For my kids who were Ivy/Stanford caliber students, it was easy to find great “safeties” because it’s not hard to love beautiful colleges like Colgate, Lafayette, and Washington & Lee. Looking back, even 12 years ago those schools were probably more matches than safeties, but the top cohort at S’s high school didn’t view them as such. In fact, they secretly considered Cornell a safety–you know, if they didn’t get into the likes of Princeton, Yale or Columbia, lol. Luckily for them, it worked out. But back then Stanford didn’t have a 4.68% admissions rate.
In contrast, due to the increase in competition and D2’s lower stats, her safeties have to be schools like Montclair State. Rutgers is no longer a given, even for students much better than she. Lately we’ve seen kids who were admitted to HYPS rejected at Rutgers. So I hate to say it, but D just couldn’t get all excited about Montclair. The tour guide was THE most inarticulate college student we have ever met, we saw not one kid actually doing any work, and I could go on but I won’t because she may attend. Similarly, we went to a few other safety schools and didn’t find them even remotely appealing. One school I’ve seen touted on here as “great” was downright shocking. The student body looked like the people featured in those Walmart people youtube videos. Can’t. Just can’t.
Re safety schools, I don’t think a kid has to love it. I just think they have to like it enough so that if they don’t end up anywhere else, they will be happy to attend. My D doesn’t love her safeties. Like I said though, she would have been fine if none of the others came through.
I do think it is probably more useful than not to find some kind of career path. I do not want my D to end up making coffee at the end of her degree. No problem with that, but as a person who “chose” (or didn’t, really) that kind of “career path” I don’t want the same for her. I never really found the thing I wanted to do until very recently,and I of course am now a grown adult with teens. My degree was pretty useless, I never sought any career guidance, I had literally no idea what I was going to do,once I left college. Luckily, things worked out for me, but it was luck. Luck isn’t the best way to forge a future.
@TheGFG I suspect that kids rejected at Montclair who have top stats are rejected because they failed to,show interest. My Ds safety has a 70% acceptance rate, but looking at scattergrams on college data shows that kids with higher stats than hers were rejected. My D showed interest at every school she applied to.
Edit, I meant Rutgers. @TheGFG
Not only did my kid love her safety, she eventually chose to attend it it over the more-highly-ranked schools to which she was admitted. The horror!
D loved her school, made some great friends, was the “shining star” in her department, and got great internships. She’s now well-established in a career she loves (and is making almost twice the salary of her mother…) And did I mention that thanks to the scholarships she was awarded for her schooling, we actually had money left over from her college savings?
If your child doesn’t like his/her safety, maybe s/he just hasn’t found the right safety yet.
I know you mean well, scout59, but posts like yours can come off as self-righteous. You and your D managed the process perfectly, so maybe the rest of us need to just look a little harder? Personally, the number of hours my H and I have spent running NPC’s, doing online research, and traveling to colleges makes us look like obsessive nuts. Friends have suggested I’m really overdoing the whole college search thing. Great students have great options at great schools, as well as super merit offers at decent, lower-ranked schools. That was the case for my other two. My average good student, however, does not. A mediocre state school that costs $31,000 in state does not seem “great” to me.
@TheGFG My son will likely end up at such a place too and I agree with your sentiments. I think the point though is to cultivate a positive attitude and make the most of it. A mediocre state school is not a tragedy. It can be a good springboard. I’ll be cheering my son the same way scout cheers the daughter.
Edited to add: It occurs to me that in our case at least, and maybe yours, the safety is actually the match school.
My son is still undecided, but it looks increasingly likely that he’ll attend the least selective school to which he applied. It’s a neat place, has the kind of college environment he’s looking for, and is strong in his areas of interest. We do have to get past the fact that it looks a little less impressive by a number of metrics than some of the other schools on his list. But if he does pick it, he’ll be choosing it rather than settling for it, because it’s a terrific fit for him. It took some digging to find it, but it was out there.
I do sympathize with the kids who dream of being surrounded by incredibly fascinating, high-achieving peers and find it hard to embrace places where the density of such kids is inevitably going to be somewhat lower. Hopefully, that gets compensated by the kind of positive benefits @scout59 highlighted that are associated with being one of the standouts. And hey, there’s bound to be a bunch of other kids on campus like them who had a similar run-in with the college admissions fates! You don’t need to perfectly relate to everyone at your school, you just need to be able to find your people.
With regards to how career-focused to be in college, the main thing I’ve been preaching to my kids is to try to use their time in college to get really good at something. Come out with a skill set, an area of genuine expertise, that’s not common, and that society will hopefully be willing to compensate them for. It’s basically the philosophy espoused in Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I highly recommend it for kids heading off to college.
GFG- big hug. Is your D still considering Bryn Mawr? That seems like a perfect solution if you can make the finances work. Fantastic student body, incredible resources, good distance from home if you get lonesome!
Great thread and great advice. In my IRL group of friends I’m one of the only ones who already has 1 kid in college (several more are seniors this year, and then a lot of them will be coming up with their oldest kid in 1-3 years). I was out to dinner the other night with a large group and we were talking about the daughter of one of the women… she’s a high school junior with great test scores and a strong desire to get out of California ;-). Her mom was talking about some of her favorite schools (and to her credit, she’s got a range of selectivities). But one of the other moms said, “Oh, Meredith will be able to get in anywhere she wants.” I had to jump in and give the spiel about how that’s not necessarily true even if Meredith is amazing and that every kid needs a lot of backup options that they like.
We liked Bryn Mawr a lot. But it would cost us a good bit more than other schools which are pretty good, like Dickinson and Franklin & Marshall. I worry that if we were to give up our athletic ED advantage at those colleges in order to try ED at BM, she may be left with nothing, as BM is more of a reach. I say this because on these boards I’ve read of an athlete recruited by F&M, with higher stats than D and who went through a successful pre-read in the summer, and yet was rejected in ED. Of course, there may have been a bad rec letter or something, but still, it’s worrisome. Haverford, which would be a much better athletic fit for D but likely too much of an academic reach, has a bad reputation for this in athletic recruiting, meaning successful pre-read but rejection in ED round.
Going back a couple of pages, there was some talk about using Naviance to predict target/safety schools. I agree with the poster who said it looks like things have gotten more competitive in the past couple of years and to be cautious when relying on Naviance exclusively to choose safeties. I’ll give my one data point as UC Davis… by Naviance, my daughter was a shoo-in based on her high school’s previous record. But she was wait-listed there (2015). Thankfully she had plenty of other options.
Sorry if I sounded self-righteous, @TheGFG - in truth, I was a little angry at the sentiment that “no student actually loves his/her safety.” The implication is, of course, that safety schools are for losers – and that’s just as untrue as “it’s easy to find a safety.”
It’s NOT easy. Truth be told, we were just lucky that D loved her safety so much. People tend to downplay the role that luck plays in all of this…
If you think Franklin and Marshall will be affordable AND it looks like your D can get in-- what a wonderful position to be in!!! I get that there are no guarantees- but you are FAR away from having to think about Montclair State if Dickinson and/or F&M are on the table, no???
My children have been fortunate to be in the best schools up to now - around other kids that were “average excellent” if not outright stellar. In the sense that a rising tide lifts all boats, they benefited by the influence of this peer group. I often wonder what may have happened had they been the big fish in a smaller pond. I attended some of the worst public schools, and knowing that as a young person actually motivated me to punch above my weight class. If my children wind up at a safety school, I hope they too are motivated to punch above their weight class. I think there is more opportunity for them to mature as leaders. They’ll have something to prove.
In some instances, students who wind up at a safety school are more qualified than most on that campus.
But in other instances, they’re actually a good fit for the school. That’s why they were admitted to the safety and not to the more selective schools on their list.
I think the problem of a student being too big a fish in a small pond comes up more often when a student has to attend a financial safety school rather than an academic safety school. A young man I know is facing that situation right now. He was admitted to our state university and to another college, both of which are good fits, but the financial aid at both schools was inadequate. He will have to attend his safety – two years at a community college followed by a transfer, probably to the state university (the parents can afford two years there but not four). And at the community college, he will be almost ridiculously overqualified.
On the other hand, if he was facing the prospect of going to the community colleges because none of the more selective schools on his list had admitted him, then perhaps the community college would have been a good fit for him anyway.
Absolutely. D had quite a few for that reason. NPCs were not accurate for us with uncertainty about the NCP (I love using those two acronyms in one sentence…)
We visited her two (admissions and financial) safeties twice to ensure that she’d be happy at them. One we self-toured first, then went to an admitted student honors-type event that was canceled due to snow…but since we came so far to attend, they did a special dinner for just us and one other family. It was pretty amazing.
The other she’d done a week-long summer program at in high school but had never gotten the official schpiel. We did a full day accepted student honors reception, dorm tour, sessions in her prospective major, etc. It was VERY rah-rah. I think she knew she’d be a bit of a star at both and was OK with that. Not “in love” but it would have been good.
OTOH, we did not visit a couple of her reaches, opting instead to visit if and when she was accepted. I suggested this visit philosophy largely because of being here on CC when my older son was looking several years ago.