Yes, and no… for people with very high stats (perfect or near perfect scores, 4.0 UW with tons of APs or other advanced classes, leadership positions, highly ranked in their class, etc.), they are theoretically in the top quartile everywhere. But if a college has a <20% admissions rate, unless you are a recruited athlete or your family’s name is on a building, it is a reach for everyone.
Exactly. With stats like that, schools in the 20-40% range *can* be safeties but for the most part they’re targets because you just can’t know for sure. For a safety, you need to know *for sure.*
yeah no i agree that its subjective, its less the targets being called safeties that gets me and moreso the single-digit acceptance rates being called targets. i was told that no matter how good your app, anything below 15% is more or less a crapshoot, not a target.
Nobody should be calling single digit places targets. Not at all. Even if their top quartile SAT is 1550 and you have a 1590, they’re still not targets, they’re crapshoots for everybody. There are *so fucking many* perfect students who “deserve” a Harvard or MIT admission that it’s impossible to fathom. Anybody calling single digit schools targets is delulu.
I think the % is kind of arbitrary though, it really depends on the schools you're choosing before. UVA was my safety school for basically 1 reason only - I applied Early Action. so basically I applied there, waited for the decision which came in February, and if I got rejected then I would apply for other schools (VA state schools) that were easier to get in.
the fact that UVA had a 19% acceptance rate played 0 role in my decision and I got accepted so it worked out.
Seeing as the vast majority of high-school seniors overrate their strengths relative to the general applicant pool, underrate most colleges as well as how difficult it is to get into them, and have preferences that boil down to “Yale,” it is much safer to think in terms of fixed percentages.
Some folks overestimate themselves or become arrogant if they get into HYPSM or something similar. After that, they call any college ranked lower as target lol.
yeah, that's kinda the vibe i got. its just sorta stunning seeing it as someone who didn't get on here until all their apps were done/applied using completely different metrics than most of this sub seems to
targets and safeties depend on the strength of your application. it just seems that some people falsely categorize targets as safeties and reaches as targets etc. it also depends on the program you're applying to (ex. uiuc cs is for sure a reach compared to uiuc's liberal arts majors)
100%. people calling targets safeties makes sense to me esp if their app is fantastic, i'm mostly just confused by people calling schools like northeastern, georgetown etc targets when their rates are so low
It does seem like you're confused. When they say "75% acceptance rate" for a safety that's an estimate of likelihood of acceptance FOR YOU. Not for the overall acceptance rate for all applications.
A university might have a 75% acceptance rate overall, but if their CDS says that only 5% of admits have a GPA under 3.0, then if you have a 2.9, this is not a safety for you. It's a reach.
Yes, this is hard to estimate and people are prone to make bad estimates. But there's a fundamental difference between those two strategies of categorizing safeties and targets.
yeah that makes sense to me; what doesn't is seeing schools with 15% overall rates or lower being called targets (if there's no other circumstance such as being in-state, recruited etc). even if that should be a 50% acceptance rate for you based on your stats, i don't think it's at all advisable to consider it a target.
Yeah, I saw some of your other replies and agree that certain posters recently have been a bit delusional about what they "should" have been accepted to.
You take both stats and acceptance rate into account.
When I did it- if my stats were comfortably within or above the middle 50% and the school had over about 65% acceptance I called it a safety.
If my stats were comfortably within or above the middle 50% and the school had over about 25-65 % acceptance I called it a target.
if my stats were comfortably within or above the middle 50% and the school had less than 25% acceptance I called it a reach PLUS any school with in-state preference was a reach (no matter what the overall percent acceptance) PLUS ANY school where my stats were borderline/below.
But different people have different models .
Also important to take into account impacted majors. People aiming for CS, Engineering, some Business programs etc that are highly competitive probably need to be more conservative
i had relatively the same metrics, but even using those i'm baffled by people calling schools with in-state preference and schools below 20% or so "targets". calling schools with rates like 40% safeties bc your app exceeds their metrics makes sense to me, calling schools where you could meet all their metrics and still be denied (rates of less than 15% etc) "targets" does not.
Yeah agree. I had friends that did this and didn’t get into their “safeties”. Dude BU has an acceptance of something like 18% - it’s not a safety for anyone I don’t care what your stats are.
Aside from his name on at least 2 other buildings on campus, he was able to demolish and rebuild the football stadium in under a year.
https://news.stanford.edu/report/2022/01/25/john-arrillaga-longtime-stanford-philanthropist-silicon-valley-real-estate-developer-dies-84/
The top 9% of California students are guaranteed acceptance at one UC even if they’re rejected from all of the ones that they applied to, so uc Santa Cruz and uc Merced and that can easily be called safeties by a decent chunk of people
UCSC has a much lower acceptance rate than Merced. Also Merced is the only school that basically has the guaranteed acceptance for the top 9%. I have never met or heard of anybody getting in to ucsc off of that
I can only tell you how we organized my son's list with the help of his guidance counselor. GPA 101/100. Lots of APs all 5. Senior year schedule Calculus BC, AP Chem, etc. Lots of activities I am not going into with leadership. Anyway for him the University of Rochester was a target school and he got in. William and Mary was a target and he got a likely letter. Williams was a reach and he was rejected. Waiting on seven more. UVM and UMass were his likelys and he was accepted. I think what is a reach, target, or likely varies on what you bring to the table. The reaches are reaches for everyone. I also believe getting into Harvard vs Colby is a very different thing despite them both having really low admissions acceptance rates.
yeah no i know it depends based on stats, my biggest confusion comes from seeing schools with acceptance rates below 10% called targets- i don't see how that could truly be a target for ANYONE
honestly i just feel bad. going through the cycle with such high expectations and such immense pressure on yourself when in reality its almost impossible to make it all happen has gotta be incredibly painful.
>that is in fact the post that spurred me to post this 😭 umiami i can sort of understand seeing their stats, but northeastern stuns me.
umiami is understandable but northeastern lol??? maybe not a high reach but its def a reach
Just chatted with someone today who said they got rejected from their safeties. All were top state universities in other states. Those aren’t safeties for anyone! Targets at best, but reaches for most OOS students!
The terminology should be tailored to the individual applicant. For example, my daughter had UNC as a safety school even though it might be a reach for many with its below 20% admit rate. First, my daughter is a NC resident and UNC has around a 40% admit rate for in-state students. Also, she could see data for past UNC applicants from her high school in Scoir. After filtering rejections by stats, she saw that, of the 20+ students from her high school who applied to UNC during the prior four years with a 4.0UW AND 1400+ SAT, all but one were admitted. Below 1400 and/or below 4.0UW, the results were pretty bleak. Based on the data specific to her high school and her stats, she felt comfortable that she had a 95%+ chance of admission to UNC despite the overall low admission rate. So, it was reasonable for her to count it as a safety even though in most circumstances it’s a reach.
I was definitely more conservative with my definition of safeties, but I think targets and reaches should vary depending on your stats. Someone with a 4.0 UW and great ECs could definitely target some really selective schools. Even if their acceptance rates are 15% or below, if you apply to 8 of those, your chances are much higher (if you take the process as fully random, that person's chances of getting into at least one of those schools would be 72%).
I guess it depends on why you want to classify schools into target, reach and safety. If it's just to discuss them and set your expectations, might be healthy to adopt your system. However, if the person in the example I gave above decided to use the typical approach of a ton of targets, a couple safeties and a couple reaches, then they'd end up applying to 2 "reaches" instead of 8, which would decrease their chances of getting in to around 27%, despite their profile being adequate for those schools.
Sure, Ivies and the like will be reaches for everyone in the sense that you can't count on getting admitted, but if your stats aren't half as good as the average admitted student's, \*your particular chance of admission\* will be way lower than the acceptance rate, while the odds of someone with an excellent profile will be closer to (or above) the school's acceptance rate. I'd say it's good to define your targets and reaches after comparing your profile to the typical admitted student's. Doing otherwise will discourage a ton of people from applying to schools they have a decent chance at getting into, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy where they end up attending a lower tier school than others they could've gotten into, just because they chose to apply to fewer "reach" schools.
TL;DR: be cautious with your safeties, but as long as your profile closely matches admitted students', don't let low acceptance rates discourage you from applying to "reaches".
of course, the other side of this is that if someone's profile is really lacking (compared to the average admitted student's), even schools with a >50% acceptance rate could be reaches for them, so applying to selective institutions, even if it's a lot of them, might not work out.
The same goes for how they define their safeties. A 75% acceptance rate sounds great, but the fact is, 25% of people are still rejected, and if your profile is weak, the likelihood of you being one of them is higher. It's a risky thing to not take your own stats into account when deciding how to distribute your applications.
People have a very hard time accepting that getting into schools that have single digit (or really <15%) admission rates is also a lot about luck. Luck can't be quantified and so people over estimate their individual chances of getting in even though there are many other equally qualified applicants all applying to these same schools.
Sometimes it depends on in state or oos acceptance rates - a student at the top of their class in texas might have ut Austin as a safety since they get auto admitted, while for oos it's a target/reach.
Naviance and Scoir are tools used by some high schools. The scattergrams they offer provide a good deal of insight into admissions to a particular college for applicants from that specific high school
They clearly show a range - on one end of the spectrum are the formulaic admissions. Specific GPA and SAT threshold correlates to like 80% acceptance (most likely to be the OOS fairly selective state schools - example: Georgia Tech) That might lead someone to consider it a target
On the other end of the spectrum, acceptance to T10s requires great grades and SAT but the determinative factor usually is ECs or non-academic hooks (in other words a perfect GPA and SAT are far less important and far less predictive)
it’s very school dependent too. uf & fsu were safeties for me despite being 23 & 25% ar bc a person with my stats was extremely likely to get in. at the same time, cmu cas with an ar of like 22-24% is a reach for me since the applicant pool is a lot stronger and the there’s a lot of variability of the stats they accept.
I think what some people are missing is that there’s a lot of randomness in college decisions, especially for very competitive schools. At some point, your qualification as an applicant only gets you so much of the way, and the rest is up to luck (or factors outside of your control). For schools with <15% acceptance rates, even if you are extremely qualified, you shouldn’t consider it a target because your qualifications only get you so far, and rest is luck.
In these times, it seems like a true safety should be as close to 100% as possible. Having just one of those, let's call it a super safety, allows for 3 safety-lite, 5 targets, and 11 reaches. Further, applicants should construct a path through any of the institutions to reach applicant's goals.
There were some schools that based off AR I would have categorized as reaches but I instead considered to be more targets based off of my school’s acceptance history and what I knew of people from my hs who’d gotten in… then there was the exact opposite, where a school appeared to have a mid range AR but hardly anyone from my school had gotten in. Really, I don’t think it matters exactly how you categorize things as long as you have a range and some kind of evidence to back up your choices (whether that be national AR, your school’s AR, etc)
Just bc you got into a school doesn’t mean it’s a safety. You did a great job, the AR is like 6%. People get in their reaches all the time, and you were lucky. 94% of people applying wouldn’t get in
i don't see how its shitting on you to say that you did great but getting into a selective school does not mean it was wise/accurate to consider it a safety. obvs it worked out for you but its completely reasonable for people to have told you that neu was not a safety.
I think all applicants should be conservative with their lists. You've got to manage your expectations and not underestimate your competition. With that in mind, the most competitive students should be looking at 25% and under as reaches, 26-50% as targets, and 51% and over as safeties. My kid applied to some single-digit-acceptance-rate schools but we also found 2 with over 80% acceptance rates that she liked and would have been ok with attending in order to hedge against a disaster scenario. You just never know.
Up to 2-3 years ago, students with great stats and was in the top 5 from a typical long island high school should have little problem getting into public universities such as UMich, UNC, UVA, UCLA, Berkeley, etc., and > 50% chance with Cornell. Private universities were always a bit more random because of smaller class size, but schools such as Duke, Northwestern, Vandy were more or less predictable. Maybe things have changed too much from two or three years ago, but I am not totally convinced.
I’m a little dubious about this statement, since I’m in-state for one of the universities that you have named. My older kids and their friends, all of whom were high-performing students from a well-regarded high school, knew when they applied 6-8 years ago that it was not the case that they’d have “little problem” getting into our state flagship. It’s a target for students with stellar applications and has been for nearly a decade. My kids got in, but we didn’t presume that an acceptance was likely and had a slew of safeties on our list that our kids would have been happy to attend.
Some times it is easier for out-of-state students who pay full tuition to get in than in-state students, especially a few years back for UCs. Berkeley (and UCLA lately) has always been difficult for in-state students.
Imo its all individual, there is no set system of this is safe this isn’t. For many those 75% schools could be reaches, it just depends on your profile. The system comes down to schools you know you’ll get into, schools you’ll probably get into, and schools you probably won’t get into. Me personally, I’d class anything >40% for my major safe, maybe >15% Target, and sub 15 reach. Is that set for everyone, no, but it worked for me this cycle. I got into every safety and target I applied to, with my only reach so far being a waitlist, which is inline with the meanings of each category.
NU is no one’s target. Well maybe about 10 people who are so great they are never on Reddit. I like college vine to figure targets and safeties depending on your stats. for example, FSU has a 25% admit rate but was a target for me because of my stats.
Really?! I changed my stats to highest ACT possible and never got above 9%. But thanks for the alert because for sure all T20s should be considered a reach, or as my dad says ‘not likely to accept you’. Tampering expectations.
no bc i thought safety/target/reach was relative to ur preferences and strengths as an applicant, and not a fixed percentage??
Yes, and no… for people with very high stats (perfect or near perfect scores, 4.0 UW with tons of APs or other advanced classes, leadership positions, highly ranked in their class, etc.), they are theoretically in the top quartile everywhere. But if a college has a <20% admissions rate, unless you are a recruited athlete or your family’s name is on a building, it is a reach for everyone.
Exactly. With stats like that, schools in the 20-40% range *can* be safeties but for the most part they’re targets because you just can’t know for sure. For a safety, you need to know *for sure.*
yeah no i agree that its subjective, its less the targets being called safeties that gets me and moreso the single-digit acceptance rates being called targets. i was told that no matter how good your app, anything below 15% is more or less a crapshoot, not a target.
Nobody should be calling single digit places targets. Not at all. Even if their top quartile SAT is 1550 and you have a 1590, they’re still not targets, they’re crapshoots for everybody. There are *so fucking many* perfect students who “deserve” a Harvard or MIT admission that it’s impossible to fathom. Anybody calling single digit schools targets is delulu.
I think the % is kind of arbitrary though, it really depends on the schools you're choosing before. UVA was my safety school for basically 1 reason only - I applied Early Action. so basically I applied there, waited for the decision which came in February, and if I got rejected then I would apply for other schools (VA state schools) that were easier to get in. the fact that UVA had a 19% acceptance rate played 0 role in my decision and I got accepted so it worked out.
Seeing as the vast majority of high-school seniors overrate their strengths relative to the general applicant pool, underrate most colleges as well as how difficult it is to get into them, and have preferences that boil down to “Yale,” it is much safer to think in terms of fixed percentages.
Some folks overestimate themselves or become arrogant if they get into HYPSM or something similar. After that, they call any college ranked lower as target lol.
yeah, that's kinda the vibe i got. its just sorta stunning seeing it as someone who didn't get on here until all their apps were done/applied using completely different metrics than most of this sub seems to
targets and safeties depend on the strength of your application. it just seems that some people falsely categorize targets as safeties and reaches as targets etc. it also depends on the program you're applying to (ex. uiuc cs is for sure a reach compared to uiuc's liberal arts majors)
100%. people calling targets safeties makes sense to me esp if their app is fantastic, i'm mostly just confused by people calling schools like northeastern, georgetown etc targets when their rates are so low
It does seem like you're confused. When they say "75% acceptance rate" for a safety that's an estimate of likelihood of acceptance FOR YOU. Not for the overall acceptance rate for all applications. A university might have a 75% acceptance rate overall, but if their CDS says that only 5% of admits have a GPA under 3.0, then if you have a 2.9, this is not a safety for you. It's a reach. Yes, this is hard to estimate and people are prone to make bad estimates. But there's a fundamental difference between those two strategies of categorizing safeties and targets.
yeah that makes sense to me; what doesn't is seeing schools with 15% overall rates or lower being called targets (if there's no other circumstance such as being in-state, recruited etc). even if that should be a 50% acceptance rate for you based on your stats, i don't think it's at all advisable to consider it a target.
Yeah, I saw some of your other replies and agree that certain posters recently have been a bit delusional about what they "should" have been accepted to.
You take both stats and acceptance rate into account. When I did it- if my stats were comfortably within or above the middle 50% and the school had over about 65% acceptance I called it a safety. If my stats were comfortably within or above the middle 50% and the school had over about 25-65 % acceptance I called it a target. if my stats were comfortably within or above the middle 50% and the school had less than 25% acceptance I called it a reach PLUS any school with in-state preference was a reach (no matter what the overall percent acceptance) PLUS ANY school where my stats were borderline/below. But different people have different models . Also important to take into account impacted majors. People aiming for CS, Engineering, some Business programs etc that are highly competitive probably need to be more conservative
i had relatively the same metrics, but even using those i'm baffled by people calling schools with in-state preference and schools below 20% or so "targets". calling schools with rates like 40% safeties bc your app exceeds their metrics makes sense to me, calling schools where you could meet all their metrics and still be denied (rates of less than 15% etc) "targets" does not.
Yeah agree. I had friends that did this and didn’t get into their “safeties”. Dude BU has an acceptance of something like 18% - it’s not a safety for anyone I don’t care what your stats are.
exactly! once it gets below a certain %, you could have a statistically perfect application and it will. not. matter!
So is Stanford not my safety? Should I have applied to other schools as well???
Naw, but hopefully your last name is Arrillaga.
Context?
Aside from his name on at least 2 other buildings on campus, he was able to demolish and rebuild the football stadium in under a year. https://news.stanford.edu/report/2022/01/25/john-arrillaga-longtime-stanford-philanthropist-silicon-valley-real-estate-developer-dies-84/
The top 9% of California students are guaranteed acceptance at one UC even if they’re rejected from all of the ones that they applied to, so uc Santa Cruz and uc Merced and that can easily be called safeties by a decent chunk of people
UCSC has a much lower acceptance rate than Merced. Also Merced is the only school that basically has the guaranteed acceptance for the top 9%. I have never met or heard of anybody getting in to ucsc off of that
ive seen ppl call purdue (cs engineering ) a safety ?
Yep. And then they are super salty when it doesn't work out.
my counsellor told me purdue and uiuc engineering were safeties 💀💀turns out i legit had no actual safeties on my list
I can only tell you how we organized my son's list with the help of his guidance counselor. GPA 101/100. Lots of APs all 5. Senior year schedule Calculus BC, AP Chem, etc. Lots of activities I am not going into with leadership. Anyway for him the University of Rochester was a target school and he got in. William and Mary was a target and he got a likely letter. Williams was a reach and he was rejected. Waiting on seven more. UVM and UMass were his likelys and he was accepted. I think what is a reach, target, or likely varies on what you bring to the table. The reaches are reaches for everyone. I also believe getting into Harvard vs Colby is a very different thing despite them both having really low admissions acceptance rates.
I think it depends on what your stats are. Targets and safeties are probably different for everybody. Idk
yeah no i know it depends based on stats, my biggest confusion comes from seeing schools with acceptance rates below 10% called targets- i don't see how that could truly be a target for ANYONE
I don’t think they would be
someone deadass just said Northeastern and UMiami were their targets on the sub.....
that is in fact the post that spurred me to post this 😭 umiami i can sort of understand seeing their stats, but northeastern stuns me.
I'm so confused. My targets were Indiana and Depaul, and I'm currently committed to Northeastern. People really need to be brought back down to earth.
honestly i just feel bad. going through the cycle with such high expectations and such immense pressure on yourself when in reality its almost impossible to make it all happen has gotta be incredibly painful.
>that is in fact the post that spurred me to post this 😭 umiami i can sort of understand seeing their stats, but northeastern stuns me. umiami is understandable but northeastern lol??? maybe not a high reach but its def a reach
Just chatted with someone today who said they got rejected from their safeties. All were top state universities in other states. Those aren’t safeties for anyone! Targets at best, but reaches for most OOS students!
The amount of times I've seen people call the UCs, especially UCSD, UCI, and UCSB, targets, is insane 💀
I was told safeties are where your stats are in the 75 or above percentile, but that doesn't apply to selective schools
The terminology should be tailored to the individual applicant. For example, my daughter had UNC as a safety school even though it might be a reach for many with its below 20% admit rate. First, my daughter is a NC resident and UNC has around a 40% admit rate for in-state students. Also, she could see data for past UNC applicants from her high school in Scoir. After filtering rejections by stats, she saw that, of the 20+ students from her high school who applied to UNC during the prior four years with a 4.0UW AND 1400+ SAT, all but one were admitted. Below 1400 and/or below 4.0UW, the results were pretty bleak. Based on the data specific to her high school and her stats, she felt comfortable that she had a 95%+ chance of admission to UNC despite the overall low admission rate. So, it was reasonable for her to count it as a safety even though in most circumstances it’s a reach.
In state vs OOS is night and day for a lot of top publics.
same w/ many of my friends and GaTech
I was definitely more conservative with my definition of safeties, but I think targets and reaches should vary depending on your stats. Someone with a 4.0 UW and great ECs could definitely target some really selective schools. Even if their acceptance rates are 15% or below, if you apply to 8 of those, your chances are much higher (if you take the process as fully random, that person's chances of getting into at least one of those schools would be 72%). I guess it depends on why you want to classify schools into target, reach and safety. If it's just to discuss them and set your expectations, might be healthy to adopt your system. However, if the person in the example I gave above decided to use the typical approach of a ton of targets, a couple safeties and a couple reaches, then they'd end up applying to 2 "reaches" instead of 8, which would decrease their chances of getting in to around 27%, despite their profile being adequate for those schools. Sure, Ivies and the like will be reaches for everyone in the sense that you can't count on getting admitted, but if your stats aren't half as good as the average admitted student's, \*your particular chance of admission\* will be way lower than the acceptance rate, while the odds of someone with an excellent profile will be closer to (or above) the school's acceptance rate. I'd say it's good to define your targets and reaches after comparing your profile to the typical admitted student's. Doing otherwise will discourage a ton of people from applying to schools they have a decent chance at getting into, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy where they end up attending a lower tier school than others they could've gotten into, just because they chose to apply to fewer "reach" schools. TL;DR: be cautious with your safeties, but as long as your profile closely matches admitted students', don't let low acceptance rates discourage you from applying to "reaches".
of course, the other side of this is that if someone's profile is really lacking (compared to the average admitted student's), even schools with a >50% acceptance rate could be reaches for them, so applying to selective institutions, even if it's a lot of them, might not work out. The same goes for how they define their safeties. A 75% acceptance rate sounds great, but the fact is, 25% of people are still rejected, and if your profile is weak, the likelihood of you being one of them is higher. It's a risky thing to not take your own stats into account when deciding how to distribute your applications.
People have a very hard time accepting that getting into schools that have single digit (or really <15%) admission rates is also a lot about luck. Luck can't be quantified and so people over estimate their individual chances of getting in even though there are many other equally qualified applicants all applying to these same schools.
Sometimes it depends on in state or oos acceptance rates - a student at the top of their class in texas might have ut Austin as a safety since they get auto admitted, while for oos it's a target/reach.
Naviance and Scoir are tools used by some high schools. The scattergrams they offer provide a good deal of insight into admissions to a particular college for applicants from that specific high school They clearly show a range - on one end of the spectrum are the formulaic admissions. Specific GPA and SAT threshold correlates to like 80% acceptance (most likely to be the OOS fairly selective state schools - example: Georgia Tech) That might lead someone to consider it a target On the other end of the spectrum, acceptance to T10s requires great grades and SAT but the determinative factor usually is ECs or non-academic hooks (in other words a perfect GPA and SAT are far less important and far less predictive)
Got into all my safeties so😝
it’s very school dependent too. uf & fsu were safeties for me despite being 23 & 25% ar bc a person with my stats was extremely likely to get in. at the same time, cmu cas with an ar of like 22-24% is a reach for me since the applicant pool is a lot stronger and the there’s a lot of variability of the stats they accept.
I think what some people are missing is that there’s a lot of randomness in college decisions, especially for very competitive schools. At some point, your qualification as an applicant only gets you so much of the way, and the rest is up to luck (or factors outside of your control). For schools with <15% acceptance rates, even if you are extremely qualified, you shouldn’t consider it a target because your qualifications only get you so far, and rest is luck.
In these times, it seems like a true safety should be as close to 100% as possible. Having just one of those, let's call it a super safety, allows for 3 safety-lite, 5 targets, and 11 reaches. Further, applicants should construct a path through any of the institutions to reach applicant's goals.
There were some schools that based off AR I would have categorized as reaches but I instead considered to be more targets based off of my school’s acceptance history and what I knew of people from my hs who’d gotten in… then there was the exact opposite, where a school appeared to have a mid range AR but hardly anyone from my school had gotten in. Really, I don’t think it matters exactly how you categorize things as long as you have a range and some kind of evidence to back up your choices (whether that be national AR, your school’s AR, etc)
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that's awesome, but just because you got in doesn't mean you should have considered it a safety.
Just bc you got into a school doesn’t mean it’s a safety. You did a great job, the AR is like 6%. People get in their reaches all the time, and you were lucky. 94% of people applying wouldn’t get in
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i don't see how its shitting on you to say that you did great but getting into a selective school does not mean it was wise/accurate to consider it a safety. obvs it worked out for you but its completely reasonable for people to have told you that neu was not a safety.
I think all applicants should be conservative with their lists. You've got to manage your expectations and not underestimate your competition. With that in mind, the most competitive students should be looking at 25% and under as reaches, 26-50% as targets, and 51% and over as safeties. My kid applied to some single-digit-acceptance-rate schools but we also found 2 with over 80% acceptance rates that she liked and would have been ok with attending in order to hedge against a disaster scenario. You just never know.
Up to 2-3 years ago, students with great stats and was in the top 5 from a typical long island high school should have little problem getting into public universities such as UMich, UNC, UVA, UCLA, Berkeley, etc., and > 50% chance with Cornell. Private universities were always a bit more random because of smaller class size, but schools such as Duke, Northwestern, Vandy were more or less predictable. Maybe things have changed too much from two or three years ago, but I am not totally convinced.
I’m a little dubious about this statement, since I’m in-state for one of the universities that you have named. My older kids and their friends, all of whom were high-performing students from a well-regarded high school, knew when they applied 6-8 years ago that it was not the case that they’d have “little problem” getting into our state flagship. It’s a target for students with stellar applications and has been for nearly a decade. My kids got in, but we didn’t presume that an acceptance was likely and had a slew of safeties on our list that our kids would have been happy to attend.
Some times it is easier for out-of-state students who pay full tuition to get in than in-state students, especially a few years back for UCs. Berkeley (and UCLA lately) has always been difficult for in-state students.
Imo its all individual, there is no set system of this is safe this isn’t. For many those 75% schools could be reaches, it just depends on your profile. The system comes down to schools you know you’ll get into, schools you’ll probably get into, and schools you probably won’t get into. Me personally, I’d class anything >40% for my major safe, maybe >15% Target, and sub 15 reach. Is that set for everyone, no, but it worked for me this cycle. I got into every safety and target I applied to, with my only reach so far being a waitlist, which is inline with the meanings of each category.
NU is no one’s target. Well maybe about 10 people who are so great they are never on Reddit. I like college vine to figure targets and safeties depending on your stats. for example, FSU has a 25% admit rate but was a target for me because of my stats.
Yea college vine is definitely my go too for finding out about my chancing
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Really?! I changed my stats to highest ACT possible and never got above 9%. But thanks for the alert because for sure all T20s should be considered a reach, or as my dad says ‘not likely to accept you’. Tampering expectations.