<p>with the obvious exceptions of last names such as Kennedy, Bush or Gates (as in Bill) or the next Matt Leinart (Heisman Trophy winner for non-football fans), the HYP's are super stretch for anyone. </p>
<p>But, what makes a school a reach, match or safety? For example, if a kid's grades and test scores exceed the 50th percentile for the accepted class, is that a match? Of if they fall into the upper range of the 50th percentiles of a college, is that a reach or a match? What if the scores are on the lower end of the 50th %?</p>
<p>Obvioulsy, test scores and grades are only one component, but it at least gives kids some place to start to look for possible matches/safeties to add to the dream list.</p>
<p>The test scores are a place to start because you can easily find the 25/75 ranges at colleges for SAT1s. But that is only one part of the equation. For the most selective schools, there are really no matches unless you are a celeb with great stats. These schools reject a number of kids each year with 1600 SATs and top class rank. But when you start looking at schools where the top 25% SAT number is not so high and the accept rate starts going around 40%, you can use the SATs as some sort of a guide as long as you have a decent GPA and are taking top courses. If you have a hook of some sort, you can try to find a school looking for that hook. Physics majors are sought at Wesleyan, for instance, and Johns Hopkins loves humanities majors.</p>
<p>Don't get overly hung up on that stuff either, or it will drive you nuts. It is better to spend time on "Fits, Almost Fits, Might Fit, and Doesn't". Otherwise, you begin to mistake selectivity for the quality of education YOU might receive, and find yourself sadly deceived.</p>
<p>(25% of students attending Harvard today have SATs below 1380, and for the rest of the Ivies and all the LACs the percentage is much higher.)</p>
<p>The safety is the most important school on your child's list. Can you be 100% sure s/he'll be admitted? Probably not 100%, but you should be darn close. I call this the sleep at night factor. If s/he doesn't have a true safety -- one that s/he is very, very likely to be admitted to and one that doesn't give him/her or you a queasy feeling when you think about ending up there -- then it's going to be a long tense time from December to April. Determining the likelihood of getting in is an imprecise science -- use a combination of SAT scores, acceptance percentages, your highschool's success rate, the reception your kid gets from the admissions office. </p>
<p>After a safety is safely in the bag, then it really doesn't much matter if the other schools are reaches or matches. A range of selectivity just makes more sense, again for peace of mind. My son's list had one (or maybe two) safeties that he would have been happy attending. One more that was probably a match. After that it was all reach. What they all had in common was a that thread of FIT that you hear again and again. So hard to put a finger on, but you know it when you feel it. In way you're playing both ends at the same time. Aspire for the stars and love thy safety. Sometimes this means the matches get lost in the middle.</p>
<p>I have a kind of different take on reach, match and safety than you usually get from services that attempt to give that evaluation:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The only true safeties are rolling admissions colleges that accept greater than 60% of their applicants and your stats put you at least in the upper 50% of those admitted. The reason it is a true safety, other than the high likelihood of admission, is that you can apply early enough so that you learn your admission status in the Fall before you even have to send other applications; thus if admitted you are thereafter relieved of the anxiety of whether you will get into college at all.</p></li>
<li><p>There is no such thing as a safety which admits less than 40% of the applicants even if your stats place you in the upper 25% of the admittees. </p></li>
<li><p>A match is a college that admits 30% or more of its applicants and your stats place you in the upper 50% of the admittees. You still have risk of being rejected but your chances are usually better than even.</p></li>
<li><p>Any college that admits less than 20% of its applicants is a reach for everyone that applies.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I was just thinking about this today and wondering if you could ever put a school that has a 35% or lower acceptance rate on a "match" list regardless of stats.</p>
<p>There is also financial safety...which would be a school that you could afford/manage to attend if you were given little to no aid.</p>
<p>texastaximom, i think it depends on the school. Many schools are rather self-selective, making 30% or so less of a challenge. I consider Wellesley as a match for myself, for example, even though their acceptance rate is around 33%. However, since it is an all-girls school, the competition to be in that 33% is less than at many other schools.</p>
<p>A safety is not a valid safety if you don't want to go there -- regardless of its selectivity, gender bias, rolling admissions, legacy status or any other hook. You may get in, but in the end still not have a good option. My son for example, considered using Michigan because of its rolling admisssion as his safety. He is a third generation legacy and most likely would have been admitted. At any rate, he could have found out early enough in the process to come up with another plan had he not been accepted. But, after thinking about it, he decided that even though UMich is a wonderful school, he just didn't want a large university. Thus, it didn't qualify as a safety.</p>
<p>mini wrote, "(25% of students attending Harvard today have SATs below 1380, and for the rest of the Ivies and all the LACs the percentage is much higher.)"</p>
<p>How would one go about verifying that statement? And how much below 1380, in the specific case mentioned?</p>
<p>1) is pretty much certain to admit my kid, based on its known behavior in acting on admission applications,</p>
<p>2) has a strong program in an area my kid is interested in,</p>
<p>3) is affordable based on its known behavior in acting on financial aid applications,</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>4) is likeable to my kid.</p>
<p>The state university in my state fits those characteristics for my oldest son. It pretty much admits people "by the numbers," and is not known to reject applicants who are successful in the accelerated secondary math program my son is now enrolled in there. Of course, he may consider and apply to other schools as well. Where he desires to apply is up to him; my job is to pay the family share of the cost at the college he attends, and to give him (possibly disregarded) advice along the way in the application process.</p>
<p>Simple - go to either the last four issues of USNWR, or to the Harvard Common Data Sets for the last four years, find the 25%-75% split of attending students. You will find that the 25th percentile over the past four years ranged from 1360 to 1400. Which means that a full 25% of attending students had SAT Is below the mean. So it is easy to verify.</p>
<p>The bottom of the range is not verifiable by any source that I know of. But I'd be willing to bet it is in the mid 1100s or below. For the rest of the Ivies, even lower. I think you'd find these breaking by family income as well (as the rest of Ivy admits do), with the bulk being top 5%ers, and much of the rest low-income folks.</p>
<p>Mini - I have noticed that several times you posted that something like 25% of Yale students have SATs below 1380 or 25% of Harvard students were below 1360-1400. The upper ranges and lower ranges obtained by adding the separate 25% scores for math and verbal are not actually the 25% scores for the student body. This is because the students who score the lowest on the math part of the test are not the same ones who score the lowest on the verbal, and vice versa. It is more likely to be the opposite - a person who scored low on one part of the test may be admitted because they are very strong in the other area. It would be interesting to find out what the 25-75% actually are, but I don't know any way of doing this.</p>
<p>MO2 - All I have seen in the Common Data Sets are the combined scores for the student body. Are you suggesting that there are Yale and Harvard students with 400s in either math or verbal?</p>
<p>As I suggested earlier, these may be students whose applications are in some way unusual. But the acceptance of students with scores in this range is NOT unusual, as they make up a minimum of 25% of the student body, and in every school but Harvard, much more than 25%.</p>
<p>I haven't seen the Common Data Set information, but what we are saying is that if the 25% value for Math is 690 and for Verbal 690, much fewer than 25% of the students scored a total of 1380 or below. For example, the ones who had 690 or below for Math may have an average verbal score of 740 and vice versa. By random chance, only 1 out of 8 should score below 1380 total in this scenario. The actual value is probably somewhere between 1 in 4 and 1 in 8.</p>
<p>Harvard doesn't appear to put its Common Data Set information on the Web, as several of the other Ivy League colleges and colleges of similar selectivity do, which is why I asked about this. MotherOfTwo and SBmom are correct that the U.S. News data has been misleading for years--the sum of scores rank ordering of applicants is different from the rank ordering of applicants by either verbal or math scores considered alone. I was surprised to find on a College Board chart </p>
<p>(which I learned about from another CC participant) that the percentile rank of someone with my sons' SAT I score (obtained in talent search testing at age eleven) is MUCH higher than I would have guessed from his verbal score percentile rank. Many "math-high" kids do a lot worse than he does on the verbal side, it appears. </p>
<p>Returning to the main point of this thread, the top schools in the United States are MAJOR reaches for anyone with a combined SAT below about 1400. At that level, applicants are numerous (see chart referenced above) but admittees to the top schools are few. The odds for admission to the top schools go up considerably for applicants with higher combined SAT I scores--the admittees with bottom-quartile SAT scores mostly have truly phenomenal hooks that the typical high school graduate simply has never dreamed of achieving.</p>
<p>Again, the hypothetical kid with less than 25% in both Verbal & Math is a absolutely a "hook" kid who fulfills a need-- sports star, geographical distribution, URM, development admit, legacy, unusual background, french horn, or whatever... Your typical "bright well rounded kid" without a hook & with low (<25% in both) SATs will not be admitted. </p>
<p>At one highly rated LAC the 25%M + 25%V = 1270. The 75%M + 75%V is 1460. You might imagine 50%M + 50%V = 1365----- BUT, according to an insider there, the median combined score is <strong>1420</strong>. This tells you that there is a big drop off somewhere above or around 25%.</p>
<p>That the low V's have high M's or vice versa is not quite enough of an explanation.... (25%M + 75%V= 1350; 25%V + 75%M = 1380... and this schools median is 1420.)</p>
<p>"Also, the 25% with lower scores often have major hooks, are URMs, are legacies, etc."</p>
<p>I would have said they virtually always have major hooks. (But that's true of most of the student body.) That the odds aren't good goes without saying. But that's true for ALL applicants who are not top 5%ers in income, or the bottom 35% (Pell Grant recipients). In the case of Yale, there are fewer attending students in the 35-95% category than there are non-white students.</p>
<p>What is a match if my stats are in the upper 25% of all schools or all but just a handful of schools?
This was an important question for my daughter, because most of the schools she really liked accepted <40% of their applicants. We assumed a 50-50 probability for her at schools that accepted between 25-40% of their applicants, where her SATs were at or above the 75th percentile. Obviously her real chances were greater than 50-50 at some and less than 50-50 at others, but for gauging how many apps are enough, we thought this is a fair assumption. I don't remember the math, exactly, but if you apply to 3-4 50-50 schools, you're chances of striking out are pretty low (1 in 64, maybe), particularly if some effort is put into applications. She added a couple of rolling school safeties, a couple of reaches (less than 20% admitted, but no HYPS) and called it a day!
Now, the finances have to work out, and you have to be happy with each of those 2-4 schools, but there is some safety in numbers, as long as you are talking about something at least close to a match.</p>
<p>Token and SB that's very interesting info. I guess that explains why a school can list what percent of kids are admitted with a M or V score of x, but not which percent with a combined score of x. We started trying to average all the % chances for each item....rank, SAT, geographic region...LOL yes in desperation! I guess some things aren't to be known!</p>