<p>The old Groucho Marx line that I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member keeps going off in my head - it is easier, I am realizing, to come up with the reach list in helping S than the matches and the safeties. Is there some accepted wisdom on percentage breakdown in one's applications? Realizing full well that reach means reach, how have those of you who have done, or are doing, these allocations break it down? 1/3 in each category, or more heavily tilted to any one of these categories?</p>
<p>One good safety is enough. As I have written since I first became a participant on CC, a safety school is a school that </p>
<p>1) is pretty much certain to admit my kid, based on its known behavior in acting on admission applications,</p>
<p>2) has a strong program in an area my kid is interested in,</p>
<p>3) is affordable based on its known behavior in acting on financial aid applications,</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>4) is likeable to my kid.</p>
<p>Note that if a school is really a safety school for you, you don't need to apply in the early round to gain an admission acceptance rate advantage, because the school will admit you whenever you apply. And a school that you can't afford, it seems to me, is no safety school, because you won't go there.</p>
<p>Having written the above, I will talk about a likely concrete case for many of us. A lot of us live in states where there is a state "flagship" university that is good enough, affordable enough, and easy enough to get into that it can qualify as a "safety school" for our kids. My state has such a university, suitable for my oldest son's interests. That school has a "rolling admission" process, which means that admission applications are acted on as they are received, rather than being acted on in "early" batch(es) and a "regular" batch. If you know of a safety school with rolling admission that fits your child, your child might as well apply to that school as soon as possible, NOT to get an admission advantage (a safety school should be safe whenever you apply) but to get news of a bird in the hand early in the application season, to build confidence for more speculative applications and to have a financial aid offer to compare to other offers. All early action colleges I am aware of permit simultaneous "rolling admission" applications to other colleges, even the colleges that have what is called "single-choice early action" (SCEA) a la Harvard, Yale, and Stanford (what NACAC calls "restrictive early action").</p>
<p>Good luck to this year's applicants. PLEASE be sure to build your application list from the "safety" on up to include whatever schools you like, while making sure to have a sure-bet school for admission and for affordability that suits your learning desires.</p>
<p>I have to disagree with the "one good safety is enough" thinking. With the baby-boomlet, there is no guarantee these days that any "school will admit you whenever you apply". I would be a lot more cautious and look for more than 1 safety, but I agree with build the list up from the bottom. Just my 2 cents.</p>
<p>Celtic, I think the best advice is to build your list from the bottom up. (Edit: As you can see this is our mantra. :))</p>
<p>If your safety is a truly good one that your child can imagine him/herself attending without breaking out in hives, then s/he only needs one. What constitutes a good safety is questionable. For many it's the State U. That's fine as long as you live in a state with a good school that your kid really wants to attend. If not, for whatever reason, keep looking. They ARE out there.</p>
<p>Another good approach is to identify EA or rolling admissions schools. The premise here is that if you have an admission under your belt you can take more choices in the RD round. Again, this only works if the colleges you're interested in fit the bill. Think about geographic advantage, gender advantage, or in some way going against the grain -- e.g. a male at a school that is weighted toward women, an artist at a sports school.</p>
<p>For me I'd say, 1 or 2 true safeties and whatever number and balance of matches and reaches that you can manage effectively. There are many fine lines between matches and reaches and it's not worth splitting hairs over which column they fall into. In my opinion, more is better if you're in the very selective market. If you have taken the "bird in the hand" approach and already have a sound EA or rolling acceptance then it doesn't matter if the rest of the list are matches or reaches.</p>
<p>(This is not to say that reaches are any better than matches. They're not.)</p>
<p>Love thy safety is not an easy dictum to follow. As you say, it's counterintuitive and reaches are, well, just more readily lovable, especially at the early stages of research. Make sure that you and your kid visit the safeties. Sometimes seeing the campus and meeting kids and faculty can add a lot to the appeal. For sure safety does not mean substandard education. The first step is convince yourself of that.</p>
<p>Several flagship universities with rolling admissions require that a student be admitted by December in order to qualify for the larger merit scholarhips. Furthermore, some popular programs at flagship universities fill up fast - sometimes by November. A third reason to apply early is that many of the flagship universities don't have dorm space for all their students. The first students to pay the dorm deposit get the rooms. (Dorm deposits in these cases are separate from tuition deposits. The dorm deposits do not necessarily commit a student to attend and may be refundable if a student notifies the college he will not attend before a specified deadline.) So there are several reasons to apply early to your flagship university.</p>
<p>Because this is CC, we must have another opinion!</p>
<p>I think every student should have at least 2 safeties, not because I'd be concerned that he doesn't get accepted to one of them, but to allow a choice and in case the kid changes her mind. I think that there is a psychological advantage to having a choice that helps counteract the disappointment of other rejections. Also, students change a lot during senior year, and for many having 2 somewhat different schools to choose from, can be a relief.
My D had 3 safeties, not from pressure by me, but because the 3rd one would have been free and in state, and she wanted an option in case a true family emergency arose, and she wanted to stay close to home - her other choices were close, but OOS.</p>
<p>Ditto the idea of having more than one safety. Obviously, 10 safeties would be going overboard, but 2-3 sounds about right. It gives more flexibility and the safety schools may, for whatever reason, give out very different merit aid packages.</p>
<p>Obviously, this all depends on the kid. My daughter now has 4 safeties on her list, and only one match, which is a little nervewracking for me. However, she told me she'd rather go to one of her safeties than all but one of the matches she's looked at, and I can't argue with that. (And we visited a lot of matches.)</p>
<p>Her four safeties are totally different from each other. She doesn't love any of them -- they all have something "wrong" with them (one is too big, one has a curriculum she's not crazy about, one is nearby, one is not that strong academically). I figure come April, if she has to chose one of them, she has a real choice. She's also got four reaches. So her breakdown is a little unconventional -- 4-1-4 -- but it works for her.</p>
<p>sly: That makes perfect sense to me. The premise of a school being a "match" is that the student actually wants to go there. If she doesn't like them, then they aren't matches, no matter what the stats are.</p>
<p>Sly vt: remind your daughter that there is no "perfect" school....all of them will have something "wrong" with them as you say she has noted about her 4 safeties.
However, even her reach schools, if she's accepted, may not be totally "perfect" for a student. There is always something to be compromised on, be it, size, dorms, food, exact location, cost, "good/bad" professors, activites, etc., etc, etc.</p>
<p>I agree with the more than one safety for the average student. Some flagship universities, such as UVM, fill up with OOS applicants who edge out in-state average students, as discussed in another thread.</p>
<p>I am not an advocate of most students applying to any reaches!</p>
<p>"I am not an advocate of most students applying to any reaches!"</p>
<p>What about students who might have a shot at the very top schools? Those schools are reaches for everybody.</p>
<p>"What about students who might have a shot at the very top schools? Those schools are reaches for everybody."</p>
<p>That's what we have. Our list is going to be something like 6-0-2. I think he'd be very happy with at least one and probably both of the safeties.</p>
<p>A possible solution to picking a safety you can live with is to pick an area of study you might be interested in and then look for schools which are less selective in general, but particularly strong in that area. Schools like Indiana University for business, or University of Iowa for creative writing, have Top 10 departments in those fields (Iowa's creative writing program is Top 5), but admit students on a general basis, followed by admission into the program after sopnmore year. Others, such as Purdue University for engineering, or University of Missouri-Columbia for journalism, substantially raise the bar for direct freshman admission into these particular programs (vis-a-vis entry into the school in general), but allow easy determination as to whether they are true safeties even in those programs because the admission is wholly numbers driven.</p>
<p>If you don't know what you want to study, picking a safety can be difficult. If you do, it's very possible that your safety could become your school of choice.</p>
<p>All good posts. But how do you gauge what IS a safety school for you?</p>
<p>a. if your SAT scores are higher than the mid-range published for that school?
b. if your SAT scores are at the upper end of the published score mid-range?
c. same as a and b but with average GPA?
d. other?</p>
<p>It's important to look at the school's acceptance rate. I think it's risky to assume a school with less than a 50% acceptance rate is a safety, even if you score in the top quartile. There are exceptions to this, of course -- for example, a student on the East coast looking at schools in the mid-west or West coast.</p>
<p>I've been surprised by some people on CC who think that because they have high SATs, they can view some selective schools as safeties (schools like Wesleyan, for example, which accepted 25% of applicants last year). Once a school's acceptance rate falls below 30%, I think it's a reach for everyone, no matter how stellar the grades and SATs (except recruited athletes, because that's a whole different world).</p>
<p>That's my barometer, but I'd love to hear other thoughts.</p>
<p>I suggest applying to AT LEAST two "sure bets" and if you are looking for a merit scholarship then there should be several more in that category. Acceptance rates, especially for large schools, can be tricky to interpret. There are also schools that have a divison for kids with much lower stats and that may give a false overall acceptance rate because when you look on line at the class profiles you'll see that the "lower" divison can have averages well over 100 points less than the remainder of the student body. This group may include students that did not get into the "regular" college but are calculated into the acceptance rate even though they only "got in" to the lower stats program. (NYU and BU for example) Some schools might have a high acceptance rate for engineers but a low one for their college of communications or their BA-MD program. So an applicant could get turned down for the accelerated MD program but offered a spot in another college within the university. So they are "accepted" but decline because that's not the program they want. You have to look beyond the surface numbers and drill down to the real data and recognize the difference between data on "admitted" students VS students that are actually ENROLLED. </p>
<p>Some kids are interested in Honors Programs at schools where they are on the higher end of the applicant pool. When you look at the stats of the Honors Program averages, such as PENN State, they are in the same range as your reach school. (e.g. Univ. Of Delaware's Honors program stats, about 14% of student body, are about the same as PENN) In the last few years we have all seen qualified students turned down from their "sure bet" school. These are interesting times and while the rule of thumb related to where you fall in the stats range is important it's not full proof which is why we hear of kids getting rejected by schools that on paper "should" have admitted them.</p>
<p>I think sly has given a pretty good account of what a safety is. If you're a visual sort of thinker, you can see it illustrated graphically on those scattergrams some high schools have: For most colleges that get a significant number of applications from that school, you can look at the scattergram and see, effectively, a function of SAT scores and GPA, and 80-90% of the applicants on or above that line get accepted. In my mind, that school qualifies as a safety for those applicants. The line may shift somewhat over time -- and it probably has shifted everywhere in the past few years due to demographics -- but you can see the school's admissions philosophy in action, and make a fairly accurate prediction. That line, by the way, is not the same thing at all as the average SAT/GPA, or the 75th percentile of enrolled students.</p>
<p>By the same token, with some schools it is easy to see that there is NO line above which 90%, 80%, or even 50% of applicants get accepted. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, MIT . . . you can have perfect grades and perfect scores, and still get rejected. It's a "reach" for everyone. Chicago and Hopkins, by the way, are somewhat in that category. They may have over 30% acceptance rates overall, but their acceptance rates for kids with 1500 SATs and 4.whatever GPAs is not much higher than 50-60%. There's no 80-90% level.</p>
<p>I think my son's safeties are safeties because his SATs are better than 75th %ile and his rank looks good too. 61% are in top 10% of class at the safety - we think he's in top 1%. We've also looked at scattergrams for his high school and no one with his GPA and SAT scores have been rejected in the last two years. In addition like many engineering schools it has a very high acceptence rate -78%. Despite pretty high averages for SATs and ranks.</p>