What I see is a problem is students getting waitlisted on schools that should have been matches/safeties for reasons of yield management. Just take a look at the American University RD thread and see how many high stats students were waitlisted for an example of this practice. That school is giving out these “soft nos” to students they think won’t attend AU because they’ll be getting into higher ranked schools. (They’ve done this in past years as well) But given how competitive things are today, these students may actually not get into higher ranked schools. How the heck are kids supposed to pick safeties when those schools are going to WL (reject) them because “you’re too good for our school - we know you really don’t want to go here.”
@SuburbMom, my DD’s are seeing that happen to their friends. Our experience luckily wasn’t that way as a couple, of their safer schools were top athletic programs so they wanted my DD runner to attend.
@SuburbMom
You make an excellent point, and a scary one at that
My daughter applied to 9 schools. She has been accepted at three. Rejected from three and is waiting to hear from the last three. The rejections were all from fine arts programs- either film or music. No waitlists. She was originally going to apply to 13 schools but when she received her first acceptance she realized that there were some schools she would not choose over that acceptance.
But I do remember years when kids we know were waitlisted from and then got into their top choices or waitlisted and never made it off the waitlist.
My daughters friends this year seem to be either accepted or rejected. There have been very few waitlists. I think I prefer it that way. It is easier to let go and focus on the positive.
It is such a crapshoot. I wouldn’t say my daughter is any more or less qualified than the kids we know who have been accepted to the programs she was rejected from.
@Chembiodad I appreciate your point, but I think we have a different idea about what constitutes a match or a safety. I don’t know which of us is “correct” or maybe neither of us is. Personally, I would view schools “ranked” 10 - 20 for instance to be substantively the same as schools ranked 20 - 30. If nothing else, schools are often ranked quite differently by different ranking organizations out there, so rankings didn’t help us in identifying schools from the perspective of likely admission.
For our family (fairly high stats students), a safety school was a school where we were either auto-admit based on stats or in the top 20% based on stats and the school has an admit rate above 50%, AND it was a school we could afford either outright or based on likely merit aid. In short, VERY safe.
Also, to apply at all (to a safety or any other school), it had to be a school you think you would be happy to attend.
Edited to add: congratulations to your daughters on having such a great set of opportunities.
A safety, by definition, is the school a student will attend if nothing else works out. How many students are genuinely happy about attending their safety? I think they have to find something to love about each school and get it across in their app, but I think that can be difficult when they’ve already mentally classified it as a last resort. Maybe if we referred to them as “likely prospects” instead of “safeties” it would be easier.
American is in US News’ top 100 list. I’m sure there are a lot of kids who want to go there who don’t consider it a safety. If I were an adcom, I’d want the kids who clearly loved my school. Maybe the answer is that safeties can’t be in the top 100. Or maybe students have to know the schools so well that adcoms will be able to understand why the student thinks they fit there. I suspect that with the increase in the number of apps, the overflow is going to trickle down the tiers so students are going to have to be smart consumers.
I always interpreted “safety” to mean those schools in which a prospective student would meet required admissions standards, such as public state schools that say if you have a xx ACT score and x.xx GPA, you are guaranteed admissions.
@austinmshauri I have always disliked the terms “reach”, “match”, and “safety”, especially safety. But I use the terms here on CC as kind of shorthand/common terms of understanding. Unfortunately, it can often be a term of misunderstanding. Case in point: you state that “a safety, by definition, is the school a student will attend if nothing else works out.” Apparently, I did not receive the memo on that definition, as that is not how we approached it. I explained above in post #84 what a “safety” was for us. But I didn’t refer to such schools in our home as “safety” schools. Rather we talked about them as schools with a very high likelihood of admission.
Again, every school on our list(s) had to be a school that the student was interested in attending. As it turned out the most SAFE schools on our lists have often ended up at/near the top in terms of final choices because they came through with good financial aid. Classifying any school as a “last resort” is something I would avoid at all costs in the application process.
“I have always disliked the terms “reach”, “match”, and “safety”, especially safety.”
I agree. I have had a sort of underlying discomfort with these terms but haven’t thought to complain about them. I see at least two reasons for this discomfort:
To me “safety” means (i) A very high probability that the student will be admitted; and also (ii) A very high probability that the kids and parents taken together will be able to afford to attend the school. However, a “safety” school might actually be the best fit for any particular student. For example, a “safety” school might have a great program in the field that the student wants to study, while a “reach” school might have a lousy program or no program in the same field. A “safety” school might have an open and accepting social environment for a particular student, while a “reach” school might have a more arrogant or stratified social environment. There are a bunch of reasons why “safety” versus “reach” might not correspond to “where the student actually should want to go”.
Also, a “safety” school might be academically more challenging than a “reach” school. This might apply particularly strongly to my family, because between me plus both daughters we have applied to public schools in-state, public schools out-of-state, private schools, and also to universities in another country (specifically spanning the US and Canada). The admission criteria differs between in-state versus out-of-state, and also differs between countries. Thus at least in our cases “safe” schools have in some cases been the academically most challenging, while “reach” schools (particularly in the affordability sense) have sometimes been more in the middle of the pack academically.
I particularly dislike the term “dream”, largely because I have seen too many posts on CC where kids with good but unspectacular GPA and SATs have a “dream” of going to a school which would put them into the bottom 10% of all admitted students. Any student who finds themselves in a difficult class surrounded by kids all of whom got at least 100 points higher on each section of the SAT is going to find that a “dream” can quickly become a nightmare.
I think the creation of safety school list is very subjective and different for every student depending on whoever has opinions on it. For my D the counselor played a big role in the process since she had historic results and the experience with different colleges. My D started with a school list of top 3 UCs, 5 Ivies, 3 others in top 10, 1 in 10-20 and 2 in 20-30, and 3 of top 7 LACs (two of which usually take quite a few kids from the school every year). My reason was that D’s stats were excellent therefore the UCs and one of the LACs could be the safety. When the counselor reviewed the list, however, she put 2 as match, 3 as match/stretch, the rest of them as stretch, and basically none as safety. The counselor suggested a private that is way down the list as a safety school. When I looked at the historic data, there were 5-7 kids applied to that school every year, most got accepted but almost none went there at the end. I had to wonder if I were the AO, whether I would continue to give offer the kids from this school. At the end we had to remove some from the original list, expand the UCs and add a few others both as safeties and to improve the yield (!) even though I knew I would not want to pay $50k/year for those.
PSU offered my S a spot on their wait-list. In their letter to my S they promised a definitive answer by May 15. I thought this was both generous and helpful. Is he happy about it? No. But it’s certainly better than waiting with some hope all summer long, like some unfortunate kids do with other schools.
@austinmshauri - When I wrote: How the heck are kids supposed to pick safeties when those schools are going to WL (reject) them because “you’re too good for our school - we know you really don’t want to go here.” - I was saying the school is making the judgement call to WL the student because they think the student doesn’t really want to go there. But if you read the thread about RD into American, you’ll see that many of these high stats students were actually interested in American. At least one student mentioned they thought they’d be in the running for merit aid there. My D was seriously interested, and we didn’t consider it a true safety because we knew their history of rejecting high stats kids. Still, it doesn’t seem right that they’re putting so many high stats kids onto the WL.
How would American, a school that accepts 35% of its applicants and has no set admissions criteria, be a safety? Match maybe.
Spring admission has two effects:
- Enrollment balancing across fall and spring semesters. Ordinarily, fall is more heavily enrolled than spring, because some students graduate a semester early or late, resulting in one fewer spring semester versus the number of fall semesters. Having some students start in the spring allows the school to enroll its full capacity in the spring as well as the fall (or reduce the risk of going over capacity in the fall).
- Spring admits are usually at the bottom edge of the incoming frosh class, so taking them out of fall start students slightly improves the incoming frosh class stats for ranking and comparison purposes.
Applicants looking at Georgetown or George Washington see the lower stats and assume that American is a “safety” even though it considers “level of applicant’s interest” to be “very important”.
@porcupine98 - Like I said, we didn’t consider the school a safety. The school has a reputation for deciding that high stats students are only applying with it as a safety. They put more kids on the WL than they have spots for in their incoming freshman class. It’s crazy.
@snorkelmom @ucbalumnus – The spring admits are typically lower stat students & are NOT considered in the stats of the fall class admits that the coveted rankings systems judge. It is a way to get students in without lowering their profile/rank at USWNR ranks. Likewise, fall admits who are offered fall semesters off campus (like Northeastern’s NUin, Colby’s freshman abroad semester, & Cal’s freshman semester in San Fran (among other places)) are NOT lumped into the fall admit class.
Yes and yes.
DS applied to “only” 7 schools; 1 safety (state U); 2 targets (acceptance rates around 30%); 3 reaches (acceptance rates around 15-20%); and 1 high reach (acceptance rate <10). So far, accepted at 4; waitlisted at 2; waiting on the Ivy.
Frankly, waitlisting sucks. He has 3 fabulous choices (already turned down state U), and he has said over and over again that he will be happy at any of those 3 colleges. He could turn down both waitlists, but both of them have his rather esoteric major that only about 20 colleges in the country offer. So now I guess he’ll wait. And wait.
But we WILL put down a deposit at one of his admitted schools.
Here’s my question, though. We need financial aid (one reason he didn’t apply ED to a college), especially with 2 kids in college next year. Are colleges that are need-blind and full-need during regular admissions, the same way during wait list admissions? If not, we can take him off right now 
@crusoemom It depends on the college. You need to find out from them directly, either by calling or doing your own googling.