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<p>Effectively, any school that gives an EA acceptance with sufficient financial aid (if needed) becomes a safety. That means that the student no longer needs to apply to any school s/he likes less that those schools (regardless of whether they were previously considered safety, match, or reach schools).</p>
<p>" think the actual # of reaches that a student applies to is less important than their understanding that these are reaches and that they shouldn’t count on them. I think it’s much better to work under the assumption that you’ll likely get into your safeties and some of your matches, and that the reaches are a pleasant surprise but not anything to count on. If you have that attitude towards the reaches, then it doesn’t really matter how many you apply to. The problem I see on CC is that people apply to multiple reaches thinking that at least 2 of them are going to pan out. Much better to be pleasantly surprised than harshly disappointed, IMO. " - excellent advice from PizzaG.</p>
<p>I would say, at least one safety (state flagship in your case, it sounds like. two or three “matches” if you can find them and as many “reaches” as you as you can afford at $70 a pop.</p>
<p>Our DD’s GC told us that “18 was way too many,” so I guess 6-12 is a good range. there are a lot of people that apply to over twenty these days.</p>
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<p>Look, I don’t want to be a hypocrite about this; my kids went to a school where almost everyone had great test scores. But I do think this line of thought is somewhat spurious. The top quartile at Amherst, say, is about 115 kids per class. So what if the 75th percentile at a public university has test scores 300 points lower than at Amherst? You don’t think there are likely to be 115 kids in a class there with enough brainpower to stimulate your kid? Or 450? Or do you think that’s not enough, and that the Amherst kids must be desperate for more intellectual stimulation? </p>
<p>Basically, it’s usually possible to find the Harvard or the Amherst embedded in a large public university. It’s not a luxury to have intellectual peers, but it’s a huge luxury – the essential luxury of top-whatever institutions – to have everyone you happen to bump into or see on the street be a likely intellectual peer (as determined by standardized tests, of course). In the Can’t-Always-Get-What-You-Want-But-You-Get-What-You-Need department: You don’t NEED to be certain the drunken boy hitting on you at the mixer would score at least a 2300 if he were sober. You do need to find a bunch of students in your major whose ideas and intellects you respect, and a bunch of people like that outside your major who can widen your intellectual world. And that’s something you can get at hundreds of institutions, not dozens. You may have to look a little harder, but it’s there. And, thanks to the horrible conditions for PhDs these days, the faculty quality is there, too.</p>
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<p>I could not agree more. This is always a dilemma for high-statted kids whose solid “matches” are schools that accept something like 30% or less of applicants, and who are realistic candidates at schools that accept even fewer, particularly those who do not live in the 10-15 states that have strong state flagships. My state system has what you might call a “main campus,” not a flagship. 
It is even more of an issue if you need really substantial FA, and even a fabulous $30K annual merit award at a slam-dunk safety LAC or private college, which even a highly outstanding student is unlikely to get, would potentially result in loans of $80K at graduation.</p>
<p>I eventually got my kid to agree to one safety, a fine university, but he certainly didn’t love it. I’m thankful that it was not his only choice, because as it turned out their merit/need combo was among the lowest awards he received. He needed to grab the brass ring of a need-blind school that met need without substantial loans, and he did. For which I will forever be grateful. But for a while, I had everyone here cautioning me that he might turn out to be the next Andison. (A legendary CC figure, like Curmudgeon’s D, mentioned upthread )</p>
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<p>I would say that your suspicions regarding Yale are justified. They rejected the 33 ACT valedictorian stellar EC kid of a friend of mine, even though both of his parents were Yale Med school/fellowship grads and the kid got into a number of other Ivies, one of which he is attending. (The U of C waitlisted him, which still amazes me. Admissions are just nuts.) They also had the bad taste to defer and then reject my kid. (They apparently screwed up and didn’t consider him a legacy, which they should have, but that’s another story.) His scores were higher but his grades were lower. Yale is just fishing for more kids to reject. If your kid likes the place, by all means apply. But receiving a mailing means nothing.</p>
<p>Yeah, DD has also been receiving UChi brochures almost weekly. I think it is because she stopped at their table at a huge college fair. Her stats are not close to their ballpark, so I figure they just want to raise their rejections for USNWR purposes. Her G’ma is an alumna, but I think that was before fun died.</p>
<p>JHS: I don’t think you’re being quite fair. Let’s take Amherst, a high reach (13% acceptance rate), Colby, a high match (29%), and Elon, a safety (57%). At Amherst, the 25/50 range is 2020-2310 (my D’s scores would be at about the 75%) so my D might be in a class probably half of which (given the vagaries of the SAT) are about at the same level: the teacher can pitch the class to that group. At Colby, where I think my daughter would be perfectly happy, the range is 1880-2140; my daughter would still be in the top quartile. The teacher would be pitching the class slightly lower, but still on a level that would engage her completely. At Elon, the range is 1680-1970. The mean for her high school is 1660, and that includes all students taking the test, not just those in her AP classes: the teacher would be pitching the class, necessarily, to a level no higher than “honors” level at her high school. If you’re in a class of 20, being among a bunch of students with broadly similar scores is <em>very different</em> from having a score 300 points above three-quarters of the kids around you, and being the only one in the room with that score. One of the things I found most exhilarating about college was getting out of my high school, being free and inspired to be just as smart as I could be, without being held back by the plodding pace of the classes and the generally low interest of my classmates in the things I found so fascinating. Certainly, there were kids in my high school who shared my interests, but there were not enough of them in my classes to make the classes themselves all that engaging (with the exception of Honors English, God bless Miss F). </p>
<p>SATs are not, of course, the be-all and end-all in measuring student quality, but cumulatively, they do indicate something about the nature of the students at the college.</p>
<p>I don’t know Marysidney, for Geneseo I only find numbers for Math and CR. From what I see 75th percentile scores are 700 for Math and 690 for CR. Those seem pretty impressive for a State school. My daughter scored 790 for Math and I just can’t imagine thinking that kids who “only” scored 700 just weren’t her peers?</p>
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It seems to me that this issue might be more easily avoided at very large schools, where there might be honors colleges, higher level courses, well-known challenging courses (as well as well-known easy courses), that might result in a high-achieving student being able to have most classes with others at a similar level. This might indeed be harder at a smaller school.</p>
<p>Highbury: you’re right, my mistake: I was looking at the wrong scores. Geneseo would be a perfectly good match–but not a safety, with a 37% admittance rate.</p>
<p>DD applied initially to only three schools…pretty much safeties/match schools for her. She loved all three schools and felt they would meet her needs well. One was rolling admissions and two were EA. She had all three acceptances by Christmas. It was nice. HOWEVER her (stupid) parents insisted she apply to one school nearer to home just in case she changed her mind…so she did but the swap was we let her apply to an ultimate reach (waste of time and money…she was not a good candidate for acceptence there). In retrospect, we should have left it at three.</p>
<p>DS applied to seven schools. His situation was a little different as he was a music performance major and had to audition so really…no school was a “safety” school. </p>
<p>I will say…our kids did a lot of research and hunting into schools BEFORE they applied. They didn’t waste their time and our money applying to a lot of schools just for the sake of applying. They really applied to well thought out choices…narrowed down from a much larger initial list.</p>
<p>marysidney, with all due respect I think you are misdiagnosing your high school problem. There were at least four things that could have been wrong in your high school classes:
– the kids were not smart enough on average
– the kids were not interested on average
– the kids were immature
– the teachers were not so smart, interested, or skilled themselves</p>
<p>Three of those issues more or less go away in a college context, and when that happens the first turns out to maybe be not the issue at all.</p>
<p>I’ll approach this from another side. My sister-in-law is a professor who is internationally famous in her field. She is fearsomely smart (and more than a little spacey). She went to an Ivy League college as an undergraduate. She teaches at a large public university, where she has stayed out of choice despite many offers to leave. (The reputation of her department is excellent, and she was the founder and chair of an interdisciplinary program there.) Over the years, she has visited and taught at Ivy universities and at tippy-top ranked LACs. She says, and I have to believe her, that the main difference between the undergraduates she teaches at her home institution and those at the ultraselective LACs is that the latter are richer (or better funded) and do not have to spend as much time earning their tuition and living expenses. They are also more complacent and more conventional. In terms of intelligence and quality of work, she doesn’t see any difference at all, but she finds the students at her home institution both more annoying (for the drama in their lives) and more interesting. </p>
<p>Now, the 75th percentile of test scores for enrolled students at her home institution is at least 300 points below that of the fancy LAC, but that isn’t really relevant. At her home institution, lots of the students leave, or go into easy fields. She doesn’t teach big introductory courses anywhere. The students she meets have a high degree of interest in her field, and have gotten themselves a base of knowledge already. At that point, their SAT scores have pretty much ceased to be relevant at all, at least to what they are doing in their field of interest.</p>
<p>Finally, you should note that I was NOT comparing Elon with Amherst. I was talking about the Amherst that could be embedded within a much larger public university. Elon isn’t much larger, or much cheaper, so the likelihood of finding an Amherst embedded there is probably less.</p>
<p>I think maturity is a key issue here. I have 2 Ds, one who was a high achiever immediately and throughout HS, and the other who blossomed later. D1 as I said picked the right school for the right reasons when she was a junior and went one-and-done with admissions. D2 couldn’t have narrowed her search any more quickly than she did - she grew up a lot senior year and needed that time.</p>
<p>On top of that I’d say that while D1 is a quick, bright learner with an excellent memory, the fact that she got better grades overall in HS doesn’t put her in a higher intellectual category than D2. D2 isn’t so great in math, although managed to pick it up her last 2 years of HS. They ended up with the same ACT in the end.</p>
<p>Please remember that many HS kids both 1) mature a lot by the time they get to college, including intellectually; and 2) have specific talents and interests that they can pursue more full-time in college. Some of those “low” grades and “low” scores reflect a “well-pointed” student (also referred to as “lopsided,” but I’m trying to slant this as positively as possible). There are kids who are incredibly impressive in college in their area - but you’d never know meeting them now that they struggled in other subjects in HS.</p>
<p>After seeing my 2 girls through HS, I would say it was only a higher maturity level in 9th and 10th grade that made my top-stats kid any different from my lesser-stats kid. By the time they graduated they were about equal, and in college I expect D2 will blossom even further.</p>
<p>I share MarySidney’s concerns, but agree that a large university - especially one with honors programs can do a lot to mitigate that concern. I can say with certainty that unless your interest is computer science, my younger son with an SAT score 150 points below his brother would contribute a lot more to the classroom and you’d much, much rather sit next to him at lunch.</p>
<p>Hey, mathmom- what are you saying about computer science majors? Boring and messy eaters?? LOL (my son is going into CS too!)</p>
<p>So, a large state school is a good safety for a high-stat kid, and he’d be able to find lots of kids just like him–I’m sure that’s true. But if said kid has no desire whatever to attend a large school, that’s going to be a safety that he’ll attend if all else fails, rather than one he’d be excited about attending (as he is always admonished to find). (I’m not, at all, talking about whether he’d learn to like it, or whether he’s wrong to want to attend a small liberal arts school, or whether he’s a spoiled brat in not being able to immediately suck it up and be happy about where he got in; that’s another group of topics altogether). There are, in fact, lots of kids who will end up with that kind of safety, because the schools they would be excited about attending have, by nature, selectivity rates that disqualify them as safety schools, even when they are match schools at which those kids have a more-than-reasonable shot. Such students will probably need to apply to a larger number of schools, more match schools, than kids who do have a safety that they love, or an EA possibility. (Not a single one of the schools on my D’s list is EA. Small LACs don’t seem to do that.) In the end, I think the ideal of a safety-you-love may not be realistic for everyone. A safety you can accept may be more reasonable, along with a strategy of 6 or more matches and a couple of reaches. I think what fails is a strategy of 6 or more reaches, 2 or 3 matches, and a safety of last resort.</p>
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<p>That’s a very interesting insight. It certainly makes sense out here in the midwest, where going to the Big 10 / state flagship schools is seen as a smart choice among the good students, because of the relative cost compared to privates.</p>
<p>Mary- I sympathize. But from what I’ve observed, sometimes changing the nomenclature can help solve the problem. A kid who loves Swarthmore may have schools like Middlebury and Bowdoin and Connecticut College in the Matchier category… so to tell that kid that he/she should suck it up and apply to Penn State or Rutgers (depending on geography) may well leave the kid frustrated that the safety is barely tolerable.</p>
<p>But there are dozens of colleges with many of the characteristics of Swarthmore but easier admissions (YMMV). Rhodes? Earlham? Trinity? Wittenburg? They won’t be “safeties” in the sense that they are less numbers driven and more eclectic in their admissions than the big state U’s… but a savvy guidance counselor can help you figure out a list of “strong possibles” which are similar in campus culture and intellectual fever of the preferred schools, but much more likely admissions.</p>
<p>I don’t buy the “last resort” concept. Most of the kids I know who ended up mismatched at their last resort did so because a parent refused to think “out of the box” geographically. Yes- if you need your kid an hour from home, you may end up at your last resort. But if you’re willing to go where Greyhound goes…</p>
<p>My observation is that kids who ended up at the “last resort” safety had too large a gap in selectivity between the safety and the matches/reaches. Some of them applied to a number of reaches and the safety–and some of those kids are going to the safety. That’s OK if it’s a safety they love, but not so much if they don’t.</p>
<p>LOL. I love my computer geek, and he’s brilliant, but a conversationalist he’s not!</p>
<p>I think it’s easy to find LAC safeties, and tech safeties for a top student, but I didn’t feel there was a large selection of research universities of a medium size. That was the area where my younger son had to make compromises and some of his potential safeties were bigger than he wanted.</p>
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<p>I dunno - at UIUC, with $27,000 and up COA in-state and very limited assistance, either need-based or merit - it doesn’t take an enormous FA package from a ~$40-45K private to be a better deal.</p>