Safe / Target / Reach List

An online article, “15 Best Value Small Colleges for a Chemistry Degree,” could reinforce some of your son’s current choices or help him add others. Bowdoin and Hamilton from your list are included. Your son might also want to consider schools across a range of selectivity such as Swarthmore, Union, Colby and Wooster.

If a flexible curriculum becomes a priority, then schools such as Amherst, Hamilton, Grinnell and Brown would be notable on that basis.

URochester might offer an alternative to the similarly-sized CWRU that would be worth exploring.

Emory would be a target if ED1. If not, reach.

@NewEngParent ,

Yes, your second list of safeties is more accurate. I don’t want too critique too much at this stage, but your long initial list is mostly reaches/matches. Haverford is too selective to be considered a match. Even though your son seems like a very strong student, admissions can be wildly unpredictable. That said, let’s say that he applied to all the true match schools on your initial list (and I’m counting your original safety schools as matches, places like Holy Cross and Lafayette). Sure, I’d like his chances of getting into a couple of them.

If you’re not familiar with CollegeData.com, you should visit it and use its admissions tracker. Type in the name of the school, which will take you to a new screen. Select any option from the pull-down menu (doesn’t matter), and then you’ll see the admissions tracker option on the right. What you’ll see is a ten-year database of students who have shared their stats (and sometimes ECs, plus personal notes, but usually just stats: GPA and test scores) and who have also shared their results: accepted (including, sometimes, “Will Attend”), denied, and waitlisted. There are a few other results like deferred, applied, and withdrawn, but I suggest filtering out those results. The information can be quite sobering.

Since your focus seems to be the northeast, a reach would be Bowdoin, a match would be Holly Cross, and a safety would be U of Maine. LAC safeties might be Hobart and William Smith, or Ursinus, or Allegheny, or Drew U, or Wheaton (MA).

I know. I know. It seems like your son would be a slam dunk for Holy Cross and Lafayette (and I sort of feel like he would be), but with acceptance rates of 37% and 28%, they are simply not in the “for sure” category. A safety is a shoo-in, an absolute. For a very strong student like your son, safeties would be schools with a 50% acceptance rate or higher (and affordable, of course; it’s not a safety if it’s not truly an option).

W&M is not a safety. Only 30% OOS admit rate.

Overall, I think this is an excellent list @NewEngParent . A number of people have commented (correctly) that some of the schools are mischaracterized as targets or safeties, but IMHO the number and relative difficulty for admission to the schools make it extremely likely that your S will be admitted into at least a couple of these schools. You can add a “true” safety (i.e., essentially everyone admitted) to be 100% sure, but I don’t think you need to alter the distribution overall. After all, in the end your S will enroll at only one school…

Now, having said all that, you absolutely should adjust your expectations. Without hooks, many of the schools have much lower chances of admission than you might realize. My likelihood judgements (including silly, wildly guesstimated 80% confidence intervals) for your S:

Princeton University: 0% to 4%
Dartmouth: 5% to 25%
Williams College: 10% to 30%
Bowdoin College: 15% to 35%
Emory University: 25% to 45%
Haverford College: 20% to 35%
Davidson College: 25% to 40%
Oberlin College: 30% to 45%
Hamilton College: 30% to 45%
Case Western Reserve University: 40% to 65%
College of William & Mary: 25% to 40%
Lafayette College: 50% to 75%
College of the Holy Cross: 55% to 80%
Dickinson College: 55% to 80%

The good news: even using the lower bounds for the estimates above, the likelihood of getting in to at least one school would be 99.3%

@NewEngParent - the best advice we got as high-school underclassman parents was to start the search with a few local schools that are quite different: size (large, med, small), setting (big city / small city / rural), and possibly type (public / private). Even if none of them are on your potential list to apply to, it’s an easy inexpensive way to start learning some things. For example, one of our first stops was a big state school (only 45 minutes away so almost no cost to visit). This school has close to 20,000 undergrad students. My son immediately learned he didn’t want to to go a large university. He didn’t know he felt that way until he visited. We immediately scratched dozens of schools of the list and saved a bunch of time and money visiting large schools. My daughter learned the same about not wanting a college in a rural setting. Again, she had no idea she felt that way until the visit.

@2KansasKids – I like this idea in theory but I don’t think it works for all kids. My D. toured big and small schools and saw pros and cons with each. So she applied to small, medium and big schools. Her thinking and interests continued to evolve throughout senior year, and It was only during accepted students visits that she realized she wanted a small school.

OP, regarding right mix. My high stats kid applied to 3 schools with right at 50% acceptance rates as safeties, and 8 targets/reaches (I can’t really distinguish between the two) that had acceptance rates from 6 to 30%, with most hovering between 15 to 18%). [Plus some UK colleges but hard to put them in the same categories and I’m not counting them here.]

She was accepted to all 3 safeties plus 4 target/reaches, waitlisted at 2 and rejected at 2. Overall, she was pleased, and it felt like the right mix. Eleven is a lot of applications and fees, but if you’re going for colleges with 25% or less admit rates, then applying to 7 or 8 target/reaches plus safeties is a good way to play the odds.

You know this, but focus on essays, recs and demonstrated interest. That’s what sets a student apart.

I know you already have it on the list, but I think Hamilton would be a great option for him.

@Hapworth thanks for the CollegeData tip, I’ll look at that.

@foosondaughter, I need a stats person like you. Working the percentages really seems like the unfair advantage that colleges & universities have…plus they do this as a profession, we’re just doing it for 1 kid.

@2KansasKids, this is a great idea. We did tour a small, mid & large university last year and he’s done it with his school. The feedback I got from my son was “nothing too large” - which rules out UCSD, UMass, “U anything over 10k undergrads” - thus we’ve been thinking small to medium. As I’ve said, we’ve been on the Bates & Bowdoin campus’s a lot, so we know that feel. He does really like that size… but I wonder if that’s because we’ve been on those campus’s since he was small? I think of all the opportunities/things that a Case, Dartmouth, Emory, William/Mary can offer cause they are slightly bigger and I wonder if he’ll miss something. @Hapworth’s point that there’s a lot to love about a LAC is valid. And yes @Trixy34, I see Hamilton is a great place, I know nothing about it. And @wisteria100’s point about Holy Cross’s full tuition for Latin (again know nothing about Holy Cross) made my son go, “Yep, let’s visit & apply there.”

@AlmostThere2018 that’s an interesting point about UK schools. My son’s a dual EU citizen, so in places like Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, the UK (for now until Brexit) his tuition cost there is either cheap or free. But We don’t know those systems and it’s been tough enough just finding something in the US.

If he’s willing to consider staying in Maine you might want to check out BBC scholarships or programs for Maine kids. I know these schools like qualified locals. All three are need based only but I know that Bates and Colby have programs specifically designed to encourage applications form Maine students and I would guess Bowdoin does as well.

@AlmostThere2018 - “but I don’t think it works for all kids”. If your kid is good with any size, setting, and type, then maybe not. But your D also learned pros/cons with each visit, which was valuable. It is still an easy inexpensive way to start the process and I highly recommend.

@2KansasKids – I agree with local visits as a great way to start. I was just pointing out that not all kids are going to know right away based on those early visits what size campus they are looking for which I thought was what you were implying – but I may have wrongly inferred.

I think for many kids what type they’re looking for isn’t an immediate known – so I recommend not winnowing down to one type of college too early in the process. Based on early reactions steer in one direction (mostly bigs, mostly LACs, mostly urban, or whatever), but throw in a few ‘outlier’ visits along the way (especially if it’s easy to visit nearby alternatives) to ‘pressure test’ their assumptions or level of certainty about what feels right.

@AlmostThere2018 - now I get what you are saying, early reactions could change. That is a good point. However with literally thousands of choices you have to start deciding on some criteria and for us the first was size.

Is it reasonable to use the Bernoulli process to calculate one’s college acceptance probability? Is there a better probability method to use? (I’m guessing it’s some sort of probability calculation [explicit or tacit] that is helping to drive up the number of applications students make.) When I was going to college, I just applied to 4 colleges and went to 1.

Well, certainly the probability of getting into any given school is not the same as any other school. But perhaps you’re asking if an acceptance to one school is independent of acceptances to others… I think the answer to this is no (in a statistical sense), since the schools are all judging a student on essentially the same set of credentials (i.e., what they get in the Common app). This is why you see clustered results – students who get in to all or none the schools to which they apply – more than expected just based on probabilities alone.

True for most of those, but not Ireland or the UK: you have to have been tax-resident in the EU for 3 of the last 5 years. It can still be better value- lower sticker price than most US universities, and in many places Classics is a 3 year course (not 4). Info is really good online (and there are a lot of people on CC with experience of them).

However, although I am a big fan of the international experience, I’m guessing that the less-flexible system (you study one subject/specific group of subjects) will not appeal to a student with a classics/science split. While there are a few “liberal arts” courses (most notably in the Netherlands, where you would pay EU fees and the courses are taught in English), they are very much the exception: you almost always specialize from the beginning. There are a bunch of other factors that might be off-putting, but no point going into them unless the European universities come into play!