Consider any school with an admission rate below 20-30% a reach.
Your safeties may be LACs with high stats and high acceptance rates (“self selective”) and flagship honors program with clearly stated criteria. Matches would be flagship honors programs with holistic admissions or/ &high stats, as well as universities/LACs in the 25-40% range.
American University in D.C. has an admit rate of around 45%; George Washington University in D.C. has an admit rate of around 35%. Both of those might fall into what you are looking for as a match/safety school with strong programs in politics and/or international law.
Sorry. Duplicate answer.
Boy your question certainly led to some discussion. To answer your initial question a safety school is one where your chances are almost certain, that you can afford and you would be happy attending. If you are a US citizen living abroad then you may not have a State University that is significantly lower cost. Many, many US states have excellent flagship public universities that should be a safety school for most students. A common problem students have is not fully appreciating just how difficult getting into the Ivy League colleges or really any of the more selective colleges. Only looking at the average SAT scores of admitted students doesn’t tell the real story. The level of EC achievement expected is also quite a bit higher than many students really appreciate. Some colleges for you to consider:
George Washington University - great DC location, good merit aid, strong honors college
U. Mass Amherst - flagship MA campus, affiliation with sister colleges
William & Mary (maybe Target not Safety) - superb VA state school, 2nd oldest college in US
It’s fine to target HYP or Brown but I would advise you to limit yourself to 3 or 4 reach colleges and take the time to build a compelling case for admissions rather than carpet bombing 10 colleges and hoping for the best. in my daughter’s case Brown appealed to her a lot, the open curriculum and the type of student who goes there. Princeton, on the other hand did not really appeal to her. Give a lot of thought to where you apply Early Decision. Spend 60% of your time on building a strong Target and Reach list and 40% of your time on narrowing your list and creating compelling apps for your Reach colleges.
A safety school is a school 1) you are sure to get into 2) you are certain you can afford and 3) you could be happy attending. If you feel you would be unhappy at your state school, it is not a great safety.
I agree with the others that the Ivy and equivalent schools are a crapshoot for anyone. I think you need to identify a few schools a notch or so under the Ivys as well as some that are more of a true safety. UMichigan is a good idea – many top students do use it as a safety – I’d strongly suggest you apply very early so you will know by the end of December if you are in (if for any reason you don’t get in you can send in more applications).
The other thing to do is google and look through the USNWR ranking of universities not so much for the rankings but because it is a good list of schools and you should be able to pick out a couple of less selective but still excellent schools that interest you. Some schools (ex. Tulane, BC to name but a couple) have non-binding EA which is always a great option for a safety school (similar to UM).
Still, you might have a preference regarding urban vs suburban vs rural, specially if you have no kin or friends in the USA yet.
Do you want to be in a school that is part of or has easy access to a major city? Or do you want to be in a school that is in a beautiful natural setting?
The biggest deal breaker question is how much can your parents afford to pay for college? That will determine whether you need to look for merit aid.
So true, particularly with the SCEA schools like HYP. My daughter had a classmate who was an exceptional scholar, a gentleman and a conservatory-level cellist and singer who was deferred SCEA and later rejected from Princeton. He was admitted to his second choice Oxford where he is the only non-Asian in Oxford’s Mandarin course of study. He mostly taught himself to read, write and speak Mandarin by dinning with neighbors who were immigrant Chinese. Really a brilliant kid in the truest sense.
I think a lot of applicants regrettably expend their early ticket on the SCEA schools, like HYP, and miss the window of opportunity at ED schools like Penn and Brown, where almost half the entire class is selected early from a mere 1/10th of their total applicant pools. And, of course after the early round a lot of the HYP and Stanford applicants drop in to the 30,000+ RD applicant pools to schools like Penn and Brown - making them effectively a crapshoot to get in RD.
With regard to safety and match schools, we studied patterns on the Naviance plots to help categorize the schools.
I think of safeties as 35-50% admit rates with criteria that line up with your strengths. Common data set (pinned thread in this forum has links) will show you what each school’s admissions department treats as very important vs. important vs. considered vs not considered.
And the hurdle that kids with high stats face at schools with these admission rates is that they may be seen as unlikely to enroll. so do what you can to undercut that perception.
Re #21
American and GWU both use “level of applicant’s interest”. Be careful of using them as " safeties".
“American and GWU both use “level of applicant’s interest”. Be careful of using them as " safeties”. "
Agreed. I know a high stats kid who was WL’d at American and had even visited, but had not applied for the Honors Program.
Oh, come on, this isn’t hard. Just apply to the same schools every other 2150+ SAT person applies to in order to make sure they have somewhere decent to go if the top 15 or 20 schools snub them: Michigan, Tufts, Boston College, Lehigh, NYU and Wisconsin if you don’t mind cold weather; Emory, Miami (Fla), Georgia Tech, Florida, Wake Forest, and Southern California if you do mind cold weather.
That seems like a bad plan on so many levels…
@Emma27 Your approach is sort of ass backwards. Your real chances in the schools you mentioned in the first post are at best 1 in 6 and some 1 in 10. I didn’t see anything in the description that would set you apart. High test scores and high grades are a dime a dozen for all those schools.
Safeties should be the last of your considerations. You need a good 6 schools where your chance of getting in is 1 in 2 to 1 in 4.
Then you can look for reaches to roll the dice and then safeties to fall back on.
“Oh, come on, this isn’t hard. Just apply to the same schools every other 2150+ SAT person applies to in order to make sure they have somewhere decent to go if the top 15 or 20 schools snub them: Michigan, Tufts, Boston College, Lehigh, NYU and Wisconsin if you don’t mind cold weather; Emory, Miami (Fla), Georgia Tech, Florida, Wake Forest, and Southern California if you do mind cold weather.”
You call that good advice mooop?