What was your/your child's safety?

Parents Forum
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<p>Mythmom-
I can’t take credit for coining that phrase. I’ve seen it used many times on cc. [College</a> Confidential Site Search Results - College Confidential](<a href=“http://www.collegeconfidential.com/search_results.htm?q=prestige+whores&sa=Google+Search&userInput=&sitesearch=collegeconfidential.com&cx=013579521852154800353%3Avvp1k6kluvq&cof=FORID%3A9]College”>http://www.collegeconfidential.com/search_results.htm?q=prestige+whores&sa=Google+Search&userInput=&sitesearch=collegeconfidential.com&cx=013579521852154800353%3Avvp1k6kluvq&cof=FORID%3A9)</p>

<p>It wasnt directed at anyone here-- just simply re-using a commonly used expression.</p>

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<p>True. I checked. The post said prestige-obsessed.</p>

<p>It may shock people to know that both my kids had more success at reach/ match schools than safeties. All I can figure is that adcoms thought kids were a better fit at those schools.</p>

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<p>I think most parents do have that degree of sense. But every spring, we see on CC, posts of the sort “I only got into my safety and I hate the thought of going there.” Then, of course, it’s not really a safety.</p>

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<p>DS’s safeties were our state flagship and Tulane, where he applied early (thanks to a free and very easy app) and was accepted early with good merit money.</p>

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<p>"My only point is to question why we need to cast aspersions on other parents and call them prestige whores. "
-Because people have nothing better to do. Why anybody is bothered with this? Whatever name is used, it is reflection on the caller, not on another side, why to pay attention to this as well as any attention to college name that others’ kids attend as well a color of others’ grass, if it is greener, good for them, why we care one way or antoher? If you care so much for others, then you will never have time to enjoy your own life. Isn’t it the most important, absolute obligation, priority #1, why else we were given gift of life?</p>

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<p>I think it is. “Love thy safety” is an ideal. It’s not a requirement. Many students apply to (and some end up attending) safety schools that they consider disappointing.</p>

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<p>It means that the “safeties” were not really safeties. Schools which consider “level of interest” or have holistic admissions should not be considered safeties, since a much greater than average applicant still cannot have assured admission.</p>

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<p>MY D’s safety was one of our in state public universities. Her SAT score was in the top 25% range.</p>

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<p>An example I like to cite is a friend’s D who was accepted to Harvard and rejected by Sarah Lawrence. The family had considered SL a safety, but it wasn’t, perhaps because their D was a white girl from NY who needed a lot of FA and not first generation college.</p>

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<p>My daughter, applying in fall of 2006, had 2100+ SATs and 3.9 GPA. </p>

<p>Safeties: University of Wisconsin/Madison, Fordham, American (although today, American would not be a safety). She got into Wisconsin in November, was thrilled and would have loved going there.
Attended Brown.</p>

<p>I spent the year helping a friend’s daughter in the college process. She goes to a well-known private school, where most of the kids go to top selective schools. My jaw dropped when my friend would describe a school like Tufts as a safety – that was what Naviance implied, she would say. I definitely got the sense from her that for kids at this school, there was a whole different definition of safety. Which leads me to believe that the world is very different at the top prep schools.</p>

<p>(However – her daughter did not get into Tufts, or into most of her reach schools and was even denied at many of her match schools. Her results seemed perfectly reasonable to me, but totally perplexed the mom based on this school’s past performance. She was furious and upset with the results, although as I said, they made perfect sense to me.)</p>

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<p>“Level of interest” schools cannot be considered safeties.</p>

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<p>My D applied in fall of 2006 with 34 ACT and 4.3+ GPA. D’s safeties were not the typical ones. She didn’t apply at any publics, including our excellent state flagship many of her friends attended. I would say that the safeties on her list, given her stats, were Hendrix, Denison, Centre, DePauw, and Furman. She would never have considered a school where she wasn’t in the very top of the heap as a safety … and even then, she was careful not to assume that being in the top meant she would get in … for example, she was at the top for Rhodes, but they are so selective that she could easily not have been accepted. She was happy to be accepted at her “safeties,” Rhodes, Tufts, and Vanderbilt. She graduated from Vanderbilt last year.</p>

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<p>The average ACT score for the latest set of Vanderbilt admits was 34.</p>

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<p>I’m writing not to talk about safeties (or to suggest that any UC school should ever be considered a “safety”) but to address the issue of “ELC” admissions at UC schools which someone raised on this thread. I don’t have any inside information, but from studying the data on UC Statfinder and from my daughter’s school, I think “ELC” status has had, and continues to have, a much greater impact on admissions decisions than is recognized on this site, even when ELC admission is not guaranteed. Under the old system (the one in effect in 2009), “ELC” was defined essentially as the top 4% of each individual participating high school’s class (limited to California schools), based on grades only (assuming a-g course requirements met). According to the publicly available information, almost all public schools in California participate in the ELC program. At least as of 2009, students who were “ELC eligible” had a dramatically higher rate of admission at ALL UC schools, including UC Berkeley and UCLA than students with the same stats who are not ELC eligible. This can be seen by running custom tables on the UC Statfinder page, and selecting “ELC eligible” as one of the three criteria permitted. If I remember correctly, almost exactly one-half of UCLA and UCB’s admitted students were “ELC eligible” students.</p>

<p>Because of the budget crisis in California, UC Statfinder will no longer be updated (and soon will disappear altogether), so, unfortunately, the last year for which data is available is 2009. In addition, there have been changes to how “ELC eligibility” works either this year or last (I forget which). However, the results at my daughter’s school in the past few years has been entirely consistent with the results prior to the change. My daughter goes to a regular, middle class high school with about 500 kids per class. Consistently, each year, about 20 to 25 kids get into UCLA and each year 16 to 20 kids get into UC Berkeley. Looking at the admitted student data for each year at my daughter’s school, the top 10 applicants, based on grades alone, have gotten into each school. The remaining admissions have been scattered among the next group of 20 or 30 kids in the GPA ranking, with a few outliers (most likely exceptionally talented athletes or artists).</p>

<p>My daughter’s school is a school where each year, at most, one kid gets into Stanford. And, despite MANY applicants, only one kid (each) has gotten into Harvard, Yale or Princeton in the past five years (three different kids, Princeton admit was a recruited athlete). </p>

<p>The ELC program is supposed to be even more important to UC admissions decisions now than before, but it is complicated by the fact that ELC eligibility has been expanded to the top 9% of the class. Thus, the admissions RATE for ELC eligible kids will be lower (because of the expansion from 4 to 9%), but I expect things will be pretty much the same for the highest ranking kids. Also, other UC schools are supposedly going to the holistic review process that UCLA and UCB have used for years, but so far as I can tell from looking at the data from my daughter’s school, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, and to a lesser extent UC San Diego and UC Davis, still have pretty much the same grade/test score cut off as they did before. (Her school has a significant number of admits at each of those mid-tier UC schools.)</p>

<p>There has been a lot of focus on the increasing number of out-of-state admissions at UC schools, but it is important to note that, except at UC Irvine, the NUMBER of California residents admitted has remained consistent over the last few years.</p>

<p>Anyway, I’m posting this here because I hadn’t understood the ELC concept until I started playing around with the UC Statfinder site, and learning about this concept has made the UC admission process much more understandable to me. Although “guaranteed admission for ELC students” at certain schools (e.g., UC Davis) is a thing of the past, I believe that this is still a very important component of UC admissions, which, among other things, helps to explain the relatively low average SAT scores for admitted students. (Someone mentioned ELC in this thread, so this seemed relevant, even though slightly off topic.)</p>

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<p>My S1 had very high stats and picked Tufts ED. He liked everything about it. H & I thought he could have “aimed higher”, but he chose what he liked…it was sort of a low match. His safeties may have been UMaryland or Lehigh or Brandeis…he looked at many match schools and not enough reach or safety. But he’s happy, so that’s that! :slight_smile: Actually his stats were higher than his cousin’s who graduated from Vandy.</p>

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<p>D1 was top 4% in her small HS class, had above average SATs (National Merit Commended, but not NMF). Her safeties were Drexel, UMass, and URI. She was accepted to 6/7 of her schools, and waitlisted at 1 reach.</p>

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<p>DS - 1550 M+CR, 4.8/4.0 WGPA, top 10%, yada yada
Safety - UMass Amherst
Attending - UMass Amherst. Turned down a bunch of top 50 schools, some for financial reasons, some for fit. Loves it there.</p>

<p>DD - 1330 M+CR, 4.2/4.0 WGPA, don’t know her class rank
Safety - pretty much all of them. She was above the 75th percentile line for all but one, and was close for that one. Applied EA to all but two which don’t do EA. We visited all of them before she applied, and she would have gone to any of them if she had only gotten in to that one school. All but one would have been affordable without merit or FA (which we would not be eligible for).</p>

<p>DD’s HS class is sending something like 20 kids (out of about 220) to our “looked-down-upon” state flagship. This is unprecedentedly high for her HS. More and more people are stepping off the prestige train, and looking for value.</p>

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<p>32 ACT, 3.92 uw, engineering</p>

<p>Reach: MIT, Stanford, Dartmouth, Yale (rejected all)
Match: Johns Hopkins, Georgia Tech, Lehigh (admitted all)
Safety: Alabama, RIT</p>

<p>Attending the honors college at Alabama with full scholarship plus additional engineering scholarship.</p>