As I said upthread, if my advice doesn’t work feel free to ignore it.
With my definition of safety; guaranteed admission financially affordable and happy to attend - I am not sure why someone would feel constrained to only have two of those choices available come the spring. Being able to go to a school you like and can afford that accepted you seems like the success we all wish for our children.
But, as further conversations showed - the advice was given to someone without true safeties as CC defines it. It is therefor terrible advice for them. And they are right to go their own path. As are we all.
I agree with your analysis here, but just wanted to add that this confusion regarding what is a “safety” seems to recur regularly on CC and in real life too. I wish we could drop that term and go with “Likely” and “Lock.” A school with a high acceptance rate where the student’s stats are above medians, or where no student from that same HS with similar stats has been rejected in recent years, etc. is a “Likely,” whereas a school with guaranteed admission due to top X% auto-admit or published auto-merit charts is a “Lock.”
In addition to your points above, I’d also say that a school accepting 60+% of applicants where the student applying is in the Top 10-25% of applicants is basically guaranteed admission. Schools that have fairly transparent merit awards/financial aid help families figure out which schools are financial safeties.
For most - it won’t be getting accepted to schools they like - it will be the affordability piece that is hardest to achieve.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could come up with a set of terminology that everyone understood and agreed upon?
Some of this info is year dependent and may change with the more recent application years. Looking forward to SCOIR and Naviance updates for this year to define safeties since schools that have never rejected someone from our HS with S24s stats may have this past year. Yield protection and increased numbers of applications certainly has changed over the past few years.
I agree with all of this, but would note that it pertains only to “likely” schools. This is a good example of why the Lock category is useful - Locks are not context-dependent in the same way as Likelies, since the admission offer is guaranteed based on the student’s stats or other determinative factors. Criteria may change for a given school from year to year, but for Student A in Year X, there is no need to assess chances based on any outside factors - the chance is 100%.
It would, but the practice of yield protection that I have read about on this site so often makes acceptance rates and stats a less reliable measure of what a student can rely on in terms of acceptance. Thus the use of “likely” rather than “safety”. This is particularly important in regions that are overrepresented in the college admissions landscape. If you live in a region that is not overrepresented, you likely don’t have to worry about this as much.
Finding one of those is almost impossible for a kid not ingested in large public schools. We are at a loss for one that S24 would actually be happy to attend.
Can I ask y’all: when you’re referring to counselors, you mean the ones at your kid’s schools, right? Because as of right now (two weeks before the end of C24’s Junior Year, it feels like the school and the counselor are offering next to no information and/or guidance.
My kid met with the counselor in December or January just to meet her and get some advice about classes for senior year, then again this past week for the mandatory “Junior meeting.” The counselor didn’t give C24 any information about college applications, just told them that they’re “on track” to get into college. I literally don’t know what our school offers as far as actual college counseling, if we use any computer programs (I’ve seen some mentioned upthread) to help with admissions, anything. That info just doesn’t seem to be available at all anywhere that I can find (and I have been playing close attention all year!).
C24’s school is a large, highly competitive public where kids mostly go to college and mostly stay in-state (in a state that underfunds our schools in some pretty crippling ways), so I had just assumed that the near-total lack of counseling was normal, but it seems like lots of you are having very different experiences. Is there something I (or my kid) should be doing differently?
In my case, my DS attends a private school with graduation classes of 100+. Each student is assigned an academic advisor whose job it is to schedule classes and ensure that students are on track to graduate from high school on time. They are also assigned a college counselor who teaches a required class and offers two individual sessions with the student per semester in the junior year. The advice that I am referring to is from that college counselor. They have a caseload of 200 students/ college counselor.
I agree that many auto-merit Lock schools are large publics, which makes it much tougher for kids not interested in that type of experience. You might check Colleges That Change Lives for smaller schools that may offer guaranteed admission based on stats - I haven’t done a deep dive on most of those schools, but I know that Austin College, as one example, offers guaranteed admission and auto-merit all the way down to 3.26 GPA (in surprisingly generous amounts).
For us, counselor means the counselor at S24’s school (public). She has been excellent in terms of providing a check list of things he needs to complete, providing access to SCOIR, reviewing schools with him and volunteering to brainstorm about essay topics etc. The guidance department hosts several info sessions for parents/juniors about the process as well. It’s too bad you haven’t received more guidance - maybe you could reach out directly to the head of the department to find out what resources are available. Typically schools have access to either SCOIR or Naviance which is an on-line tool which allows you to search for colleges, see how kids from your school have done in terms of acceptance etc.
My daughter’s school is a small private school. They have a person who advises on class registration/fulfilling graduation requirements, etc. but there is one college counselor. Her class is only 70, so that one college counselor does all of the college advising. She’s had student and parent meetings, hosted a Q&A with (mostly) in state college admissions officers, and had the girls start a college list with reaches, matches and safeties. She has gotten them all on Naviance and they have asked for all the LoRs before the end of Junior year. She also sent a timeline and the girls are supposed to have the common app filled out over the summer, done the SRAR and things like that. They already wrote an essay as well.
It’s very possible that your school just isn’t going to provide any meaningful college advising. What you have described is already more than my D22 ever received at her large public school - meeting with the assigned counselor was pointless (350-400 kids per counselor, no background in or information about college counseling at all), and the one designated “college counselor” just sends reminders about deadlines for in-state public universities and local community colleges. Honestly, I owe my daughter’s college journey largely to this site - I just educated myself here on CC and became a de facto college counselor.
We have decided to concentrate on the likely schools and aggressively approach them in terms of meeting with their music department and the instrument teacher for his instrument, applying for scholarships and visiting. Hopefully this will be good enough. He will probably apply to UVM as a single medium size public that ticks enough of the other boxes and is a lock.
We are also basically focusing on likelies, with only 1 reach which will almost certainly be a rejection. I think we have one true safety though. It is a school where my daughter meets the requirements for the honors program and is also a university I attended and where her grandmother was on the faculty for 20 years. It is almost unthinkable she would not be accepted to that one.
Edited to add, we will find out next week if she qualifies for automatic admission to the big state schools, but she is undecided if she’s going to apply to the most competitive ones. We are considering one that would give decent merit based on a matrix.
You probably already know this but there are also music specific thread/sections on CC with a ton of knowledgable parents who’ve been through that process. @BeverlyWest is a parent who just went through this process I think.
From the limited amount I know about that process, every school may be a reach ‘musically’ even if they are a lock general admission-wise. Can’t wait to follow your son’s journey - best of luck with finding programs he is excited about!
In our case, there’s 2 counselors. 1 focuses more on the younger students and the 2nd one has a title of “senior college counselor.” However, it’s a small public charter school. This year’s graduating class is about 40 students. D24’s grade has about 28 kids total.
D24 has met couple of times this school year with counselor #1. Conversations mostly surrounded stuff like:
what classes is she going to take next school year
is she still on track for graduation
have you started thinking about what you’d want to major in college (and, if not, here’s some resources on Naviance to maybe help you figure that out)
In senior year, the senior college counselor teaches a regular daily class which all seniors are required to take called “College Counseling.” Entire focus of the class is getting into college. In that class, the counselor apparently requires the students to pick 1 major scholarship contest to apply to.
Once a school year, both counselors do a 90-minute presentation to each individual grade level + a separate session for rising 9th graders (separate meetings for each grade) where they present an overview of college application-related info for that grade level.
The counselors also have a “Thoughtful Thursday” presentation during every Thursday’s lunch period. Doesn’t last the entire lunch period. But it covers a wide range of topics, including stuff like stress management, how to stay organized, how to figure out how to study for big final comprehensive exams.
I had a bunch of D24-specific questions for the senior counselor, so I scheduled a 1-on-1 meeting w/that counselor earlier this calendar year and found that to be really helpful.
I saved a copy of their big 9th-10th graders-focused presentation from a couple of months ago, but don’t have a way to post a 159 MB presentation here. Will take some screen shots, though, and post some highlights in case that’s helpful.
Thank you! I have been following those threads and look forward to this year’s thread. S24 is not applying to audition based programs (unless of course he changes his mind after attending a music summer program). He attends an audition based precollege for music in NYC and will use a music supplement to help his general application at schools like Williams and Brown. It should solidify his interest to match/likely schools like Skidmore and U Richmond to meet with the departments and teachers. Makes the process even more complex! Would almost be easier to just audition!
