies for students, but most of the time, without a lot of data and very strong grades and ECs/awards/leadership/intangibles, one can’t tell.</p>
<p>One problem with Naviance (and some of the approaches suggested) are that they’re very number-driven. What does a student’s GPA actually mean? Many schools calculate GPA differently, and many numbers-driven colleges actually recalculate GPA to enable better comparisons, so it’s hard to tell where exactly your GPA stands. Even class rank is dubious; in one thread on these forums, parents were discussing how at one school, music students were almost guaranteed the top spots in the class, while at another, it was impossible for them to get the top spots. There’s a lot of manipulation with courses and GPAs and rank that can go on, where students believe that the GPA is the single most important thing in admissions, not their transcript. Talk to the GC or College Counselor, and they’ll have a better sense because they’ll have seen more students and more results from that particular school.</p>
<p>With that said, narrowing down he lists a bit and getting a sense of whether S/D is aiming too high or too low helps; just don’t try to be too sciency about it.</p>
<p>The GPA part confuses me. I’m assuming private colleges mean unweighted. But surely two identical GPAs coming from two totally different levels of rigor mean different things. Yes, I know that schools consider rigor, but it doesn’t fold neatly into the GPA/SAT/ACT numbers. Is there any rule of thumb for guesstimating how rigor affects the GPA stat?</p>
<p>(x-posted with Uroogla)</p>
<p>And don’t forget that the best safety is the school that has already accepted your child. Thanks to EA Chicago is now my son’s safety. :)</p>
<p>My guess for rigor for the GPA, is what you’d expect for students from that school. If it’s HYP, GPA would presumably be the most rigorous curriculum anyway. For our school rank included music so that gave my younger son a boost, otoh those courses weren’t weighted so it wasn’t a huge boost. I figured out his GPA a couple of different ways and used the high one when I felt optimistic and the low one when I felt pessimistic. (His GPA was somewhere between 88 and 97 depending on which courses you put in and whether you weighted courses.)</p>
<p>I agree about how GPAs are all over the place; it’s one reason that I didn’t bother to look at it. Not only do district weight things different (4.0. 5.0 6.0 7.0 scales), but some include HS credits taken in MS and some don’t. Some only include core classes, some include all. Just too much variability for me to mean anything meaningful. </p>
<p>That’s why estimating your chances is a little bit science and a little bit art.</p>
<p>OK, I’m liking using the high acceptance rate to define safety. </p>
<p>Back in the day, the local state U campus had a program where HS juniors who scored well on the PSAT? SAT? well, one of those, were admitted to that campus, with all rights and privileges thereof. You could take up to two classes at a time during your high school senior year, and could then apply as a sophomore transfer to any other campus. Which meant that you had your safety in hand by the end of junior year. It was an incredibly sweet deal.</p>
<p>Here’s an old thread:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/510992-safety-match-reach-high-reach-2.html?[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/510992-safety-match-reach-high-reach-2.html?</a></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree that high-stat kids don’t really have matches. </p>
<p>It doesn’t really matter where you are compared to the enrolled class – which is what all the published statistics are. It matters where you are vis-a-vis the applicant pool and the admitted class. A few colleges publish those numbers, too. The admitted class tends to have somewhat higher grades and scores than the enrolled class – because the people with the highest numbers tend to have the most choices, and therefore the lowest yield.</p>
<p>At the most selective schools, the published 75%-25% SAT scores are below the admitted class 75-25 SAT scores by 10-20 points. At schools that admit more students to fill the class (e.g., Chicago, Tufts), the difference is more substantial. If you are at the median for the enrolled class, you are substantially below the median for the admitted class.</p>
<p>But also, when you look at the stat distributions for the most selective colleges, the distributions for the applicant pool are not that far below the enrolled class. Many, many kids who are above the 75-25 range are being rejected. They may have a much better chance of admission compared to applicants below that range, but it’s 20% vs. 3%, not 50% vs. 1%.</p>
<p>Additionally, high-stat students may be waitlisted at schools that look like safeties when the colleges feel they’re being used as safeties, since that improves yield percentages. I was warned that this might happen with one of my safeties, and I know a couple people who had this happen to them at multiple safeties.</p>
<p>
Very interesting.</p>
<p>So for schools with the highest yield, the median admitted and median enrolled scores would be closer together?</p>
<p>Edit:
Never mind, I re-read your post more carefully.</p>