Picking safety schools?

College Search & Selection
1

Hi

I’m a rising senior with fairly competitive stats (2250 SAT, 800 on 1st subject test, taking 3 more subject tests and retaking SAT,lots of ECs and awards).

I am considering HYP but, of course, I know that will be a stretch. I’m also considering schools like Brown and Penn which are a tiny bit easier but would really need a few safety schools as well. I’m a bit stumped when it comes to this because the only schools I can think of are schools I would hate to attend if I had to and I don’t want to find myself in a situation where I am attending my safety school at this point. Does anyone with any experience know how to reasonably pick a safety school? Is something with 50% admittance fairly accessible,can I go for 30?

I’d like to pick something that I would be okay with going to but at the same time I’m not sure at what point I can actually consider a school ‘safety’.

Thanks for any help!

2

You not only need safeties, you need some matches as well. None of the schools you listed fit the bill. They are all reaches.

What are your preferences in terms of size, geographic location, urban vs rural? Areas of academic interest? You aren’t giving much info to let people help you. It seems you are focused purely on prestige based on the limited info you have posted.

3

Stem or Humanities or what?

4

This is how you pick a safety: imagine next spring, all your schools said no (HYP, Brown, Penn - which is extremely likely). Now what?

You need to apply to at least one school where you KNOW you will be accepted, you KNOW you can afford, and where you will be happy attending. Look for schools which offer merit to kids with your stats, with acceptance rates greater than 30% or so to your kind of applicant. Run the NPC then check with parents if this is affordable.

5

"Brown and Penn which are a tiny bit easier " you maybe in for a reality check when you get deferred or denied from all the ivies.
are the ivy schools places you have visited and love them or do you want to attend one based on prestige and the need for validation? there are so many amazing schools that you should look at that maybe a much much better fit where you will learn more, be much happier and do it in a much more supportive setting.

6

A safety must also be affordable, and most safeties give lousy need-based aid…so you need to know how much your family will pay. If you do don’t know, ask them.

7

And again, another clueless student drinking the Kool-Aid! Brown and Princeton couldn’t be farther apart as two institutions, how could you possibly consider both? Just because they are Ivies?! What do you want from your college? Atmosphere, size, location (city, rural, country), competitiveness, etc. etc. etc. Only then can you put a reasonable list together.

Others have said this but more politely, your list is ridiculous and useless!

8

“…I don’t want to find myself in a situation where I am attending my safety school at this point.”

Then, you don’t have a true safety.

What state are you from? Do you care what part of the country you would go to school? How much can your parents afford to contribute annually? What do you want to study? Any career goals? Conservative, liberal or in between? Large or small school? “Emma27” makes me assume you are a female, have you considered a female college? Have you visited any colleges? What schools? Any thought on those you may have visited?

If you are willing to give some more info, you will likely to get overwhelmed with suggestions! You have great stats and it would be a shame to not have acceptances of schools you truly like next spring.

Good luck!!

9

I will be far more charitable than others on this thread. The overwhelming majority (probably about 95%) of American four-year colleges are academic safeties for you. Once you abandon an attachment to brand prestige you can think about what you want and need in a college. For most students and their families, affordability is the foremost concern. Even if you think you have plenty of money allocated for college, you should probably pay a little attention to this crass subject if you are contemplating graduate or professional school down the road. Law and medical schools are even more expensive than college, and even stingier with financial assistance. The most venerated colleges and universities are the ones with the deepest pockets, overall, and they are generous with financial aid to middle-class households. Once you descend from that rarefied circle, however, financial packages won’t necessarily meet demonstrated need, much less what your parents believe they can afford. Brand-name status can be misguided and dangerous at that point. For many students, their own state universities are the best matches and safeties. They usually offer first-rate educational opportunities, and often have honors colleges and terrific merit scholarships for the most accomplished in-state applicants. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get away from home, however. If you are fortunate enough not to be worried about finances, then you can think about other priorities: academic interests, location, environment, and - yes - relative prestige. If money is of any concern whatsoever, especially if you have your sights on law or medical school, follow the money for safeties and matches. Apply to colleges where you will receive enough aid to avoid incurring debts this early in your educational career.

Now that we’ve gotten that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, think about what you would like. There are thousands of colleges out there, and - as I said before - most of them will accept you happily. Your reasons can be non-academic, and you are under no obligation whatsoever to justify them to anonymous parties on the Internet. If you have fantasized about leafy, ivy-shrouded campuses, look at the Colleges That Change Lives for small liberal arts colleges (along with NESCAC, et al). If you want big-time D-1 teams to root for, apply to Notre Dame and some Big Ten universities. Do you like to ski/snowboard? Do you want a vibrant, urban setting . . . local live music scene . . . warm weather? There are excellent colleges that can fulfill all those requirements. If you find one or two matches and safeties that satisfy you, then you can aim high with your other applications. I also suggest that some, if not all, of your match and safe schools have either rolling admissions or non-binding Early Action options. Those allow you to relax a bit while awaiting notification from your reaches. Tulane is a good match, if it appeals to you, because they have a free application, and you will receive an answer by Thanksgiving (usually including merit aid announcement) if you apply by their priority deadline.

10

You only named five Ivies in your post. You need to sit down and do some thinking about what you want in a college. (“Ivy” isn’t an option). Right now, you don’t seem to have any criteria other than prestige. What do you want to study? Where do you want to go to school? Do you like a green leafy campus or do you want something urban? Do you want a preprofessional environment or are you looking to a more classic college experience?

Brown and Penn are both great schools but they are very different, location, size, feel, type of student. While a student can apply to both, ask yourself what draws you to Penn and what draws you to Brown?

Once you have a list or description of what you want in a college, then the search can begin. Start at the bottom. Picking the safety is the hardest part of the search and it will take work. Find two schools with at least 50% acceptance rate. These are schools your parents can afford, you are assured admission, and you will be happy to attend. There are hundreds of schools - you will find schools you like but only if you put in the effort. Do not settle for the default state school if you do not want to attend.

Another way of looking at safety schools is to find schools where you will automatically get merit aid based on your stats. I call them “goodies” schools, because these schools will give you money to attend. Your stats will be well within the top 25 percentile, probably top 10 percentile. These schools will not be the prestigious ones but they are well known and respected within academia.

Once you have two safeties, then it’s up to you. Lots of reaches, knowing that you will likely be attending one of the safeties (remember you are guaranteed admission), or a mixture of matches and reaches as well as the safeties. Pick the matches using the same characteristics you used for choosing a safety.

Picture the schools on a ladder. You are looking for or at a particular type of school. You want to find schools with these characteristics but with acceptance rates of 50+%, 35-50%, 20-34%, and the teens and single digits. Sure, you can knock out the middle rungs but the climbing is pretty hard.

I echo using rolling or EA to safeties or low matches. Knowing you have a college acceptance before Thanksgiving is definitely an ego boost even if it’s a safety or match. This boost is necessary because if you go the “lots of reaches” route, you will likely get some rejections (they hurt more than you would expect, even from HYP). Also, it’s just nice to have your first response be a positive response.

11

Do you have hooks that would help you get into any of the schools on your current list (recruited athlete, URM, legacy, development). If not, you need to start broadening your search. I know plenty of kids with 2380 or 2390 and top GPAs who were shut out at all the Ivies.

12

<<<
French American living in Kuwait
Go to a British school
Junior in High school (Year 12- British system)
<<<

Sounds like she’s a US citizen with French parents and she’s living in Kuwait.

From her other threads, doesn’t sound like low income and not a URM.

As someone above has said, if you don’t want to attend your safety, then it’s not a safety.

How much will your parents pay for your education?

Do you have any residency status with a state in the US?

13

Anyone who thinks Brown and Princeton “couldn’t be farther apart as two institutions” doesn’t get out much. Both have excellent history departments, both have interesting-looking neuroscience programs for undergrads, each is a university in which the College, rather than grad programs, is the primary focus of the institution. That’s before we get to size, endowments, selectivity, demographics, location. Princeton and Brown have a helluva lot more in common than either has with CCNY or University of Montana or UC Riverside or Harvey Mudd or Bob Jones University.

I think there is more than one flavor of Kool-Aid on offer here. And the lifestyle choice/fit model is as just as one-dimensional as the prestige model. Alternatively, you could start by figuring out what you’d like to learn and then look for good places to learn it. (Cautionary note: conceptualizer what you want to learn in broad and/or diverse ways. You may not be able to accurately predict your major at this stage but you probably do have a decent sense of your own tastes/interests.)

And with the kind of credentials you have, the reach/match distinction doesn’t really work. The matches are all reaches, because, at that level, scores and grades don’t determine who gets in – they just put you in the qualified/eligible category. If you think who gets in is a crapshoot, then rolling the dice as many times as you can makes a certain amount of sense. But it isn’t completely a crapshoot and that’s why you need safeties. If you have the money, one approach is to look at the “public Ivies” where scores and GPAs are the primary criteria for admissions. Of course the other big criterion is in-state residency, which you don’t have, so you need a few such options. Michigan (Ann Arbor), Wisconsin (Madison), the University of California system, and University of Washington (Seattle) are some of the non-Ivies my science-loving high-stats kid is looking at. And, in the end, there’s something really exciting to her about each of those options. YMMV, depending on field, but if you look hard enough, you can probably get to the same place. By contrast, SLACs, less selective (and/or more specialized) private universities, schools in the South, and women’s colleges were leaving her cold.

14

exacademic - I won’t get into an argument here as it is not the question that was asked by the OP, but I will briefly rebut by saying that Brown has a whole different type of kid than Princeton, and I know this from personal experience. Brown kids are much more into creative arts, and much more laid back, non-competitive, free spirited types than Princeton. Oh yes, and there are not “lunch clubs” at Brown - is that what they are called at Princeton? I would agree that CCNY or your other mentioned colleges are more dissimilar but based on the OPs original post with the colleges she mentioned and my experiences, I stand by my statement.

And now back to the OPs concerns.

15

@exacademic and @amtc you both have points. We recently visited Princeton and Brown with our rising senior and while they do give off a very different vibe, they are similar (mid) sized research institutions with strong commitment to undergraduate education. That distinguishes them both from small LACs and large public universities. While you definitely get the sense that Brown leans farther left than Princeton politically and socially and the curriculum has more creative course offerings and has a grittier urban feel, I think a kid who is focused academically could be happy at either one. As an adult, I have friends who went to Princeton who remind me of my friends who went to Brown and vice versa.

16

My broader point is (a) the key factor in choosing a college shouldn’t be am I a ___ type and (b) kids applying to a list of excellent schools with different vibes aren’t necessarily clueless – they could be focussed on academics. To me, prestige and fit are both superficial paradigms for college selection.

17

Is your 800in French?
Do you speak Arabicand are you interested in majoring/minoring in either/both languages?
What did you get for GCSE’s and what are your As subjects, and their predicted grades?
What are your Ecs?
Are your parents considered residents of any state?
Look into honors colleges, especially those with rolling admissions. Pitt would be a good pick, as would UAlabama. AsuBarrett is another safety with a strong honors college. Look into the book or website “public honors colleges” to Ind a couple you like and apply as soon as the app is up.

18

I think around a 40-50% acceptance rate is a good number. My stats were similar to yours, and I used schools with lower acceptance rates than that as safety schools and was waitlisted. Alabama is always a good safety choice - you’re guaranteed to go to college with a good - sized merit award. Beyond that, we need more parameters to suss out some good schools. Any geographic or climate preferences? Rural, suburban, urban? Size of the student body?

Also, no problem with applying to a bunch of Ivies, even if they seem dissimilar on paper. You can like different things about different schools. For example, I applied to BU and Kenyon, because I loved the closeness of the city at BU, but I loved the writerly vibe at Kenyon. Very disparate places, but I found something appealing about both.

19

Look at the University of Virginia. Not a safety, of course; it has an admit rate of about 27% for OOS applicants; but you might be a good candidate.

20

Thanks for all the responses!

Maybe I didn’t make myself very clear in my original post.
I am trying for HYP but they are by no means the only schools I am applying to. I’ve been told to apply to some of the other Ivy Leagues and there were aspects of both Brown and U Penn that I found interesting.While I haven’t finalized my college list, they were both considerations based on the subjects and ECs I’m interested in. However, I am also, of course, looking at non- ivy schools and am fully aware that my chances of getting into Ivy are slim.Right now I’ve been particularly interested in U Michigan. I know SAT scores do not guarantee anything and do have plenty of ECs to
back them up. My interest in certain Ivy League schools stems mainly from their strong programs in the subjects I am interested in and the fact that a lot of the ECs I’m currently doing seem to be very popular there.

I realize I didn’t provide very much information about my profile and my question may therefore have sounded a little vague. I’m particularly interested in politics and international law and therefore am looking at schools that would offer strong programs in these. I don’t mind location or size very much, especially since I’ve lived most of my life outside the United States.I am quite happy going to college in any State so I don’t reckon it will be too big of a deciding factor
for me.

My question was regarding safety schools and how people go about finding them. I can think of several universities I would like to attend but am not sure at what point a school becomes a ‘safety school’ and I want to make sure I have a backup plan that I enjoy. Some schools I have looked at and considered had 20-30% acceptance rates and I didn’t know whether I could reasonably consider those safety schools. I was just wondering how anyone in the same boat with maybe similar stats and interests had dealt with this.

Thank you for all the suggestions – I will definitely be taking them on board. :slight_smile: