<p>Everyone on this site is fixated with a handful of "top" colleges (Ivies, MIT, Stanford, Duke, etc.) to the exclusion of thousands of others. People here don't make much of an attempt to learn anything about a few of these others, and this NARROWS options rather than expands them.</p>
<p>At the handful of "top" colleges, nobody is guaranteed admission and admissions are so unpredictable. At a typical school with an average SAT score of 1500 (750V+750M), the acceptance rate is 10%-20%, and a large percentage of those admitted are legacies, those with parents offering to donate a large sum of money, those with a special athletic or musical skill that happens to be urgently needed, etc. So such a school is a long shot even for someone with a perfect SAT score, perfect GPA, a 5 on every AP under the sun, Nobel Prize, etc. At a typical school with an average SAT score of 1000 (500V+500M), the acceptance rate might be on the order of 80%-90%, and admissions are quite predictable. But there are FAR more schools with an average SAT of 1000 than schools with an average SAT of 1500.</p>
<p>Then there is the "Tufts" syndrome - some colleges below the Ivy level in terms of stats of enrolled students reject the top applicants they think will go somewhere else. But only a small percentage of the thousands of schools out there fit this category.</p>
<p>So it's possible for everyone on this board to sit back, relax, be in the top 10% of the class instead of the top 1%, and still get into the vast majority of schools.</p>
<p>Some things I found at the College Board Matchmaker:
1. 149 accept all high school graduates, 587 accept more than 75% of students, 637 accept more than 50% of students, and only 233 accept less than 50% of students. I suspect that the colleges that didn't report the acceptance rate probably had a very high acceptance rate, as the most selective colleges LIKE to brag about a low acceptance rate.
2. At only 447 of these schools did at least 75% of the class have a high school GPA above 3.0. At 402 schools, 50%-75% of the class had a high school GPA above 3.0. At 99 schools, over 50% of the class had a high school GPA between 2.0 and 3.0.
3. SAT statistics are given for 1149 of the schools. (This is the number I got when I plugged in perfect dual 800s for the SAT scores. You can bet that the other 889 4-year colleges that don't report this stat are not that selective.) Having dual 750s puts you in the top 75% of the class at all 1149. Dual 700s puts you in the top 75% of the class in 1149. Dual 650s puts you in the top 75% at 1116 schools. Dual 600s puts you in the top 75% at 1055, dual 550s puts you in the top 75% at 935, dual 500s puts you in the top 75% at 709, and dual 450s puts you in the top 75% at 347. Thus, you can see that even the average student taking the SAT is in the bottom half of the class in only a minority of schools. Also remember that SAT scores understate the difference in selectivity among colleges. At the upper end, there are the erratic BS factors and all those additional unknown BS requirements. But at the less selective colleges, there are more students who didn't even take the SAT or were too embarassed to report their low scores, so these schools are probably even easier to get into than the stats suggest.</p>