Grouping together a 50% school and 100% school isn’t helpful.
A 50% acceptance school is still often a nationally recognized ranked competitive institution.
And grouping them together, as you have done, is part of the problem of not giving helpful advice.
And the posters coming here aren’t the ones that really want the 100% acceptance institutions. They are coming here for advice on the more competitive admission schools.
I gave the example of a student with a 3.5/1150 – Such a student would be competitive in many colleges with a 60-80% acceptance rate. Many of those schools would be matches or low reaches.
But I do feel like the culture on these boards might intimidate such a student asking around here, because they don’t want to hear that every school is a high reach.
We can each set up our own selectivity ranges, and can come into general agreement on what Reach, Match, Safety comprise.
It’s much harder accurately assessing an applicant’s chances at a particular school or set of schools… other than to say that, unless strongly hooked, the Ivies and their ilk are reaches for all. We simply don’t know what the more holistic schools are looking for – the CDS helps but still isn’t adequately detailed.
However, the way students and parents describe matches on these forums, it seems like they expect to get admission from most of them, meaning an implied better-than-coin-flip likelihood.
The “UC disappointment” threads and posts of past years where students and parents angry at being rejected by UCs where published admission rates indicated around 50% admit rates for HS GPA ranges that their HS GPA (and likely lower for those who applied to more selective majors like CS and engineering majors) fell into are examples of this.
Outside of auto admission, there just isn’t any way to perfectly predict a kid’s chances. The best we can do is give a somewhat educated guess based on what we know – and that knowledge is imperfect.
I’d say that, generally, prediction difficulty rises as holistic level increases. You mention the UC’s a lot, and they seem to be quite a bit less holistic than most of the selective private schools. So I’d feel more confident chancing a kid for the UC’s than for, say, U of Rochester and Case Western. For Ivies, my default answer is “Reach”. hehe
If people have trouble understanding honest answers, then I don’t think the solution is to give them dishonest answers.
But like I said, I use an entirely different vernacular. Reach/match isn’t about odds of acceptance, it’s whether you have the grades/rigor/background that matches the type of student the school is looking for.
4.0/1600/20 APs/Class president/raised $1 million for charity is a match for Harvard. Doesn’t mean they will get in. But if anyone is a match for Harvard, that person is a match. May still only have a 5-15% chance of getting in, but they match what Harvard is looking for. As opposed to someone who is 3.8/1450 – Their stats are a reach for Harvard. Probably not even worth applying unless they have a hook.
And that’s what it means to me – “Match” – This is the general type of student the school is looking for, you would have a decent chance of admission if you apply, you match.
Reach – Unless you have a hook or get lucky, you’re unlikely to get in. Potentially a waste of application fees to apply to lots of reaches.
Likely – If you take the application process seriously, demonstrate interest, submit good essays, then combined with your stats, you are likely to get admitted. You are an “above average” applicant for the school.
Safety – Rejection is unlikely (but not necessarily impossible) as long as you take the application seriously. Apply to a few of these as just-in-case back-ups.
So to me, it’s not really about percentages. It’s simply how you compare to other applicants and how you compare to what the school is seeking. Reach isn’t “your odds are low” – Reach is, “your odds are low because you fall below the criteria the school is seeking.”
Actually, they may be more holistic, in that UC admission readers assign a single score to each applicant, versus (for example) Harvard which has readers assign separate academic, athletic, extracurricular, and personal scores.
However, this does not mean less predictable. UCs are likely more predictable because:
They are not as selective as colleges like HYPSetc… The “compression at the top” of typical US high school academic stats is somewhat less for UCs (and significantly less for the least selective among them).
The effect of hooks is lower because legacy, URM, and development are not considered, and their large size means that recruited athletes do not consume much space in the admission class.
Recommendations are not generally used at UCs. Recommendations inject an unknown (the quality of the recommender’s recommendation writing) neither under control of nor even visible to the applicant in most cases.
Of the 13 factors listed in How applications are reviewed | UC Admissions, 12 of them are academic or academic + other criteria (with the other criteria being either context of opportunities and/or extracurricular achievements).
Rolling Admissions for a fair majority of applicants should be part of a “Best Practice Approach.” Certainly, you have to look at the affordability aspect of any school, but once you are accepted, it’s a safety.
Consistency in terminology is important. For example, we used the Princeton Review for researching schools during our process. Their terminology is dream/reach, target, and safeties. Here is a link to the article covering this. How to Choose Dream, Target, and Safety Schools | The Princeton Review.
I like the term target, maybe because it feels more aspirational than a match. Also, I like how the Review calls the “target schools” the bread and butter. Lockdown your safeties, and try a couple of Dream/Reaches if you are in the ballpark, but really target the schools that you squarely fit into the academic range.
I note Princeton Review seems to be using the same definitions of me… They say a “reach” is:
“A dream school is a college where your academic credentials fall in the lower end, or even below, the school’s average range for the cohort of students accepted the previous year.”
It’s a cop-out to say that elite schools are “reach” for everyone. Seems the Princeton Review terminology anticipates that there are students who match the academic credentials. Doesn’t mean you will get in, of course.
And what they say about target/match:
“There are no guarantees, but it’s not unreasonable to expect to be accepted to several of your target schools.”
I agree with this – Doesn’t mean if you apply to 1 match school, you will get in. It means if you apply to 10 match schools, you’re likely to be accepted into several.
[And if you take a student with a 4.0/1600/etc – And they apply to every Ivy and every Ivy equivalent, they can indeed expect to be probably be accepted into 1 or more]
College admission decisions are not independent events, since various colleges often look at similar application criteria (including the more opaque-for-comparison ones like essays and recommendations). Common results reported here for bulk applications by students with stats-match (by your definition) to the most selective colleges are either:
Shut out, suggesting that some unknown-to-the-applicant “defect” (e.g. mediocre recommendation) led to rejection at all.
Admission to multiple, suggesting that multiple such colleges found the application package impressive enough to admit.
The one area I’ve been trying to wrap my head around is how to approach the idea of ED. You see schools like the one’s on your list using taking larger percentages of students this way to help them better predict their yield.
There is some truth to the “all or none” – Especially if you went back 5 years in time, you’d find more consistent “all.”
That’s less true today, especially with the elite universities.
Very few students are 8/8 with the Ivy Leagues of 10/10 for the T10 schools. There isn’t a secret ingredient, unknown to the CC community, with Ivy league admissions offices conspiring to select all the same candidates.
And you can see it’s not true in yield rates – Columbia University, for example, has a 60% yield rate. If every person accepted into Columbia also got into the other 7 Ivies, then the yield rate would be closer to 10-15%.
There are indeed known factors beyond GPA. There are different degrees of rigor. There are truly standout ECs — A student who has raised millions for charity, or has contribute to Nobel winning research. And our community can weigh such factors when disclosed.
Moving away from elite schools – to schools with 30-60% acceptance rate – A 3.9/1500 student isn’t likely to be “all or none” absent factors that would be apparent with full disclosure. Was the student suspended a semester for bullying – then they might be a “none.” Is the student first generation to college, underrepresented minority, and an award winning poet – Then they might be “all.”
But a typical 3.9/1500/bunch of APs isn’t going to be all or none – they are most likely to get into some, rejected by others. Their application doesn’t look the same to every school – they may be applying to different programs at different schools. Based on their regionality, the schools may calculate their yield algorithm differently. The essays are different in each school, different levels of demonstrated interest. Different schools will weight a bit differently.
The risk of “none” has increased in test optional, with schools moving to protect their yield rates with an overflow of applications. But a student can protect themselves getting into a match by applying ED, by making sure they demonstrate interest, tailor their essays.
My feel is that ED significantly improves your odds, especially if you are already a match.
It takes yield out of the equation for the school. You often see a top tier student get rejected from the second tier schools, as they play the yield game. But they would have no reason to reject that student during ED.
Thus, if a student is an academic match for a school AND they apply ED – Then there is no “yield” based reason to reject that candidate. It thus makes a match school even more matchy.
I can’t edit my previous post, but here is the breakdown that College Board provides. They have a 50-90% category and and a 90-100% category that I had collapsed into one.
According to the College Board, there are 2,235 4-year colleges. As the number of schools sorted by admissions rates below total 1,743 by my calculations (and not the CB’s 2,235), I will use 1743 as my denominator.
26 (1.4%) of them have admissions rates between 0-10%
59 (3.3%) of them have admissions rates between 10-25%
250 (14.3%) of them have admissions rates between 25-50%
1,151 (66%) of them have admissions rates between 50-90%
289 (16.6%) of them have admissions rates between 90-100%
That still means that 2/3 of universities accept at least half of their applicants but don’t accept all of them.
If everyone used the same definitions, it would be easy. Good luck getting us all to agree!
Apparently the organization affiliated with CC uses Reach as 0-30%, Match as 30-70%, and Likely as 70+%. @prezbucky’s categories (minus the high/lows) is 0-25% reach, 25-90% match, extremely likely 90-99.9%, and safety 100%. @Dadto2NY uses Match when he thinks the applicant is the type of student a school would be interested in, even if a school only has a 3% acceptance rate, whereas a reach is if one’s stats are on the low end of acceptable, likely is an above average applicant, and safety means that rejection is unlikely.
So if someone says that an applicant is a match for a school, how is the reader supposed to know that they’re the type of applicant a school is looking for but their odds of admission are poor because the school is so selective? Or a different poster says a school is a match and so the person thinks that means that they have a 50-50 shot of acceptance? How are readers, particularly those who don’t read this forum exhaustively, to know what each individual poster means when they use these common terms that have multiple meanings depending on the user?
I wish that forum members were allowed to have signatures on our posts. We could each define terms how we mean them, and then whenever we post, all a reader would need to do is read our signature to see our definitions.
Chicago is the tricky one here if you’re an unhooked applicant.
They offer both ED and EA simultaneously to test your commitment level. If you apply EA they will likely defer you, giving you the option to switch to ED2 or continue into RD. If you go the RD route your chance of acceptance will be very low. So keep this in mind re UChicago.
As to the rest, not so easy to give guidance.
Such a student is competitive for every school.
But does the student want to use ED to shift a 10% chance to 20%, or rather use ED to shift a 25% to 50%.
One strategy (not necessarily right or wrong) would be to use ED1 for a dream school, and use ED2 to make a low reach more likely.
Partially depends on how risk averse the student may be.
Can use ED1 and ED2 both for dream schools, knowing there is a good chance you may have to roll dice during regular decision, and you might get shut out.
Or, if a student is very risk averse… apply to safer (safer, not safety) schools in ED, knowing ED gives you a good chance of getting in, so you can avoid the RD lottery.
A potential downside is having to rush and get the essays and apps done in a compressed timeframe. Can be mitigated by starting early in late summer/early fall, but essays tend to get better with repeated effort and revisions (by the time you’re applying RD the essays will likely be much more polished).
I’ll also say that with the exception of a few colleges applying EA as an unhooked applicant doesn’t necessarily give you a bump.