<p>Some kids do not have their school preferences in order of selectivity. My kids did not. The selectivity was really not much of a factor to them as what the school offered that they wanted. Yes, name recognition was nice, but not the most important thing. </p>
<p>If you do rolling or Early Action and get accepted, that is your safety school. And that school could be very selective. My oldest was accepted to BC through EA and it is hardly a safety. It was also one of his top choices. My current college student’s top choice was not the most well known college on his list, and though selective it became a good safety, admissions wise when he was accepted EA.</p>
<p>I couldn’t attend my top choice, BU, for financial reasons. I’m going to UConn instead. At first I was pretty upset, but I warmed up to UConn after visiting and talking to my advisor, and now I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else.</p>
<p>I’m still working on being happy with my safety school (4 months after the last letter) and I move in less than 3 weeks. It comes and goes in phases for me. My parents weren’t greatly helpful during the admissions/waitlists/rejections process, and I wish I had picked a safety that I was truly happy with. True, a lot had to do with finances in the end, but honestly, my college list was never very realistic. Everyone thought I was a shoo-in, but I guess not… Once school starts, it’ll all turn around for the better.</p>
<p>Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and my daughter was going through the college process the CC mantra was use a bottoms- up approach. This meant putting the putting the time and effort in to the safety school first, then work your way up. A true safety meets the following criteria:</p>
<p>The it is school, were your child is pretty much a sure bet as far as getting admitted.</p>
<p>It is a financially feasible option for the family</p>
<p>The child is happy to attend</p>
<p>The advice that I gave my daughter (continue to give my students) is select your college list from the perspective of “If this is the only school that you are admitted to, will you be happy to attend.” </p>
<p>During her application cycle, she was accepted to every school that she applied to. Even though she heard from her reach schools early in the process, she was just as thrilled to hear from the safeties which remained in contention until the very end.</p>
<p>my college counselor from high school told my class that if we were not prepared to see ourselves at a campus for 4+ years, don’t consider it a safety. Safety schools are schools that you’ll be willing to go to if you don’t get into reach schools.</p>
<p>The love thy safety mantra is heard loud and clear in this house, but it does not change the fact that my daughter has one school that she has fallen in love with. The school first interested her because an alumnus piqued her interest, but the first time she visited the website, she felt strongly about the school. She visited the school the summer of sophmore year and absolutely loved it. She visited again this spring as a junior, this time meeting with the coach of her sport and despite visiting twenty plus schools, this school remains firmly in the number one spot. The school is a reach, both academically and athletically, being an OOS flagship with a highly ranked team. But she loves this school and really feels that she belongs there. She has other schools that she likes and one safety that she would be ok with attending, our state flagship with full tuition scholarship. But the fact remains that she will be very disappointed if she doesn’t get in her number one school. We have talked about it quite a bit and she realistically understands her chances, but I know it will be a very bad day if she gets rejected. Unfortunately, I have no suggestions on how to handle the disappointment. So far, my approach has been to be brutally honest and upfront about her chances to be admitted and hoping that knowledge will soften the blow.</p>
<p>It sounds as if you have the academic and financial saftey aspects covered. But if she is only ok with attending, then you still do not have a true safety school. Gotta go back to the list and find a true safety that she would be happy to attend.</p>
<p>Sometimes students “fall in love” with a school for odd reasons that don’t have a lot of rational thinking behind them. My older son had his heart set on a particular reach university from about the age of 12 - don’t ask me why - basketball rep. probably had a lot to do with it. When we visited prestigious university in spring of his junior year - I was put off by the attitude of both admissions and our tour guide - very arrogant - not terribly welcoming - what you might expect from a school that receives 10 apps for every spot. Anyway, long story short, he applied ED and was deferred and was quite crushed. Was accepted at 3 match schools and his safety - and chose one of the matches to attend. It really took until about late June for him to kind of accept where he was going and be somewhat happy about it.</p>
<p>Fast forward one year - he loved his freshman year at his college and now thinks it is the better fit for him after all. The smaller size has given him some opportunities he might not have rcvd at prestigious university and he is pursuing a major that the other school did not offer. So, sometimes the beloved school is really not the best fit anyway - they have latched onto it for some reason - but it is the other schools on the list that were selected more thoughtfully that might work better in the end.</p>
<p>Isn’t there anyone else whose child is having a hard time finding a true safety? </p>
<p>I have an '11 with high stats and our state does not have a real “flagship”. Found schools he can definitely get in, that we can afford, but the “love” is missing. Any suggestions?</p>
<p>I think parents can help define the “love”. We never labeled my son’s surest admission/best chance of merit aid/affordable option as a “safety”. That way he never felt like he would be settling, if he attended. We also helped guide him to schools that had the same qualities as his first choice, as much as possible. It’s important to have a continual conversation with your student as he/she determines the fit.</p>
<p>I don’t think that chanting “Love the Safety”, while a useful strategy, addresses the OP’s question. What do you do if your child only gets into his/her safety? He/She sucks it up and goes to the safety. I could spend paragraphs on platitudes about lemonade from lemons, but the harsh reality is that this is a “teaching moment” where some kids are going to have to face the fact that life doesn’t always go the way we want. Furthermore, reading about kids who get completely shut-out will have about the same impact on a teenager as telling to him to eat all his vegetables because there are kids starving in Somalia. They won’t hear it because they simply can’t envision the fact that they could possibly fail on such a grand scale.</p>
<p>The only thing I can offer is to try a game my brother played with his kids. Take a brown paper bag and put 100 M&Ms in it, making sure that there are only the same number of red M&Ms as the acceptance rate of the school, (e.g., Stanford accepted 7% last year, therefore 93 multi-colored (non-red) M&Ms, plus 7 red). Your child is a red M&M. Have them close their eyes and pick out one candy from each bag for each school. Do this a few times. There will be times when they get all reds, of course when no red M&Ms show up one time, they might start to get the picture. Eat the M&Ms.</p>
<p>(Disclaimer: I realize that admissions aren’t random and that the game isn’t truly statistically valid, but it does get a point across)</p>
<p>Of course kids love their number-one school, and of course if they do not get in they will be disappointed. The issue is really minimizing the disappointment by having good alternatives, not just schools at the right admissibility level.</p>
<p>I think the key to good safety selection is to keep in mind what kind of school the student really likes. If he/she wants to go to a small to midsize school with a strong sense of community and lots of direction interaction with professors, then the state flagship may not be a good choice unless there is a really good and well-defined honors program and even then maybe not. That somewhat undercuts the otherwise good advice to find a school with a rolling admissions program, but I think it is an important consideration. But a kid who wants to go to a large university and lives in a state with a great flagship is really in luck–though it may not be a true safety for other than very strong students. Whatever type of school a student prefers, good fit can be found at many if not all parts of the selectivity spectrum. And I believe good fit is the key to overcoming the disappointment of not getting into top choices and being happy at matches and safeties. I think it is ok not to visit before applying but important to visit after acceptance if a safety ends up being one of the choices on the table once all the decisions have come in–but it’s important to do thorough research during the application process. </p>
<p>Financial safety is a whole other issue, and one I cannot speak to from direct experience. I do think, however, based on (too many!) years of reading CC, that there is perhaps an overreliance on the expectation of merit money. A school may be an admissions safety but not give much if any merit aid, or give lots of merit aid in terms of number of students it awards merit aid to but not as much per student as people would wish for. Again, I think the key is to find the right fit and balance. Even some public colleges and universities seem to have surprisingly high tuition these days so I suspect public may not always be the best choice given the possibilities of need-based aid for families who can demonstrate legitimate need. And even now with declining endowments there may be the real possibility of merit money from less selective schools maybe one step own from schools that would be safeties for a given student if merit money were not an issue.</p>
<p>The problem is that some kids just automatically shut out certain schools because they are not selective. My son did not look at the selectivity of the school as an important feature. His favorites were not ranked by how selective or how much cache the school has. When you have kids who consider that a top priority in their college, it is going to be very difficult to get them to find any safeties they will like, much less love, since by it’s very definition, it is not desirable. This mindset is not limited to kids only. Many parents have it as well, and the media, neighbors, family, cocktail hour talk, peer pressure talk all fuel this push to get into schools that are difficult to gain admission. The rarity of something is what enhances its value.</p>
<p>Also some kids truly fall in love with a school. Though mine did not, the last one really liked one school over the others. It was clear as he kept gravitating to the that one. It just struck him the right way, and its features all were things he wanted in a college. Not as big of a problem is the school is not selective or super expensive with little prospect of aid, but when it becomes something the kid so very much wants, that’s when there is pain all around. We so want them to get they want. Any many of these kids are great kids who have worked hard, done well, and “deserve” to get rewards for their behavior and discipline. I don’t know a parent who doesn’t hurt when a child does not get into his/her first choice school that is the dream school. And talk all you want, if a kid gets latched onto a dream school, it’s like a crush. No answers as to how to soothe the pain when it doesn’t pan out.</p>
<p>My D found safeties that she loved for non-traditional reasons. For example a great program in her favorite EC, a cool location where she thought she might enjoy living for a few years. Even though they were not academically her dream schools, they had some other perk that she would be able to hang onto. In the end she liked one of her safeties so much that it stayed in the running until the ultimate decision day.</p>
<p>Though we do refer to some schools as safeties, this is pretty much what we’re trying to do. Safety schools often aren’t well-known, which makes the student think if no one’s heard of it it’s not worth attending . The parents can help by talking up a school’s virtues and why it might appeal to the student. If you can find friends or family who are alums, or find a student-written post on CC that talks about all the great things about going to the school, or find a current student who loves the place, that helps the student see a potential safety as a great school on its own merits. </p>
<p>I’m a big fan of visiting potential safeties. Sometimes students find that they like the college or surrounding area more than they expected. Sometimes they hate it, in which case the safety is no longer a safety. I like challenging my kids to tell me three things that they like and 3 they dislike about a potential school. I’ve also found that over time a student can bounce from dislike to like, or vice-versa. Some of rising senior D1’s safeties she was initially not interested in at all post-visit, but now a year later she’s decided that she would be glad to attend. Another safety that she liked very much at the visit (she was on the verge of buying a t-shirt) she now says she dislikes. I’m forcing her to apply there because it’s a free early app, and because I’ve seen this yo-yo-ing opinion thing before.</p>
<p>All of this, I hope, helps innoculate a student against devastating disappointment if they “only” get into their safety. There might not be full-blown “love”, but there’s been a seed planted that might blossom into the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Your mileage, of course, may vary. </p>
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<p>Have you searched for schools where he’d be a strong candidate for merit? If you can identify some factor that he loves in his reaches, it might be possible to identify that in some schools that are generous to high stats kids.</p>
<p>I was talking to a mother of my son’s classmate. She was accepted to UNC Chapel Hill many years ago, but with no scholarship or aid. She was also accepted to a local school that is not anywhere nearly as well known, and not selective at all, but with a full scholarship and an offer to continue said scholarship through a master’s if she kept her gpa at a certain level and stuck with the program. She didn’t give the matter a thought. She took the local option that did not cost. She saved her family a heck of a lot of money. She also missed out in going to a national school away from home, but in her case, she was very much aware of her family finances and the sacrifice her parents would have had to make had she gone away.</p>
<p>The ramification of her decisions are still apparent. Her father died shortly after she finished college, and what is a major factor in her mother’s relative security is the fact that they did not have to shell out the big bucks for her college. Plus she was at home during some difficult time, enhancing her resume further with the free master’s which she did get. The quality of life for others in her family was much enhanced by her decision. She was a bit perturbed at the talk from her sister’s kids about absolutely wanting to go to the big ticket schools that will frankly hit the family very hard financially. They really can’t afford to do it without taking huge financial risks during this already risky time. But the kids feel entitled to getting this experience regardless of cost. This lack of concern for other family members is really disturbing to some of us.</p>
<p>My advice is to spend the money to visit your safety. It could pay big dividends in the end. D actually liked her safety a lot when she visited. We considered in an “academic” safety, but they ended up offering her a lot of merit money. The more she thought about it the more it grew on her. She went back for admitted students weekend, and really fell in love with it. She is a rising junior now at her safety, and is thrilled with her choice. She was admitted to several more highly ranked schools, but is happy. And it has saved me something like $60,000 due to the merit aid. Well worth the cost of the visit!!</p>
<p>1012 Mom: My D found safeties that she loved for non-traditional reasons. </p>
<p>That is our plan. D’s “low match”/safeties are both less selective (both stats and yields) and DIII, where she would be a freshman starter in her sport as opposed to hoping to walk on at her reach/matches. Also, we are most definitely visiting two of her “low match”/safeties. I hope she loves them both and her interest is noted by the admissions staff.</p>
Your mileage, of course, may vary. </p>