90% chance is a low match, not a safety. Also, if the school in question considers “level of applicant’s interest”, then it probably assumes that an “overqualified” applicant who does not show whatever it considers “interest” (recorded visits, checking the admission portal frequently, etc.) is applying there as a “safety” and won’t attend.
@GnocchiB Thank you very much. I wish you and your daughter luck in the application process!
Kids (and I suppose GC’s) use the word “safety” sometimes to describe a category of school without regard to whether it is- in fact- a safety. Last year I remember a bunch of kids who were January admits to Maryland who were horrified- Maryland had been their “safety school” and now they were being told “show up in January please”.
So Maryland- not a safety anymore.
Well in fact they did get into Maryland, so in my book it’s a safety, even if that’s not what they wanted.
We were pretty comfortable with “likelies” as opposed to “safeties”. And as I said somewhere upthread - EA etc meant they actually had news early. If they’d gotten bad news they might have reconsidered their lists.
"The question is whether they can meet the institutions established objectives better by using their judgment than could be achieved using a more structured and objective process. "
It IS a structured process. It’s just like when I hire people. It’s a structured process, but it’s a holistic “admission” (job offer).
Anyway if any of these places felt a computer program could do it better, they’d do so and save a lot of money
I also don’t know how you “prove” that the class you admitted was “better” than some hypothetical other class. You don’t know what happens to those people.
Anyway this is all silly because out of 30,000 applicants the adcoms are not claiming that they have found THE Ultimate Combination of 2,000. They’re just claiming they’ve found a really really awesome combination of 2,000. That’s all. We all know darn well that another combo of 2,000 could have been pulled. So stop pretending that adcoms are acting as though they’ve identified the platonic form of the class of 2019.
If the sfety had a 90% accept rate, that’s one thing. If it’s some college match engine churning out the accept rate, that’s a whole other. Some of the kids my son knows were really disappointed with numbers coming from Papyrus and some other calculator. Turned out one was just comprised of estimates from other applicants. They meant nothing.
Also even getting into a 90% accept rate school can be an issue if your kid is applying to some selective program within it which was the case for my one son. A friend of mine’s son was rejected from Purdue when she was sure he’d get accepted given those rates, but he was applying to the aeronautic program which was highly selective. Also some state schools fill up fast They accept just about every warm body, early on, but then when the seats are starting to get filled, they get selective.
A likely is not always a safety.
I have the impression many top-stats kids have lists which are roughly:
Many Ivies,
Stanford,
local public college.
Their families may be able to pay, but they’re only willing to pay for a handful of schools. So it’s hyper-competitive for a few colleges, but the family’s not willing to apply to colleges outside the Ivies, even though many colleges outside the Ivies may offer everything the Ivies can offer, and sometimes more.
The applicants are very disappointed, because they have set up a list with colleges which are very, very different in terms of selectivity and level of instruction. (Reach for everyone) and (certain admission.) They choose to apply to many extreme reaches–and no one should be applying to all the Ivy Leagues colleges, they’re very different from each other–but they have very few matches.
There’s also the problem of relative admissions difficulty. A college which admits 25% of applicants may look much easier to get into, when it’s still a college which turns down 3 out of 4 applicants.
I think for the top schools it’s better to view admissions as a casting call rather than an awards ceremony.
Most GCs have too many students, and are pushed to get every kid into some college, but not pushed to encourage children to excel. My GC told me don’t bother applying to Ivies because the cost of two applications would be a burden for my family and I wouldn’t get in.
I was not in the top 20 of my graduating HS class and got into two Ivies. Multiple students ranked higher than me did not get into a single Ivy they applied to, including the ones I got into.
Also know a kid who had very high stats who was deferred from UMich, and knew other kids with lower stats who got in.
I think that it is better to view admissions at top schools as a casting call rather than an awards ceremony.
I have the impression many top-stats kids have lists which are roughly:
Many Ivies,
Stanford,
local public college.
Their families may be able to pay, but they’re only willing to pay for a handful of schools. So it’s hyper-competitive for a few colleges, but the family’s not willing to apply to colleges outside the Ivies, even though many colleges outside the Ivies may offer everything the Ivies can offer, and sometimes more. Thus, for those students, it is like being shut out of paradise, as the family isn’t willing to pay for colleges in between the utmost selective and the affordable guaranteed admission colleges.
There’s also the problem of relative admissions difficulty. A college which admits 25% of applicants may look much easier to get into, when it’s still a college which turns down 3 out of 4 applicants.
People don’t realize how many valedictorians are out there. My kids go to a high school where they will graduate with 700 other students. I expect 30 kids will have the 4.0 and completed the specific number of AP test to be considered the valedictorian of the high school. With her 3.85 UW gpa, my daughter just cracked the top 60. This is one of 7 high schools in our public school district in Colorado which all are about the same size and have the same type of overachieving students. So there are tons of qualified applicants.
If we lived in Texas, my daughter wouldn’t make the UT auto admit of 7% even though she has an ACT score over 30.
I think that it really helps to put in into context for kids. I did the math last year and IIRC you would fill all of the Ivies plus a few other top schools if you only took Valedictorians. There are about 8500 National Merit Scholars (not to mention other high achieving students) alone. Including all Finalists you have 15000 spots every year. If they all appy to the same 12 schools and the schools all have 1000 freshmen every year…that leaves 3000 NMFs wondering what happened (assuming they filled every spot with NMFs)
^And that’s counting valedictorians as one per school - lots of schools seem to give out valedictorian status like candy.
“@chris17mom, tell your son that at least one poster on CC (and no doubt other kids as well) actually turned down Ivies acceptances for Richmond with money. If he got in to one of the programs I’m thinking of there, they seem pretty darn amazing in terms of the opportunities they provide.”
The University of Richmond is a fantastic school. We had visited it and were so impressed by it. As an aside, I don’t know that I have ever been to a school that was so clean it gleamed like Richmond does. Great academics, division 1 sports, by far the best cafeteria that we had seen (we visited 21 colleges). No one should feel badly about having the opportunity to go this school!
And what kids don’t take in to account is that the super-selective schools don’t.
The schools need and want to fill out a student body with all sorts of talents and characteristics, many of whom aren’t in the 99th percentile in stats. With hooked kids filling out half or more of each class at the very top (and still something like a quarter at the lower end of the super-selective elites), even if there are 20K total slots, there still aren’t enough for all the 99th percentile kids out there (and many of those slots will go to those in percentiles 98-95 or even lower as well).
It’s only when you add in the big top publics like Cal,/UMich/UVa (and UCLA/UNC/UW-Madison/UT-Austin) that you get enough slots for all applicants in the 99th percentile.
I was just rereading this and in truth what applymap put out as a safety is an elite school with a less then 50% acceptance rate so it is totally correct that that should never be considered a “safety”. For my daughter though it was just that all here classmates around her were being admitted to an ivies.
Another math deception occurs in thinking that if the student applies to school A with at 40% acceptance rate and school B with a 20% acceptance rate, that the student has a 50% lower chance of getting into B because the admission rate is 1/2 of A’s rate.
Unfortunately, lots of students and parents do not consider that the average applicant to school B is not the same as the applicant to school A, and is, on average, a higher stats, better ECs kid, so the change in odds is actually greater than it appears.
Or the marginal applicant, which is more important.
Don’t you think that if we are saying that a safety school is only one with over a 50% acceptance rate that it’s understandable that a child with elite school stats might not want to attend such a school because then a lot of his classmates won’t be at his same intellectual level? I think some of the reason why kids seem so upset with their acceptances these days is that the practice of some skills to deny students who are at the top of their admit stats because they are worried that these students won’t attend has forced this new definition of a safety. Back when I was applying to colleges, tippy top students knew that schools like Tufts, and at that time even Duke and Penn, could serve as safeties. Now not only is the competition much tougher for any top school, but safeties are no longer safe. A student might attend either Harvard or his public state option depending on a roll of the dice. i think that makes some high schoolers understandably uncomfortable.