Not to be inflammatory, but is Columbia a safety?

Colleges & Universities A-Z Columbia University
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<p>Stats:
SAT: 800CR, 770 M, 800W
SAT IIs: 790M2, 780 US History, 800 Bio
UW GPA: ~4.0
W GPA: ~5.0
Rank: #1, 2, or 3 out of ~500 kids in class</p>

<p>Subjective:
Essays: idk, excellent, i guess
Teacher Recs: Excellent
Counselor Rec: Excellent
Hook (if any): three season all-city Athlete; taught myself three languages; organized and led a one-month service trip to help those affected by hurricane Katrina; wrote a few political editorials in established newspaper; organized youth rally for democratic party, math wiz (one some local competitions, but ****ed up big time on the SAT..argh :( )</p>

<p>Location/Person:
State or Country: CA
School Type: public
Ethnicity: White
Gender: Male</p>

<p>Other Factors: None</p>

<p>If Columbia is not a sure thing, where else should I apply to? I was thinking NYU or Fordham?</p>

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<p>I believe by ‘one some local competitions’ you mean ‘won’</p>

<p>Columbia is not a sure thing for you, or for anyone whose last name isn’t Bollinger.</p>

<p>But with an attitude like that I certainly hope Columbia is a sure thing for you, lest you end up at my school and make it that much less enjoyable.</p>

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<p>Yeah I was just kidding about Columbia being a safety.</p>

<p>Obviously, Columbia is not a safety for anyone. Did any of you read an article in TIME about a girl who got into Stanford, Brown, Williams, Vassar, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Duke, but got waitlisted at Columbia?</p>

<p>I was just amused about how kids on the Columbia forum were saying that schools like UCLA, Cornell and Georgetown were safeties for them, so I just wanted to see the reaction when I said that Columbia was my safety (which is just as ludicrous).</p>

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<p>^what makes columbia less of a safety than those schools, is that for one thing they all have much higher acceptance rates and also because columbia, i’ve heard, tends to be slightly less numbers based. If a school has a track record of getting 40-50 students into columbia each year, and you are better qualified than almost all of them last year, then it could be a safety for you. </p>

<p>This is what many on this board don’t understand: there are a few high schools out there which take a set of the smartest students, prepare them very well and work them very hard. and might have like 30-50% getting into the ivy league. if you’re one of the best there and your councellor has a good rapport with columbia admissions, you can almost be guaranteed entry if you write normal (don’t need to be spectacular) essays. A topper at stuyvesant (per se) who leads a few clubs and has taken a few initiatives, with high sat scores, could be such a character.</p>

<p>that being said, hyp, stanford, brown, wharton, mit, columbia, caltech, amherst, swarthmore, williams, maybe even dartmouth, upenn (other) and duke would very rarely be safeties, because either the applicant pool is extremely competitive (cal tech) or the acceptance rate is very low</p>

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<p>i really don’t think any schools in the top 20 should be considered safeties. colleges look for different things. i got into columbia while rejected from dartmouth and hopkins (wasn’t expecting that but heck, it happens). go for NYU as a safety</p>

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<p>I don’t even think NYU is a safety. People on CC have been rejected with my kind of stats. Maybe Fordham.</p>

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<p>LOL @ safety.</p>

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<p>If you’re valedictorian of Philips Andover and/or national debate champion, national chess champion, hold 5 patents, or have published meaningful scientific research in peer-reviewed journals, by age 17, Columbia <em>might</em> be a safety for you. Or at least not a reach.</p>

<p>Aside from cases like those, a little extra hard work and dedication can only help. Because nothing is guaranteed.</p>

<p>SATs and GPA are not guarantors of anything. they can keep you out, but they can’t get you in all by themselves. Same is true of athletics, aside from recruits.</p>

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<p>What does all-city athlete mean? If “city” means L.A., that’s really impressive. If your city is just a big-ish town, the athletics are obviously less of a boost.</p>

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<p>While we build a new institution fit for your academic needs, I first suggest you check in on the meaning of inflammatory.</p>

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<p>What a lot of people dont realize is that one can have stellar statistics and extraordinary academic achievements, and be in the top 75% or higher range of who those schools accept and these schools would still be considered reaches. They are reaches not because the applicant does not have the criteria to be accepted but just because there are so many extraordinary applicants amongst the 20,000 or more who apply. None of these schools could be considered a safety. There are applicants who get accepted to Harvard but not Columbia. Accepted to Yale but not Brown. Accepted to Princeton but not Dartmouth. There is no way to know.</p>

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<p>collegebound, I disagree. The very fact that someone gets into H but not Columbia suggests he/she is at the top, enough to be guaranteed acceptance at one of the Ivies. There are only 1600 or so SAT scorers above 2350, only 250 at 2400, very few with that plus 2400 in SAT 2s. When colleges say they turn away thousands of 800s they don’t say that they do not turn away thousands of those who got 2400s in both sets of tests.</p>

<p>In other words, if you have truly stellar testing, stellar grades in the toughest courses at your school, and you did not one EC you are practically guaranteed one of the Ivies.</p>

<p>You won’t know which one.</p>

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<p>Yes, I agree that you should be guaranteed into at least one or more of the ivies, but you are not guaranteed to get into Columbia. Therefore Columbia is not considered a safety. You are guaranteed to get into anywhere from one or more ivies, but there is no way to know which one. Therefore none could be considered safeties.</p>

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<p>WindowShopping, according to merriam-webster, inflammatory is “tending to excite anger, disorder, or tumult”…which is what I was trying to do (b/c it’s a stupid question that was asked in response to comments made on another thread that were just as ludicrous).</p>

<p>Guys, I just want to reiterate that, in my inexperienced opinion, Columbia is not a safety for ANYONE. Neither is any other top 35 school. </p>

<p>thank you</p>

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<p>collegebound, we are in agreement, yes, you should normally get into one (although that Indian kid in Dallas proves the exception, not one Ivy after perfect SAT and ACT, so rarely it could be so) but since you don’t know which one, none is a safety.</p>

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<p>“There are applicants who get accepted to Harvard but not Columbia. Accepted to Yale but not Brown. Accepted to Princeton but not Dartmouth.”</p>

<p>incorrect reasoning, those are many but not all applicants, I’m talking about the exception. if you come from one of the best schools and are stellar in every way and you’re school has send many kids to columbia (or insert other top college), you can get in to columbia and pretty much any school that you want which fits the criteria (except schools which reject you because they know you won’t come and go to better school instead).</p>

<p>“Guys, I just want to reiterate that, in my inexperienced opinion, Columbia is not a safety for ANYONE. Neither is any other top 35 school.”</p>

<p>this is simply missing the point. It offends people’s sensitivities but there is no absolute standard for safties. there are amazing applicants which schools just would not turn down. I had a couple of friends in my high school who were amazing and got in everywhere with full rides everywhere as they should have, not a single rejection, applying to the likes of harvard, princeton, columbia, mit, yale. For them, they were so stellar that these schools too were nearly guaranteed, it wasn’t luck, they were a cut above the rest.</p>

<p>A significant difference which noone is seeing here: is when you go to a top school, that the ivies know about, colleges are more sure that your 4.0 is actually a close to impossibly difficult 4.0 without exceptions. they know what it means to lead x, y or z club and so the pedigree in those qualifications is known for certain, good scores on top of that and a few ‘life experiences’ and you’re in. Write a decent essay and you could well get in to all the top schools (modifying your essay to appeal to each one). </p>

<p>It might offend people’s sensitivities that your reaches are their low matches or even safeties, but logically a safety is always relative to the candidate. that’s why Fordham which is not in the top 35 will be a reach for tons of kids. If you can understand this, the revese is also true, that better colleges are safeties, because safeties are intrinsically defined relative to the candidate. It’s true to a much lesser degree, but I’m talking about a serious exception to the norm, which happens to be a very very small % of applicants each year.</p>

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<p>“that being said, hyp, stanford, brown, wharton, mit, columbia, caltech, amherst, swarthmore, williams, maybe even dartmouth, upenn (other) and duke would very rarely be safeties,”</p>

<p>First, Wharton is not an Ivy League institution by itself. It’s a degree program at the University of Pennsylvania.</p>

<p>“because either the applicant pool is extremely competitive (cal tech) or the acceptance rate is very low”</p>

<p>This can never be the case of using “OR” because 90% of the time a school which receives a competitive applicant pool usually end up with ultra low acceptance rates. </p>

<p>“It might offend people’s sensitivities that your reaches are their low matches or even safeties, but logically a safety is always relative to the candidate. that’s why Fordham which is not in the top 35 will be a reach for tons of kids. If you can understand this, the revese is also true, that better colleges are safeties, because safeties are intrinsically defined relative to the candidate. It’s true to a much lesser degree, but I’m talking about a serious exception to the norm, which happens to be a very very small % of applicants each year.”</p>

<p>In addition to this, I’d like to remind people that if you can be rejected from your “safety” then it should never be considered as a safety. I feel that many applicants should evaluate their safeties. “I here many people say statement like I got rejected from all schools even my safety” or “admission is getting competitive for top students where safety are rejecting students”</p>

<p>I think a key formula in knowing whether to determine a safety or not is to look at the type of students the school usually admits and make sure you fall a notch or two above them. Even stellar students need to because of considering schools like SUNY & CUNY as safeties because theres a possibility these colleges might reject them because they feel they wouldn’t enroll due to the strong emphasis on their yield.</p>

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<p>I dont agree and here is why. At top prep schools like Choate, Andover ect, there is a significant amount of wealthy amongst families. You can cross reference the matriculations list with who made cum laude ect and you can see that who gets in is not always the most stellar.
At Choate for example, 7 students may be admitted to Harvard in a particular year. What most dont realize is that of the 7 who were admitted, two may be developmental legacy admits who were strong candidates but not stellar but whose families have been connected to the school for generations and have given millions. Some even have buildings named after them. And dont forgt all the families who have children at these schools who are worth hundreds of millions themselves. Then, there are the international students who are American educated and get the benefit of being reviewed by both the regional admission officers for the state the prep school is in as well as the admission officer for that ****ry. Then, of the 7 there may be two under represented miniorities with pretty good SAT scores and grades. Unfortunately these students have an edge over under represented minorities from the average public high school. Schools like Harvard jump to underrepresented minorities from these top private schools, and top public high schools even if they have had the same academic opportunities as their caucasian peers. Then there are the recruited athletes.
So while 7 may have been accepted to Harvard, two may be development admits who were not as strong as those they did not take, two may be under represented minorities, one might be an international student, and one may be a recruited athlete, so in this scenario these are no spots left for the stellar candidate. Usually there is room for one or two to get in, but it is not that Harvard may have taken all 7 who were stellar.
So the reasoning that the other poster mentions is not correct I dont believe.
One is not guaranteed to go to one of the top schools in the country because they come out of a top high school. Their chances may be very good, but nothing is definite. It is a very competitive world out there. Some can maximize their chances by having great SAT score and grades and have done some extraordinary things and achieved extraordinary things, many that are unique and showing great passions usually in the arts ect. Some can maximize their chances by having perfect or near perfect grades and SAT scores and achievements in academics. However, they are likely to find that if they applied to about 9 schools, including the ivies that they should be able to get into a few of them. Which ones, it is difficult to tell.
Yes, there are some who will beat the odds and get into them all, but the number is very small</p>

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<p>ok, here goes:</p>

<p>“First, Wharton is not an Ivy League institution by itself. It’s a degree program at the University of Pennsylvania.”</p>

<p>you can’t apply similtaneously to penn’s different undergrad schools, so wharton can be and is tougher to get into than the others.</p>

<p>“This can never be the case of using “OR” because 90% of the time a school which receives a competitive applicant pool usually end up with ultra low acceptance rates.”</p>

<p>this is politically correct non-sense, there is nothing to suggest this, it makes sense that certain schools get better applicants than others. because when you tell people ‘we’re holistic in our admissions’ you do get better rounded and cooler applicants, but you get jack of all trades, master of none applicants also, who haven’t excelled at anything, and are significantly worse than average.</p>

<p>" I’d like to remind people that if you can be rejected from your “safety” then it should never be considered as a safety."</p>

<p>first of all randomness implies that anyone can be rejected from any school, and secondly some schools are anecdotally at least known to reject applicants they feel will certainly get into and go to more prestigeous school. Obviously no evidence since schools will never admit to it, but the incentive is there to keep yeild up and acceptance rate down.</p>

<p>A safety is defined by a school that you are almost guaranteed of getting into. I think you agree on this, so i don’t see why you contradict yourself by saying a safety should never reject you.</p>

<p>to college bound:</p>

<p>what if I were a legacy, urm at choate, with a very strong athletic and academic background? these people do exist, you portrayed your groups as being mutually exclusive. Whatever colleges consider in their choosing - legacy, athlete, urm, academics, work experience etc. there can be someone who is exceptional in enough of these that any school or at least columbia nearly for certain would not turn him/her down. Since nearly a hundred thousand apply each year to the top schools, you don’t think there could a 50-100 like this? try to guage the numbers. </p>

<p>There is a full spectrum of holistic ability, which implies the extreme outliers.</p>

<p>“Yes, there are some who will beat the odds and get into them all, but the number is very small”</p>

<p>odds implies getting in out of random chance, I’m saying they can know nearly for certain that columbia will take them, and some people will know for nearly certain that no school, not overly concerned with yeild, will drop them.</p>

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<p>our valedictorian last year got into harvard but was rejected from duke</p>