I’d be very careful with that analysis. Your handicapping is probably not as accurate as you think it is. You’re definitely ignoring correlation. I would dial down the 95% expectation quite a bit.
“If you consider targets 50-50, and you apply to at least 5 or 6 of them, you’ve got a 95%+ chance of getting in to at least one” 
DEAD wrong!
The “chances” of getting into ONE individual college have NOTHING to do with the chances of getting into another!
If you put 5 coins into 5 separate slot machines , or buy 5 tickets for 5 separate state lotteries, [ which is essentially what you are doing with each college application] , you DONT have a greater chance of winning at any ONE of them than any other gambler in each state or casino [ or applicant].
“What do you mean by using EA wisely?”
About half of the schools on my D’s list (similar in size and selectivity to the safety/target schools that are being discussed here) offered EA. Her GC had the rising seniors begin work on their essays in the summer, and then take a mandatory 1-day class on the Common App during the first week in August. Consequently, D had half of her apps in by mid-September, and several interviews under her belt. By Thanksgiving she already had two acceptances (including 1 CTCL school) with great merit aid.
I can’t begin to tell you the sense of relief this brought to her and to us. That period between Thanksgiving and March 1 becomes very long and very stressful for many seniors. Friends of D’s who were fortunate to have one or two acceptances in the bag at that point were really able to relax a bit. As a parent, the drop in tension that first acceptance brought (along with a scholarship that said ‘we really want you’) was incredibly appreciated and valued.
There is a very wide swath of EA acceptance dates. The school that D ultimately chose accepted her EA at the end of January, two and a half months after her first EA admission (in part because of a dramatic increase in applications to that school this year). She did not apply ED anywhere because merit aid was important to us, and she did not have a clear favorite in the fall, despite almost 20 campus visits to that point.
I agree with other posters, like @LeftofPisa, who have suggested focusing on the match schools rather than safeties. There are so many matches out there that your D really might love (such as SLU, Denison, Skidmore, on and on), I would concentrate on finding a handful of those where she can see herself thriving. As mentioned upthread, our experience was that our D with stats similar to those of your D got into all 8 of the LACs she applied to (with merit aid ranging from $5K to $24K). Paying close attention to EA was a big part of her success IMO.
By EA I do not mean Early Decision - great if you have a clear favorite, but my kids didn’t. I mean applying EA or rolling admissions to every school on your list that offers it. Some merit schools don’t have EA but will invite you to apply early anyway (Bard’s one day program, or RPI sent a letter to my older NMF son inviting hm to use a priority application that would give him a decision within 3 weeks of receiving 1st quarter senior grades.) Getting into a school early, especially if they also offer merit aid definitely makes the rest of the waiting for a reach heavy list a lot more relaxing. And if the EA school reject or defer you (older son got that RPI acceptance early, but was deferred from both MIT and Caltech) it means you know that you might need to either expand your notion of what is a match school or take another look at the soft parts of your application to see what could be improved. Younger son got into a reach EA he never dreamed would accept him which let him know that his application apparently looked better to colleges than it did to us.
Regarding targets and predictions, we tried to stay away from making any assumptions about acceptance although I understand the impulse to do so!
Yes, @CHD2013 and @menloparkmom have valid points. There is a flip side to that, though. At a great many LACs you can get a bump just by visiting. One CTCL LAC told us that nearly 50% of their applicants in a recent year were “stealth” applicants, students that they didn’t previously know and who had not visited campus. So in at least some cases, the visit (and especially a second visit) can increase your odds. Once a college is reasonably assured that an applicant can do the work (indicated by test scores, GPA and rec letters) much of the rest of it comes down to where they think they will make their yield. While this may not be the case in the very top LACs, it is certainly a factor in many schools that would be on your D’s match list.
@menloparkmom Actually the math is correct. If you don’t get into one school the chance of getting into the NEXT school is still the same, as they’re independent of each other, however the chance of getting into one (any one, not a particular one) over many applications is much greater than 50%. Think of it as the chance of getting heads when you flip a coin being 50-50 if you flip it once, and the chance of getting heads the next time you flip it is 50-50, but if you flip it 100 times the likelihood of getting at least one heads (in that 100 flips) is huge. B-)
However – I’m not a fool and I don’t think it’s actually a 50-50 chance, like flipping a coin. There are many variables and what applies to one school will probably apply to similar schools, increasing the weight of positives & negatives in an application. I was just generalizing to demonstrate why I thought applying to more schools was better in her case. Clearly using numbers was inflammatory… Mea culpa and apologies if I wasn’t clear.
And yes, I understand (as much as most parents, anyway) how the need based FA works, which is why I’ve got a very detailed spreadsheet with things like the average breakdown of need-based financial aid by gift and self-help. One of the very telling statistics about a school is the average debt upon graduation…but in any case, I’m just trying to educate myself as much as possible.
@MidwestDad3 Thank you for the explanation! My confusion was that I was reading EA as early acceptance rather than early action…that’s why I asked. 
I’m pretty unfamiliar with early action as none of the colleges top on D’s list offer it, but I completely agree with the stress-relief of a non-binding acceptance! We’d love to go that route. Also, we have already toured a bunch of the smaller LACs & started the interview process, and D is a legacy x2 at Bryn Mawr, so there’s that.
@mathmom I had no idea that you could get invited to apply early. Fascinating! And congrats to your son.
@LeftofPisa I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you telling my about your daughter receiving merit from BMC with similar stats… and I’ve also heard that MHC gives better merit aid.
Finding an EA safety is the one bit of advice I always give to those starting the process. For my DDs it was Tulane. Their stats put them at the top of the range and by Thanksgiving they each had an acceptance with merit money. Huge, huge, stress relief. DD2 really loved the school, and although in the end she chose elsewhere it remained in high contention right to the very end. State schools often have EA, and even if they do not offer as much merit aid being into somewhere early makes the process much less painful. Do the essays over the summer so apps can go in very early.
D15 pretty much followed what @MidwestDad3 outlined. She applied to five (of seven) schools EA submtting the five apps on October 15th. She received acceptances to three, maybe four by Thanksgiving. That made things so much nicer and less stressful. If she had received rejections, she had another list of schools to apply RD. FWIW, D did not make her final decision until April.
One thing I noticed was LACs in the midwest and south were less expensive and more generous with the merit aid. You may want to nudge your twins to look a little further west or south.
@1012mom, I just looked up Tulane, and it says financial aid notification is on a rolling basis starting March 15. Yet you had an offer with financial aid details by Thanksgiving? I didn’t know that happened…either your daughters are amazing, or I’m completely clueless – most likely, both.
Phoebes - The March 15 date may well be for need-based aid, rather than merit-based aid.
“Actually the math is correct”
Actually is not. The reason is because EACH application =only ONE coin flip, not multiple coin flips. You dont get to try to increase the odds of acceptance by applying over and over again to one college, like flipping the same coin over and over again or by buying hundreds of tickets in one lottery drawing. There is no cumulative effect of applying to multiple individual colleges, who all choose students independently , that increases the overall odds of acceptance somewhere.
The odds of a having a winning ticket in any ONE state lottery are NOT increased by buying tickets to OTHER lotteries held in different states. Each lottery has its own individual odds- just like the chances of acceptance at each college.
The “odds” of acceptance at each college are strictly a function of what’s in the students application, compared to other applicants.
A student with a 1600/2400 SAT and a C average applying to every single IVY + Stanford, MIT, CAltech, Chicago does not have any greater chance of acceptance at any of those colleges than if he applied to only one.
Every single year there is someone who comes on CC and argues that they statistically have a “better” chance of acceptance somewhere simply because they apply to more colleges.
It does not work that way. [-(
^Maybe a math teacher could weigh in here, because something doesn’t seem right about the reasoning. If what @menloparkmom says is correct, why does any student even bother applying to more than one college? You supposedly don’t increase your odds of getting accepted anywhere . . .
^^ applying to multiple colleges is not about odds, it is the only way to have a better chance of getting accepted somewhere! For 99% of students, there is NO guarantee of acceptance at any one college. So you have to spread a wide net and apply to colleges where your GPA, scores, interests and activities put you in the range of recently accepted students .
I second (or is it third or fourth now) the concept of choosing some safeties and even matches EA. The more the merrier, just so you know that you have options. Of my son’s target schools, 3 offered EA - 2 safeties and 1 match, the match being a top-3. He got into all by mid-December, with various amounts of merit aid. Huge relief, and we further whittled the rest of the list down to 8 total from 11 originally (didn’t have to pay app fees) b/c he knew he was into a top-3 pick.
Its the kids who use the assumption of
" If I apply to every Ivy then I will be IMPROVING my chances of getting into ONE Ivy " who have a warped understanding of the REAL odds of getting into colleges.
Actually, college applications are not completely independent events. even though the admissions processes at different colleges are separate. Most colleges consider criteria from a broadly similar set of applicant attributes like HS courses/grades/rank, standardized test scores, extracurriculars, essays, recommendations, etc… To the extent that these criteria overlap between different colleges, there will tend to be some correlation with results from several colleges of the same selectivity level.
Actually, there are lots of colleges with automatic admission criteria that a student can know with 100% certainty that s/he will be admitted to if s/he meets such criteria. But most of these colleges are ones that those reaching for super-selective schools would not want to attend.
I really didn’t mean for this to escalate, and that’s why I followed my point immediately by saying I DIDN’T think it was like a coin flip and the whole thing is messy. My D could not apply to 100 Ivies (if they existed) and increase her odds of getting in. Everything’s NOT equal. The problem isn’t with the math, which I’m quite comfortable with, it’s with the labels.
Can we agree that it’s not a good analogy and not worry about that part of it?
I’ve always believed the point of targets is finding a field of schools you have a good chance of getting into and then applying to a bunch to increase the odds that you get into something. That’s really what I was getting at, sorry if I didn’t explain myself well. The key is that they genuinely have to be targets that you have a good chance of getting into in the first place. Nothing’s a guarantee, even most safeties (although they’re much more likely) but you can increase your odds of getting in SOMEWHERE by applying to more schools, if they’re similarly appropriate.
@ucbalumnus Thanks, that’s why my next paragraph was :
However – I’m not a fool and I don’t think it’s actually a 50-50 chance, like flipping a coin. There are many variables and what applies to one school will probably apply to similar schools, increasing the weight of positives & negatives in an application. I was just generalizing to demonstrate why I thought applying to more schools was better in her case. Clearly using numbers was inflammatory… Mea culpa and apologies if I wasn’t clear.
I am so sorry I even mentioned numbers, it seems to have really bothered a few people, which was SO not the point. I am very thankful for everyone’s advice though. It’s been a great help.
menlpark is wrong, the odds do increase of getting into A SCHOOL the more schools you apply to, but Pheebers also overstates the impact. The likelihood of being accepted at similar schools is not independent. I imagine there is significant overlap in who similar schools would accept. Not a 1-1 correlation, but greater than if they were truly independent.