There are a lot of colleges in the US. A kid who can’t find a safety (assuming he/she doesn’t need a full ride, or isn’t in a position where the family really can’t afford any of the admittable options) is a kid who isn’t working hard enough to define what he or she is looking for.
No, Penn and Duke are not safeties. But kids and parents seem very hung up on applying to the same 30 schools that everyone else in their HS are applying to.
Cast a wider net. Don’t apply to Bates and Union as your safeties if your entire HS class is doing the same. Apply to Beloit or Lawrence where your geography becomes advantageous, not a strike against you.
When a kid tells he he/she can’t find a safety, that’s a kid who lives in Chicago and refuses to look outside the Northwestern/Chicago/U Michigan bubble, or a kid who lives in Boston who won’t go past New Jersey (specifically Princeton NJ).
Interesting discussion, and depending on what side of the street you are approaching this from, well, your actual results will vary. For instance, in the past I have been involve with several Ivy plus schools about obtaining more application from qualified Native American/Hawaiian/Alaskan students. When looking at the base number at admissions for the general population, the acceptance rate hovers around, 6-9%. However, when one drills downs on what that rate looks like for Native students, its much closer to 21-25%—a rather large difference. My point being–depending on who you are–then numbers always look different.
I would not go by acceptance rate to determine reach/match/safety, since strength of applicant pools (or subpools for different admission buckets at the school) can vary.
In any case, it does seem that “safety” is often used on these forums as a pejorative term to refer to a college that is “beneath” the student and therefore undesirable to attend (perhaps only marginally more desirable to the student than not attending college at all), rather than a non-pejorative term that describes a school that the student is assured for admission and affordability and which the student would be pleased to attend.
“Cast a wider net. Don’t apply to Bates and Union as your safeties if your entire HS class is doing the same. Apply to Beloit or Lawrence where your geography becomes advantageous, not a strike against you.”
I totally agree with keeping an open mind and looking farther afield for school choices, but at the same time if a student has a 4.0 gpa and SAT scores of 1450+, a school like Beloit might not be the right fit and schools like Tulane or Kenyon might deny that student thinking he won’t attend. It is a problem that schools don’t want to be a student’s safety and reject those students because that makes having good fit safeties a real problem.
My wife is in charge of a parents group at D HS called Parents of 2016. They have met once monthly during the school year since freshman year to discuss topics which affect the students. They are reasonably well attended usually 20-50 parents depending on the topic. In August of this year the class will be entering their senior year and the first topic will be college applications. My wife has asked me to sit in on the discussion as I have been the source of information in our family prompted partly by my visits to CC.
There are two points I am going attempt to make. First, is that parents need to have an understanding of how much they are willing to contribute their child’s education and to communicate that to their child. The importance is not so much to establish grounds for where to apply but rather after the acceptances and financial aid packages come in what will need to be discarded due to cost constraints.
Second, I want to communicate the idea of applying to safeties, matches and reaches. My definition of “Safety” has three components. 1. It must be affordable 2. It must be a school they have a very high degree of certainty in getting accepted to. Finally and very importantly, it must be a school the child would happily attend. Therefore the safety is actually the most important school your child will choose. Matches are those schools that meet your child’s criteria, is strong in their area of study, and have an acceptance rate of over 30% for students in your situation and your child is academically competitive. Reaches can be reaches for two reasons either your child is on the low end of their academic averages or the acceptance rates are quite low and the school is a reach for anyone.
If anyone has any suggestions or correction let me know. I think many of the parents who have been regular attenders to these luncheons will likely know some of this, however, some are sending their first child off to college and some may simply not be informed.
I think the way to convince colleges like Tulane that you might attend is to demonstrate interest. They have non-binding Early Action, which high-stat students should all probably utilize, but students should also investigate regional events with field representatives if they are unable to actually travel to New Orleans for a visit. They are less likely to accept a “shot-gunner” whom they believe applied to them as an after-thought than they are someone whom they believe might well attend. The “top-tier” colleges are so brutally selective now, that colleges like Tulane know some high-stat kids will be shut out of their top choices. They will use merit packages to attract those students once they have their acceptances lined up.
I see the issue of schools rejecting high stats kids as something of an urban legend (at least in my neck of the woods). Everyone “knows” someone who got into Princeton but was rejected from Muhlenberg, or got into Harvard but rejected from U Mass (this was an in-state kid). The reality was that the Muhlenberg reject got into Princeton early, never completed the M application, and got a letter asking “if you are still interested, we never got your transcript which we need in order to complete your application”, etc. The Harvard kid did the reverse- had his scores and transcript sent but never did the application, which generated an auto-email, “if you are interested in U Mass you need to complete an application”. So not instances of a kid who was actually rejected by the safety school- but kids who never actually applied (y’know, which is kind of a requirement no matter how brilliant you are).
It is not that tough to “show the love” to your safety school in the day of email and the internet.
When I interviewed for Brown I was amazed by the number of kids who claimed they couldn’t find a single safety school. Heck- I could name 20, and that was before CC, and before online web tours.
@pittsburghscribe, why would Beloit, which is among the top 50 undergrad institutions per capita at sending students on to get science and engineering PhDs (just behind Duke and better than Dartmouth, Columbia, and UPenn) not be a good fit for a high-stats kid?
Clearly, the top students at Beloit do well, like almost all LACs, the faculty are almost certainly nurturing there, and unlike at most Ivies/Ivy-equivalents (where merit money is impossible or close to impossible), a 1450 M+CR SAT kid may even get some merit money thrown their way.
So let’s say we have a high-stats kid. There are more high-stats kids than there are tip-top elite colleges that will accept them, so some of the high-stats kids are going to lose in this particular game of musical chairs. When a particular high-stats kid is looking for safeties, they should ask themselves where the other kids who lost the musical chairs game end up.
It’s not as if one high-stats kid doesn’t get into tip-top elite colleges, but all the other high-stats kids do, and therefore our unlucky applicant is doomed to be surrounded with his inferiors wherever he goes to school. Rather, there are lots of high-stats kids who end up at schools somewhat lower on the scale, whether because they were rejected by tiptop schools or they can’t afford to attend a tiptop school. So our high-stats applicant just has to figure out where the other high-stats kids not at elite schools are ending up, and apply there. When the high-stats kid gets over himself or herself and starts to look at schools a little lower on the scale, they’ll discover that the other schools have plenty of smart, high-achieving students just like himself or herself.
lvvcsf: You have a great start. The points I would add to would be to discuss Net Price Calculators as a guide to financial aid and to understand the difference between a school that meets full need and one that doesn’t. Also, that some schools count home equity as a potential source of tuition funds.
Another is that if a student wants merit aid, they need to look carefully at the financial aid/scholarship section of the schools website - some give no merit money. Also, merit money at those highly ranked schools that give it is very competitive. Many schools may give a few thousand to a lot of kids, but that doesn’t go very far in paying for a $60K+ school. The student must be over the middle 50-percent average on SATs and on GPA (or be in a HS that is well known for being very challenging).
Third, be honest with your kids. Even if you don’t know what you can afford, let them know that you may be willing to raid the retirement fund for Harvard or MIT, but not for NYU or Villanova (just picking random schools) and that the cost will be a consideration.
Finally, that it will be fine and that almost all kids end up blooming where planted.
Okay, maybe Beloit may not be the right fit but what about Lawrence? Willamette? Hendrix? New College of Florida? Dickinson? Austin College? Whitman? The thing is there are many colleges that might be the right fit for that 4.0GPA/1450+ SAT student.
Blossom is right - too often, students tend to cluster and apply to the same five schools. One friend said that during a college visit, there was a little poll. Students were asked how many applied to College A, B, C, D, as well as E where they were visiting? Almost all the students (from the same general region but not from the same high school or even state) raised their hands almost every single time.
Finding the safeties is the hardest part of the college search and too often, it is relegated to the end of the search as an afterthought. Also too often, students and parents think of their safety with contempt as if the school is beneath them but they need a “safety”. If that’s the attitude, then the school is not a safety.
I think the college my daughter finally picked to attend could have been thought as a “safety” but she truly likes it for itself. That her last ACT score is two or three points above the 75th percentile is irrelevant. Her first ACT score was around the 50, maybe 60 percentile. She studied to score higher because she wanted to be a stronger applicant, not to show she was “too good” for the school.
High stats are nothing more than numbers. I can’t imagine that I’m alone in knowing people who burned out early in life or blossomed late. I know brilliant underachievers who are the most scintillating company imaginable, and highly creative people who never fit comfortably into traditional academic niches. Simply because someone scored slightly lower than you on a standardized test does not mean that they are intellectually inferior. The vast majority of people who graduated from Stanford or Harvard a generation ago could not get in today; are they somehow unworthy of association with current students at those universities? I have to question the intellectual sophistication of anyone who even asks these questions. As a point of reference, I have one son who has been a hopeless underachiever for most of his life. He matriculated at an arts college with very low academic criteria (most students are admitted based on auditions or portfolios, into departments with varying degrees of selectivity). His SAT scores were well above the median range, but he certainly encountered classmates with higher ones, but his classmates were creative and shared many of his interests which other “high-stat” kids might not. He has since transferred to a large university. His high school GPA is probably below average there, and his SAT scores (especially the 780 CR) are above, but he does not feel that he is out of place intellectually. He encounters a range of abilities and inclinations. He is in one class that satisfies quantitative subject requirements for liberal arts majors and social science requirements for STEM and Business majors. He enjoys the variety of perspectives. Haven’t others here been shocked to learn that some seemingly dense, obtuse person they encounter graduated from an elite college Phi Beta Kappa?
Thanks mom2and. I’m a bit leery of being the person to broach the subject of NPCs. Most of the ones that I have used seem to be very incomplete and they haven’t been particularly accurate for us. Others seem to be much more accurate and give a decent estimate of grants, loans and scholarships. Because of that I am not completely sold on the idea of using them as a reference for comparing potential costs. I’ll definitely mention it, especially in reference to applying to private colleges which seem to ask more questions and give a more accurate estimate. My oldest D is attending an OOS flagship which according to its NPC she shouldn’t have bothered applying to. It’s NPC showed it was several magnitudes more than we could afford. She did anyway and frankly none of us expected her to be able to attend. She was given a scholarship and grants tied to the scholarship allowing her to attend. I guess it would be a good tool to use to establish limits to a child’s expectation of being able to financially afford an institution. Unexpected news would be good news.
Another thing I have to question is why a high-stats kid can only be comfortable and fit in with other high-stats kids. I absolutely believe that fit and school culture are important, but there’s only a correlation there (and as @woogzmama pointed out, there are some smart people who don’t have high stats; my best friend in college is very smart, extremely personable, thinks outside the box, and almost certainly didn’t do well on standardized tests because when I asked him what his SAT score was many years after graduation, he professed to not remember and took the position that test scores don’t matter (LOL)).
Think of it like an athlete: the top HS football players are recruited by and mostly go to the top programs, but while the percentage of them who make the NFL is higher, many do flop while every year, a not insignificant number of kids from no-name schools get drafted. They clearly were not handicapped by teammates with inferior football ability. So for some kids, being average at a top-tier school is better, but that’s not always true and for some kids, that’s actually worse and being in the top 5% at a lower-tier school is better.
Likewise, for some recruits, being the starting QB for 3-4 years at a lower level school actually prepared them for the NFL better than riding the pine at a football powerhouse for 4 years.
This safety business- like anything else having to do with college reputations- is so regional.
I have a sibling in a state with a “decent but not U Michigan” type flagship which has become very popular with kids from my region. This sibling finds it hilarious that friends and neighbors of ours are willing to pay out of state prices for their flagship- again, a decent but not stellar state school. Many of them are convinced that our own state flagship (very close in the actual rankings to this out of state college) is quite inadequate for little Roger or Sally, but that it’s “worth” stretching financially for the “superior” experience out of state.
I know people in Boston who would stretch to pay for Drexel but not Northeastern- because when we were kids in Boston, Northeastern was a commuter school which wasn’t particularly tough to get admitted to (although has always had some fine and rigorous programs). If you tell them that this is how folks in Philly feel about Drexel they have a meltdown. Just like the various “mental rankings” of Davidson, Vanderbilt, Furman, Elon, Emory- it depends on where you live and what the “buzz” is about a particular school.
And don’t get a long time resident of DC talking about GW- especially in front of parents who have taken on a second mortgage to pay for it!
I agree that kids cluster and there are lots of good schools. But I don’t think that the students at Beloit will be the same as the students at MIT or Harvard. If a school accepts over 50 percent of its applicants it just isn’t likely to have the same calibre of students as a school that accepts 8 percent. If Blossom’s right and it’s just urban legend that students are getting rejected to schools like Tulane and Muhlenberg while getting into schools like Princetown and Harvard than maybe the “safety” issue isn’t as much of a problem. But then we shouldn’t be criticizing students for selecting schools like Dickinson or Whitman to be their safeties.
I dunno. Maybe not rejecting kids outright, but my kid got wait-listed at a couple of schools where he demonstrated boatloads of “interest” and was at or above the 75th percentile for admits. I’m still shaking my head. Not that he was wait-listed (these schools were more “matches” than “safeties”), just that this whole “demonstrated interest” thing everybody talks about pretty much turned out to be the actual “urban myth” in our experience.
FWIW, @lvvcsf, we found the Net Price Calculators HIGHLY accurate for both FAFSA and CSS schools. I would encourage families to run them; there are no guarantees, but they’re pretty eye-opening and a lot families clearly NEED their eyes opened about how expensive college is today.
One more thing, I think I already posted this in this thread, but “safeties” can be problematic for the kid who desires a LAC experience but who is quite advanced in math. As much as he wanted to attend one, my son ended up choosing two large public flagships (our own state’s and another with huge, automatic merit money guaranteed) as his safeties. He applied to them early, was admitted within a few weeks and could focus the rest of his applications on more selective schools. He didn’t even bother applying to some of the great LACs we visited because he was so underwhelmed by their math offerings.
I have found that in general, parents who have not had kids apply to colleges in the past ten years or so have NO IDEA how competitive some schools have gotten, or how much they cost, and are shocked when they find out. (Ditto for medical schools, but that’s another story.)
I do think that aside from admissions, parents and students should be paying attention to graduation rates and requirements, availability of popular classes, and to attrition rates in specific classes and majors.
@pittsburghscribe, as you and many folks have pointed out, the average kid at Beloit will not be the same as the same as the average kid at Harvard, but as I have pointed out many times before, should that matter? Even if the top kids at Beloit do as well as the average Harvard kid?
And who’s criticizing (high-stats) students for selecting Dickinson and Whitman as safeties? Where do you see that? Possibly if that is their only safety (because admission to tiny LACs is idiosyncractic). But otherwise, please point that out.
