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You are not looking for a safety, you are looking for a school that is at her level but that she would pick as first choice. You need to look for a sure admit with a cost you can afford, and the apply away at all the schools she wants to go to.
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<p>This is very true. The OP and her D really aren’t looking for safeties, they seem to be looking for similar schools to the top choice(s). Those wouldn’t be safeties, those would just be match or low reach schools.</p>
<p>A safety may not be 'loved just like my reach school". </p>
<p>Think of it like looking for a job…you throw your apps out there, and you include some companies that may not be perfect for you, but the job would be fine and pay the bills. If that job is the only one that comes thru, then that’s where you’ll be working. </p>
<p>Safeties are NOT going the way of the dodo bird for a student with your child’s stats. EXACTLY the opposite. A child with high stats (assuming you also mean high test scores), would have LOTS of safeties as long as you can pay a little bit.</p>
<p>A child with an ACT 30+ can find many good schools that will give large merit scholarships</p>
<p>There are always crazy stories after the application process… My D’s friend was accepted at Cornell and waitlisted at: BC, Bowdoin, Bates and Colby, and Lehigh (her safety!), rejected from Brown. Another friend was accepted at NYU, rejected from Syracuse (her safety!). One more friend accepted at Cornell and rejected from Lehigh!</p>
<p>I guess a “safety” is never a guarantee. In the above cases, safeties were determined based on a lot of data including Naviance.</p>
<p>This is why I love this forum…while it raises questions, it has also helped us answer them!</p>
<p>Schools D considers safeties (Rochester and Tulane) don’t fit that criteria for me. Both are excellent schools that she would love to go to. But I don’t think she should count on them—not just because they have been known to reject students despite good scores/grades but because they’d break the budget without a good financial aid package. </p>
<p>Our state flagship (UIUC) is an excellent school (I’m an alum, myself), but it is also very expensive for a state school, especially for her major, and there is little chance of any real financial aid. We would end up paying full tuition and fees, which makes it just barely in our our budget. (Most EFC calculations we’ve run come in at about $30K, which is at the top of our budget.) It is also extremely large and does not have a med school associated with it, which makes her worried about being able to find undergrad research opportunities. Still, I’m pretty sure she could get into LAS at UIUC based on stats alone (3.88UW GPA/34 ACT). It would do in a pinch, and thanks to advice I’ve gotten here, I’m pretty sure that she will applying there early.</p>
<p>Also based on input here, there are two other schools that look promising as good safety candidates. UIC (University of Illinois Chicago) may not have the campus feel she wants and it’s awfully close to home, but it’s a good size, is located near the med school and might offer more research opportunities, so she’s looking into that. UAB (University of Alabama Birmingham) keeps coming up on my radar, too, as a good school for an aspiring medical researcher. It seems to have a lot going for it…and we may be trying to shoehorn it into our campus visits next week. </p>
<p>Which means, her “short list” of schools to apply to is now probably back up to 15! </p>
<p>There are privates that would accept nearly everyone, but you may not want to go there and you need to pay for it. ;)</p>
<p>A safety is usually not a school on top of your mind. It is your backup plan in case everything else failed. Many schools cannot be safety for anyone, even for in state. For example, UMich is not a safety for oos even if your scores and GPA are above 75%, nor for in state if you are below admission average. As no one would get guarantee admission with these stat. If you don’t get at least >80% chance to get in, it is definitely not a safety. Also, don’t forget the financial consideration for a safety, particularly if you are look for merit aid. You would need to aim a bit lower.</p>
<p>I look at safety schools as those with a guaranteed, probably rolling admissions based on your stats. One should be able to afford them. </p>
<p>In most cases these are schools in state where you are almost guaranteed an admission based on their policies or prior admission statistics. I also expect such schools not to use the term “holistic” in their admission process! :)</p>
<p>“A safety may not be 'loved just like my reach school”.</p>
<p>Think of it like looking for a job…you throw your apps out there, and you include some companies that may not be perfect for you, but the job would be fine and pay the bills. If that job is the only one that comes thru, then that’s where you’ll be working."</p>
<p>There are plenty of safety schools if you redefine the cc accepted notion of “safety.” The tricky part of the triad is “loving the safety.” Let’s face it, that is never, ever going to happen for a lot of kids. Just like there are plenty of unemployed adults out there that say 'there are no jobs," and choose not to work at all. Not so, there aren’t any jobs that they WANT. The job is “beneath” them…they feel they are too smart, have worked too hard, achieved too much to work in a fast food restaurant for example…yet we expect high achieving 17 year old’s to cheerfully accept lesser colleges?</p>
<p>Sorry, not buying this. My high-stats, low income kid had multiple safeties on his list - and, yes, they were “true” safeties. He started with the automatic/guaranteed merit schools - Alabama, UA-Birmingham, and UA-Huntsville. And, despite people mocking his choice to even consider attending school in Alabama, he visited all three . . . and found something he liked about each one. Our rolling admit state flagship was also a safety for him, with the possibility of vey attractive merit aid.</p>
<p>The kid who sits around all day poring over viewbooks from Princeton and Yale is going to have a hard time finding a safety they like . . . and that’s when it’s time for Mom or Dad to step in and redirect the kid towards true safeties. Do some research, make some visits, put some serious energy into finding the schools that are the most important ones on that kid’s list!</p>
<p>Lehigh’s acceptance rate is 31%. That’s not a safety for anyone. </p>
<p>While many students do truly love their safety and are thrilled to go there, I think for most kids the safety school represents some sort of compromise. In my daughter’s case, she wanted to go to a mid-sized school, and her safety was a huge university. But other than size, it had almost everything else she wanted. </p>
<p>And that was sort of our process for finding safeties for her. Look for schools that have many of the ingredients of your top choices, but with one or two differences. Can you live with those differences? If yes, then that’s a safety. I’m also very risk averse – to me, a safety accepts at a minimum 75% of its applicants. Anything less, it’s just not a guaranteed acceptance. </p>
<p>To me, what’s important is the overall strategy, and whether it provides an adequate safety net. This might be one “true safety,” or it might be several pretty darn safe safeties. I think a student with a good strategy should try to love his safeties as much as possible, but I don’t think anybody has to pretend that he likes them as much as the more selective schools he’d rather attend. But if he has a well-thought-out strategy, wherever he ends up, he can say that his strategy worked.</p>
<p>dodgersmom, it’s great that your kid liked Alabama and that you could afford to pay the amount left over after the guaranteed merit. I don’t think we could have. </p>
<p>Let me clarify again that when I say a student should be able to consider U of M <strong>OR</strong> Michigan State as a safety, we are talking about ONLY an instate student, AND one whose scores and GPA are, like the OP’s kid, in the TOP 2% AND I specified that they should apply EARLY and take advantage of rolling admissions. I find it very, very difficult to believe that an instate student with a class rank in the top 2% of their class AND scores in the top 2% nationally could not regard UIUC as a safety.</p>
<p>I think that this “not a safety for anyone” stuff is frequently over-stated. But if an instate kid with an A average who is in the top 2% of their HS class with an ACTs of 34+ is seriously in danger of being rejected from IUIC, they must have a hell of a student body: certainly much more qualified than the students at U of C or Northwestern.</p>
<p>Lehigh should not be considered a safety, since they accept about 30% of their applicants.
If the school became “hot” this year, that number could have dropped sharply.
So if your stats put you above 75% of the applicants for Lehigh, but you don’t visit or open your portal, you may be waitlisted.</p>
<p>Agreed about the “overall strategy.” If your state flagship isn’t a sure thing, then apply as early as possible in the rolling process. If your kid is accepted, and you can afford the price tag, you’re essentially done with this very important exercise. If not, move down the food chain in state until you find one that will suffice. </p>
<p>But I have to agree that for a high-stats student, especially one that excels in STEM subjects and desires more of a small LAC feel, there may not be any true Would-Love-To-Attend-And-We-Can-Afford-It-Safety. Such is life.</p>
<p>The other advice that some wise person shared last year when we were at this stage is to line up a couple of good safeties for your child, so that, God forbid, nothing else ends up being an option, your child at least has a choice to make. I think psychologically that’s really beneficial to the kid–or maybe I’m just projecting because it sure makes ME feel better!</p>
<p>" But if an instate kid with an A average who is in the top 2% of their HS class with an ACTs of 34+ is seriously in danger of being rejected from IUIC, they must have a hell of a student body: certainly much more qualified than the students at U of C or Northwestern."</p>
<p>They don’t reject ALL students in the top 2% of their HS classes with ACT’s of 34, Consolation - but they DO reject some. For such a student, UIUC is a likely, but not a true safety the way that, say, Northern Illinois University might be. </p>
<p>Perhaps those students did not play the “level of applicant’s interest” game at Leigh?</p>
<p>High stats students can find safeties easily (see the automatic admission and scholarship threads in the second post of this thread). But it appears that many think that anything that can be a safety is too “lowly” for them.</p>
<p>PG, is this related to admission to specific majors? Otherwise, I find it unbelievable. Unless the kid has an arrest record or some serious academic infraction.</p>
<p>Lucie the Lakie I agree that 2 safeties are a good idea, for the very reasons you state. Having a choice makes a kid feel god, even if those choices aren’t the tippy-top of their list.</p>
<p>A student who insists on a small school may have a harder time finding an academically appropriate safety, since a small school may have too few top-end outliers to be worth offering appropriate courses for those students.</p>
I have to agree with this statement. I’ve seen this in the last few days or so. CalPoly SLO/UCSD/UC Davis seem a “safety” for a 35ACT 2300 SAT 800 Subject Test 3.9 UW, 4.5 W kid, but some of them were rejected at the California schools that I mentioned. See the “rejected/Waitlisted” threads at these schools. </p>